/ 4 February 2025

Gen Z needs to get out of its comfort zone

(John McCan/M&G)
(John McCan/M&G)

The left has become unrecognisable, not least because anti-Semitism has become one of its silent partners. It was integral to the far right in the last century. It now inhabits the far left.

There’s another reversal worth mentioning. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the bastion of political correctness was the religious far right. The left’s default position was irreverence and mockery. Its bastion is now the far left and Trump and his ilk are ingenious in finding ways of ridiculing it. 

What explains this reversal in the political landscape? 

It becomes noticeable in 2015, a year after the Gen Zs enroll at university. I will consider one fact that explains this change. Let me first say a thing or two about this generation. 

The first is that it experiences itself as a group that is fragile in body and mind. It is averse to taking risks and to having its opinions challenged. It favours being reassured and feeling safe.

Why is that? If you were born in 1996 or thereafter, then you spent most of your childhood and teenage years online, being part of virtual communities, at home and under parental supervision. And you’ve lost out on the skills kids generally acquire when participating in games away from their parents or outside the home. 

For instance, when a conflict arises between kids engaged in some game on a playground, and they’re unsupervised, they have to figure out a way of resolving it on their own. That builds resilience, strength of character and a desire to reach consensus in spite of differences of opinion. 

Virtues like these are integral for kids who will later have the duty of sustaining a democratic form of government. I will return to this in a moment.

The other thing worth mentioning is one of the principal ideas of this generation. This is that what I feel is the case is the case, or the idea that my feelings track the truth. If I feel I am being bullied, then I am being bullied. If I feel you’re being racist, then you’re being racist.

What does that imply? Among other things, that I should not be exposed to ideas that disagree with mine because they make me feel bad, that is, they harm me. Disagreement, in this context, becomes “microaggression” and speech a kind of violence. 

Contrary to the old rhyme “sticks and stones”, there are some words that do break one’s bones. This generates the “cancel culture” we have become familiar with. 

It is worth noting in this connection that people are not cancelled because they express racist, sexist or oppressive ideas. It is because their ideas make students “feel unsafe” and are “triggering material”. 

In other words, the cancel culture doesn’t strike me as a political or social thing per se, despite what it claims. It is a mental health issue, that is, one concerning the difference danger versus safety (rather than right versus wrong).

Let me now turn to my main point. So, we have a group of young adults, fragile in body and mind, owing largely to the ubiquitous presence of social media in their lives, that enters university in 2014 and 2015. And every student who chooses a subject in the humanities is taught, as one of its essential components, intersectionality. That is what I want to talk about. After explaining the notion, I will tease out two of its effects.

I want to say three things about intersectionality. The first is that it is a diagnostic tool the social scientist uses to make power relations that are otherwise invisible in the workplace and elsewhere visible.

Take a company like Mattel. Let’s say it has 12 members on its board of directors. How many black people does it employ as compared with whites? How many women does it employ as compared with men? 

Let’s say its board includes 50% black people and 40% women. You may think that the principles of equity and diversity are almost perfectly realised. You would be mistaken, however, if it turned out that it has no black woman on its board, because the 50% black people are men and the 40% women are white. 

As individuals, we intersect both grids, black/white and man/woman. The social scientist has to add more variables to complete her analysis: white male, black male, white female, black female. She will add more variables as she considers their sexual orientation, their abilities and disabilities and so on. 

Now — and this is the second thing I want to say about it — students are not taught to see intersectionality only as a tool of analysis but also as a representation of society. It tells you who is in power and who is in a position of minority. 

White straight males are typically found on top of the food chain in most sectors of society. Those who have the opposite characteristics are found at the bottom end, such as nonwhite, non-straight women, transgender and disabled people.

The problem begins when professors at places like Berkeley and Harvard (and the rest) embed this representation in a moral setting and they tell their students that those who are in power are evil and that the oppressed are good. This is the moment when they cease to teach and they begin to proselytise.

I call it an “epistemic (or cognitive) distortion”. Its effects are many. I will mention two. 

First, it produces a politics that is incompatible with democracy or a republican form of government where consensus has to be reached on issues between individuals who are otherwise in disagreement about almost everything.

For what do you do when you believe that the person who disagrees with you is (by virtue of disagreeing with you) evil? You refuse to hear him out. You cancel him. Now add to that the fact that students want to be emotionally safe and the attack on free speech becomes inevitable.

It is certainly ironic that free speech should come under attack today from the left. 

The other effect is no less debilitating. Young adults, including Gen Zs, typically go through a developmental stage where their main concern is their moral standing in the world. They ask themselves questions like, “Am I a good person?”, “Does she [some authority figure like a professor or parent] love me?”, “Does she consider me worthy of being loved?”, “Do my friends think well of me?” and so on.    

Now, the simplest way for a left-leaning Gen Z to resolve these questions is by looking at where he stands on the chart of the social food chain. “Am I a white male? Damn, that means I’m evil! But hold on, I’m queer as well. That may not make me good but it mitigates how evil and oppressive I am.” 

One problem, then, is the framing of society as a battle between good versus bad people. It is a distortion to view the oppressor as evil and the oppressed as good. And besides, there is no place for morality in the analysis of power and, generally, in the human and social sciences. 

The other problem is that the left-leaning Gen Z cannot help but think that his sexual identity and orientation says something profound or deep about his self, something moral or metaphysical, to the point that he talks about it compulsively with everyone. 

The fact is that it says nothing deep or profound, it says nothing at all. Besides, one’s sexual identity hasn’t been a political or social issue worth talking about in public since the Millennials and Gen X.  

I believe that this generation has to unlearn virtue signalling, that is, posturing as a good person by declaring who you hate and love, and that it has to learn how to disagree.

I worry that, by the time my children are of age to start university, its motto will be, “Here we do not educate to make you think, we educate to make you feel comfortable.”

The left has lost its grip on commonsense by pandering to some of these views. It is one of the reasons it lost the election in the US. The left will keep alienating ordinary working folk as long as it continues to make common cause with the fringe insanities of identity politics. 

It is not merely the university but the future of democracy that is at stake. 

Rafael Winkler is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.