The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

This book is subtitled, "How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization." In her book, Ms. West describes the situation facing Western Civilization as a generation of young people refuses to grow up and assume the role of adults. We are seeing in our own nation the results of this refusal to assume adult responsibilities. Everywhere one looks we see physical adults acting like children and refusing to accept adult responsibilities. The book is filled with pages illustrating examples of this failure. It is not an easy read but it is a valuable read if you have any interest in the future of the United States of America or, on a more global scale, Western Civilization itself. Ms. West's book is also a sobering read; she points out in very clear terms the problems our society faces today. As our society goes, so go the lives of the members of that society. Our society and we as members of that society are facing one of the greatest threats in the history of Western Civilization. One of the most dangerous aspects of that threat is our refusal to even identify the threat or acknowledge that it exists. We appear to think that if we deny that the threat is real, it may even cease to be a threat. That is truly delusional. The threat is Islam and the Quran (and yes, I do have a copy of the Quran and have read many portions of it, but mostly use it as a reference). Islam has a clear agenda which includes the United States. Islam's goal is the conversion of all peoples and nations to a global caliphate under Sharia law. If you do not understand the implications of an Islamic society under Sharia law, you better start doing your homework; this book is an excellent place to start. The book starts well but then bogs down a little with too many illustrations of adolescent misbehavior. Don't give up on it as it really gets interesting again later on in the book. In the chapter called "The Real Culture War," page 148, and from that point on it is a captivating page turner. In a sense, it is upsetting to read; if you are faint of heart and prefer denial it would probably be better if you passed on this book. The book points out how a moral vacuum in the West has left an opening for a zealous Islam to step in and fill that void. It is interesting that as Western Civilization has turned its collective backs on Christianity, that it has unwittingly abandoned its best defense against Islam. By abandoning the virtues and moral certainties of Christianity for the nebulous uncertainties of multiculturalism and secular humanism; Western Civilization has left the gates wide open for the entrance of Islam. I believe that this book has very important information and astute insights for those who prefer to be informed. I'm very glad I read it.

This is a book every American should read, but it is really two different books. The first book is about the sexualization of American youth culture, and thence of all popular American culture. The second book is about multiculturalism, and how it renders us completely defenseless in the face of a newly resurgent, culturally assertive and confident Islam. Both books are good, even if I'm not sure they belong under one cover. The first book complains about the juvenalization of the mainstream culture, but I disagree with the author's thesis. The issue here is not juvenalization, but paganization and sexualization. A 1950s conception of a "grown-up" included notions of probity, sexual restraint, and circumspection that were essentially Christian in origin but had become a fixed part of the larger culture and hence were accepted by believer and non-believer alike. The Sexual Revolution overthrew the 1950s norms of grown-up behavior and replaced them with pagan ones. Diana West makes much of the mainstreaming of rock music, previously a fringe, juvenile form. Why is rock music so bad? Because rock music is far more immediately and crudely sexual than previous forms of American popular music, such as the standards, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway show tunes, or even Jazz (despite the fact that Jazz had its roots in the same segregated black nightclub scene that produced rock 'n roll). But why is it a problem for grown-up society to marinate in a crudely sexual sound track? The answer (which West never articulates) is that it is a problem for Christians who are trying to maintain Christian standards of sexual conduct. It is not a problem for pagans, nor for the post-Sexual Revolution pagan culture and conception of what it means to be a "grown-up." The second book is about Islam, and the seeming inability or refusal of Western governing elites to speak truthfully about Islam, its gross incompatibility with Western freedoms, values, and modes of self-governance, and its utter un-reformability. West attributes this failure to speak truth about Islam to multiculturalism, and she's right. But what does this have to do with adulthood or being a "grown-up"? I don't know. Multiculturalism is a utopian ideology; it holds that as long as we will suspend our powers of judgment, discernment, discrimination, etc., and not say critical things about other cultures, religions, or the Other generally, nor value our own religion or cultural patrimony, then we will all live peace and harmony--wars, hatred, and human conflict will come to an end. I suppose that multiculturalism is "childish," but no more so than any other utopian ideology, including Nazism, communism, socialism, fascism, etc. And Diana West fails to mention the great safeguard against utopian ideology of all species: A Christian worldview that understands that human nature is fallen and human societies are simply not perfectible. No utopian ideology can succeed; therefore, none is worth the sacrifice of freedom and human dignity, and concentration of arbitrary power in the government, that is necessary to try to implement it. Multiculturalism cannot succeed, and hence is not worth the constant, demeaning lies necessary to uphold it. The amount of truth that Diana West speaks about Islam is both bracing and enormously refreshing. One of my favorite columnists is Mark Steyn, who is not afraid to speak truth about Islam, but even Steyn doesn't dare say some of the things Diana West says. She's in rarefied air insofar as being willing to tell unwanted truths about Islam. She is a much needed corrective to the multi-culti lies about Islam that we hear from the media and government, lies that have become so degrading, insulting and demeaning. Even if you don't care about pop culture, you should still buy this book and read the last two chapters, about how multiculturalism render us defenseless against Islam. A final Note: Shame on St. Martin's Press for publishing this book in a microscopic typeface!! If you're going to read this book, I recommend buying the kindle version, with adjustable font. Because, apparently out of desire to save money on paper, St. Martin's published the whole book in teeny-tiny, footnote-sized font, that one has to use a magnifying glass to read comfortably.

