Adolescence: A Heresy
A review of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, by Robert Epstein, Quill Driver Books, 2007, 376 pp, plus appendices, bibliography and index.
At age 14, Andrew Jackson fought in the American War for Independence, was captured by the British. He was also orphaned. David Crockett, hero at the Alamo, struck out on his own at age 12 and returned home four years later a full-grown man. Audie Murphy, who left grade school to support his 11 brothers and sisters, won 33 combat and other service decorations during World War II before he was 20. And David Farragut, chief of the federal navy during the War of Northern Aggression, commanded his first ship at age 12.
Jackson, Crockett and Murphy appear in my own book, Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire, and Robert Epstein, a psychology professor and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, briefly writes about Farragut in his interesting if flawed book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen. Epstein’s thesis is hardly controversial if you know anything about history: Parents who want to know why teenagers are such a mess should look in the mirror. For about the last 150 years, American parents have infantilized teenagers by refusing to let them make decisions. As is usual when society turns in the wrong direction, it wasn’t average Americans who created the problem. Rather, the experts created it—and the problem, Epstein avers, is the imaginary psychological construct called adolescence. While we consider it a given of human maturation, and read back into history the notion of teenage rebellion, the very concept was only defined and given a name in 1904, when psychologist G. Stanley Hall, a biological determinist, coined the word.
Adolescence, the teenage years of rebellion, depression, angst, stupidity and generally incomprehensible behavior, is an accepted fact among the elites and experts, meaning the headshrinkers, eggheads and legislators who want to tell the rest of us what to do and when to do it. The belief in this imaginary developmental stage, which most parents share, explains why young people are such a mess. Or at least they seem to be. For Epstein contends that most teenagers aren’t a mess by nature. They act nutty, stupid and incompetent because we expect them to, and we expect them to because we believe they are nutty, stupid and incompetent—i.e., incapable of making intelligent decisions, incapable of working and incapable of just about anything else that requires a modicum of common sense. We believe that teenagers can’t think, that their brains are screwy. We believe in adolescence.
The result? At best, we delay these young people’s maturation until they are well past the teenage years — and at worst, we drive them into rebellious behavior up to and including drug use, pregnancy and serious crime, not least of which are the major school shootings in the United States over the past few years. Epstein diagnoses the problem, and his prescription is a simple one: Stop treating teens like small children. He’s right about that. And wrong about other things. Not least of those is giving teenagers unfettered rights as opposed to expectations and responsibilities.
Adolescence Is Not Real
Epstein explains that one needn’t read the book word for word to get its gist. The small abstracts opening each chapter will do. Yet understanding the scope of the problem requires reading his historical exposition of adolescence and how this flatly preposterous notion evolved. If you understand the history, you understand why the modern American conception of the teenage years is so outrageously amiss.
Throughout most of human history, he writes, young people were thoroughly integrated into adult society. From an early age, they worked alongside their parents, typically on farms, and were not dragooned into school with dozens or hundreds of peers. They married shortly after puberty began, sometimes as early as 14 or 15. Adolescence did not exist, so a boy or girl went from childhood to adulthood.
In short, our ancestors raised children differently than we do. Few laws restricted what children and teenagers could do. That’s where some of his laconic historical vignettes come in, from a young Alexander the Great to Jimmy Carter explaining that he carried a .22-caliber rifle as a small boy and drove a truck when he was 12.
Beginning in the early 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, the authorities began creating laws to restrict a child’s activities, most of them targeting work. These laws blossomed in the early 20th-century, concomitantly with compulsory school laws, the idea being to push children into school and prepare them for work in an industrial society.
The biggest push to infantilize children came, surprisingly, from feminists—the most prominent and successful being Jane Addams, a typical late 19th-century reformer (i.e. busybody). She created Hull House, which began as a measure to help immigrants and children and evolved into a nexus of radical social change.
Epstein quotes a congressional report about this nerve center of crackpot feminism: “Practically all the radicalism among women in the United States centered about Hull House, Chicago, and the Children’s Bureau, Washington, with a dynasty of Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.” And according to the Jane Addams Reader, “nearly every major reform in the years 1895-1903 came with Jane Addams’ name attached in one way or another, including labor and housing regulations, employment regulations for women and children, the eight-hour workday, old-age and unemployment insurance….”
What is more, “Addams’ reach was extraordinary. She either founded, helped to found, or was a major player in the American Civil Liberties Union … the Campfire Girls, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Consumer’s League, the National Peace Congress, the Women’s Peace Party” and more. No mending or ironing for this world-shaker. She helped concoct the deleterious juvenile justice system, and Hull House “spawned the first Boy Scout troop in Chicago,” as well as the city’s first public swimming pool, playground, kitchen, free art exhibits and college extension courses.
So three major movements initiated the move toward defining and recognizing adolescence: the Industrial revolution, which spawned the first child labor laws; compulsory education, which came next; and the women’s rights movement. As for compulsory education, it “was viewed by leading industrialists as a means of controlling the poor and working classes, and, specifically, for preparing them for work in new Industrial America.”
“The working class,” Epstein quotes a book about the subject, “had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace,” even as the “agendas of people like Jane Addams overlapped with the agendas of the industrialists.” These agendas of the “child savers” funneled children “off the streets” into a one-size fits all classroom. Epstein explains why compulsory cafeteria schooling is a failed experiment. A child spends almost his whole day separated from adults. What is worse, he writes, quoting John Taylor Gatto, public schools alienate children from their families.
The child-savers’ agenda also overlapped agenda of the labor unions, which wanted to stop children and teenagers from working because they competed with union members—but in any event the anti-work laws kept coming until they evolved into what we have today. A kid can’t work full-time until he is 16, and he certainly can’t work during school hours. Anyone under 16 needs a permit to work.
So Addams and her “child-savers” viewed teenagers as “fragile and incompetent” beings who “need adult protection.” The child savers “defined youth as a troublesome period of life based on their own class-based moralistic biases and created an infrastructure that mass produced young people in the image they themselves had invented: dependent, angry and incompetent. They robbed the young of their independence.”
