Time Immortal

Count Roland is, I think, seeking to supplant Ed Darrell as my most frequent correspondent. He writes in yet again with some supplemental thoughts on this article, which hinted at how our society’s loss of innocence in recent decades more or less parallels the reduction in the number of children our society is producing.

This has ben noticed, at least by ‘fringe’ ‘conservative’ not crazy intellectuals for at least 25 years with Neil Postman’s “The Disappearance of Childhood” and his and Diana West’s analyses (hers in “The Death of the Grownup“) pin the decline as definitively started in the 50’s and prepared for since about the time of Vatican I (Not to mention various papal writings which indicated part of this due to their topics - Humanae Vitae and adolescent sexuality for example).

It is a return to the situation of the middle ages and earlier without the large hanging anvil of the necessity of several children to survive oneself and have at least a couple children survive to adulthood. Our one designer baby and our pet or doll surrogates fill the rest of the psychological space, or so some are deluded to believe, and that one child will survive sans accidents and we have the government to support us in old age, not children, so one is enough.

But I agree with both of them that the ‘adultification’ you speak of is of a severely adolescent nature since adult and child are contrast classes with adolescence only recently bridging the gap in our thoughts. But, if one of the contrast classes diminishes, so does the other. Without children there are no adults and vice versa. Thus all that remains is the adolescent group which attempts to marry the rights of adulthood with the responsibilities of childhood. A system stable that does not create.

Mark Steyn and many others have spoken about the concept of permanent adolescence being the prevailing trend in our post-Christian society, and I do think there’s more than just a ring of truth to the observation. Adolescence, as I recall it, was a struggle to exert one’s rights as a fledgling adult while still retaining all the child-like ways of acting and living that made life “fun.” And it is no stretch at all to say that many people these days have not grown up past that point.

A glance at the birth control-addled, sex-obsessed meta-adults that roam about Edmonton’s downtown area on any given evening (especially on weekends) tells the tale more than any number of essays could: ours is a world in which “fun” (read: gratification) is the ultimate object for many people, and for whom “responsibility” is nothing more than an extremely hard-to-spell (more than) four-letter word. We have become a society of people obsessed with the things we have a “right” to do, and yet we care not a whit for any consideration that intrudes on, or gets in the way of, our fun. We are, in other word, a society of people stuck in a permanent adolescence.

And it will likely be up to Christians to pick up the pieces once that unstable social framework devolves into pagan chaos.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!