WHERE HAVE ALL THE GROWN-UPS GONE?

Long time passing...

A provocative look at the rise of youth culture, the worship of perpetual adolescence, and the sorry spectacle of adults shirking the responsibilities of maturity. Firebrand conservative columnist Diana West looks at the mess America is in and wonders "Where did all the grown-ups go?

Amazon description of, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

One evening in a graduate course in American history, the professor started the conversation by calling on me.  ‘What qualities should a President have?” I blurted out the first things that came to mind, “Intelligent and open minded.”

Today I would have answered, differently: A person:

• of proven competence, like a two-term governor.

• who has been publicly tested.

• who is psychologically stable.  

• comfortable in their own skin.

• with experience.

• with wisdom. 

•   with inherent honesty

• who is serious and mature.

 In a word, a person with gravitas. 

The word derives from ancient Rome where men in authority, even in low level positions like the head of a household, were expected to exhibit strength and dignity.  Their manner should create feelings of respect and trust.  They don’t sputter with anger.  They control of their baser instincts.  No ego demons, no pettiness, no grown-up adolescents.  Integrity.  An absence of truculence. A natural self-esteem.  Quiet confidence.

Gravitas is a desirable quality for parents, CEOs, military officers, professors, physicians, clergymen, financial advisors, counselors, lawyers, team captains, and especially for the most powerful individual in the world, the American President.  We want Plato’s “philosopher King” running the show, but the stoic philosopher/ Emperor, Marcus Aurelias has been dead for 1800 years, and the current crop of presidential candidates is far from this ideal.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Tim Walz, and J.D. Vance are the new normal.  (The jury is still out on Vance, who graduated summa-cum-laud from Ohio State University and later from Yale Law school. He has intelligence and poise, but at age 38, is still young and untested.) 

We may have peaked out in double gravitas when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower twice in the 1950s.  They weren’t sexy; they were two distinguished gentlemen, worthy of the office. Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Mondale, Reagan, Dukakis, Dole, George Herbert Walker Bush, and Mitt Romney… were serious men…but after them, gravitas at the presidential level began to run thin.

Gravitas from presidents to the rest of us has been sliding for generations.

“Once upon a time, in the not-too-distant past,” wrote Diana West in 2007, “childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist, and adulthood was the fulfilment of youth’s promise.” 

West quotes Mike Males who wrote in 2003, “The deterioration in middle-aged adult behavior has driven virtually every major social problem over the last years.” Has it really been that bad?  Well, perhaps not every major social problem, but the Protestant or Puritan work ethic that undergird America’s economic success since Colonial times, has dissipated. It had an upswing after World War II, but while we were pursuing the American dream, in harmony with the traditional work ethic, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society took us down the road to entitlement, a road leading us away from our culture of hard work and rugged individualism. 

Paralleling the Great Society was the trendy existential notion that just making money was not genuine; we should strive for lives of meaning. As a result, many able-bodied men today prefer not to work.  .  The manager of Texas Roadhouse told us that he offers staff a forty-hour work week, but many do not want to exceed 20 hours so they can collect unemployment.  The children would rather be taken care of than work for a living. “It’s hard to get good help these days,” is an unfortunate reality

And so it goes.  In the past, government policies like limited liability and tax incentives for home buyers, encouraged investment and entrepreneurship.  Today’s lawmakers encourage incentives to not work.  

Ø Forgiving student loans encourages irresponsible behavior.

Ø Free breakfast and lunch for kids in school

Ø Welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance

Ø Social Security

Ø Medicare

Ø Inflated grades and lower standards at all levels

Ø Depicting homework as unfair or too burdensome.

Ø Kamla Harris’s suggestion to tax unrealized gains, meaning taxing profits that have not been cashed, would frighten investors and lead to chaos in the market.

Ø Millions of illegal aliens given credit cards, rooms in four star hotels, free rent, free legal help, workforce training, driver’s licenses, and food.

 The conglomerate effect of these entitlement policies is to undermine adult behavior and encourage dependency and irresponsibility.

In 2012, sociologist, Charles Murray wrote,

Until recently, healthy men in the prime of life who did not work were scorned as bums.  Even when the man was jobless, through no fault of his own, America’s deeply rooted stigma against idleness persisted – witness the sense of guilt that gripped many men who were unemployed during the Great Depression even though they knew it wasn’t their fault they were unemployed.

Eric Hoffer, a migrant farm worker during the Depression, and a brilliant observer of human behavior, concluded that his fellow workers never blamed others for their tough times. Rather than whining about the unfairness of life or looking for scapegoats, they took responsibility for themselves, believed they could make it on their own, and were resilient enough to overcome hardships.  

Murray concluded, “…white males of the 2000s were less industrious than they had been twenty, thirty or fifty years ago, and that decay in industriousness occurred overwhelmingly” among the lower socio-economic classes.

This shift to dependency is exemplified by suggestions like this from Dr. John G. Cottone, writing in Psychology Today in 2021.

I believe we need to expand our current conception of adolescence as a period that extends past the teen years and into the mid-20s. In short, my experiences—both in treating undergraduate and graduate students and in raising my own teenagers—have informed my perspective, such that we should now think of age 25 as the new 18 in our expectations of what adolescents can psychologically handle.

 So here we are. Twenty-five is the new eighteen. The number of young adults living with their parents hit at least an eight-decade high in July, 2020, partly due to the pandemic.  More than half of adults under 30 (52%), or 26.6 million, were living with one or both of their parents as of July, according to a study of Census data from Pew Research Center, exceeding the previous high of 48% in 1940.

Remember what used to be said of women: keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant. Now we say of children, keep ‘em dependent, infantile, irresponsible and forever adolescent.

Diana West is correct, western culture has undergone a “profound civilizational shift,” part of the seventy-five-year transformation to a society that has lost its way.