Diana West's book deserves far greater attention than it is currently receiving. She manages to analyze several seemingly disparate cultural trends including Islamic appeasement, the devolution of our music, lack of civilizational pride and the deceits of political correctness and multiculturalism discovering the common denominator to be the infantilizing influence of the post WWII emphasis on youth with the resultant elevation of "youth" to its current cult like status. But it is much much more than that. Diana West provides the reader with that most coveted of reading experiences, the "ah-ha" moment whereby the reader is exposed to depths of insight and analysis that lead him to observations that he "felt" or "knew to be true" but left to his own devices might never have fully articulated. She's that good. I'm sure she wouldn't mind me saying that she's a bit of an anachronism in that she brings to bear pre-modern sensibilities that enable her to so successfully illuminate our current condition. Diana West is a very bright and insightful author whose refreshing look at our culture and its decent into immaturity and callowness is long overdue. She tells us that we need to stop being afraid of being an adult, of standing for something other than self-indulgence. She castigates multiculturalism as as a childish refusal to make moral and ethical distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad. We need to stop being afraid to face the truth and speak openly about it. Instead we succumb to the childishness of relativism and nihilism rather than face the more cumbersome questions of adulthood. According to West, many things changed as a result of the burgeoning wealth following the Second World War: "When you talk about the postwar period, the vast new affluence is a big factor in reorienting the culture to adolescent desire. You see a shift in cultural authority going to the young. Instead of kids who might take a job to be able to help with household expenses, all of a sudden that pocket money was going into the manufacture of a massive new culture. That conferred such importance to a period of adolescence that had never been there before." As a result of this elevation of the youth cult the adult authority was undermined and eventually adults abdicated their age old responsibilities. "Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process." We have become cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded. As Mark Steyn too has pointed out, the welfare society has further contributed to the infantilization of our citizens. Diana West's critique of our modern world is broadly based encompassing, in fact emphasizing, the extent to which contemporary music degrades our sexuality and undermines our capacity for mature monogamous relationships. Many who read this book, particularly those under 40 may be incapable of understanding much of what West writes so immersed have they been in the polluted cultural mainstream. West says, "It's not for nothing that Plato taught us to "mark the music" to understand and individual or his society. . . . . If the American popular song could idealize romantic love to a fault, rock 'n' roll degrades physical couplings to new lows - destroying not just the language of love and romance, but also the meaning of love and romance. And, I would sadly add, our capacity to experience both. . . .There are salient differences between a civilization that sings of romantic love and marriage ("Have You Met Miss Jones?"), and a civilization that sings of lust and one-night stands ("I Can't Get No Satisfaction")." One other thing: Go to Diana West's web site and look over her columns. They are very very good. I've just recently discovered her since reading this book and her columns are every bit as good. This is an excellent read which I highly recommend.

