Post-adult culture in America and its harm

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THE DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: HOW AMERICA'S ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT IS BRINGING DOWN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

By Diana West

St. Martin's Press, $23.95, 256 pages

REVIEWED BY LARRY THORNBERRY

"When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things."

These are the words of St. Paul in his first letter to the church at Corinth. Doubtless Paul would be appalled, as is Diana West, by contemporary Western culture, which allows, even encourages, people to stay children for a lifetime. Too many in our secular, multicultural, androgynous, non-judgmental, post-everything mush of a culture are choosing not to grow up. Ms. West says this is to our detriment and peril. Our very existence may depend on learning to produce full-service men and women again.

The matter isn't only an aesthetic blight, though it's certainly that. It's a burden on the adult eye and ear to see middle-aged full-professors, tie-dyed and tenured, wearing unlaced sneakers and backpacks. It's grating on the grownup ear to hear members of Congress or corporate executives prattling on about their favorite rock bands. How melancholy to learn of the large number of Americans in their 30s and 40s watching the Cartoon Network and "Seinfeld" re-runs. How dreary to see father and son slouching in the same baggy and rumpled shorts, dirty sneakers and T-shirt.

But beyond these aesthetic insults are the more important matters of the challenges and normal battles of adulthood that are not being joined because lifetime children in positions of political or cultural authority don't want to do their duty, any more than they wanted to do their homework or clean up their rooms when they were actual children.

And here's the peril. If it's a bunch of adolescents up against determined Islamic jihadis who know what they believe and what they're willing to kill you about if you won't believe — whom do you bet on?

Ms. West's book, her first, may be a bit of a jeremiad. But what she says is important, and her presentation is thorough, well-reasoned, and clearly written.