I have written a lot about our modern cultural trends, especially our elevation of youth and youthful pursuits to the highest level of aspiration, but I am afraid I have not done well at making my case. I can point to many specific details, but I have the feeling that in each post I have written I have provided only one, maybe two, examples, leaving each individual post less than convincing. Taken as a whole, perhaps they make my case, but individually they are not satisfactory. So, in an attempt to make my case that our society has adopted a rather juvenile outlook on life, and is in the progress of becoming progressively more immature, I want to put together the evidence and provide all the evidence in one place.

I think the best evidence is our belief in what passes for "profound" or "serious" in art. There are, as I see it, two differing schools, and both show their immaturity by the facets of life upon which they choose to focus. First, there is the "somber" school, the one that thinks nothing can be profound unless it is "grim", "gritty", "dark", that is, uniformly depressing and downbeat. This same school also fuels all the anti-man rhetoric which supposedly shows one to be an elevated thinker. The second school of thought is the "just kidding" or the "look at me" school, or to put a pompous French name to it, the school that revels in epater le bourgeoise. These are those who enjoy either shocking or amusing their audience, who see art not as a means of conveying any message, but simply getting a reaction. Some add a pseudo-intellectual excuse, such as "deconstructing dominant paradigms" or "violating hegemonic standards" or some other agglomeration of intellectual buzz-words, but many don't bother and simply follow the dadaists in believing that the reaction is an end in itself.

Let us look at the second first, as it is clearly the most childish, and even some practitioners recognize that. That is why we have deconstructivists, poststructuralists and the rest of the modernist horde coming up with essays about "violating paradigms" and "challenging perceptual hegemonies" and so on to excuse the obvious childishness of using art to do nothing but get a rise out of people. But even they know it is all just an excuse. Shocking people with intentionally ugly or offensive images, reproducing meaningless commercial images or blowing up comics to ten times normal size is nothing but a means of thumbing one's nose at traditional concepts of art and beauty. (There is also the "anti-hero" concept, though that is a hybrid of the two approaches, part mockery, part nihilism.) This school of thought is nothing but childish, and I doubt anyone could make a reasonable argument otherwise.

And that brings us to the second school, the one that tends to monopolize "serious" art in our culture, as well as "high brow" pop culture. This is the school that finds joy in the grim, the morbid, the sordid, and thinks there is nothing more profound than finding fault with man and claiming he is a particularly negative influence on the world. Be it art of environmentalism or philosophy, this concept has monopolize much of modern thought.

But why do I call it childish?

Because it is precisely that. Anyone who has had children can tell you, very early on they learn there are certain words that get a rise out of mom and dad. And they learn that words relating to death, violence, and anything gloomy and dark are among those. And so they harbor a secret fixation for all things morbid.

On top of that, children's lives are filled with relentlessly happy, upbeat, bright and cheery images. We, quite reasonably, want to keep them innocent, shelter them from the more horrifying aspects of life, and so we present them with a cheery world view. And, at the same time, we want to instill morality and a sense of worth, so we tell them that being good brings rewards, that the good guys triumph, and that man is a superior being. In their mind, these messages all get confounded into one image of childhood.

And so, as they grow older, and want to prove they have left behind childhood, some will reject those bright, colorful, innocent childhood images, many by adopting dark, somber, brooding ideas and images. And some of  those, having confounded our moral teaching with the childhood images, will also reject the idea that good triumphs, that man is special and the rest, showing they are "grown up" by rejecting the messages their parents tried to give them

And that is why I call this school of thought childish. It is essentially the perspective of an adult who never got over that teenage rebellion, who is still convinced that dark and brooding is more mature, that portraying the triumph of evil makes him mature, that criticizing man qua man makes him profound. I can understand. I once wrote a lengthy story about the defeat and destruction of one of my childhood heroes, the only difference being that hero was Ultraman, and I was eight at the time. But perhaps I exaggerate. I too was caught up in teen rebellion, and thought the somber and dark was right and good, but with age, I grew, and came to realize that there is no more maturity in a simplistic rejection of the good than in a simplistic and thoughtless embrace of the good. (Though if one is going to embrace without understanding, the good is preferable. It makes life much easier and more enjoyable.)