Where have all the grown-ups gone? It's a question that has perplexed me. Why is it that young people these days seem unwilling, or perhaps unable, to grow up? What is so attractive about youth, about perpetual adolescence, that is so attractive? My wife and I have discussed these things at length, trying to understand why so many of the young people we know (young people who are really not so young anymore) seem stuck. They are working on second or third college degrees; they are living at home with mom and dad, even into their thirties; they are looking at marriage only in their late twenties or early thirties. What is happening? When I was young I could hardly wait to pass through my teenage years so I could live life as an adult and in so doing I think I followed generations before me. What has happened since? Diana West has asked the same questions and The Death of the Grown-Up is her attempt at an answer. A book that has generated no small response, it concludes that America is suffering from a case of arrested development and that this will, this must, bring down Western civilization. This is no small claim. Neither is it a popular one (as evidenced by a near 50/50 split in Amazon reviews between 1-star and 5-star reviews). But it is one West manages to legitimize. It seems that one of the driving forces behind the death of the grown-up was the rise of the teenager. Before the 1940's, the term teenager was unknown; before this period humans tended to fall into only two groups--children and adults. Exactly when a child transitioned to adult could vary, but what was clear was that there was no intermediate period. Furthermore, children, or those in their teen years, would seek to identify with adult culture--they would seek to behave like adults, to dress like adults, and to be taken seriously like adults. Today the tables have turned. "That was then. These days, of course, father and son dress more or less alike, from message-emblazoned t-shirts to chunky athletic shoes, both equally at ease in the baggy rumple of eternal summer camp. In the mature male, these trappings of adolescence have become more than a matter of comfort or style; they reveal a state of mind, a reflection of a personality that hasn't fully developed, and doesn't want to - or worse, doesn't know how." It is teenagers who are respected and teenagers who are envied. Adults now seek to recapture youth and to return to their teen years. They dress like teens, think like teens and increasingly act like teens. This intermediate period between childhood and adulthood, this recent development, is being continually extended. Some organizations today go so far as to suggest that adolescence continues until age thirty. Some go further and suggest thirty-four. Thus a thirty-three year old man or woman should not truly be considered an adult. Any other generation would laugh at the mere suggestion. After the idea of adolescence became popular, it took only a generation before popular culture, and particularly the medium of television, began to portray age as "square" and youth as "hip." The dignity of age was replaced with disgust. Where children used to orbit around their parents, today the opposite is true. Parents orbit around their children, "abdicating their rights and privileges by deferring to the convenience and entertainment of the young." No wonder, then, that people wish to avoid adulthood. There are consequences to our disregard for maturity. "Even as age has been eliminated from the aging process, they have a hunch that society has stamped out more than gray hair, smile lines, and cellulite. What has also disappeared is an appreciation for what goes along with maturity: forbearance and honor, patience and responsibility, perspective and wisdom, sobriety, decorum, and manners--and the wisdom to know what is `appropriate,' and when." Having laid a foundation for the death of the grown-up, West surveys a variety of topics, showing how they are contributing to the downfall of society or how they played a role in the rise of the adolescent. She looks to popular music and entertainment, to parents who need parents, and to a society that values excess rather than control. And then the book takes an unexpected turn. As she moves from the past to the future, West suggests why this matters so much; she turns to the consequences of the death of adulthood and the death of maturity. Focusing on the ideas of multiculturalism and political correctness, cultural forces she believes could only be accepted by an immature society that is willing to pretend that differences are non-existent and unimportant, she suggests that these leave us entirely unequipped to deal with the forces seeking to destroy us. And here she points primary to Islam and to terrorism. She writes about how our immature thinking leaves us unable to grapple with the reality of what we are facing in global Islam. Our society sits passively by, anaesthetized with movies, music, television and video games, while Islam plants deeper and deeper roots within. The Death of the Grown-Up is a compelling book. While it is certainly not the only book examining the growth of adolescence, it is perhaps the most far-reaching and the most courageous in its analysis of where this will and must lead. If West is correct, our society needs to grow up and needs to do so before it is too late. Yet whether or not you find you agree with her prescription, only a person blind to the culture could disagree with her initial analysis. And on this basis alone this book is worth reading and enjoying. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in understanding the culture we find ourselves in.

It's been quite a while since I read this impressive analysis of one of the underlying causes of the West's current weakness. What she says basically is this: the contemporary consumerist culture that dominates in the US and the other liberal democracies is infantile. The trend bagan in earnest in the 1960's when middle class children were indulged to an extend never seen before in history. One of the attributes of being an adult is take responsibility for your own actions. Well, we can all be victims now especially if we are female, or coloured other-than-white. Trashy feminism has been a major influence in Western culture over the last decades and it is responsible for a lot of this junk-think. The resulting weakness in Western culture is being taken advantage by the baccilus of Islamo-fascism. The death of the grown up is part of the PC culture that has crept into the academia, the libbo media and the self-seeking minds of the tossers who rule over us. It takes a gutsy woman to make a critique of the femo-nazi sisterhood. This is a smart woman who has traditional values. Good book highly recommended.

