I don't have time to write the post I'd like, but the tragedy of modern society is usually on my mind, in this case, the lack of opportunity for young Americans to practice heroic love.
We live in a culture built on delaying marriage and family five to twenty years beyond puberty in order to serve the industrial state and information economy with experienced specialists. Of course, delaying marriage a full decade beyond the onset of puberty is completely unnatural, so we have substituted contraception and frequent sex for marriage, covenantal love, and babies. Couples who do what comes naturally and marry in their teens are looked upon as burdens to society and their families. Their marriages are assumed to be failures in the making.
But what percentage of our population is capable of living a virtuous life without marriage for the decade or more beyond puberty required to complete graduate degrees and take on advanced training for a technological economy?
Thus, should we be surprised that school sports are among the few opportunities to practice heroic virtues that we offer our teenagers? A teenager is not allowed to bag groceries at Kroger until he is 16. Missionary orders in America won't let you volunteer until you are 18.
Should we be surprised that girls get pregnant and decide to keep the baby? Having a baby, even if conceived in a flash of passion, is often better than the boredom of deferred gratification of gaining some sort of certification for specialized employment. The reality is that boredom is all we offer many of our young people.
Should we be surprised that many boys (and girls) cannot wait to turn 17 and obtain parental permission to join the armed forces?
I am not regretting my own life choices: two grad degrees, marriage after 30, etc. I must say that I was lonely and tempted much of the time before I married. I love to read, study, write, and teach, and thus was able to obtain advanced degrees.
Nonetheless, I fear for my country and our culture if we do not nurture family structure any better than we do. We need to support morally and structurally the vast majority of young people who don't want their adolescence prolonged for more than a decade and would prefer to pursue their vocations while they are married and having families. "Friends with benefits" is not a social structure, but rather, a sociological and moral train wreck.
Michael Barone's Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future notes that America produces incompetent 18 year olds and remarkably competent 30 year olds. The price of postponing any sort of risk for our young people as long as possible is greater than we want to admit.
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1 comments:
Great reflection here -- I couldn't agree more with your conclusion. The idea of extending adolescence into the mid-20's and even early 30's is a disaster. It would be far, far better for society and for most folks if we had an economy and a social structure that enabled people to have productive work at younger ages. That in turn would enable the formation of marriages at an earlier age...
Of course, the underlying problem is the "credentialization" of the modern workplace. I had to go through 4 years of college and 3 years of law school to get to be a lawyer. Abraham Lincoln got to be a lawyer the old fashioned way: he apprenticed with a lawyer and learned the trade on the job.
Under the fixation with paper credentials is addressed, the necessity to delay adulthood will remain with us. Additional schooling -- most of it useless, a waste of time and resources, but required in order to get the necessary piece of paper -- will mandate that a large chunk of the productive population delay career, trade and family.
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