"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
My husband read that quote to me the other day as I was puttering around the kitchen muttering to myself (and anyone within earshot) about the decline, even disappearance, of the moral compass of America's youth, and therefore the United States of America as we know it. “This is just like Rome. Mark my words. It’s a disaster. Exactly like Rome. The apocalypse is nigh. I’m telling you, we are falling and we are falling fast,” I mumbled as I banged around, emptying the dishwasher somewhat aggressively and putting the plates away.
“Do you have any idea how old you sound?” he asked, kindly enough. When I refused to answer he told me. “You sound almost as old as Socrates. He was the one who wrote that paragraph I just read to you. And he wrote it approximately two thousand, four hundred and eighty eight years ago. So that is about how old you sound.” He smiled at me. “Ancient Greece old.”
“But this is different,” I said, to which he responded “I’m sure Socrates thought it was different too. The first time in history that children, adolescents especially, had raised that much hell and caused their poor Greek parents countless sleepless nights.”
And then I paused and thought about my parents and how horrified they had been at the music I listened to in the eighties. Music that I loved and that I still enjoy to this day. “Jungle rot” (whatever that was supposed to mean) was my mother’s term for it. “Turn that damn jungle rot off!” was one of her usual howls. My parents were also horrified by how much time I spent glued to the phone. I grew up in the age when there were never enough phones for everyone who lived in a household and all were attached, by a very short cord, to the wall. I’d stand there for hours, pressed up against the refrigerator, a willing captive, as I talked about nothing at all with my teenaged friends.
And then I think of the poor parents in the fifties, and forties, and thirties, and between the two World Wars and what they witnessed. The wars and bloodshed and casual loss of entire generations of able young men. And then there are the superficials. I’m often quite surprised at the way young girls dress today but not as appalled, I’m sure, as parents of the flappers. The young girls from the roaring twenties who threw away their corsets and pantaloons in favor of sleeveless, short (to the knee!) dresses and “step in” undergarments. The flappers were scandalous. Even as a fashionista well-versed in what adolescents have worn through the centuries I am happy to have children in this generation and not in the 1970s when both men and women wore tight and quite revealing synthetic short-shorts, and women and girls threw away their bras and flashed their boobs all in the name of women's liberation.
Recently I read an article on the BBC Worklife page that spoke exactly to this issue and I suddenly felt less alone. Some of my favorite quotes from the article are almost as old as Socrates himself.
“They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
Aristotle (4th century B.C.)
I remember being an adolescent quite well. And even in my twenties I thought I had all the answers and that my parents had old-fashioned and outdated ideas. As a teenager and young adult I felt invincible, wise, informed. And now I see that youthful confidence in my own children. They seem worldly. Sophisticated. Fast-paced. They try to show me things they find insightful or hilarious or moving, on Tiktok or YouTube or Instagram or “X” or something called “Threads”…and I just don’t get it. I’m decidedly left out of the joke. I feel old, confused, left behind.
Young people are high minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.
Aristotle (4th century B.C.)
I was high minded, arrogant, and thought I knew it all until, at age 32, I was completely and irrevocably humbled by addiction. And that humbling, the force of those circumstances, made me turn to something that was not me. Some people would call what I turned to in desperation God. I choose to call it my Higher Power. And I’m grateful for that. Perhaps I simply grabbed the same invisible thread that people have turned to forever when they are out of hope and out of options. Something otherworldly.
Before Christ, the Israelites worshiped Moses and Abraham. The pagans worshiped the old pre-Christian gods through seasonal festivals and countless other ceremonies. Humans have, since the dawn of time, worshiped gods and goddesses, the sun and the moon, the ocean, mother nature, fertility and even death. Most humans have, it seems, needed a fragile reed to cling to for support in times of real distress. But most humans don’t start looking for this life-saving reed until they REALLY need it.
One of my children is agnostic and I’m pretty sure the other two are on the fence about God. For now they don’t need a Higher Power in their lives. Maybe they never will, and I’m fine with that. My eldest once said to me (a bit condescendingly truth be told) as I was expressing my faith in prayer “but isn't God just like an invisible friend? Like what little kids make up for themselves when they are lonely…but for grownups?” I’m fine with that too. Who doesn't need an invisible friend in times of need? I certainly do.
As my children get older and start to become their own people I see, with great joy, that for all their disrespect and chatter and not rising when I enter the room (just as they neglected to do in Ancient Greece thousands of years ago) I can learn as much from my children as I hope they can from me.
And what I really cling to and hope to impress upon them as they mature is once again more wisdom from our dear old stoic Socrates…
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
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