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West, Diana.
The Death of the Grown-Up.
New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-312-34049-0.
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In The Case Against Adolescence
(July 2007), Robert Epstein argued that the
concept of adolescence as a distinct phase of life is
a recently-invented social construct which replaced the
traditional process of childhood passing into an
apprenticeship to adulthood around the time of puberty.
In this book, acid-penned author Diana West, while not
discussing Epstein's contentions, suggests that the impact
of adolescence upon the culture is even greater and more
pernicious, and that starting with the Boomer generation,
the very goal of maturing into an adult has been replaced
by a “forever young” narcissism which elevates
the behaviour of adolescence into the desideratum of people
who previously would have been expected to put such
childish things behind them and assume the responsibilities of
adults.
What do you get when you have a society full of superannuated
adolescents? An adolescent culture, of course, addicted to
instant gratification (see the debt crisis), lack of respect for
traditional virtues and moderation, a preference for ignoring
difficult problems in favour of trivial distractions, and for
euphemisms instead of unpleasant reality. Such a society spends so
much time looking inward that it forgets who it is or where it has
come from, and becomes as easily manipulated as an adolescent at the
hands of a quick-talking confidence man. And there are, as always, no
shortage of such predators ready to exploit it.
This situation, the author argues, crossing the line from cultural
criticism into red meat territory, becomes an existential threat
when faced with what she calls “The Real Culture War”:
the challenge to the West from Islam (not “Islamists”,
“Islamofascists”, “Islamic terrorists”,
“militant fundamentalists” or the like, but
Islam—the religion, in which she contends the institutions
of violent jihad and
dhimmitude
for subjected populations which
do not convert have been established from its early days).
Islam, she says. is a culture which, whatever its
shortcomings, does know what it is, exhorts its
adherents to propagate it, and has no difficulty proclaiming its
superiority over all others or working toward a goal of global
domination. Now this isn't of course, the first time the West
has faced such a threat: in just the last century the equally
aggressive and murderous ideologies of fascism and communism were
defeated, but they were defeated by an adult society,
not a bunch of multicultural indoctrinated, reflexively cringing,
ignorant or disdainful of their own culture, clueless about
history, parents and grandparents whose own process of maturation
stopped somewhere in their teens.
This is a polemic, and sometimes reads like a newspaper op-ed
piece which has to punch its message through in limited space
as opposed to the more measured development of an argument
appropriate to the long form. I also think the author really
misses a crucial connection in not citing the work of Epstein and
others on the damage wrought by the concept of adolescence
itself—when you segregate young adults by age and cut them
off from the contact with adults which traditionally taught them
what adulthood meant and how and why they should aspire to
it, is it any surprise that you end up with a culture filled
with people who have never figured out how to behave as adults?
October 2008 