As this social movement began, American business contributed youth-oriented industries, beginning with manufactured toys and games and metastasizing into the “youth-oriented corporate empires” that plague us today: Hasbro, Milton Bradley, Tonka, Kenner, Toys R Us. Beyond toys, big business now offers teenagers an entire menu of films and music dictating how teenagers think and controlling what they wear. Films typically depict aimless and “infantile teens … defiant and uncontrollable teens … drugged and inebriated and oversexed teens … depressed and suicidal teens.” Teen music is much the same.
American teens, Epstein writes, are the most troubled in the world — despite their wealth and prosperity. Why? Because they are infantilized, and they are infantilized mostly because they can’t work. In California, the age-old newspaper delivery boy is no more; you must be 18 to deliver the daily newspaper. And if teens are too immature to work, they assuredly are too immature to do anything else: sign a contract, buy a home, or get married.
Thus does Epstein catalogue the list of laws on everything from drinking to driving, none of which existed before the early 18th-century, the Industrial Revolution, compulsory schooling, the child-savers movement or the concept of adolescence.
Before the 20th-century and even in the early part of it, teenagers didn’t suffer the myriad pathologies they have today, and in many areas of the world, particularly pre-industrial cultures, they still don’t. But as American culture inoculates the world with the plague bacilli of consumption, materialism and adolescence, more young people across the globe misbehave.
Love and Marriage
Apart from the long list of don’ts imposed upon teenagers, society infantilizes teens by prohibiting them from pursuing love and sex. Citing the plethora of incoherent laws that forbid carnal activity to teens, Epstein adds the prohibition on marriage to the prohibition on work as one of the key methods adults use to infantilize teens. The strict laws regulating sexual behavior became necessary because the experts concluded that young men and women were too “immature” for that ultimate of “adult” relationships, marriage.
As with work, until the 20th century younger teenagers were permitted and encouraged to pursue romance. Epstein explains that modern sensibilities forced an erroneous depiction of Romeo and Juliet as 40-year-olds instead of what they were: not just teenagers but young teenagers. Epstein begins this section of the book with the story of a woman who, at 13, married a 21-year-old man and stayed married for more than 80 years. Today, her husband would be jailed.
What do we know that our ancestors didn’t? Not much. Epstein cites four presidential wives who married as teenagers and stayed married for their entire lives, including Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush. In the old days, marriages lasted longer than ours, yet today we reserve marriage for “adults.” However, the divorce rate among adults shows they aren’t much more successful than teenagers might be. Indeed, men who marry young tend to have successful marriages more often than not. This isn’t to say all teenagers are ready for marriage. But obviously many are.
Laws forbidding teenagers to marry, because they are too “immature” to experience romantic love and marriage, cause pre-martial sex and out-of-wedlock births. Forbidding teenagers to marry also helps explain the “high turnover” of girlfriends and boyfriends in high school. So too does the co-ed, compulsory high school itself, where hundreds of teenagers are confined for nine months in an environment offering the obvious cornucopia of carnal delights. Indeed, the two work in tandem: Adults forbid teenagers marriage, the proper outlet for sex, but imprison teenagers in a co-educational environment where they display their wares while consuming raunchy music and movies.
Like forbidding teenagers from working, denying them marriage explicitly tells them they are incapable of adult behavior—even though teenagers can procreate, one of the two purposes of marriage, and human beings reach their intellectual peak in terms of memory and reasoning ability in their teenage years.
As for this last, Epstein provides a list of the accomplishments of kids and teenagers: Louis Braille, blinded by an awl, invented the first version of the Braille reading system at age 12. Mozart was composing at age 7, and composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote A Midsummer’s Night Dream at age 17. George Parker, of Parker Bros. fame, invented his first board game at age 17. A teen-age Walt Disney left home to drive an ambulance in France in the aftermath of World War I. Not to mention Jackson, Crockett, Murphy and Farragut.
Admittedly, Mozart, for instance, was genius and prodigy. And so were many other accomplished young people. But most of them weren’t. Teenagers can work, think, fight and love. The law prohibits all of it.
Where Epstein Goes Wrong
Still, the book is not without a few minor problems and one major flaw: it lacks a moral center.
The minor problems are a few glib, erroneous conclusions. Introducing his argument to show that children can be warriors, he explains that Americans once thought women should not, and could not, fight in wars. He quotes an American soldierette, who claims that a properly trained woman can fight like a man, and concludes that women should be permitted in combat. On this point, Epstein is in over his head. He’s wrong for practical and moral reasons.
Early in the book, Epstein notes that acquisitive capitalists who run globe-straddling businesses created a market for bad music, bad movies and bad clothes that also infantilize teens. At the end, he describes overhearing two gabbling skateboarders, who repeatedly call each other “dude” and wonder whether they might “get air.” “These are the teens we have created:” he writes, “mindless consumers, dressed from head to toe in the garb prescribed by specialized divisions of the music and fashion industries, isolated from their heritages and their elders, producing nothing of value for their families or their society.”
All true, of course, but he also says he doesn’t oppose the acquisitive greed and centralization of business and commerce that created the problem. Why not? If avaricious entertainment tycoons peddle smut and stupidity to kids, he should oppose it. Instead, he avers, teenagers have a right to consume the very poison killing their souls.
This is why the book lacks a moral compass. Indeed, the word isn’t mentioned. Epstein never concedes that certain laws ought rightly to apply to everyone, one example being abortion restrictions, which he opposes. Epstein argues that a child who can demonstrate competence, as determined by tests, should be permitted to drink, smoke, purchase contraceptives, read pornography, have sex and abort a child.
It is true, as Epstein argues, that telling a soldier who earned the Medal of Honor he cannot buy a beer or pack of cigarettes is not only ridiculous but also oppressive in the extreme. But abortion is another matter. Pro-lifers want abortion banned for everyone, not merely teens, because they believe abortion takes an innocent life; i.e., it’s murder. Of course, Epstein opines in a milieu of legal abortion, and because his argument turns on the point that adult women can abort, perhaps it contains a perverse logic. If teenagers can make adult decisions, and abortion is a legal procedure, why can’t a teenager get one without parental consent? But that isn’t, of course, the problem. The problem is abortion, an odious crime whatever the age of the girl or woman.
