Being an old guy, one of those Baby Boomers, I haven’t been very interested in YouTube. But last week I decided to check out a link to YT that I happened to run across during a Google search; it regarded property dualism. Well, I’m definitely interested in the mind versus body debate, so I had to have a look. It turns out that there are a slew of little videos that discuss the dualist versus physicalist issues regarding the mind. Just about all of them were made (and usually narrated) by young people, probably recent college or grad students. I’m pleasantly surprised to see such interest in the question. Most people my age seem pretty brain-dead about it; the prevailing attitude is “conscious, yea, I’m conscious, I’ve got a mind, so what’s the problem?” But the colleges appear to be doing a good job in “raising consciousness” regarding the brain versus soul question; they are getting the Millennium Generation interested in what I think is a really important moral and philosophical question. But, read on . . .

As expected, most of the videos and most of the responding comments sympathize with physicalist monism. That is the ‘flavor of the day’ in academia, and the students are mostly taking the bate. No big surprise there. (There is one intelligent young YouTube contrarian who is actually defending substance dualism and theism! Hang in there,npage85.) I came across a rather cynical and rather enjoyable goof on dualism contributed by one Hurley41, and I recommend it for the humor. It starts out by trashing Descartes (oh, what a new idea!), but then shifts to a mock-religious conversion film, with stories of how dualism miraculously changes lives. Playing in the background is that familiar, cloying piano “Muzak”, the kind we old Boomers hear these days on radio commercials for cancer care centers and nursing homes. Well done, Hurley41! I definitely got a chuckle out of it.

Still, I’m a bit disturbed by this trend. The Millennium Generation is the upcoming wave, the people who will be running this country in another 20 years. The college-educated component of this generation (a significant part of Barack Obama’s wave of support, incidentally) is being taught that we are nothing but machines; cool machines like laptops and ipod’s, but machines nonetheless. They have gained the impression that neuroscience has closed the book on the last refuge of “human mystery”, i.e. the conscious mind. It appears that the Enlightenment and the info tech revolution have finally triumphed. My point is that this is going to have a big effect on American society over the next 30 or 40 years, just as the Baby Boom, with its wacky ideas and hypocrisies (think Bill Clinton), owned the 1980s and 1990s (and is still warping the 00’s).

For one thing, forget about religion and standard theistic beliefs; these kids have been inoculated against it! (Not that the Baby Boom crowd was very big on it either.) The only people who will go to church will be the working class and service industry crowd, i.e. the high school students and community college grads who never took a philosophy or neurobiology course. This split won’t be apparent only in church; it’s going to ripple through all of our social institutions. It’s going to be the techno-Enlightenment crowd versus the old-school class everywhere you look, in the workplace, in our schools, in restaurants and recreation places, in politics, in where and how we live, etc.

In sum, America is going to have a CLASS PROBLEM. There’s going to be less and less common ground between the old-school class and the “Neural Buddhists”, as NY Times columnist David Brooks recently called them (Brooks also calls them “bobo’s”, i.e. bourgeois bohemians; and he admits that he’s talking about himself). See my May 15 blog entry (below) for a cite to his article, and for more YouTube discoveries. The Baby Boomers started this trend, and the Millennium crowd is going to take it all the way. There will be two Americas; they will be interspersed geographically, but worlds apart in thinking, in needs and wants, and in political demands.

The current split between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton supporters is a good clue to the future. But I really shouldn’t call it “good” — actually it’s rather ominous. America is not going to have the kind of unity that got it through the crises of the 20th Century, i.e. two world wars and a cold war. It appeared that America was coming back together after 9-11, but that turned out not to be much more than flag waving. The US is going to face both military and economic challenges from a slew of opponents out there, including Iran, the BRIC alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China), al Qaeda, etc. Then throw in global warming and natural resource depletion (I’m still waiting for market forces to break the rise of oil prices), and — well, something is going to crack. America will survive, but as to whether it can continue to pull off the “Triple Crown” (guess I’m thinking about those horse races going on this time of year) of being the world’s strongest, richest and most free nation in the world — well, that is the million-dollar question.

I’m not sure what the Millennium Generation believes in. They appear to be taught not to believe in anything at all (or too much at once, as Barack Obama with his slick rhetoric has proved). As with most things, the medicine of skepticism can be helpful (e.g., it helps combat superstitions and irrational prejudices), but an overdose can do much harm. Dualism, for all its problems, does leave a wide berth for sanctity and human dignity (when intelligently presented). I’ve cast my lot with those few who argue that mental dualism has not been ruled out by the evidence, and should remain in play as an acceptable line of thought. The academic world today gives dualism a quick nod, but then highlights the glories of quasi-rational, monistic scientism. Sure, this keeps people from thinking about driving 767’s into office towers (mostly the people who weren’t going to think about that anyway). But it is also a huge social experiment that few outside of academia are presently aware of; and I can’t help but wonder if it’s going to backfire.