‘Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth’s promise. No more,” Diana West writes in her book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization. West is worried that “eternal youth” is “fatal” and recently took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: You note that more adults watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. Surely, you’ve seen Jack Cafferty. Is this really a problem?

Diana West: Not if that were the only statistic out there indicating a seismic cultural shift in sensibility has taken place that has made us more adolescent and less adult.

Other such factoids include: the average video gamester was 18 in 1990; now he’s 33; the National Academy of Sciences has redefined adolescence as the period extending from the onset of puberty, around twelve, to age 30. And, leaving CNN aside, here’s another cartoon statistic: One third of the 56 million Americans who sat down in 2002 to watch SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon each month were between 18 and 49 years old. (Nickelodeon, incidentally, thought its core demographic group was the six- to eleven-year old set.) These older fans may be chronological grown-ups, but their taste reveals an affinity for kidstuff their forebears didn’t share and almost certainly wouldn’t understand. The point is, aspects of the maturation cycle have stalled, leading to significant changes not only in pop culture, but in ourselves as a people.

“There isn’t any clear demarcation of what’s for parents and what’s for kids,” a former Hollywood studio executive told the Wall Street Journal. “We like the same music, we dress similarly.” The Death of the Grown-Up explores how, when and why this phenomenon came about, and, on a deeper level, what it is doing to us as a society and nation.

And just for the record, I’ll mention that I regularly appear on CNN, and once alongside Jack Cafferty (whose remarks recently on Chinese imports that prompted pro-China protests on the streets of Los Angeles I must say I support)!

Lopez: What is the real culture war?

West: “The real culture war” is the reason I wrote this book. We are in the middle of it, whether we know it or not.

Recall the academic “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s — a struggle that was, in large part, a war over cultural identity. Were we going to remain heirs to the Western canon, or become children of a multicultural world? Because that question was asked of a post-grown-up society exhibiting classic symptoms of “identity crisis,” the winning answer came decisively from the multicultural Left.

I didn’t realize the full extent of that victory until much later, beginning on 9/11, when the Multicultural States of America–a nation that had taught itself to believe, for example, that the complete works of Alice Walker and William Shakespeare were interchangeable, offering equal enlightenment and meriting equal study (giving Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt) — came under cataclysmic attack. Was it a real war, this time, not a culture war … or was it a real culture war?

And here we go again. Many of the same questions that drove the theoretical culture wars of the past came back in this more literally perilous era. What do we stand for, and, no less important, what do we stand against? Is the West itself going to remain intact, or is Western-style liberty going to be transformed by contact and conflict with, in this test case, Islam? These are the questions that the post-grown-up, multiculturalist society we have become is having trouble answering. It’s not just the mystery identity of “we” that’s problematic at this point. When a civilization defines itself by an eternally youthful pliance and infinite openness — just as its citizens define their personal lives, not at all coincidentally — it’s difficult to determine what, if anything, that same civilization can be definitively closed to. In this real culture war, the stakes are much higher than they used to be: that is, we’re not just discussing whether Rigoberta Menchu has a place in the canon alongside (or instead of) John Milton; we’re talking about whether Islamic law (sharia) has a place alongside (or instead of) Western law. Having caved on Rigoberta Menchu et al, it shouldn’t be surprising that we are also caving on sharia. I am hoping the latent grown-up in us all can put a stop to this.

Lopez: “Jihad is from Mars and Islam is from Venus”?

West: Ah — you have seized on my spoofy punchline about the extent to which the myth of Bad Jihad-Good Islam has become our conventional wisdom. Such “wisdom” requires us to remove jihad from Islam entirely, allowing us to frown on the former and embrace the latter. This is a dangerously misleading strategy.

I have come to believe that the Western way of life — which I’ll define in brief as life lived according to Judeo-Christian-evolved morality and liberty — is imperiled by the demographic spread and influence of Islamic ideology and laws. Notice I didn’t say the spread of “Islamism.” Or “Islamist-ism.” Or “Islamofascism.” Or just “Wahhabism.” Or “fundamentalist militant extremism.” Over the years, I have used most of these “ists” and “isms” in my column, trying them out one by one until I got to the point where I realized they were serving as a distraction, a form of verbal camouflage that turns our attention away from the ideology and laws of Islam itself. In the cause of not-giving-offense — the highest cause of Westerners-turned-multiculturalists–we have prevented ourselves from undertaking a hard-eyed appraisal of Islamic ideology as a whole, jihadism included, and engaging in a serious discussion of how to contain it.