Epstein only observes that a girl might want an abortion, but never examines why a girl might want to abort, which invites rehearsing the assessment of a very wise priest:
"The Nazis and Communists ran death camps, which they concealed, and which employed at most a few hundred thousands of guards. “We” have killed 45 million, with the locations advertised in the Yellow Pages, with approximately 100 million people directly involved in the killing. I think it’s self-evident that our society is much sicker than Germany was in the Spring of 1945. The process by which 100 million people were brought to that point? Anything that infantilizes people; i.e., anything that creates people who have reached that age at which they can procreate, without having the minimum of adult instincts that would cause them to recoil at the notion of killing one of their own children. The influences that have brought about this level of infantilization are obviously many. I would name, primarily: government schooling and all other instances of socialism. The sexual revolution — the normalization of fornication, pornography, and contraception."
Readers might recall this line from an “abortion rights” advocate, pregnant with triplets, who told readers of The New York Times magazine about her decision to abort two of the babies: “When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It’s not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.” These are the words of an adult? Point is, killing a baby because you don’t want it, or can’t handle it, or whatever, is the act of a selfish child. Accepting and loving the child is the act of an adult.So perhaps the very infantilization of teenagers Epstein decries leads to abortion. If so, eliminating parental consent laws would not help solve Epstein’s problem, and neither would giving teenagers the “rights” to fornicate, buy contraceptives or consume pornography.
The false assumption behind Epstein’s argument flows from the libertarian ideology of rights: that individuals, not families, are the basic unit of society. This is why Epstein insists that teenagers should operate as rootless adults exercising “rights,” regardless of the effect on family or society. But this is precisely what he complained about, having listened to the skateboarding cretins, and it contradicts his point that teenagers are “isolated from their heritages and their elders, producing nothing of value for their families or their society.” Handing them rights will further isolate them, just as exercising those rights isolated their parents. And that’s because the American fixation on individual rights vitiates those obligations to elders and heritage.
Epstein certainly has a point: We’ve infantilized teenagers by refusing to treat them like adults, by permitting big business to create a global teen culture encouraging rebellion and crime, by compulsory schooling with peers and separation from parents, and by forbidding work, marriage or even drinking a beer. And he echoes pedagogue James B. Stenson, who writes that parents should raise good adults, and says parents and teenagers are adversaries because the latter have not only the sexual but also the intellectual powers needed to function as adults. But repealing laws and turning teenagers loose upon society to exercise their “rights” isn’t the answer to infantilization. A Christian cultural and moral order, after all, must replace those laws.
Epstein should have explained what curtailing the state’s power over teenagers requires. Granted, before the experts created adolescence and government passed the behavioral statutes Epstein opposes, those things did not exist. But no one believed teenagers or children had free-floating “rights.” Rather, they had duties. Loyalty and obedience were expected. They worked because they had to. As well, familial and cultural customs and religious canons firmly governed society. Young people married with the advice, careful consideration and blessing of their families, who sought to protect their own interests. Parents decided when a boy could smoke or drink. They firmly guided their children in choosing their life’s occupation. Were control of these matters returned to parents, communities and religious authorities, adolescence would wither away. Teenagers would grow up.
And they would learn what learned so long ago: They are not individuals who need the license to smoke, drink and fornicate, but members of families, which require adults, teenagers and children to fulfill duties to each other and the kith and kin to whom they are tied by blood, marriage, tradition and religion.
The Case Against Adolescence is full of interesting, and arresting, facts and ideas. Jackson, Crockett and company, with about 1900 years of history before Hall concocted adolescence, make Epstein’s point. Yet his attachment to “rights” and “individuality” undermine his argument and will not help us “rediscover the adult in every teen.”
R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know And Admire (Cumberland House).
Comments
“The biggest push to infantilize children came, surprisingly, from feminists”
Where’s the surprise? Infantilizing children is as much required by feminist ideology as emasculating men?
In general, this book seems to present a very radical thesis which is correct overall. Even the specific areas where Epstein is wrong actually support his thesis. For example, “adult entertainment” has come to mean across the board sexual misconduct for recreational purposes. It is, at least on paper, forbidden to teenagers while being held out as a goal toward which they should aspire. Epstein’s problem as the reviewer well states, is lack of a moral center.
Another thing which I think needs to be examined is the degree to which “traditional” parents contribute to this situation. I can recall in the early 50s when the average age of marriage briefly dropped and parents were bemoaning the fact that kids were getting married too young. Well, that problem’s been solved, hasn’t it? The average age of marriage is approaching 30, and the number who don’t bother getting married at all is increasing by leaps and bounds. The ideology of adolescence is not solely responsible for this situation but it is noteworthy that adolescence has now become extended to 30 years or more and is considered the ideal to be strived for rather than something to be outgrown. “Traditional” parents who insist that their kids stay in school and not marry until they have a degree and a good job may be contributing to this problem as much as the radical social “reformers”.
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Braille was blinded by an awl not an awe. Spell checkers don’t substitute for proofreading.
That said, Feminists rarely succeed in emasculating men. They are much too successful at infantilizing them. And they keep the women stupid enough to become feminists.
I suspect the whole point is why homeschooling works so well. The Children generally are given the responsibility and treated with respect and kept out of the industrial educational machine.
We need Ron Paul now more than ever. Not only should the Dept. of Education be closed, it should be destroyed and some radioactive substance spread over the debris to insure it will never return in the next 10,000 years.
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<<Walk it off, Cletus.>>
Well, the North WAS “aggressive”, so…
To say the North and the South fought each other in a “civil war” is erroneous. Yes, there was a “civil war” being fought, but not by Northerns and Southerners.
The “civil war” was fought by Southerners against Southerners, and Northerners against Northerners. For example, here in Alabama, during the War of Northern Aggression, there was a war fought between the citizens of Alabama, especially concerning the question of conscription by the Confederate government. As a matter of fact, Winston County, in the northwest of the state of Alabama declared itself neutral, fighting neither for nor against either the North or the South. As a matter of fact, there were movements in counties in the Appalachian South that wanted to secede and form their own states, much like what West Virginia did.
