(First in a three-part series on where American culture currently sits, and how we can course correct.)
Contemporary American popular culture, at least that of the woke variety that currently controls the national media, academia and federal agencies, is clearly built on what is often referred to as the Peter Pan or Tarzan principle: Children are inherently wiser than adults.
A quote that was (apparently falsely) attributed to Mark Twain for many years made light of the fact that in adolescence, we necessarily rebel against our parents — but eventually grow out of that and come to appreciate their hard-earned knowledge.
Another quote, attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre, said that as a young man he had confused disillusionment with enlightenment.
And so while it is natural for adolescents to go through a period of questioning everything they’ve been taught, it also used to be natural for them to eventually grow out of it.
Until the last 50 years, anyway, when entire swaths of our population seem to have become stuck in adolescence — unable or unwilling to move on to the next stage of human development.
We see this in the programming of the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon: the adults are always portrayed as lovable buffoons. Assuming, that is, that they’re even present. On many of the shows, the parents are simply absent.
In either case, it’s always up to the kids to save the day.
This is also reflected in much of what for as young adult “literature,” comic books and most video games.
Is it any wonder American kids grow up thinking they’re smarter than the adults?
We see manifestations of this throughout our society — university students demanding professors be fired for supposedly giving offense of some sort; recent college graduates demanding promotions above people with decades of experience; young reporters right out of college churning out article after article about how corrupt, racist, sexist, etc., the United States is.
The results of this infantilization of American society aren’t all harmless, either.
Those who eschew adulthood tend to avoid accepting responsibility: Everything is the fault of outside forces.
But without responsibility there can be no accountability. And without accountability, you get ... well, San Francisco, frankly. Or Los Angeles or Chicago or New York or Philadelphia or any of the big cities with woke district attorneys who believe it is wrong, if not unfathomable, to hold people responsible for their actions.
And so suspects are released without bail — only to prey on even more victims. We’re not even talking about supposedly victimless crimes, like turnstile hopping or panhandling. Suspects are being arrested by police for crimes such as shoplifting, assault, even rape — only to have charges dropped without ever even facing a jury.
A mere 60 years ago in this country, age was treated with a certain respect — if not the reverence we see in other cultures.
My father, now in his mid-80s, told me when I was in college that one of the proudest moments of his young adulthood was when a grocery clerk called him “sir.” He said that made him feel like an adult.
Then came the Woodstock era, in which an entire generation smugly reassured themselves that they knew better than the old folks — and that to be older was to be stodgy and out of it.
Call anyone under the age of 75 today “sir,” and you’re likely to get a shocked look, and some kind of humorous response like, “Oh, you must be thinking of my father.”
The generation that gave us “Never trust anyone over 30" 50 years ago isn’t handling aging very well.
In fact, most of the senior centers built in the 1970s and ’80s by local governments anticipating the aging Baby Boomers sit unused — because the Baby Boomers are congenitally unable to view themselves as senior citizens.
The results of this cultural shift can be tragic, as when minors are allowed to not only make life-altering medical decisions that may leave them sterile and / or sexually dysfunctional, but the adults in their life are prohibited by law from even questioning these children’s assumptions. Instead, doctors, teachers and even parents are required by law in many states to “affirm” the child’s desire to change genders — and never mind the science. (It’s telling that the political side of the aisle that most likes to offer up Europe as an example of how we should do things has grown very silent about how Europe is handling gender dysphoria in minors.)
And to publicly question this insanity is to be branded a “phobe” of some sort.
(The intentional mutation of the word “phobia” to now mean “bigot” is another column altogether.)
We’re seeing numerous examples now of young adults in their mid to late 20s who underwent irreversible genital surgery and hormone treatment as teenagers now realizing it was a horrible mistake, detransitioning back to their original gender, going public and asking, “Where were the adults in my life?”
Indeed.
Other cultures don’t do this.
In the East, it is still assumed — as it was in the West pre-Woodstock — that age brings experience, experience imparts knowledge, and knowledge can lead to wisdom.
