Higher Ed in the USA was already chugging down the suicide track before this spring’s eruption of pro-Hamas fury. The college loan racket (government-backed) had the perverse effect of pumping up tuition costs beyond what even many pretty well-off families could afford, while loading up young people with life-wrecking obligations (debt which “Joe Biden” is now shifting onto the creditors, US tax-payers). Decades of DEI have filled the faculties with incompetents and assorted malcontents teaching fantasy curricula with no real-life value, and burdened the schools with cadres of overpaid diversity busybodies and thought-police. Diversity college presidents are very publicly failing to cope. The whole rotten train is going off the rails.
I’m not at all sanguine that the society we are becoming will need this vast infrastructure for babysitting young adults who could otherwise make themselves useful and productive on-the-ground in lines of work that actually keep civilized life going. This is too self-evident now to belabor, though there is an awful lot of confusion about what kind of society we might become.
I doubt that it is to be the utopia of robots, A-I, and non-stop sexual titillation that the techno-narcissists dream of. Rather, it will be a society struggling to keep too much complex stuff running with insufficient energy resources and capital — that is, a society falling apart, losing knowledge, technical know-how, comfort, and convenience while having a hard time feeding itself.
The campus Hamas zealots ironically (and tragically) represent exactly the sort of rough medievalism that the citizens of Western Civ countries would be chary of sliding into. You’d have to sadly conclude that many young people really can’t take much more Modernity, and are now pretty avid to opt out of it, even as they gaze into the magic, glowing pixels of their iPhone screens.
