Peter Pan Nation

If it seems that America’s establishment figures have been getting increasingly immature as the years go by, you are not imagining things. Gifted writer Diana West catalogues this trend to a fare-thee-well in her admirable book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.

“More than a syllabus is at stake; more than the ethnic makeup of college students is at issue; more than the feminization of the hard sciences is under consideration,” she writes. “Looking back, it becomes clear that there was a great luxury in fighting a culture war in the classroom or boardroom.”

“But if the settings were somehow artificial, the hits taken were very real, disabling faculties of judgment and discernment, and undermining confidence and authority.” The daughter of a distinct cultural minority—a conservative Hollywood screenwriter—West has fought those battles from a very tender age.

Currently, she is a columnist for The Washington Times. “In other words, it came as no shock to learn, for example, that in our public elementary school in Westchester County, New York, third-graders devote a hefty part of a semester to studying Kenya,” West remembers. “They don’t know who discovered the Hudson River, who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, or where the Battle of White Plains was fought, but they come home with plaudits for Kenya’s health care system—which, incredible as it may seem, I had never heard of.”

“This, I recognized, was par for the PC course, as were the stories that came home about cow’s-blood cuisine and earlobe enhancement, which the kids found relishingly disgusting.” West shows just how disabled our “faculties of judgment and discernment” have become.

We make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation look level-headed. Consider:

• “More adults, ages eighteen to forty-nine, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN.”

• “Readers as old as twenty-nine are buying ‘young adult’ fiction written expressly for teens.”

• “The average video gamester was eighteen in 1990; now he’s going on thirty.”

• “And no wonder: The National Academy of Sciences has, in 2002, redefined adolescence as the period extending from the onset of puberty, around twelve, to age thirty.”

• “The McArthur Foundation has gone farther still, funding a major research project that argues that the ‘transition to adulthood’ doesn’t end until age thirty-four.”

• “Maybe this helps explain why about one-third of the fifty-six million Americans sitting down to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month in 2002 were between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine.”

At 48, I fell in this bracket then and now but have somehow managed to resist this program even when my eldest daughter is watching it and one of my favorite actor’s voices, that of Ernest Borgnine, is featured on the show. Just don’t ask me about The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

Seriously, and ultimately the author is quite serious about this, this refusal to grow up, a la Peter Pan, has real-world implications. While in previous conflicts, western leaders could draw sharp contrasts between fascism and freedom, dictatorship and democracy and communism and capitalism, currently western leaders get tongue-tied in their efforts to find a warm and fuzzy way to say Islamo-Fascism.

Applying the touchy-feely approach to defense and foreign policy that has reaped dubious dividends in education and culture leaves the West with a more depressing decision than the “choice not an echo” promised by Barry Goldwater’s campaign in his unsuccessful 1964 run for the presidency. It doesn’t even leave you with the echo.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.