Anyway…
Look at what grown American men wear, as has been pointed out on this here website before - as an example:
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y252/maogirl/americans.jpg
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Uh...repealing child labor laws or public education is throwing the baby out with the bath water, it’s crazy.
I agree that much of problem of “adolescence” stems from the breakdown of the moral order, but that has nothing to do with child labor laws or the public education.
Lots of kids are amazingly talented and proficient at a young age, Bill Gates for instance. But the example of Bill Gates is also the result of a strong middle class background and a public school system that was not dominated by the political correctness and sexual revolution that emerged during the decadence of the 1960’s “cultural revolution"…
An interesting article, with some amazing observations, but misdirected on some of the solutions.
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Andrew Capp wrote: To say the North and the South fought each other in a “civil war” is erroneous.
The American Civil War was a war to protect free labor from slave labor…it was not a “war of Northern Aggression”, it was fought to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery into the western frontier. The South was based on European institutions and ideals. The South was always a plutocratic society with an economic system based on the ideal that human beings were property.
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It is easy to find people who have started working early, and became successful. It is also easy to find people who bitterly regret they didn’t go to school when they were young. Education gives people a choice. Our forefathers worked very hard so that we today would have access to public education, and they showed great foresight in doing so.
The teenage soldier need not be idolized. From the Third Reich to the Soviet Union to Africa today, these teenagers are persuaded or forced to enter into a short and brutal life as soldiers. War is simply not for kids.
Working in the summers is extremely useful for teenagers, and it gives them some money of their own. I remember what I learned working summers better than most things I learned at school.
As I come from a rural environment, to say the least, I think that kids here do develop along a different path than their city peers. Our teenagers often are capable of operating heavy machinery, tractors and boats, but in a social setting they can be shy, and often appear childish. On the other hand this might be a sign of self-confidence, maybe you don’t need to work so much on your cool talk if you work a Caterpillar in the gravel pit on weekends.
Ah well, in short, adolesence is a fact of life today. They are not adults. They need our close supervision and help when growing up. Otherwise they will not turn into adults, but become teenagers for life, and that is the bigger problem.
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My two sons, ages 12 and 15, and a friend, also 15, took rakes in hand and walked the neighborhood attempting to find yard work to earn some money. They were turned down everywhere except at our immediate neighbors. Why? People fear teenagers now, more than they fear the illegal aliens who they contract with to do their yardwork now. Nevermind that my sons have lived in this community all their lives and never caused anyone any trouble, and nevermind that we have no knowledge of any previous criminal background of the illegal Mexican who has free reign in the neighborhood while my sons do not. The homeowner is thinking “what mischief will these tool-wielding boys do me” and “will I be sued if they hurt themselves.”
It is clear that Americans, not just adolescents, are infantilized. We expect to experience an optimum life with no injuries, disappointments or setbacks. And that is true among adults who had childhoods full of adventure and responsiblity. They, after all, are the parents currently infantalizing their children.
Our nation of immigrants came from dirt, hard work, loss, heartbreak, personal and social devastation and poverty. In their zeal to make sure their children never had to suffer these misfortunes, the American nation has become sanitized beyond a level that is healthy for the continuation of our society. Let’s not look to Jane Adams to hold responsiblity for our current cultural aversion to unhappiness - she, after all, sought to alleviate the conditions caused by man’s inhumanity to man - but look in our mirrors for the answer. My sons are the ONLY BOYS in our community to cut my grass and shovel our snow and that of our neighbors. I don’t have an electric garage door opener because I have boys who can get out of the car and pull up the door. Jane Addams had no effect on my choice. It is considered “low-class” in my community for children to be seen doing manual labor.
And please understand, the Mexican illegal immigrant who wears a barn coat and billed cap no matter how cold the weather, and whose children have no boots or mittens CHOOSES to live that way! They are laughing at us Americans and our lack of initiative.
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You might want to consider placing the entire development into a different perspective. Instead of saying that in many societies, including medieval Europe, childred were integrated into adult society, it would be more accurate to say that in those societies “adults” never became adults: they played the same games, read the same fairytales and in general remained just as emotional and impulsive as children. Beginning in the late 15th century, adulthood slowly came into being in the West as a separate condition characterized by self-control, self-discipline, delayed gratification and a general suspicion of impulse-behavior.
Set against this historical background, the condition of teenage stems from an effort to delay the change into adult behavior. Indeed, it is easy to point out ever more “adults” who do not seem to have made the transition at all.
The “adulthood came and is now disappearing” perspective produces a very different set of suggestions about how to deal with the problem. Unfortunately there is not enough room to discuss them here.
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Shakespeare on adolescents:
Adolescence is largely a time for “getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting” and, if he spoke of their brains at all, which was rare, he dismissed them as “boiled”.
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Tom Wolfe wrote, “college is just an extension of
adolescence.”
“I don’t like the looks of those teenagers.” Poor
grandpa.
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@Kari Konkola
Very interesting, that what we consider “adulthood” springs
from the beginning of what we call “The Enlightenment”.
I have no real argument against that.
The “Modern Age” has brought us “adulthood”, but, in the
end, it [the “Modern Age"] has destroyed Western Culture.
Now, in the “Postmodern Age”, Western Culture is
destroyed, and “adulthood” is fading away.
We are left without the controlling influences of either
Western Culture or “adulthood”.
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1)The “Civil War” was not fought over slavery, it was fought
“to keep the Union together”. Lincoln never explained why it
was important enough to expend 600,000 lives and millions in ta
tax dollars to achieve that end.
The anti-slavery card was played 18 months into the conflict
to justify the northern invasion and to keep European powers
out of the conflict by portraying it as a moral crusade.
This was pure politics, much the same as Bush playing the
“we want to estabish democracy in the middle east” card that
is being used to justify the damnable invasion of Iraq.
2)In fact the individual is the basic unit of the family. It
is child labor laws, drinking age laws, compulsory education.
laws etc. that undermine parents and undermine family units.
