Tolerance and her children

Young Germans are using shock tactics to rattle the liberalism of their parents, and sending a message about tolerance to the West.

Young Germans are using shock tactics to rattle the liberalism of their parents, and sending a message about tolerance to the West.

Among the millions of Euro-sceptics applauding last week’s “no” votes on the European constitution, one would almost certainly find three German lads living in a small city west of Munich. The three friends, in their late teens and about to graduate from high school, featured the previous week in an article in the magazine Der Spiegel on the neo-Nazi movement, to which they are loosely attached.(1)

It is doubtful that these boys know much about the European Constitution -- which their own government ratified without a referendum -- but they live in the new Europe and they don’t much like it. Their reasons are a mixture of real fears and right-wing propaganda. Real fears include violent foreigners in their own home town. Propaganda includes the view that Germany’s problems of economic stagnation and unemployment would be solved if the foreigners went back to Russia, Albania and Turkey.

Fears for their own freedom and safety, and a slick campaign by neo-Nazis to colonise youth culture, have seen these and increasing numbers of young people adopt a xenophobic posture and the insignia of the right-wing scene -- from Lonsdale jackets and Doc Marten boots, through CD’s from extremist heavy metal bands, to cell phones with Adolf Hitler’s voice as the ring tone.

Scary stuff, and, accompanied by actual violence here and there, enough to get the cash-strapped federal government to pledge spending of 180 million Euros (if the Euro survives) by 2006 on programmes, mainly in schools, to combat right-wing extremist ideology.

But is right-wing ideology the real problem? Der Spiegel follows the scent of a different ideology and finds that it leads straight to the doors of parents who are so liberal that nothing but a “Heil Hitler!” from their son can shock them. For some, at least, says youth psychologist Wolfgang Bergmann, the Hitler fad is no more than this -- a stage of puberty, a form of rebellion when neither sex, drugs nor poor grades at school can faze parents.

That is not the whole story, however. A study by the Bavarian State Office for Political Education hints that young people’s right-wing extremism is a revolt against liberalism itself. For the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s there is, officially, only one great commandment: “Thou shalt tolerate everything that has not definitively been proved harmful by a large consensus of peer-reviewed studies”.

But kids who have grown up in the vague moral universe of tolerance are not impressed. They feel unfairly exposed to cultures that have a strong identity linked to strict moral codes -- or, at least, a strong survival instinct. They are angry with their parents for not equipping them for this struggle and they fall to fighting back with the only weapons provided: banned CDs and bovver boots.
America faces reality
It is not only in Europe that the ersatz morality of tolerance is wearing thin. In her book, <I>Liberation’s Children</I>, American journalist Kay Hymowitz has severely criticised the adult cult of “non-judgementalism” and its effect on the younger generation. Parents, she says, have laid aside their traditional role of instructing their offspring in moral values and have become instead “housemates” and “facilitators” who accompany the child in the autonomous project of creating an “authentic self”.(2)

In fact, says Hymowitz, the project is doomed. All that today’s values of tolerance and open-mindedness do is set kids adrift in a sea of experiences and expose them to manipulation by people who do know what they stand for, particularly the entertainment industry. The mind and soul are freed, but only by emptying them.

The Beatle, John Lennon, in a song that epitomized the spirit of 1960s liberation, imagined that without heaven, hell, religion, patriotism or anything to die for the world would be filled with peace and the spirit of universal brotherhood. Thirty years later we know better. A world in which the traditional sources of values -- including the family -- are suppressed is not a morally different world. It is a morally empty world, rapidly filling up with new power politics, anxiety and mutual suspicion.

It is just such a void that the German neo-Nazi movement is exploiting. It is the void that “no” voters in France and the Netherlands have begun to suspect lies behind the European Constitution. Americans have seen it opening up in their own society but, as is so often the case, they have proved smarter than their European cousins. Last year large numbers of them changed political colours to vote for “family values”.

It is not clear to what extent popular feeling against the European ideal in its current form is motivated by such concerns. But to the extent that it is, to the extent that Europeans realize the tolerant society is actually endangering their children, America has set a dramatic and encouraging example.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet

Notes

(1) “Shock Mom and Dad: Become a Neo-Nazi”. Der Spiegel.  21 – 25 May, 2005

(2) Kay Hymowitz. Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Post-Modern Age. Ivan R Dee, 2003