Lopez: What should the war be called? The name matters, doesn’t it?

West: Yes, it most certainly does matter. For starters, the war should not be called “the war on terror,” which, as many have pointed out, is a tactic, not a nation or coalition or ideology. It is as if in 1941 the U.S. had raised an army to fight “the war on surprise attack,” or “the war on blitzkrieg.” “The Global War on Terror” isn’t any better on this count, just geographically bigger. And I don’t like The Long War, either. I don’t think this war would be a “long” war if we had the courage and clarity to identify the jihadist ideology and aims, and set our minds to protecting Western societies from both. I probably favor “war on jihadism.” Islamic jihad is what threatens us; and a war on jihadism suggests a war that is being mounted defensively to repulse an aggressive movement.

Worth noting is that poll after poll in the Muslim world indicate that Muslims believe the “war on terror” is in reality a “war on Islam.” Are they correct? As the war is currently designed, I would have to say yes, they are — although this is surely not the president’s intention. If, however, you understand that freedom of conscience and sexual equality, to take just two basic ideals of the president’s democratization strategy, are seen as antithetical to Islamic law, it becomes clear that bringing such freedoms to the Islamic world would certainly appear to Muslim believers as being part of a war on Islam.

Consider the overarching conception of “freedom” itself. The entry on freedom, or hurriyya, in the Encyclopedia of Islam describes a state of divine enthrallment that bears no resemblance to current Western understandings of freedom as predicated on the workings of the individual conscience. But multicultural “we,” rigorously trained to see all peoples and all cultures and all religions as ultimately wired in precisely the same way, persist in overlooking such distinctions. We instead regard our kind of “freedom” as being one-size-fits-all “universal” freedom — universally valued and universally desired. Then we scratch our heads when large swaths of the monocultural Muslim world regard it as an ineluctably Western (if not infidel) threat to Islam. Frankly, I don’t think that convincing Islam otherwise is where our security interests will be met, or even can be met. Me, I would like to see us get out of the high-end democratization business to concentrate more specifically on warding off Islamization in the West and jihadist terror via a “war on jihadism.”

Lopez: How are “dhimmi life under Islam” and “PC life in a multicultural world” similar?

West: For me, this pairing was something of a “eureka” moment in the writing of the book.

I would describe PC life in a multiculti world as being marked in part by self-censorship based in fear — fear of professional failure, opprobrium or social ostracism. I would also describe this same self-censorship as a form of childishness. During one lecture on The Death of the Grown-Up, I took a question from a man who wondered, in a rather agitated way, if I were actually saying that multiculturalism is juvenile. I hadn’t phrased things that way, but, on quick reflection, I told him that, yes, that was indeed what I was saying. The fact is, buying into multiculturalism — the outlook that sees all cultures as being of equal value (except the West, which is essentially vile) — requires us to repress our faculties of logic, and this in itself is an infantilizing act. I mean, it’s patently illogical to accept and teach our children the notion that a culture that has brought liberty and penicillin to the masses is of no greater value than others that haven’t. In accepting the multicultural worldview, we deceive ourselves into inhabiting a world of pretend where certain truths are out of bounds and remain unspoken — even verboten.

Our adoption of PC norms and multicultural speech codes, of course, came about independently of the historical conditions of the dhimmi, who, as Jews and Christians living under Islamic law, developed cultures of self-censorship and self-denial at a far remove from anything going on in the United States. But that doesn’t negate the comparison between what may be regarded as two cultures of self-censorship. Indeed, it helps explain the terrifying compatibility between the conditions historian Bat Ye’or has chronicled as “dhimmitude” and the multicultural mindset that flourishes in a post-grown-up world.

For death-of-the-grownup purposes, one aspect of dhimmitude has particular resonance, or, perhaps, non-resonance; and that is the silence of dhimmitude regarding Islam. Among dhimmi populations, it is the silence of an insecure, fearful, self-censoring society. In the West, it is also the silence of the post-adult, identity-less society, the one that never quite grows up into itself. And the similarities between the two are alarming.