These laws do postpone adulthood for teenagers.
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I have also long believed that adolescence is a bogus concept. My late maternal grandmother was trained to be a seamstress. I doubt that she even finished elementary school. Yet, she raised two fine daughters after being widowed at an early age, helped keep a rural bank afloat during the last Depression, did a fine job as a college registrar and librarian, and was still taking college classes for fun well into her 80’s. I could cite other examples of being tossed into life at an early age and working one’s way to success. While being a young man in the military, I was thrust into positions of tough responsibility before my 21st birthday. Necessity is a mother all right, but to keep people in a state of frustrated and retarded development for many years mainly to keep otherwise unemployable “educators” busy is a terrible waste of human capital. From my experience, most of secondary schooling is a wasteland. I was reading at a college level in mid grade school, and after that, until graduate school started, life was grim. to my mind, we should scrap the entire adolescent fantasy, let people mature in their early teen years through the responsibilities of living their own lives, and then when education becomes necessary they can go to the best educational invention in the 20th Century, the community college and pick up whatever they need or desire at a modest cost. As a cartoon I once admired said, “Teenagers! Leave home and go off on your own and live the way you wish. Do this now, while you still know everything!”
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The false assumption behind Epstein’s argument flows from the libertarian ideology of rights: that individuals, not families, are the basic unit of society.
Without individuals, you have neither families, nor society. And anyone who doesn’t think our rights are individual rather than collective should go back and read The Declaration of Independence. If all law were abolished tomorrow, individuals would still participate in marriage, family, religion, and society.
But no one believed teenagers or children had free-floating “rights.”
Makes no difference. The fact remains that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” (empasis mine, baby). You can disagree with the author’s stance on abortion, but the fact remains that young adults either have rights or they do not, just as the unborn either have rights or they do not. If a yound adult wants to view those rights and his very life as free-floating, that is his choice, and from it he will learn, however painful.
It is not up to the budybodies who pass socialist laws, nor the busybodies posting at this site. It is up to the individual.
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My mother, God rest her soul, used to say “When I was a teenager, we didn’t have teenagers!”. (She was born in 1932). What do you mean, Mom, I would say. Well, we weren’t teenagers, we were “young people” and we were expected to comport ourselves as young adults, she said. This is not to say that they didn’t have popular fashions and music and such. I don’t want to see kids working in mines and factories at age 12 but I think Mom had a point. The whole youth culture thing is really over the top. Mom also told me that “they” (the public schools) added 8th grade to keep kids out of the work force. She lived in Front Royal, Virginia and went to 12 years of public school, graduating from high school in 1950. My dad, born the same year, went to 11 years of public school and graduated in 1949 at age 17, finding himself one year later over in Korea. Mom said that 8th grade was just a repeat and that it was added to delay kids in the work force one year so there’d be more jobs available for the veterans after WWII.
More so than the now 13 years of public school is the fact that “kids” (i.e., young adults) are often in college until 22 or 23, further delaying their entry into the “real world”.
I see no point in forcing the non academically inclined to sit through 4 years of high school taking geometry, trig, chemistry, etc. Let them pursue a vocational track, get out early and makes tons of money as plumbers. They will be happier and less of a discipline problem in school. Then, we really need to look at whether every smart middle class kid needs to go to college. There are professions for which college is necessary, medicine, law, things like that. But what good is a MBA or even a BS in Business Management? Couldn’t a young person learn the necessary things with some sort of apprenticeship or internship? And save his or her parents thousands of dollars in tuition money as well. I am starting to feel that the whole go to college thing is largely a racket to separate parents from their money.
I remember reading the Little House on the Prairie books to my daughter and we were both astounded to find that Laura was teaching school at age 16.
I don’t know where I’m going with this but just to say that yeah, I think things are messed up with teens and education and and and something needs to change.
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It aint just children who are infantilized, the entire thumb-sucking culture is. Not only do teenagers wear what are essentially pajamas in public, adults do it all the time as well, even “professional “ types . Adults want to be children forever, they want to be told what to think, what to wear, what to buy , what to eat. Everybody is on a first name basis. The meritocracy has succeeded beyond all measure to an extent that the lowest common denominator is king...or maybe dauphin.
When the charade ends, and it will, it always has, the giant thwacking sound you hear will be the clanking of the average American’s rubbery and pinky abraded sphincter over their thumb in their mouth as they suck to within an inch of their dutiful lives. If they’re lucky, they’ll simply pull an auto-black hole and suck themselves into a vanishing pop.
The key thing to remember is that even childhood has been institutionalized into a grabass of planned activities and relentless organized activities. There is no time for individual fantasy or exploration.....no time for the kinds of petty larcenies that teach a child right from wrong or hazards from zones of safety. Being a kid now is like being an inmate in a punishing psyche ward where Nurse Ratched is your mother or nanny and your Father is the decaying wreck of a doom clad building itself. It is always film night though, even while in transit.
If children had the childhood of even a generation ago, childhoods that had both free and organized time along with the satisfaction of a task to benefit the family, it would not be so bad. The childhood of today is a kind of forced march into consigned compliance with a Giant Marketplace that punishes individual thought and imagination with the alacrity of a Bolsheviki Hall Monitor.
Kafka was an optimist. The Berlin Wall started coming down in 89 but it is finishing being mopped up right here in this former Lone Superpower.
Why have adults anyhow when the most powerful adults in this besotted lapsed Republic are a wanker like George W...our Neo- Infante Don Carlos Bush , his vice Torquecheney and Condi “look no hands” Rice? The only valuable task toward success these days is developing arms to throw people under the bus without mussing one’s hair.
Even our captains of Finance are so clueless as to near-tank the markets on these SIV’s, CDO’s, MBS’s that failed to get even the Business 101 requirement of verifying the loan holders real assets. At least the Dutch were left with some nice blooms when they went soft over Tulips.
No Virginia, it’s amateur hour and there shall be mussed diapers for all....forever.
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There is much truth in this essay, but some flaws need to be pointed out.
