Friday, October 05, 2007
Our Child-Based Decadence [Candace de Russy]
Years ago, at the New School in Manhattan, I taught a course on civilizational decline, with a focus on the foibles and malfunctions of American civilization. The subject continues to interest me.
So – upon reading Bruce Thornton’s cogent review of the book (aptly titled “Childish Americans Make Easy Pickings For Determined Jihadists”) – I’ve ordered a copy of Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
Snippets from the review:
- In any conflict, understanding ourselves is as important as understanding the enemy.
- The demise of the adult has led to the abandonment of adult virtues and mentalities, and their replacement by the instant gratification, impatience with the limits of reality, and the obsession with the self typical of the teen-ager.
- Rather than flog the 60’s, West correctly sees that decade’s cultural degeneracy as the “epilogue” of the 50’s and its post-war affluence, demographic explosion, and increased freedom for the young.
- Also important was the development of adolescents into the most coveted demographic for consumer capitalism, the group most prone to transient fashion and impulse buying – and now possessing the funds to gratify those ad-stoked desires.
- Most important was the pop-cultural institutionalizing of “rebellion” that would bear such bitter political fruit in the 60’s. This demonizing of all authority, from mom and dad to the government, legitimized the impatience with the limits to desire typical of children and teen-agers. And this worldview quickly became the default attitude of much of American culture, particularly after the sixties – “the biggest temper tantrum in the history of the world” – and the craven reaction of the adult world.
Thornton also praises West’s astuteness in linking
multiculturalism’s self-loathing idealization of the “other” to the adolescent “identity crisis.” Our ignorance of the West’s unique goods enshrined in its history and traditions has led to a loss of cultural identity, which “would seem to be linked to the loss of maturity. At the very least, the easy retreat from history and tradition reveals the kind of callow inconstancy and lack of confidence that smacks of immaturity as much as anything else. It seems that just as we have stopped ‘growing up,’ we have forgotten ‘who’ it was we were supposed to grow up into.”
The academy, in its wholecloth embrace of “multiculturalism” at the expense of civilizational identity, has surely been at the head of the pack in hastening the demise of the adult.
(tip: writer Jack Kemp)
10/05 12:36 PM
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