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| Super tree frog picture I'm not finding a credit for. Here for instance. |
David Brooks ("The Rise of the Amphibians") says he's been interviewing Millennials—why do I imagine a voice going, "Dad, this is so awkward"? No, it's not like that at all:
I’ve begun a little tour in which I gather millennials for interviews and ask them what they have faith in and how they are going to lead us in the years ahead.
So I guess he proceeded the same as when he was making his Journey Into the Heart of Whiteness in search of the Trump voter last year, driving to towns he suspected might have some good Millennials and asking the local authorities—ministers, aldermen, a dean in the local college—to hook him up with them. "Kelly, nice to meet you! I'm David! So... ah... what do you have faith in?"He didn't have anything in particular to say about what they have faith in, but he did notice something nice, though he didn't quite get it:
One thing that’s hit me over the head right away is how many young adults have interesting backgrounds — one is part French, part Costa Rican. Another is a conservative lesbian from the rural Midwest who came to study in the urban East.
A number talked with me about the difficulties of living with heterogeneous backgrounds: Who am I? If people ask me where I’m from, what do I say? “The problem is being hyphenated,” one graduate student said. “It’s a spiritual problem.”
But those people who are fishes out of water were often the most vibrant ones in the room. I’ve begun to recognize a social type, the Amphibians — people who can thrive in radically different environments.
I'm not sure I'm believing in that conservative country lesbian, not that she couldn't exist, but she just sounds a little too constructed, like the Applebees salad bar (not that I would have known about that if I hadn't read about it), but there's something likable about Brooks discovering the hyphenated.
I'm fairly hyphenated myself, as a lot of readers know, the descendent of Yastreblyansky immigrants from Bessarabia on my father's side and WASPs on my mother's (my grandmother and great-aunt Emma joined the DAR on the strength of the tale that they were descended from an obscure signer of the Declaration, Josiah Bartlett, which turned out, when Mom investigated it in later years, to be totally bogus), and the kids are visibly hyphenated, between me and their Southeast Asian mother, as are an awful lot of their friends in NYC in various combinations, and perhaps that makes me more conscious, but it's a thing you don't stop seeing. One of the most politically conservative men I know (we don't really talk about that) is a very serious Catholic whose wife is a pretty serious Baptist I suspect of being more on the left, and also a gluten-free vegan, and they get along great.
The wider thing of "thriving in radically different environments" is something I've been thinking about since I lived in Southeast Asia myself, in Singapore, where it is or used to be pretty common for people all up and down the social ladder to speak four languages and work in an environment where all of them are used; and because I was a student of linguistics. There's a quiet assumption in the field that the normal case is for people to be monolingual, and I started seeing that that's not true at all (it's more likely that in a truly monolingual society people develop a kind of interior bilingualism, like men's vs. women's language in Japan, or toffs vs. working class in a given dialect region of England), and the theory ought to take account of that, which was the thing I was trying to think about when I dropped out of grad school.
Unlike Japan or England, the United States has never been a truly monolingual society except in pockets, like white Appalachia, or the Anglo island of Stuyvesant Town in downtown Manhattan in the early 60s when David Brooks was having his formative experiences. But we've long had a kind of mythological belief in linguistic, and indeed ethnic homogeneity as a lost norm to feel nostalgic about, pushed by nativists and Know-Nothings and not adequately mocked by the rest of us schlubs. It leaves us treating heterogeneity as a social problem that needs to be mitigated, by the presence of what we used to call "bilingual social brokers" and Robert Putnam (Brooks seems to have called hm up again) calls the possessors of "bridging capital".
One of the things I love about Millennials and their now maturing little sisters and brothers is the way they seem to turn that upside down with the expectation that it's normal to have a complex identity, and abnormal to stay stuck in a limited community, as the Hasidim or the Amish or Salafi Muslims do, frightened by the uncleanness of life outside. I think that the whole complex gender identity thing has played a big role in this, encouraging kids to think of how they could fit in to a 72-gender system (RIP Ursula K. Leguin, who must have been delighted to watch that in her last years), and so is the discourse on intersectionality, calculating all the different identities from which a person can be disprivileged, but also generating a discourse in which people can glory in their multiple identities, the interestingness that confers.
(I also think I'm seeing lots of young people of this type, definitely many bilinguals. in the videos from Parkland, Florida, and the high school kids who brave Marco Rubio and Rick Scott to demand action on assault weapons and other critical issues that their politicians ignore.)