1. The traditional age of majority in the English-speaking world was always 21 or thereabouts. (In Britain, for reasons unknown to me, it was traditionally 21 years minus one day; in America, it was, more logically, the 21st birthday itself.) In some other societies, such as classical Rome, the age of full majority was even higher. This has actually gone down rather than up in the last century (to 18 in most states).
2. “They married shortly after puberty began, sometimes as early as 14 or 15.” This statement is true for some traditional societies, but it has not been true in the English-speaking or Western European world for five or six centuries at least. By Shakespeare’s time, 13-year-old brides like Juliet, while not unknown, were rarely the norm, and were relatively common only among the upper classes (where youthful marriages were often forced for dynastic reasons). In early modern England, the average age of marriage was only slightly lower than it is today. It was lower in the American colonies of the seventeenth century, but still around twenty for women and somewhat higher for men. It fluctuated greatly in the U.S. over the following centuries, reaching a historic low in, of all periods, the 1950s, after G. Stanley Hall and Jane Addams were long dead and shortly after the word “teenager” was coined. It did begin to rise again to its present levels in the 1960s.
3. I have more than a few doubts as to whether child soldiers, even if they sometimes did grow into great men like Jackson and Farragut, are a phenomenon that it would be particularly desirable to revive.
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The South is full of ignorant masses who scream against big government but eat high off the hog of Government pork.
What would the Founding Fathers say about Patriot Act provisions.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery! Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry
Speak of young adults, William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister of England at the age of 24 and had to deal with Napoleon:
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” – William Pitt (1783)
His father made this comment about the British Army occupying the American Colonies but it applies equally as well the the American Army occupying Iraq
“If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms—never! never! never!”
Why you fighting Johnny Reb? Cause y’all is down he-ah Yankee.
Pitt the Elder also said “Where laws end, tyranny begins.” We now have Republicans saying if the President says its legal then its legal regardless of what the law says. Yet no Patriots rise to demand the ouster of these people. Especially the young who have to pay for this folly with the lives and rights and somehow pay off Bush’s $4 Trillion debt.
Shame on us all for not raising our kids right. Especially George H. W. and most especially Barbara Bush.
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Marrying and procreating a family requires monetary resources beyond the means of many adults. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that American teenagers will ever be capable of supporting families on what they earn.
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Andrew Capp............Only a fellow Alabamian would know about
“Looney’s Tavern”......(Ha-Ha).
1. Oprah has taught the parents that it is their responsability to fit into their childrens lives. As a result, the kids expect the teachers to fit into their lives and then they expect their employers to fit into their lives, and eventually they expect the prison system to fit into their lives! The older generations clearly understood that as children, they were to fit into their parents lives!
2. The fast food industry was amazing in the early days when teenagers actuallyt worked there! LBJ’s “Great Society” ruined that.
3. Sports now dominate many teens lives, leaving little room for working a part time job and parents love living out their sports fantasy through their child like a status symbol.
4. Bad things happen some times, but now days, if a minor is injured on anybody’s property lawyers come running like wolves!
5. The “Great Depression” pushed children out of the home, not only to we, but to generate income to take a burden off of the family. Many of the poor in the South actually died of malnutrition and poverty.
6. American parents have simply chosen the materialism over the traditional family, and the teens have enough sense to recognize it!
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“adult entertainment” has come to mean across the board sexual misconduct for recreational purposes.
Excellent definition. Long Russian novels are usually read by grown-ups, but is not “adult entertainment.”
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The outcome of the applied Epstein thesis--with its utter lack of a moral compass--was prophetically, ironically and superbly portrayed in the 1968 classic (IMHO) film “Wild in the Streets.” Go here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063808/ for the IMDb documentation.
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As a high school teacher, I very much enjoyed both the article and the commentary and agree with much of both.
However, as a former Southerner, it’s THIS I want to comment on:
If the CSA won, what sort of country would it have become? Answer: in almost any imaginable scenario, a utterly crappy one. South [sic.] was better off being defeated and taken back in.
Well, yes and no, but the NORTH was definitely NOT “better off” taking the South back in--or, at least, not under the circumstances under which she did. That’s because, as a clash of CULTURES, the South actually WON the so-called “Civil War.”
She would have LOST it only if she had been forced, after thirty or forty years of existing in the doldrums of an orbit of the British mercantile economy (which, as a cotton-producing region, she would have been SUCKED into, immediately upon winning her “independence"), to come crawling back, chastened regarding her TRUE besitting sin--which is not “racism” but an infatuation with feudalistic hierarchy and militarism--crawling back, I say, on her hands and knees, begging to be re-admitted into the dynamic, egalitarian, free-market albeit socially democratic society that the Union MIGHT WELL HAVE EVOLVED into WITHOUT the baneful influence of an incorrigibly anti-egalitarian culture.
My ancestors were Catholic New Yorker “Copperhead Democrats” who resisted (and despised) the first “imperial President” and who said, “Let our erring brothers depart in peace.” They were right, and my years (over thirty) of living in the God-forsaken Southland with its religions of football, uniform-worship and hellfire, and its taboos against spirits and miscegenation let me know, early on, how right those ancestors of mine had been.
Thank God they paid for one “substitute” who died at Antietam, and then his replacement, who lasted out the war, while my paternal ancestor studied “art” in London!
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My paternal grandfather was apprenticed as a carpenter at age 12 and was a journeyman at age 17 when he came to this country.My maternal grandfather was apprenticed as baker at age 12 and worked at the trade untill age 72.My father was a carpenter at 12 and used it for 70odd years.As a modern man I am still a big baby in my sixties.We are way too soft with our kids when it comes on our expectations.Keep these kids busy and productive.
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<<...as a clash of CULTURES, the South actually WON the so-called “Civil War.”>>
No.
Almost everything in the “New South”, the South that has infected the USofA, is New England Yankee Puritan in origin.
Baptists, temperance, football, etc. were all brought to the South by evangelizing carpetbaggers, and have NO PLACE in traditional Southern Culture, whether it be Coastal or Piedmont or Highland.
