Commentary
Sometimes it’s both entertaining and instructive to revisit social and cultural critiques from the past and see how the author’s conclusions and predictions have panned out over the years.Which is why, after a long absence, I recently reread parts of Diana West’s 2007 “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
“Once upon a time, in the not too distant past,” Ms. West wrote in her Preface, “childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist, and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth’s promise.”
For the first 150 pages or so of “The Death of the Grown-Up,” Ms. West demonstrated through data and anecdote how Americans have gradually exchanged maturity for perpetual adolescence. She devoted the rest of her book to the dire consequences of drinking from this fountain of youth, particularly in regard to Islamist terrorism and the conflicts in the Middle East in the wake of 9/11.
More specifically, Ms. West argued that following World War II, there arose in the United States a youth counterculture that, by its allure and advertising, would replace adult culture. She used scores of specific examples to support her argument, ranging from a comparison of the Hollywood movies of the 1930s and ’40s to those of the ’60s and ’70s, the radical changes in popular music, and the upheaval in everything from fashion to sexual morals and mores.
“This mainstreaming of countercultural behavior,” Ms. West contended, “is probably the most significant marker of our own stretch of civilization.”
Yet she also noted that this marker for most of us has become impossible to apprehend.
“A profound civilizational shift has taken place, but, shockingly, it is one that few recognize,” she wrote. “The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball may have summed up this collective myopia best: ‘Having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive our transformation.’”
Even worse than these changes are the perspectives that, once associated with adolescence, are now embraced by the population at large and even institutionalized. The current demands that we exchange meritocracy for fairness and equity, for example, are rooted in childhood longings, rarely countered by that old grown-up truth, “Life isn’t fair.” The obsessive sexualizing of children is indicative of this blending of adolescence and adulthood.
Few would argue that the years since then have improved this situation.
Of course, many Americans are exceptions to this decline. Several of my younger acquaintances, men and women in their 20s and 30s, handle their affairs as responsibly as did their grandparents and great-grandparents. They work hard; they marry; they have children and raise them to be moral, hard-working human beings; they generally practice a religious faith; and they confront difficulties without boo-hooing or blaming others. They are, in short, grown-ups.
“The adults are back in charge” is a message that should bring no comfort these days. America is stock full of adults.
What we need are more grown-ups.
