THE VAST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SMART, GOOD AND ETHICAL

The middle-class child-rearing of the last four decades in America seems to have yielded up a population of rather naive and simple folk. It is easy to blame media and poor educational institutions for much of it, as I have done, but I have to question what parents, single or partnered, have been teaching their children about the realities of human existence. After all, parents/caregivers have the earliest and greatest impact on personality formation.

I believe I encounter one clue to the answer on my daily walks. Young adults with children in strollers are often ignoring the children in favor of a smartphone. This is compounded frequently by the presence of an ignored dog on a leash as well. All parties in this family-values parade seem unconnected in consciousness to one another. The dogs look particularly disgruntled, if not downright depressed. After all, who has stronger pack instincts than a dog?

The lack of active social dynamics in these ambulating family units is glaringly visible to me as an oncoming stranger. Occasionally, it is the dog who makes eye contact with what I consider a dog's grin. In the eyes of the ignored animal, I sometimes see a plea: "Wouldn't you like a dog, sir?"

Yet these same parents, disengaged from their actual environment, swarm to paranoid social media about child abuse and predators of all shapes and kinds. Bogey men ...and yes, it's almost always men. I guess sometimes Facebook has hosted a new horror as I approach one of these individuals. Sometimes I get a wary stare from an approaching mother behind a stroller or a young woman dressed for an Amsterdam picture window.  The look says, "You're old, White and male. And you're not one of my Facebook friends." 

I do not doubt that many of these suburban mothers and women are smart. They must have something going on in their brains to afford my neighborhood. Smartphones are reading devices and communication devices of a kind. While content matters, they are reading on some level. They also seem to know how to type with their thumbs. I'll concede that "smart" in 2018 has probably been redefined from "generally teachable" to "electronically crafty".

The majority seem good in the blander sense of not-intentionally-aggressive. I say "seem". Here's where it gets tricky. For example, I recently bought property from a pair of young people who fit the description. While they were not particularly difficult as sellers, they were also not helpful. They (and their young agent) were what my psychiatrist friends in the past would have called "passive aggressive". A certain amount of poker-face is expected in real estate, but this was different. 

I speak here as a person who has completed a dozen or so real estate deals over the past twenty-five years. This last purchase was at times infuriating. The simplest request for information was like pulling teeth. Shortly after we moved into the property, I met a veteran real estate agent who told me she retired from selling houses for decades in my area. When I asked why, she said, "I can't stand doing business with affluent young people any more. They are simply rude and too much trouble."

I am getting the picture of a society of people under 40 who are smart and good, especially in their own minds, but lacking a sense of individual social ethics or etiquette beyond whatever is the cause of the day on social media or their own selfish agendas. It is their conformity to the perceived ethics or etiquette de jour, as long as it does not inconvenience or embarrass themselves. Then ethics and etiquette become "too hard" and get thrown out altogether. 

Much of this population are conformist even when the social pressures they conform to make absolutely no sense. They decry racism but allow shameless public ranting of racist rhetoric against Whites by minorities. They decry sexism but take the word of a woman over a man about sexual dynamics without any proof or due process. They decry government interference and oppression but demand that government control speech and internet access. 

What I see missing is obvious: Responsible independent thought based in deep personal self-education and self-examination. That is the ethical path in life. The bland chanting of the Christian message of doing unto others what you would have them do to you means nothing if the chanter only wants everyone to always be "nice" to him/her. Being "nice" to everyone is hypocritical because not everyone behaves in ways everyone likes or in ways that are healthy for the individual. 

There are addicts and robbers and murderers about. There are mental patients, now simply referred to as "homeless", who need rehabilitation because their failure to develop socially appropriate coping mechanisms, or to take medications, has impoverished them. Being "nice" to a deranged/addicted homeless beggar is probably the worst thing you can do for that person. Ignoring that person is more therapeutic. Working politically to restore a public mental health system would be even more ethical. But then you would have to listen to your peers calling you "intolerant" or "mean".

You can be smart about information technology and be stupid about people, society and how the world works at the same time. You can be good ("nice") and be doing a bad thing (or nothing at all) for someone else at the same time. You can be ethical and appear mean and uncaring to those who do not know better.