Mother Knows Best

I can guess pretty well what this experience must have been like, both because I spent six weeks every summer from 1948 to 1966 in my aunt’s home 20 miles from Brittas Bay and because I joined RT (Irish radio and television) as a trainee reporter in 1971. Ireland, in those days, was deeply Catholic, morally conservative, family-centered, and socially authoritarian. It was also much more gentle and accommodating to outsiders, including internal “outsiders,” than the current myth of its uniform puritan repression. The picture in John Ford’s The Quiet Man, though painted in rosy hues, is not a complete distortion.

In any event, the young Miss West enjoyed her stay there and returned to the United States transformed into a polite, respectful child who automatically stood up when Teacher entered the room. But America, too, had been transformed in her absence. Adolescents now said rude words, did rude things, and showed no respect to Teacher–nor, indeed, to anyone in what had once been called “authority.”

Growing up in this transformed home, West noticed that everyone else was growing down. She was a walking culture clash within herself. The mental distance given by her life in Brittas Bay enabled her to experience the revolutions of “the sixties” from inside and outside. And what others found simply “liberating” she felt to be unsettling at first and, eventually, sinister.

In fact, though West was too young to notice such things, the cultural change had gotten well under way in the 1950s before she was born. Teenagers, invented circa 1944, were already an important consumer market by then. Large numbers of young people with money meant that society and the economy set out to cater to their tastes.

The first convulsive effect was rock ‘n’ roll. No sooner had Bill Haley and Elvis hit the charts than they began to drive the older tradition of American standards out of them. Resistance was brief and easily overcome. One of the more touching proofs of America’s social decline West unearths in her research is a gallant but now unthinkable effort to criticize blatant sexual references in song lyrics from a 1955 front-page editorial in the showbiz notice board, Variety:

Legislation backed by these more responsible sources was introduced in the mid-fifties. It went nowhere. Rock ‘n’ roll had become an instantly popular mass culture phenomenon. As Rosemary Clooney would later recollect, by the 1960s Frank Sinatra (in his mid-forties) was taking a six-year vacation from the music business, 55-year-old Bing Crosby had signed up with a British recording company because he couldn’t find an American one, and Mel Tormé, younger than both, was considering a career as an airline pilot.

By the time the young Diana West returned from Brittas Bay in 1970, rock ‘n’ roll had, for 15 years, been acting as a battering ram for a mass of other social changes, almost all of which elevated drives over restraints, emotions over intellect, and sex over all. Some such loosening of social mores had been foreshadowed in the postwar middle-class popularity of psychoanalysis. But the drug culture, the Pill, feminism, the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, and the campus rebellion took this loosening to a more elemental, vulgar, and even threatening, level. Finally, all these revolutions began to change the power relations in society.

West’s first cultural shock, naturally enough for a teenager, was the transfer of authority from adult to adolescent, teacher to pupil, and parent to child. She arrived in an America whose sages and media were celebrating the greatest generation of young people in world history, even as these paragons trashed the colleges, burned books, imprisoned skeptical faculty members, and generally made the tantrum a mass cultural phenomenon rivaling rock ‘n’ roll itself. How could such things happen?

For perhaps the first time in history, adolescence was a time of joyous irresponsibility for most people. Parents and teachers must have envied this; maybe they subconsciously wanted to imitate it; certainly they appeased it. Under the new rules of postwar parenthood, that meant being your kids’ best friend. At first that required not exercising heavy-handed authority, then not exercising authority at all, and finally becoming an adolescent just like them–uncertain, irresponsible, subordinate to peer pressure, pandering, anxious above all not to be like the stern unbending parents of the past–whom, oddly enough, you loved nonetheless.

West produces comically extreme examples of the corruption this faux adolescence requires. For instance, the managing director of a Wall Street brokerage firm arranged a party for his son’s football team at which a nude “interactive” stripper–surely there used to be a single noun for that–squirted whipped cream on her breasts for the team to lick off. Not to worry, however. According to one boy, the “parents were right there, having a good time with us.” That led to their arrest because, by being there and not halting the fun, they opened themselves to a charge of child endangerment. It is quite possible that the parents were indignant about their arrest. After all, they had performed the new version of a chaperone’s duty: They were present to ensure responsible behavior if things got out of hand. Maybe they had condoms on hand, just in case things became really interactive.

