The Internet Is No Place to Grow Up. Go West, Young Man

“Washington [D.C.] is not a place to live. The rent is high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man. Go West, and grow up with the country.” — attributed to Horace Greeley

G arnet, Mont., was once a place for adventurous young men to seek their fortunes. Located 30 miles east of Missoula, the town stands as a remnant of a more freewheeling time in American history, when the frontier mentality drove Americans west. One of many boomtowns during the gold rushes of the 19th century, Garnet was core to the American experience for the first hundred years of this country’s life.

Garnet today is a shadow of its former pioneering glory. Like most of those earlier boomtowns, it has become the playground of ghosts, for most of the year sitting abandoned up in the mountains. During the summer, however, the town holds an opportunity for any adventurous spirit willing to suffer the elements for a few months. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management hires a volunteer every year to live in the town and run the souvenir shop during the summer. As long as you’re willing to guide the occasional tourist around the town, and don’t mind the lack of electricity or running water, you’ll be rewarded with free room and board and a meal stipend. With the city only 30 miles away, it would seem to be a relatively safe adventure.

The town remains a live echo of the frontier, the great march westward, that made the American spirit. As Frederick Jackson Turner famously noted, the American was forged in the wilderness out of a synthesis of the European and the Indian. The American identity was formed on the ever-shifting boundary between civilization and savagery. This identity — and its accompanying desire for a frontier to tame — remains the core of the American soul.

The frontiers to which this spirit has turned post-1890, the year in which the Census Bureau officially declared the physical frontier closed — have been numerous. Young men went overseas to Cuba and the Philippines in pursuit of empire. From San Juan Hill to Manila, young American soldiers pursued glory and adventure on the battlefield in service to their country. As a nation the United States committed itself to defending and spreading its values in both world wars. During the Cold War, America looked to the stars as a place to direct its adventurous spirit. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, American society, with its optimistic outlook, forged into the wilderness of the new digital frontier.

But this cyber-frontier has led us toward failure, and its failure has been particularly felt by the men of my generation. Though the world is more connected than ever, the corrosive effects of the internet on people’s souls are impossible to ignore. Young men have been devastated in their exploration of this frontier. Internet pornography usage is growing among my cohort, to the detriment of their physical and mental health. The online gambling boom is seen most acutely among American youth, a fact any college student can anecdotally attest to. The internet has bred new religions that seduce a disturbing number of young men, turning them away from the Christian virtues that undergird American society. If, as C. S. Lewis wrote, modernity produces men without chests, the internet has made such a process formulaic.

Of course, every frontier has its potential for corruption. In 1783, Edmund Burke spoke before the House of Commons on the troubles plaguing Britain’s governance of India. He lamented the moral effect of the assignments on the young Englishmen sent to govern:

There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse, than in the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power.

The digital dynamic is in some ways similar. Boys left to the ravages of the algorithm have been hollowed out. Cyberspace has left us all worse for wear, but for the young man who finds himself in need of adventure and risk — and a place to inculcate virtue — a lifetime caught in the Web is no substitute.

Michael Brendan Dougherty proposed that, in the wake of our decade of populist upheaval, the next task ahead should be working to rebuild our ability to produce great men. I am sympathetic to his position that our education system needs an overhaul, and that reviving traditional masculine virtues in the places boys grow up would go a long way toward solving our nation’s ills. Rebuilding a sense of adventure and a taste for real-world risk should be among them. Virtue taught in a classroom only goes so far; meaningful virtue must be lived. For the young men who so desperately need a meaningful outlet, a physical frontier would be hard to top.

There will never be another frontier, with millions of acres of free land to homestead, like the one Americans flocked toward in 1890. But that does not mean there are no physical frontiers left to tame. The age of remote work has arrived, and with it new opportunities for someone looking for a fresh start. For the young man without a full-time Zoom job, there are opportunities still. Three-quarters of counties in the United States experienced a decline in prime-age (25–54) population over the last decade. All across the country, communities are desperate for new energy to revitalize their towns. Options abound in places on the verge of becoming ghost towns like Garnet.

The message to American youth, and particularly struggling young men, is the same as ever. Because the internet today is no place for a young man to grow up. Its institutions are toxic. Its atmosphere is corrosive. Many of the people encountered there are destructive, and its morals are deplorable.

Go west, young men. Go west, and grow up with your country.