We will always need asyla, or sanctuaries, for those who want to keep their lives inside a particular community forever, like those tribal peoples and cult members, the people Paul calls "weak in faith" in Romans 14, or even those Trump-voting coal communities; or no doubt for a particular liminal period, like students at historically black colleges, but I think we really need to start taking multiple identities as the norm, and I'm oddly glad to see old Brooksy liking them so much, and thinking it might encourage him to be a little less frightened about tradition. (He'll probably be back next week with a lament on the subject.) I feel so good about it I don't even have that much time to make fun of him. Though "amphibians" is not a great designation for kids who are "at home in every society" since frogs and salamanders and so on are pretty limited as to which parts of their lives are spent in water vs. on land. But never mind.
I'm fairly hyphenated myself, as a lot of readers know, the descendent of Yastreblyansky immigrants from Bessarabia on my father's side and WASPs on my mother's (my grandmother and great-aunt Emma joined the DAR on the strength of the tale that they were descended from an obscure signer of the Declaration, Josiah Bartlett, which turned out, when Mom investigated it in later years, to be totally bogus), and the kids are visibly hyphenated, between me and their Southeast Asian mother, as are an awful lot of their friends in NYC in various combinations, and perhaps that makes me more conscious, but it's a thing you don't stop seeing. One of the most politically conservative men I know (we don't really talk about that) is a very serious Catholic whose wife is a pretty serious Baptist I suspect of being more on the left, and also a gluten-free vegan, and they get along great.
The wider thing of "thriving in radically different environments" is something I've been thinking about since I lived in Southeast Asia myself, in Singapore, where it is or used to be pretty common for people all up and down the social ladder to speak four languages and work in an environment where all of them are used; and because I was a student of linguistics. There's a quiet assumption in the field that the normal case is for people to be monolingual, and I started seeing that that's not true at all (it's more likely that in a truly monolingual society people develop a kind of interior bilingualism, like men's vs. women's language in Japan, or toffs vs. working class in a given dialect region of England), and the theory ought to take account of that, which was the thing I was trying to think about when I dropped out of grad school.
Unlike Japan or England, the United States has never been a truly monolingual society except in pockets, like white Appalachia, or the Anglo island of Stuyvesant Town in downtown Manhattan in the early 60s when David Brooks was having his formative experiences. But we've long had a kind of mythological belief in linguistic, and indeed ethnic homogeneity as a lost norm to feel nostalgic about, pushed by nativists and Know-Nothings and not adequately mocked by the rest of us schlubs. It leaves us treating heterogeneity as a social problem that needs to be mitigated, by the presence of what we used to call "bilingual social brokers" and Robert Putnam (Brooks seems to have called hm up again) calls the possessors of "bridging capital".
One of the things I love about Millennials and their now maturing little sisters and brothers is the way they seem to turn that upside down with the expectation that it's normal to have a complex identity, and abnormal to stay stuck in a limited community, as the Hasidim or the Amish or Salafi Muslims do, frightened by the uncleanness of life outside. I think that the whole complex gender identity thing has played a big role in this, encouraging kids to think of how they could fit in to a 72-gender system (RIP Ursula K. Leguin, who must have been delighted to watch that in her last years), and so is the discourse on intersectionality, calculating all the different identities from which a person can be disprivileged, but also generating a discourse in which people can glory in their multiple identities, the interestingness that confers.
(I also think I'm seeing lots of young people of this type, definitely many bilinguals. in the videos from Parkland, Florida, and the high school kids who brave Marco Rubio and Rick Scott to demand action on assault weapons and other critical issues that their politicians ignore.)
We will always need asyla, or sanctuaries, for those who want to keep their lives inside a particular community forever, like those tribal peoples and cult members, the people Paul calls "weak in faith" in Romans 14, or even those Trump-voting coal communities; or no doubt for a particular liminal period, like students at historically black colleges, but I think we really need to start taking multiple identities as the norm, and I'm oddly glad to see old Brooksy liking them so much, and thinking it might encourage him to be a little less frightened about tradition. (He'll probably be back next week with a lament on the subject.) I feel so good about it I don't even have that much time to make fun of him. Though "amphibians" is not a great designation for kids who are "at home in every society" since frogs and salamanders and so on are pretty limited as to which parts of their lives are spent in water vs. on land. But never mind.
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