Are they to blame that the definition of “responsibility” has changed since the 1950s? Official America itself–in the form of school sex education classes, social welfare agencies, the courts, Planned Parenthood–now hands out condoms to underage children on the argument that, since things will inevitably get out of hand, they need to be helped to practice “safe sex.” Maybe the problem here was neither the parents nor the stripper nor (of course) the fine young football team but an out-of-touch detective who, with antediluvian certainty, thought that “there’s certainly a limit on what parents should allow.”

Hey, buddy, who’s to say?

And that, as Diana West further documents, is the problem. The paralyzing uncertainty inherent in voluntary permanent adolescence spreads. It spreads geographically and socially, of course; Brittas Bay is a different town today and Ireland is becoming a post-Catholic society in the mold of Quebec or Spain. It also spreads across categories of thought and activity.

Parents who find it hard to justify the simple exercise of authority over their children are likely to be teachers who fail to assert the authority of scholarship, or Americans who doubt their country is admirable (let alone exceptional), or Westerners uneasy about Western Civ, or Christians earnestly respectful of every religion except Christianity. In each case they are stopped by the question: “Hey, buddy, who’s to say?”

Earlier generations would have given such answers as “because I say so,” Cardinal Newman, Theodore Roosevelt, Nicholas Murray Butler, or God. Some may be tongue-tied because they don’t know those, or other, answers. What is more significant is that those who do know the answers are equally tongue-tied. The only authority they can bring themselves to accept is the authority of relativism. Doubt is the new faith, Pontius Pilate the patron saint of the age.

All of this is powerfully argued and supported by numerous examples. The author carries the reader along with her through sections on the moral life–popular music, parenthood, the decline in demanding forms of identity, censorship and public decency, the sixties revolutions, the continuing culture wars–of America and the West. She should probably concede that there were some good reasons for the cultural changes she rightly dislikes: Not all families were as happy as hers (and mine); misery, brutality, and petty tyranny stalked many homes. Some social loosening was justified, even if it went too far.

West might also derive comfort from the recent improvement in some social statistics, especially the reductions in divorce, abortion, and family breakdown. After the convulsions of the sixties, society is settling down to a new moral balance, less traditional than the fifties, more stable than the seventies, captured by a cartoon showing an Afro-haired hippie passing a crew-cut “suit” in the street, both thinking the same thought: “I’m glad I don’t look like that any more.”

Hollywood reflects this balance. Beginning with the superb Groundhog Day, it has been producing a series of Capra-esque films–Waitress, Bella, and The Ultimate Gift are recent examples–in which characters, presented with hard moral decisions, make the right, painful choices and become better people. Bella is interesting because that choice is not to have an abortion; Waitress even more so because the central character decides not only to have her baby and end an extramarital affair, but also to dismiss her brutal and unfeeling husband from the home. It is undoubtedly a moral ending, but not from the standpoint of Brittas Bay or the Hays Code.

These points qualify rather than nullify Diana West’s central argument about America’s internal failings. She is on more treacherous ground, however, when she deals with the difficulties of the West’s relations with the Muslim world. She rightly sees that placatory rhetoric about “universal values” from Western politicians merely exposes their adolescent anxiety to avoid any strong stance in dealing with the Other. As a political tactic to avoid conflict with the Islamic world, it misses the point. Not only jihadists reject the idea of universal values. And almost all Muslims, including moderates, do so.

Nor are they entirely wrong. The Saudi embassy in London was undiplomatic but correct when it wrote on its website: “Some human rights are controversial, and yet others are anathema to a large portion of humanity.” Abortion is a controversial “right” even within Western societies shaped by the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is anathema to societies shaped by Koranic traditions. And because rights arise from particular cultures and religions, many other Western rights are rejected by Muslims who see them–more clearly and accurately than Western secular elites–as essentially Judeo-Christian imports. Some kind of conflict is, thus, inevitable. What kind?

West seems tempted to go along with those secular rationalists–some post-Muslim, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali–who would wage an ideological war on Islam worldwide, including Muslim countries, on human rights grounds. Such a war is unwinnable. If waged, it would swell the ranks of the jihadists, radicalize moderates, and maximize conflict everywhere. Cultural geography suggests that, while we may shout encouragement from the sidelines, we must leave the main work of promoting human rights within the Muslim world to Muslims.

Our own world is a different matter. If we cannot bring freedom of religion to Saudi Arabia, we are under no obligation to surrender it in Western countries by the creeping dhimmitude that West uncovers in matters such as the Danish cartoon controversy. People who come to live among us must accept our rules and ways. Even if our values are not “universal”–and they are not universally accepted–they are still our values. We can justify them on numerous grounds, not excluding “Because we say so.”

But we have to be adults to say that.

John O’Sullivan is the author, most recently, of The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.