The Death of the Grownup By Sally Thomas

My reflexive response on reading Diana West’s The Death of the Grownup has been to keep announcing magisterially to all and sundry that I am one. Pass the salt, because I said so, and I am a grownup. “We know,” the children reply wearily, which is a relief. After all, I’ve just been reading a book that argues that, in the wake of World War II’s “Greatest Generation,” successive generations have abandoned traditional notions of adult gravitas in favor of a presumably, and even desirably, terminal adolescence. The titular allusion to Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West cannot be accidental: This cultural development, West argues, marks a devolution of civilization as, well, we used to know it. Adult judgment—the mysterious sixth sense, as it seemed, which enabled my mother to declare from outside my bedroom door that I was not going out wearing that—has been replaced by a gormless disinclination to discern the good from the not-so-good, or to venture even that such distinctions exist at all. The problem, as West views it, is not merely rejection of authority but rejection of the responsibility to assert authority on any level, wreaking havoc in the family and the local community and rendering the West as a whole all the more vulnerable to jihadist assault.

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