How I was looking forward to my last issue of Harpers [April 2025]; you may think this counterintuitive since you, constant reader, have noticed how often Harper’s provided grist for the old mill, fodder for my cannon, hot air for my balloon. But I’ve found the writing so frustrating, so incommunicado – to me at least – that I switched to Consumer Reports. But alas there was too many factoids and not enough grist there, so like the proverbial dog (as in the Proverb), I’m back in 2026 to the postmodernist vomitus.
However, my last 2025 issue, displayed above, I was especially looking forward to read. The picture telling; the headline more so: “The Social-Skill Crisis: Have we forgotten how to work together?” I thought, “Great at last someone will address the apparent unwillingness, powerlessness, or zombie-ness of the Gen Z to interact person to person.”
It did no such thing. The only mention of this was as follows, “Now that pandemic-era college students have entered the workforce, the problem has only intensified. The accounting and consulting firm KPMG is trying to rehabilitate ‘lockdown-damaged’ Gen Z recruits, wrote the Telegraph, as if Zoom had denatured their brains. Unfortunately, the soft-skills crisis might be part of a bigger problem [This article definitely thinks it is.]: the so-called loneliness epidemic, or what The Atlantic has called ‘the anti-social century,’ has driven people to the lowest recorded levels of in-person socializing in our country’s history” (Scherlis, Lily, “Going Soft: Future-proofing the American Worker”, Harper’s, 26).
This title is the real gist of the main article. This issue that I thought was going to be about the social skills that I find lacking in virtually every checker, bagger, clerk, teller, and even in AT&T’s and Vanguard’s customer service agents is about “soft-skills.” A term I never heard of before this article. It turns out that it’s a term that originated with the US military in the 60s for skills that don’t require the use of machinery. The article notes, “By the mid-Fifties, the phrase ‘soft skills’ was cropping up in Army literature” (Ibid., 28).
This must have been why a Colonel, not even in my chain of command, told me in the mid-70s I would never have a career in the military not because I was filled with “piss and vinegar” but because I “refused to socialize.” Who knew I was a poster-child for lack of soft skills without even knowing the term? The corollary to this is: If the unsociability of Gen-Z is notable by one who was unsociable way before it was cool, how bad must this crisis be?
The article begins with the most popular remedy for lack of soft-skills: a Dale Carnegie course based on his 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence Neighbors, though the article tells you that Dale Carnegie first taught such a course in 1912 the year he founded the Dale Carnegie company (Ibid., 26).
The rest of the article then goes on to redeem itself, in my eyes, in two ways: First, it pretty much disses the concept of soft-skills. “Soft-skills researchers have been mired in their own long crisis. None of them have convincingly determined what a ‘soft skill’ even is, despite decades of research” (Ibid., 27). In a 2022 article entitled “Soft Skills, Do We know What We Are Talking About?” social scientists [read psychobabblers] patch together definitions from an inconsistent taxonomy of subskills, interpersonal skills, empathy, emotional intelligence, problem-solving skills, etc., etc. etc. (Ibid.). She goes on to relate talking to corporate leaders looking grave when she brings up the soft skills matter. Do you see? They know this is a must-acknowledge crisis and talking point though no one can quite tell her what those skills are.
The second way this article redeems itself has to do with what I’ve written ad nauseam about: “The soft-skills paradigm seemed to accord with women’s stereotypical strengths, helping them to eventually worm their way into the C suite [This refers to a company’s top management positions. The “C” stands for “chief”. I had to look this up because I was afraid of what this might mean in Gen-Z’s love of vulgarities.], as though the skills were a kind of feminist panacea” (Ibid., 28).
Two final quotes from this 2025 article and we’ll move on to the 1982 article Harper’s paired with it. “But no matter how little quantitative evidence we have that soft-skills training helps employees, employers still preach soft skills as the key to individual success” (Ibid.). The authoress takes a corporate-sponsored course on them. At the end of the course a presentation was given on the magic formula for soft skill succeeding. It was the importance of smiling. The authoress asks the presenter what he did for a living. He was a dentist. She then concludes sagely, “In that moment, it struck me that if soft-skills do exist, they may come into play most urgently when you’re drilling a hole into a child’s tooth – more so than when you’re managing subordinates” (Ibid., 30).
The 1982 article “Inexplicable and Fatal” by Ann Hulbert sums up her view of how the farm boy who was no social success at Missouri’s State Teachers’ College, Dale Carnegie, became the authority on winning friends. She ends by quoting Emerson, “’My friends have come to me unsought.’” And also Montaigne’s remark about the “’inexplicable and fatal power’ at work in the best friendships.” She points out that this power makes possible in real friendships what doesn’t exist in Dale Carnegie’s methods: Sincerity, empathy, sympathy, conversation, “commitment rather than causal association” (“Inexplicable and Fatal”, 31).
A pastor ordained in the 1950s said everything changed in the 60s. It became about personality and little to nothing about confessional adherence or faithfulness. When I entered 30 years later is was only about personality, which seminaries now test for and mold believing this is “spiritual formation”, but it’s only the ghost of Dale Carnegie. And here’s the punchline: the Missouri Synod’s Districts and Synod as a whole, with some notable exceptions, continue to elect those majoring in soft-skills with relative soft theological heads.
Elijah, Elisha, and the Second Elijah, John the Baptist, and Second Elisha, the Christ, lacked soft skills. Elijah slaughtered 100 soldiers who disrespected his office (2 Kings 1); Elisha had two she-bears maul 42 kids for disrespecting his office (2 Kings 2); John the Baptist called people snakes; Jesus declared the most respected scribes and Pharisees hypocrites, and my favorite example is Luke 11:44-46: Jesus says to the Pharisees, “’Woe to you! For you are like concealed tombs, and the people who walk over them are unaware of it.’45 And one of the lawyers •said to Him in reply, “Teacher, when You say this, You insult us too.’ 46 But He said, ‘Woe to you lawyers as well! For you weigh men down with burdens hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.’[i] When people warned Jesus He was being too harsh, He doubled-down not clamed-up.
[i] I ultimately disassociated myself with a confessional group in the Texas District called the Lutheran Mission Alliance when I kept hearing the laymen talk of our need to be “winsome”. I left the ACELC for a similar reason. Most of the confessional pastors knew it was hypocrisy to commune at district conventions where there was not Biblical fellowship among the liberals and confessionals. Most would avoid those services privately and surreptitiously. But they would not agree with me that ACELC should come out publicly against such services. When a building is burning and even just lives, not necessarily souls, are at stake, winsomeness and politeness and soft-skills be damned – rather than people. But if you take this tack you will be sailing against every wind of modern church doctrine and practice and into a sea of vinegar and another yellow substance.