In other words, it is the job of the adults to not only teach the children, but to acculturate them — to impart an understanding of their future role in society.
When we raise the next generation with the admonition — as many, if not most, of our schools do today — that it’s up to them to radically change society, the underlying premise is that our existing society is in need of such drastic change.
It’s hard for most of us in this nation to see what those irreparable faults are that are so in need of change.
But I think that mind set is certainly evident in young people today — military recruitment is way down in the United States, and one reason is that many “woke” young adults do not feel the United States is worth protecting.
They believe our adversaries’ lies that the United States is the most corrupt, racist, selfish and violent nation on Earth.
And that only the next generation can possibly save us from the scrapheap of history.
Certainly, politicians and even business leaders in places like Moscow and Beijing are more than happy to agree with them — although one suspects that the Russian and Chinese critics of the United States are more mercenary in their philosophical attacks than our domestic true believers.
No, it is only woke Americans — mostly from from upper- and middle-class families — who believe the United States is the most horrible nation on Earth.
It makes one wonder what they think of the African, Asian and Latin American migrants risking all in order to come to the United States — legally or illegally.
If the woke have an Achilles’ heel, it is their hubris. There is a smug arrogance about the woke which makes it difficult for them to course correct. Most of us over the age, of say, 40, have been largely disabused of this conceit by having been proven wrong so many times in our own lives.
But as we’re seeing in the behavior of the national media regarding story after story they’ve gotten wrong, unless they lose a defamation lawsuit and are ordered to, they don’t admit to their errors — they just move on to the next story.
I would argue that woke hubris is fueled in large part by the abject failure of our public education system.
Over the past half-century, many public schools have moved away from the classical approach to education. A few years ago, a study found that Korean high school students were more likely to be able to place the U.S. Civil War in its correct time frame than their American counterparts — although the American students displayed much higher self-esteem about their knowledge of the Civil War.
The purpose of a classical liberal education — focused on history, literature, the humanities — was to give young people a fuller sense of their nation’s and culture’s possibilities by teaching them about its past.
When we de-emphasize the liberal arts in favor of career skills, and what history we do teach is wholly slanted against our own nation, we’re producing citizens lacking the basic foundation needed for a representative form of self-governance to thrive.
And yet, this same arrogant ignorance also leaves the woke often unable to respond quickly to changing circumstances; because they’ve often never even considered alternate viewpoints or other ways of seeing things, when their assumptions turn out to be wrong, they are poorly equipped to adapt.
If we lived in a utopia, maybe none of this would matter.
But the reality is that we live in a highly competitive — cutthroat, really — marketplace of ideas, and right now, the idea that a free, democratic people can effectively compete against strictly regimented dictatorships is being questioned — in Beijing, in Moscow, in Teheran and Riyad and a dozen other capitals.
If young Americans won’t defend the principles upon which the United States was founded and is still more or less run, then who will?
I guarantee you that Chinese and Russian schools do not focus their curriculum on those nations’ shortcomings the way our schools do on America’s failures.
Critics claim that the curriculum changes over the past half-century focusing on racism and other flaws in American society are nothing more than taking an honest, unvarnished look at our history.
But they are clearly more than that. There is a clear distinction between acknowledging our failings, and fixating on them as our only defining characteristics. One can admit we’ve fallen short of our ideals without dismissing our ideals as out and out fraud.
Perhaps the critics are right, and the history previous generations were taught was too uncritical — nothing more than mythology.
But can any nation successfully compete without a mythology to balance that of its adversaries?
Russian and Chinese students are taught their nation’s mythology; so are students in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, and nearly every developing nation. Read the books those students are taught from, and you’ll find nothing but paeans to their greatness.
And given China’s ascendancy, it’s hard to buy the argument that our hypercritical approach makes us more competitive.
It is only in the West — the nations with the freest citizens, with the governments most answerable to the people — that the taxpayers subsidize an education system that questions the very legitimacy of those governments.
It is insanity, and it it puts our future as a nation in real jeopardy.
Next week: How a fear of freedom has turned the woke into intolerant control freaks.
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