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The Adolescent Society

by Christopher Chantrill
April 23, 2007 at 4:19 pm

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SOME PEOPLE think that we have extended adolescence way too far into adulthood.

In rural society there is no such thing as adolescence. One day you are a child. The next day they conduct a coming-of-age ceremony and you are a man or a woman.

Not any more. Now you can live in the adolescent twilight zone between childhood and adulthood until way into your twenties. We talk, a generation after the liberating 1960s, about the responsibility of colleges in loco parentis for people who have already attained the age of majority. Today, college kids are treated more like children—except of course in their all-important “sexual life”—than back in the good old days when students had to keep one foot on the floor.

So when a crazed kid, sorry an adult adolescent complete with reversed baseball cap, kills 32 people in a gun-free zone of a college campus even the Wall Street Journal starts busily editorializing about what the college woulda coulda shoulda done to stop it.

But surely the pundits should be marveling at how well colleges prevent student violence.

Young men, science tells us, are wired for violence. We bombard them constantly with the message that violence never solves anything. But we titillate them with all kinds of virtual violence in movies, music, videos, and first-person shooter video games. Then we humiliate them in our compulsory schools run, for the most part, by women with the assistance of mood-altering drugs.

On top of that we have deliberately targeted young men of little or no color in the past generation with a deliberate program of discrimination to atone for the sins of their fathers. Everywhere you look the education system has a plan or a program to humiliate young men of little or no color.

So what do our young men do about all this? Are they erupting against daily indignity in an existential rage that will not be denied? Not at all. They just hunker down in front of their first-person shooter video games and vote with their feet against the schools and colleges that so humiliate them.

The astonishing thing is that, with all this barrage of instruction, titillation, and humiliation only one middle-class boy misses the point, shorts out his social conditioning, and fires up his hard wiring. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of our cultural conditioning system, or at least the tolerance of modern young people for rank, unapologetic oppression.

Of course, the system doesn’t work so well among the lower orders.

The annual murder rate in the United States is about 6 murders per 100,000. It’s a bit higher in places like New Orleans, according to Nicole Gelinas in City Journal—about ten times higher. That’s understandable. There’s nothing you can do about inner-city problems without solving the root-cause problems of poverty and discrimination. So that’s different.

But in the world of higher education almost every kid seems to get the message. Except for one student at Virginia Tech last week.

Now we are engaged in the usual Monday-morning quarterbacking. Should the university have warned the students? Should authorities have removed the disturbed young man from school? Should there be more gun control? Should there be less gun control? Did the university make a mistake by declaring the campus a gun-free zone?

All these questions have only one answer: More research is needed.

But some people wonder whether we are asking the right questions. They want to look at the bigger questions. They want to question the entire program of extended adolescence and endless education.

William W. Lewis in The Power of Productivity has found that the importance of education to a productive economy is overrated. You can train people for most jobs. And you can train very ordinary people to be the most productive in the world, as Wal-Mart has proved. Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption argues that adults have grossly overestimated their ability to control and influence children. Indeed she raises the question: Do we really know what we are doing by crowding children into our factory schools, given that children learn mostly from older children rather than from adults? And Robert Epstein in The Case Against Adolescence argues that we should do away with an arbitrary age of majority and emancipate children as soon as they can pass tests of responsibility.

It’s an interesting question. Is all this extended education that is so central to our society really such a good thing—other than for the education industrial complex, of course?

Don’t expect changes any time soon. Vast privileges and powers depend upon the existence of the Adolescent Society and the extended childhoods of our children.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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