RUTHFULLY YOURS

MARK STEYN: ADOLESCENT THINKING

Posted By Ruth King on March 20th, 2010

MARK STEYN
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NzdiYWNlOWExZDhiZGIxOTNmMjBlMjE1NTI0NTkxNmY=

Adolescent Thinking

‘I see some young people in the audience,” said President Obama in Ohio the other day. Not that young. For he assured them that, under Obamacare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were 26.

The audience applauded.

Why?

Because, as the politicians say, “it’s about the future of all our children.” And in the future we’ll all be children. For most of human history, across all societies, a 26-year-old has been considered an adult, and not starting out but well into adulthood. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parents, but someone who might well have parental responsibilities himself. But, if we’re going to remain dependents at 26, why stop there? Why not 36? An Italian court ruled recently that Signor Giancarlo Casagrande of Bergamo is obligated to pay his daughter Marina a monthly allowance of 350 euros — or approximately 500 bucks. Marina is 32, and has been working on her college thesis (“about the Holy Grail”) for over eight years.

America is not yet as “progressive” as Italy, so let us take President Obama at his word — that, for the moment, the 27th birthday marks the point at which a boy becomes a man and moves out of his parents’ health-insurance agency. At what point then does an adult reenter dependency?

Well, in Greece, a woman working in a “hazardous” job can retire with a full government pension at 50. “Hazardous” used to mean bomb disposal and mining. But, as is the way of government entitlements, the category growed like Topsy. Five hundred and eighty professions now qualify as “hazardous,” among them hairdressing. “I use a hundred different chemicals every day — dyes, ammonia, you name it,” 28-year-old Vasia Veremi told the New York Times. “You think there’s no risk in that?” Not to mention all those scissors. TV and radio hosts can retire at 50 because they use microphones, which could increase their exposure to bacteria. Is column-writing also “hazardous”? It used to be, what with the significant risk of paper cuts. Takes its toll over the years.

So working life is now an ever-shrinking window of opportunity between adolescence and retirement. These two happy conditions are the contribution of the advanced social-democratic state to the traditional life cycle. In the old days, you were a child until 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died. And that’s it. Now the interludes between childhood and adulthood and between adulthood and death consume more time than the main acts.

If adolescence ends somewhere between 27 and 32 in advanced Western nations, when does it begin? We turn for guidance to the Daily Mail in London: “Girls as young as 11 are to be offered pregnancy tests at school. They will also have access to contraception, the morning-after pill and advice on sexually transmitted infections.”

Michelle Pedone/Getty

Whatever it takes to get you through recess. So a sixth-grader can be taught oral sex — “outercourse,” as British teachers call it — and given the abortion-helpline number without parental consent. Because, as everyone knows, our bodies “mature” earlier, so it would be unreasonable not to expect our grade-schoolers to be rogering anything that moves, and the most we can hope to do is ensure there’s a government-funded condom dispenser nearby. But, evidently, our minds mature later and later, pushing into what less evolved societies regarded as early middle age, so it would be unreasonable to expect people who’ve been fully expert in “sexually transmitted infections” for the best part of two decades to assume responsibility for their broader health-care arrangements.

And if retirement begins at 50, when does it end? Life expectancy in most advanced nations is nudging 80. When Bismarck introduced the old-age pension in 1889, you had to be 70 to get it at a time when life expectancy was 45. We haven’t precisely inverted that equation, but we’re getting there. So the “death panel” has a certain rationale. The Dutch, pioneers in medically assisted suicide, are now debating whether to let non-medical personnel assist in dispatching people who don’t have anything wrong with them: If you’ve reached the age of 70 and “consider your life complete,” well, don’t let us stop you.

The economic impact of an aging populace has been well aired, even if not much has been done about it. But European politicians are frantically trying to wean their citizens off unsustainably early retirement on lavish public pensions that, in Greece and elsewhere, will swallow the state if not rolled back. The impact of an ever-extended adolescence is also economic — and demographic: The longer you stay in school, the longer you delay forming a family, and the fewer children you’ll have to pay taxes to fund your third-of-a-century-long “retirement.” When American politicians promise airily a future in which every child can go to college, they presumably haven’t thought through all the ramifications.

Yet the impact of an endlessly deferred adulthood is, I’d say, primarily psychological. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the Western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire societal aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: “Where have all the men gone?” Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to be.

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