Jeremy S. Adams, Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation (Washington, D. C.; Regnery, 2021).
Adults have complained about the upcoming generation for millennia. In this volume, Jeremy Adams, an award-winning high school teacher, who also teaches at the college level, uses his experiences with his students to continue this tradition by raising an alarm about the state of the coming generation of American youth. He identifies five aspects of hollowness: hollowed-out selves, hollowed-out culture, hollowed-out schools, hollowed-out homes and hollowed-out democracy.
By “hollowed out,” he means that today’s youth “seem bereft of an understanding of what it means to be fully human. . . [T]hey seem mysteriously barren of the behaviors, values, and hopes from which human beings have rationally found higher meaning, grand purpose, or even simple contentment.” (2).
In particular, he connects this hollowing out with no longer teaching the classics: “Today’s colleges promote lessons from the Frankfurt School and downplay knowledge of the Academy or the Lyceum or the Bible or Americas’ founding fathers.” (11). He appears to believe that Western Marxists are taught more than the Ancient Greeks. Another aspect of our hollowed out youth is their lack of friendship. He cites studies of how “young Americans today are more miserable, depressed, and lonely that any other generation in American history.” (16)
According to Adams, one of the principle causes of this state of affairs is “postmodernism.” He writes, “Post-modernists believe that human beings flourish not through association, but through liberation. They believe individuals should be free to create their own taxonomy of what is good, proper, or reasonable. They believe the sovereign individual should even decide what constitutes reality, which, in this view is a subjective ‘construct.’” (10). He provides no citation for this characterization. The book has no bibliography, but in the notes I didn’t see any reference to primary sources on this subject, just references to popular articles.
The curious thing to me is that the label “post-modern” seems to apply better to the Trump-Republican Party than to most on the left. What is the difference between the post-modern “sovereign individual” and the Trumpers “sovereign citizen?” How is the “post-modern” idea that reality is a “subjective construct” different from the Trumpers citation of “alternative facts” or “fake news?” I would be curious to see how many on the left identify as “post-modern.”
Another culprit, according to Adams, are social media and video games. He argues that today’s youth are content to be “verified” by Twitter, rather than engage in some pursuit that will lead to real accomplishment.
Adams complains that today’s youth they have chosen “A Living Instead of Life.” He takes youth to task because they are so focused on careers. “Getting ahead in one’s career is as important as racking up conquests on Tinder; both are something you can brag about.” (38). He talks about careerism in the context of “hollowed-out culture,” but it seems that he does not appreciate that the youths he criticizes did not create this culture; they simply grew up in it.
A constant refrain in the book is that the Declaration of Independence is the glue which holds the country together. He argues that the United States is not derived from a particular nationality or ethnicity, but rather that is based on a belief that “all men are created equal,” a belief founded on the natural law. He clearly not a white supremacist. But what I find interesting is that implicit in Adams’ argument is the assumption that the left has rejected this belief.
Because the natural law comes from God, Adams believes is true for all times and places and cannot change. However, there is no mention of freedom of the press in Locke’s Second Treatise. The Zenger case, which established freedom of the press, wasn’t until 1735, almost fifty years after Locke’s work. Are we stuck with the understanding of natural law of the Enlightenment? Might it be the case we have not abandoned natural law so much as developed a more sophisticated understanding of what the natural law is?
In a chapter entitled “Hollowed Democracy,” Adams gives his account of the current state of American politics, particularly from the conservative side of the divide. He writes: “They [Conservatives] are proud of American history, told as a story of freedom, prosperity, and progress, and they are disconcerted, to put it mildly, with the progressive push to demonize America’s past as largely a story of racism and oppression. Moreover, they are appalled at the balkanization of America into special interest groups, apparently united only by a sprawling catalogue of grievances, and they resent being haughtily dismissed as ‘anti- ‘science,’ marginalized as reactionary ‘deplorable,’ and summarily rejected as ‘bigots’ merely for believing once commonly held, patriotic, Judeo-Cristian points of view.” (100) [The 1776 Project forms an appendix to this volume.]
One difficulty with his point of view, of course, is that not all Americans see themselves in that story of freedom. It was not the Black or the Native American who chose to balkanize America. The Declaration of Independence of claimed that all men were created equal, but it was the white man who claimed he was created superior.
Moreover, Adams clearly has difficulty understanding the concept of “systemic racism.” “Nominalism” is the philosophical belief that there are no universals are; “realism” is the belief that universals are real. Margaret Thatcher’s statement that “There is no such thing as society” is a nominalist statement. If only individuals exist and there is no society, then there cannot be any systemic racism.
Adams seems to be aware that there are barriers to human flourishing. But rather than trying eliminate these barriers, he appeals to the “bootstrap” route, believing that if one tries, one will succeed. Again, his nominalism prevents him from seeing any point to collective action to address problems.
One of the things I don’t understand is why, if Adams’s goal is human flourishing, he sticks so close to the founding fathers. The founders did not believe that the purpose of government was human flourishing; they thought it was the protection of property. As Charles Beard makes clear in his classic An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution was not just a political document, it was also an economic document designed to protect the property interests of those who drew up the document.
If one is interested in human flourishing, it seems to me that making sure people have a place to live and food to eat would be an important step.
The rising generations certainly face problems, but it is does not appear that Adams’s take om conservatism has the insights or the remedies to deal with their problems.