Only after the Reconstruction was the Old South beginning to transform into the New South. Contrary to what they teach in schools, the Reconstruction has gone on for over 100 years, and really hasn’t stopped. The difference is now the entire USofA is under Reconstruction, not just the South.
OK, let’s all try to stay on subject, for a change…
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No, Mr. Capp, despite your evidence of “football” and “carpetbaggers,” the feudalistic mentality of the “Old South"--the Old World snobbishness, the slavering at the feet of uniformed “heroes” a la the Walter Scott novels that were idolized by the Southern gentry--triumphed, with the assistance of the status-hungry Yankee plutocrats who flocked to places in the South like Aiken, South Carolina, where I grew up, over the spirit of Whitman, Thoreau and Emerson.
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A lot of opinion, very few facts. For all the damnyankess that think they know about the War of Northern Aggression, some research is in order. Just for a quickie, I paraphrase de Tocqueville, “The Northern states are more racist than the south.” And from A. Lincoln, comparing the white and black races: “ ... in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.” And his solution for the blacks was either “Send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” Or, the colonization plans, send them away from the United States. Haiti was a possibility, thought I don’t think anyone ever asked the Haitians.
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The Northern states are more racist than the south.”
This is supposed to insult me? I am a racist, and America would have been infinitely better off if Lincoln shipped the slaves back to Africa. The South’s ultimate revenge on the North was sending its blacks up to our great cities, eventually destroying them.
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The infantilization is most obvious in Christian liturgy. We’ve more college educated graduates now than any society in Christian history, yet we’re often told that simplistic, childish reassurances and banal hymns are what “adults” really need, not the cold, austere patriarchal solemnities of formal chant. There’s no development and no maturation and it’s the result of letting women have too great a hand in shaping society.
Feminism is blamed, but the reality is that most feminists I’ve encountered are hardly the maternal types who relish the childish innocence of children and seek to preserve it. Far from it—they detest children and know nothing about how to properly “infantalize.” It’s the problem of women simply being allowed to exercise their coddling instincts in public matters.
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The American Civil War was a war to protect free labor from slave labor…it was not a “war of Northern Aggression”, it was fought to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery into the western frontier.
Explain to me again how leaving the Union was supposed to give the South a heightened ability to spread slavery into the territories than they would have had if they had stayed in the Union? I mean, I would have thought that a Republican-dominated government would have been even *less* likely to let foreigners bring slaves into the territories than they would to let slaveholding citizens of the U.S. do so.
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“Traditional” parents who insist that their kids stay in school and not marry until they have a degree and a good job may be contributing to this problem as much as the radical social “reformers”.
Posted by Kirt Higdon on Dec 03, 2007.
I agree. Do you agree that young people should be able to marry against the wishes of their parents?
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“I agree. Do you agree that young people should be able to marry against the wishes of their parents?” - Peter
Yes, but it would be better if the parents would encourage and support them in marrying earlier. Higher education should also be more restricted and postponed until the students have had experience in the real world to which to compare what they are told in the ivory tower. Most college and university education at the present time is simply indoctrination in the values of a secular liberal society combined with drunken orgies.
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I visited a bookstore today and I found “Confessions,”
by Rousseau. I flipped to a page in the back that stated,
“a child is not an adult, and they should not be treated
as such.”
Feminism is just the latest stick that the
sophisticates have used to whip western culture into
shape.
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Judging from the review of Epstein’s book I’d say I am in much agreement with his thesis--and in partial agreement with Mr Kirkwood comments. I would carry the thesis farther though. Adolescence in the US is now carried on into the mid-20s at least and often into the 30s. There are several reasons for this; one of which is the hyper-inflation of education. For example, I worked at Ohio State for many years. One of the “requirements” for a university mail carrier was a “minimum” of an undergrad degree! Our department found this quite humorous. To make it worse, an undergraduate degree is yesterday’s high school diploma. Today’s MA will be tomorrow’s BA. I suspect there are or will be a glut of PhD.s on the market who will end up spending their lives as waitresses, clericals, “customer service reps” and temps. Of course, heavy industry is no longer an option.
But getting back to the subject. I am sick to tears of hearing the phrase “babies having babies” to decry teen pregnancy. If we did have an epidemic of babies having babies, it would make headlines and those babies would be the subject of much scientific research. Or even worse. Some of the fundies and rightwing Clinton haters who comment in my hometown newspaper insist that Bill Clinton is a “child molester.” The proof? Poor abused exploited Monica Lewinsky was only 24--a child herself--who didn’t know any better.
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Well put. Note also that the terms “child rapist”, “child molester”, and “pedophile” are now routinely used for any 18 year old who fornicates with his 17 year old girl friend.
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Part of the ‘hyper-inflation’ of education that Mr. Greiner has observed is the direct result of the SCOTUS Griggs v. Duke Power case which effectively banned the use of IQ-testing the private sector to determine a potential employee’s abilities. Because too many black people performed poorly on the tests, it had a ‘disparate impact’ on them and thus needed to be eliminated.
The result is that employers were forced to use college degrees as a measure of an applicant’s intelligence and capabilities (but even that is now worthless thanks to the racial spoils system in academia.)
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I would be willing to discuss the infatilization of the
teenagers (of which the automobile can be said to contribute
because with mass transit a twelve year old can move
independelty, but with dependence on automobiles becomes
a package to be delivered to its destinatin by an adult)
but not with people who manage to blame women and
feminism for everything no matter how contradictory.
When it started, and women went looking for jobs, then
they were accused of neglecting their children, and
leaving them without nurture and coddling.
Later the same movement that was said to deprive childrn
of coddling is now accused of a plot to coddle them
too much.
You know, if you want to blame women for everything tha
goes wrong, you might take the trouble to make you
accusations self-consistent. When you don’t, as
Chesterton said about the accusations about the Catholic
Church, all it shows is irrational hartred.
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Feminism does not equal women - it’s just another evil leftist ideology. Those who subscribe to it, male and female, are the feminists.
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Well, reading the original piece as well as
the postings, you do see a dislike of modern women.
For the most part, feminism seems just an excuse.
This piece is strange in its longing for times when we
were all poor and short-lived, but apparently responsible.