The reason these schools of thought persist is very simple to explain, it is the same mechanism I have described over and over. Teen rebellion and the youthful rejection of adult mores is a timeless phenomenon. All youth rebel, try to assert their independence. It is part of growing into adulthood. The difference in the past was that adult society held members to certain standards. Youths were expected to rebel, but until they adopted properly mature standards they were not admitted to adult society. And they recognized this, and after some period sewing their oats they would return tot he fold and effectively become their parents.

What we now have is a system where the roles are reversed. Thanks to our senseless adoration of youth, the adults of our society no longer set the standards. Instead, the adults watch the young, see what they are doing, and emulate it. Thus, to be admitted to adult society, the young never need to mature, they simply need to age. Of course that means that society as a whole is constantly loosening its rules, as the young push the envelope, it is adopted as the cultural norm. And so, each generation finds it must go farther and farther to push against the limits of an every broader envelope. Which is why so many lament that each generation seems more permissive, less focused and more extreme. Of course they are. When the adults refuse to enforce standards and instead chase after the values of the young, that is the inevitable outcome.

But I seem to have made it pretty far without providing even one of the examples I promised. So perhaps I should go back and start again.

Perhaps the best example is to be found in our attitude toward standards. For example, in my youth there were the famous "seven dirty words" not allowed on network television. A generation before parents were not allowed to be shown sharing a bed and the word "pregnant" was forbidden. And at present the FCC is debating whether the word "f**k" is allowable as an adjective. What changed to make those rules change so dramatically in 50 years? Many would claim "progress", but look at the past. Can you name a 50 year period in the past when morality changed so radically? Only with the abandonment of adult standards do we see such rapid decline*.

We can see a similar pattern in our interaction with one another. Where in the past a sense of decorum would keep us from swearing in most public contexts, would encourage a minimum of civility, and otherwise constrain us to behave in a decent manner, we have been increasingly coarsened, to the point where people suggest laws to prevent us from doing things civility and commonsense would normally control. For instance, I have seen signs in a downtown district encouraging adults not to curse. Even a decade or two ago I could not imagine someone having to require that. Likewise, it would seem commonsense would tell individuals not to text and drive, but we lack not only common sens,e but any concern for other drivers, and so take actions which are actually dangerous because we have so little concern for anything but immediate satisfaction of our needs.

Even our political discourse has taken on this character, and on both sides of the aisle. There was a time when protests were the real of union goons and campus radicals, those who knew that protests were an implicit threat of physical force. Now we have protests staged by almost any group one can name. Similarly, even in my youth we respected the old rule of not discussing religion and politics in social settings. Not so today. Any setting is likely to explode into a heated political argument. We have lost all sense of civility, of self control. We have lost those rules that once guided us.

In short, we have become a nation of teenagers, and worse still, teenagers who were raised by perpetual teenagers. Many of us are two generations removed from any concept of venerating age and experience, of following established rules, of the value of tradition. There are exceptions, pockets where tradition has been respected, even large regions, but by and large the social environment which started int he northeast and west coast, mostly urban enclaves has spread, and as information spreads ever more swiftly, so does this collapse. Outside of a few self-confined societies (Mormons, orthodox Jews, a few others), this cultural trend will rapidly spread throughout the nation, and we will find ourselves completely immersed in a sea of spoiled teens.

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* I am not arguing that the morality of any generation is ideal, all I am saying is that standards have clearly declined. What si the ebst set of values is something that can be debated, my only argument is that we do NEED standards, not a constant loosening with no endpoint in sight.

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POSTSCRIPT

Here is a list of my earlier writing on this topic:

Frightened for our Future
The Adoration of Youth
I Blame the Romantics
Revisiting an Old Topic
The Sky Is Falling! Again! Really! We Mean It This Time!
Tired and Annoying Theme
IMDB Makes My Case
A Thought On the Watchmen
An Interesting Article
Anti-Man Intellectuals
In Defense of Standards
Addenda to "In Defense of Standards"
Our Rude Behavior
Where the Wild Things Are
A Reason for Hope
A Thought on Twilight
Social Controls

If the essay above provided too few examples, the list above can certainly provide more.

POSTSCRIPT II

In my essay "Political Polarization and Divisive Politics" I discusses political polarization and argued that our current violently divisive political environment is something of a natural state when you have real choices and not two parties echoing the same line. And I still believe that. However, as I said above, that division does not have to degenerate into constant political arguments in inappropriate venues. That is a feature of our societal collapse, and is not a natural outcome of having a real choice in politics.