The author does a credible and extensive analysis of the arrested moral, emotional, and spiritual development of Americans over the last 60+ years. Stylistically, she can be wordy and tedious. She might have additional force if she were more economical and spare with illustrations. Content is good, very well thought through. The major failing is that she analyses the symptoms but not the disease and offers no cure. The Cure is The Gospel of Grace: The Creator God was crucified and died on a Roman cross, was buried and rose bodily from the dead for our Justification and healing from sin. Trusting Jesus Christ and His finished work of the cross for Salvation from sin, death, and the Devil means all sin has been forgiven for the believer and reconciliation with God secured. It brings the Grace of God, the undeserved love and favor of God in our individual and national lives. Jesus Christ is The Answer, the only answer. It is all about Him and not at all about us. Whatever is not in Him will perish eternally.

I read this book when it was first published. It's a work that should make a lot of us who are baby boomers feel very uncomfortable with where we drifted during our youth. Diana West lays out a convincing indictment, with plenty of supporting evidence, against an entire generation of white-haired Americans who still think and act like teens. And, as she aptly asserts, the "boomers" who have not emotionally grown up created a disaster for the nation. The children of the Great Depression/WWII generation who became our parents probably did too much for us, spoiling us in many ways that they were not spoiled. Still, it's not their fault that we did what we did. Look at the three Presidents our generation gave the nation: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As West shows us, if we want to figure out where the nation has gone so wrong in so many different ways, and why we're losing the ideological battle against the forces of Islam, we need to go look in the mirror. That's a difficult thing to accept. West hits the target dead in the center.

Sad, but true. There is some consolation in reading a book where juvenile behavior is pointed out. Maybe in that way there is hope for us.

This book in two parts , The first part devoted to the real life facts about the disparition of the grown- ups due to the apparition of the beatniks, sex,and rock and roll culture ... And the second one devoted to the ensuing results. A broken society at odds with Islam and the multiKulti progressive PR. Anyway , this book doesn’t give us the deep reasons which have emerged now from the post 9/11 and needs to be read along side with « pawns in the game » of william Guy Carr , »the barbarians inside the gates « of Don de Grand Pré and for french reading people, the Books of Alain Pascal ( especially , « la trahison des initiés « ).

I found Diana West's text hard work until I upped my reading rate to a level that skipped words here and there. Now I understand what she is at. The premise is that we are submerged in a sea of irrelevance just attractive enough to be able to penetrate consciousness unbidden and largely ignored, except that there is so much of it that some is bound to cling. The stream that flows into the lake is from a factory up the road owned by people who know what we like best. It's got to be easy to understand and easy to use, like a detergent. What may that be? We're all kids. That general principle chooses our clothes, our food, our entertainment and the way we talk. It's easy. Hard tasks and hard choices don't exist because they are not easy. Ms West has a point and presses it home saying that the result is an all-pervasive indifference (non-confrontational) to morality, honesty and truth. Kids you see must not be confronted with real live trouble. Trouble has been replaced by issues, questions that you can talk under the carpet. A most troubling issue is that of negotiating with Islam. It seems that it doesn't listen to reason. Its values are not ours, they are fixed and immutable a fact that infantilism cannot accommodate in its vast and patronising fund of inclusivity and diversity. It seems that there are some beliefs that are too diverse to be included. Ms West tells a good tale but is that all? Christian democracy has been called to account and its apologists are in hiding facing charges of prejudice, arrogance and lack of charity (among other crimes). The kids find it hard to assume the role of defenders of the faith. What are we prepared to defend, who will and how? Ms West's analysis carries weight but we don't know how far she is going with it.

In this well-written book, author Diana West show how from the 1950's onward, the western world has allowed its youth to take command of the culture and steer our civilization in the direction that they want. Prior to this, youngsters wanted to grow up and be adults. Now, adults want to act, dress and talk like youngsters. She shows how rock music has pushed all other types of music aside and how the silliest and stupidest fads become mainstream simply because no one has the guts to condemn them. Our youth oriented culture determines our politics and our political leaders, revamps our language and decides which movies and books will succeed or fail. A civilization which allows its youth to lead them is a civilization that will not last. My only complaint with this book is that the print is so incredibly small, it is difficult to read without a magnifying glass!

Great work Ms West! A book that hits the nail on the head as to why there are very few adults left in society!

Excellent book! Diana West is one of America's Best Writers.This book was written back in 2007 before Obama's 8 years in office.This book was and still is a prophetic book of events that are happening right now.