Young people are FUBAR

Most of today’s youngsters will know what this texting acronym stands for. However, if you’re no longer in the first flush of youth, nor even in the second, I’ll give you a clue: the last three letters stand for ‘Beyond All Recognition’, and I shan’t decipher the first two out of decorum.

A survey has shown that a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer their smartphones. They check the caller’s name and text back (or not), the mode of communication they also prefer when initiating the contact.

One possibility is that they resent spontaneous phone calls because they find them intrusive. This is something I sympathise with, old codger that I am.

At this point I have to make a confession that I know will diminish me in your estimation: I don’t own a smartphone and I don’t even know how to text. We maintain a respectable average in our family because Penelope has two smartphones, which she operates with the digital dexterity of the virtuoso pianist she is.

My phone is antediluvian, and it’s permanently switched off unless I expect a call or wish to make one. The other day a coach at our tennis club wondered what that thing was that I had just pulled out of my pocket.

My natural luddite leanings have something to do with such retrograde preferences, but they don’t extend to e-mail, which I use all the time. You see, I am a writer, as are most of my close friends. And if they aren’t writers, they are musicians.

People in such occupations work all the time, even when they seem to be doing something else. If they don’t have their fingers on a computer or piano keyboard, they ponder what they are going to do when the irritation of quotidian life recedes into the background and they can resume tickling those keys.

An unexpected phone call can derail their train of thought, and sometimes it’s hard to get it back on track. An e-mail, on the other hand, isn’t intrusive. You finish your work, look up your e-mails and answer them at your leisure, without jeopardising your musical discoveries or deep philosophical insights for posterity.

If that’s why youngsters refuse to answer the phone, good on them. This though I haven’t met too many young people constantly involved in febrile mental activity, or at least, FWIW, something I’d recognise as such. But IRL it doesn’t matter what I recognise or not.

So much for giving young people the benefit of the doubt. Alas, one suspects that they refuse to talk on the phone not because they choose not to, but because they can’t. That’s of course rather sinister because generations devoid of basic verbal and social skills will eventually plunge the world into barbarism, if they haven’t already.

Having a conversation is an art and, like any other art, it requires finely honed skills. Such skills can only be acquired by constant practice. Natural aptitude is a factor, but it’ll remain an irrelevant one in the absence of daily toil. And any diminution in such skills spells a social and cultural disaster.

To begin with, when youngsters communicate in ungrammatical snippets abounding in acronyms, they do untold damage to the English language. A comparison between the two languages I know best, English and Russian, is a useful illustration.

English grammar, lacking genders and cases, is much less complicated than Russian, what with its six cases, three genders and a mind-bending system for making them all agree across every part of speech. Yet in my (pre-computer) day, native Russian speakers, even uneducated ones, hardly ever made grammatical errors.

By contrast, even young Britons and Americans blessed with higher education often use atrocious grammar. That turns language into an amorphous, mostly semiotic system of interjections, shortening the distance separating humans from animals.

I don’t think anyone knows the nature of thought and how it’s connected with language. Yet it’s fairly obvious that a connection exists at some subcutaneous level. But physiology and psychology apart, certain empirical observations are indisputable.

Clear, properly structured language betokens clear, properly structured thought. Grammar is verbal discipline, and no cogent self-expression is possible without discipline.

It’s hard not to notice that young people hardly ever speak or even write complete, perfectly parsed sentences, which leads one to believe that they hardly ever think complete, perfectly parsed thoughts. That makes them easy prey for demagogues wielding language as an offensive weapon.

Such chaps are congenitally adept at communicating in truncated bytes of slogans designed to tickle the listeners’ naughty bits, not to withstand rigorous logical tests. This works wonders with an audience used to this mode of expression and no other.

That becomes obvious during elections, with people’s untrained minds unable to separate the wheat of sound policies from the chaff of infantile waffle – even in the area of economics, close to most people’s hearts.

Jones is supposed to represent the future, while Smith stands for change. Jones thinks it unfair that some people make so much more money than others. Smith thinks it disgraceful that some people make so much less than others.

Both promise to do something about that, though they are hazy about the specifics. Unless an economic disaster is upon us, they stand for higher public spending and lower taxes, though they are reticent about how such mutually exclusive ends can be achieved at the same time.

They’d never penalise hard work (as far as they are concerned, extorting, on pain of imprisonment, half of people’s income doesn’t constitute such a penalty). At the same time, they wouldn’t let down the less fortunate (this means increasing taxes on the more fortunate, which is to say the majority, even further, though this is seldom stressed).

The voters, unable to parse sentences, can’t decorticate thoughts. They have developed no analytical ability, something that throughout history has been inculcated by training in logic and rhetoric. So they vote for Smith or Jones, choosing one waffle over another.

Moreover, people who neither speak nor write extended thoughts can’t read them either. They respond ‘TMI’ to a suggestion that they shouldn’t form strong views on, say, global warming without reading a few books on the subject first. It’s so much easier to respond to Greta Thunberg’s drivel with Pavlovian alacrity.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

Our problem is different: young people do understand one another’s speech. The trouble is that what they understand isn’t really speech. It’s Mowgli-like fragmentary communication in sounds, not words, sentences or consequently thoughts. This is indeed a BFD for anyone who is concerned about the future of our civilisation, based as it is on reason, expressed through structured thought and cogent word.

Computers, be it laptop, desktop or pocket, are valuable tools, but only for those who already know how to do without them. If I had little children now, I’d bar their access to any electronic devices until they’ve left their formative years behind them.

Or rather I’d try, only to find out that such draconian measures are no longer possible to implement. Modernity is FUBAR, and so, I’m afraid, are most young people. LMK what you think.