The modern society is the first that actually can support
the adolescent way of life. This is because they are few in
numbers. In earlier centuries most people would be under 15,
and people over 40 would mostly be dead. There was no time
to delay work or marriage. But these were not better times.
It is true that tenagers and children today have less
responsibilities than in earlier times. But so do adults.
Unlike your grandfathers, Americans today mostly do not have
the responsibilty to fight your nation’s wars. Does this not
make you feel infantilized?
It seems mr. Epstein and Kirkwood has a yearning for
epic heroism of bygone days. The child soldier as a symbol
for a better era is absurd. For every child soldier hero
there are litterally thousands who just suffered and died.
Earlier generations had it much harder than we do. But they
did not want for us to go through the same pains. They
worked hard to make it easier for their children and
grandchildren. Why not enjoy our comfy lives and be happy
about it, as they intended?
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Indeed, dannfinn, they seem nostalgic for bygone days,
perhaps because they do not think that there is any
danger they will have to live through them.
Yes, teenagers had more responsibilities then, and so
did children. Children also died young, very young
(the death of Little Nell was more than a pathetic
recourse to move hearts; it reflected the reality that
too many children died before reaching puberty.)
The drop in infant mortality meant tht society went from
the frog model of reproduction (a lot of children,
minimal care, some survive, and do not worry too much
about individuals, because they can easily be replaced)
to the elephant model.(few children, but given the most
care by its family, and most expected to grow to
reproductive age). Of course it is a big adjustment to
go from the disposable child mindset to the precious
child mindset, and we are still adjustig.
As for men and women, well if women can be said to be
overprotective, then do not forget that men too often
go for the disposable child mindset. After all, getting
another child is easy and pleasurable. They can always
get another one, so they tend to be more detached, in
general
(Perhaps the most extreme attitude about disposable
children was in the Turkish empire. The Emperor had
children of a multitude of women and concubines, but only
one son could succeed him, the rest of the sons got
killed at the beginning of the new reign - while the
daughters remained. Reminds you of what happens to
livestock. You keep the females, and one male, and the
rest of the males you castrate and fatten for slaughter).
Now, if that is what you want to discuss fine, but next
time that I hear complaints about women “coddling” or
“infantilizing” I will remind you that the alternative is
being culled for not being good enough.
by mother, aunts, and bigger sisterrs
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MethKiller-
“Ultimate counter-argument to delusional Civil War revisionists: If the CSA won, what sort of country would it have become? Answer: in almost any imaginable scenario, a utterly crappy one. South was better off being defeated and taken back in.”
This and the rest of your “boot in the face” triumphalist “humor” shows exactly why the South longed to be free of your Yankee arrogance. A pox on you.
I wish we killed three million more.....
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“....You keep the females, and one male, and the
rest of the males you castrate and fatten for slaughter).
Now, if that is what you want to discuss fine, but next
time that I hear complaints about women “coddling” or
“infantilizing” I will remind you that the alternative is
being culled for not being good enough.
by mother, aunts, and bigger sisters”
Posted by Adriana
So its bow our heads and submit to modern feminist statism, celebrate our chains or the only “alternative” is your example of life in the Turkish Empire???
In Moslem culture what are people but cattle? What could they ever be? Your “choice” is sillier than nonsense. Really I have never heard a dumber comparison in my life.
As far as the article is concerned of course the book, and the reviewer are right. The state will use any excuse to expand its own power and reduce people to cattle (longing for the old Turkish empire plan) examples are the “drinking age” which keeps going up, driving age, age for gun ownership etc.
The next step will be when the drinking age is increased into adulthood say-25?
Basically children are slaves of the state with none of the rights of free citizens, it’s a cinch for the state to keep increasing the span of a persons life when they are officially slaves.
They are doing it and will continue doing it. Good job Northern Masters, thanks a lot!
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Disposable children? Never has a culture disposed of so many as the modern liberal feminist secular porno-culture with its sinking already below replacement birth rate and its routine abortion and contraception. What few children it permits to be born, it does not so much coddle as drug and deprive of responsibility as it drugs and shirks responsibility itself. The modern world will end with neither a bang nor whimper, but a self-satisfied smirk and leer.
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@Kirt
The fact is that up until the last century nobody expected
all their children to live. They were heartbroken when
it happened,but they lived with the certainty that it
would happen.
which meant a certain callousness, and that political
calculations meant that children could be replaced easily.
And for chidlren being slaves of the State, the alternative
was children being the slaves of their parents. Maybe
you should go back to the Bible where the father had the
right to sell his daughters as concubines, or into
brothels, even, or kill them for “unchastity”. At least
with the State they get some legal representation.
You do not like abortion, fine. Neither do I. But I do
not idealize a past which was known for extreme brutality
to children (like the whips used in factories to make
children keep working instead of dawdling - those children
would have loved to deal only with nuns rapping their
knuckles with rulers).
As for the “aunts, sisters, and mother” it was a comment
on elephant society which got transposed when it should
be erased for the sake of parallel construction.
The fact is that there are two models of reproduction:
Have plenty of offspring and leave them be, in the hope
that some make it to reproductive age, or have few
offspring and take good care of them, to make sure they
do make it to reproductive age. We have gone from one
model to the other - our ancestors sought to move from
one model to the other, because they did not relish
burying their children - and once we got the first part
right, making infant mortality negligible, we still have
to get the second part right. When to nurture, and when
to stop. No need to seek for villains, nor to want to
go to a past that our ancestors fought tooth and nail
to leave behind.
Unfortunately a lot of others things kept happening at
the same time, so it is hard to sort things out.
if they thought
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As usual, Adriana, you posit two false choices. How about this, have many offspring, given them education in virtue and a good example, and allow them to assume responsibilities at an early age, including the responsibility of being parents themselves. Or there is the modern model - exterminate most offspring in utero so that few survive, let the state have primary responsibility for educating them in submission and political correctness and above all teach them irresponsibility by example so that they can get well past reproductive age without actually reproducing. The modernists look forward to the perfection of cloning so that in future times, human beings can be manufactured and sex can be 100% without responsibility.
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