image credit: buildabear.com
Several years ago, I read Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-up – a sober and somewhat frightening
exploration into why America is full of adults who do not grow out of
adolescence. The other day, I came across Mark Steyn’s words on the subject:
Almost every structural defect of
western societies arises from the contemporary phenomenon of prolonged
childhood - later family formation, leading to collapsed birth rates, providing
an "urgent need" for remorseless, mass unskilled immigration, setting
in motion profound, destabilizing cultural transformation. Indeed, one reason
why the existential threat of that transformation is so hard to recognize is
because, among its other effects, protracted adolescence so infantilizes the
populace (as Wells saw in The Time Machine) that it utterly enervates even a basic
survival instinct.
Why be surprised by that? A society
in which it becomes the norm for 40-year-olds to climb the stairs every night
to their childhood bedroom, the same one that once had the teddy-bear wallpaper
and the Thomas the Tank Engine coverlet, will not be a world that makes men, or
women, in any meaningful sense of those terms.
The rest of Mr. Steyn's blog post is here. This may not be, technically speaking, a Tea Party subject,
but since perpetual adolescence carries its own micro- version of “fiscal
responsibility" – or should I say “fiscal irresponsibility” - I thought it worth
posting.
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