Maybe this hush of dhimmitude fell over the West after the 1989 Salman Rushdie fatwa, when the notion of “protected” Islam — “protected” from criticism on pain of death–was first communicated to a wide Western audience. And now? It’s become a part of our world. In the nearly two decades since the Rushdie case, we have seen, to take just a few random examples, a British broadcast watchdog group note that “Islam was accorded far more respect on television and radio than other religions”; the EU racism watchdog shelve a report on antisemitism in Europe because it concluded Muslims and Palestinian groups were responsible for most of the incidents; a British Foreign Office minister apologize repeatedly for a line in a speech that called on British Muslims to choose between political dialogue and “the way of the terrorists”; and an American president end his “crusade” before it began and declare Islam a religion of peace. (I refer to President Bush’s early post-9/11 remarks: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”)

Is this dhimmitude under Islam? Or PC life in a multicultural world? Or have the two worlds morphed? I try to answer these questions in the book.

Lopez: Are there any grown-ups running for president?

West: That is a perfectly fair question but I’m going to turn it around to wonder whether there are any grown-ups voting for president. Seriously, we are all creatures of our time. Ask yourself: Does grown-up talk, let alone grown-up virtues, even resonate in the American electorate circa 2008? We certainly don’t hear much of it, and that probably has as much to do with the population as with the candidates. Self-reliance as an ideal, for example, appears to be at a historically low ebb, arguably eroded as much by GWB’s “compassionate conservatism” as by Democratic liberalism. Indeed, it wouldn’t be surprising if the candidate who offers the biggest government gimme bag wins. It was interesting to see how quickly John McCain reversed his perfectly grown-up comment about the subprime mortgage crisis– “It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers” — in order to offer a government “solution” to the housing crisis a la Hillary and Obama. I guess the grown-up comment didn’t poll well. And speaking of polls, what kind of a stand-up grown-up sets course by them?

Lopez: Why does adult dress matter?

West: Once upon a time, children were dressed like miniature adults; such societies didn’t foster a sheltered or protected time of childhood. Later, adults began dressing their children differently from themselves — think short pants and play clothes — in an era that became a heyday for childhood as a phase distinct from adulthood. In our time, adults have begun dressing themselves like children (again, think short pants and play clothes) and adulthood as a developmental destination has become noticeably uncrowded.

About a century ago, Booth Tarkington wrote “Seventeen,” probably the first novel about adolescence. Set in small-town America, the plot hinges on seventeen-year-old Willie Baxter’s ability to borrow, on the sly, his father’s dinner jacket, which the teenager wants to wear to impress the new girl in town. In other words, it’s not a pierced tongue or a tattoo that wins the babe; it’s a tuxedo. Willie dons the ceremonial guise of adulthood to stand out — favorably! — from the other boys.

That was then. For the most part, father and son today dress more or less alike, from message-emblazoned t-shirts to chunky athletic shoes, for example. (So do mothers and daughters dress alike, although with female fashions there is the added fillip of pornified fashion that sexualizes girls and leaves women looking overblown.) Sure, there is a workplace wardrobe that, depending on the workplace, may be different. But the sartorial default position is always adolescent. And that tells us something. After all, if clothes make the man, they also reveal what the man makes of manhood.

Lopez: Why do you knock rock? What’s a grown-up to do for fun?

West: Does that mean there’s no fun without rock?

Rock lover or not, any objective assessment of general cultural decline can hardly overstate the deleterious impact of rock ‘n’ roll. So, if you knock cultural decline, at some point, you’re going to have to get around to knocking rock.

In analyzing the rise of an adolescent culture in The Death of the Grown-Up, I also analyze the rise of rock’n’roll — the most vivid reflection of teen ascendance. More than the simple addition of a musical form, the development of rock ‘n’ roll (and related offshoots) both reflected and stimulated brand-new behaviors, attitudes, and aspirations.

Culture-check story: Something my Dad mentioned in his last years was a kid he served with in the army during World War II, a guy from New Jersey, 18 or 19 years old. One day, kidding around, this young GI started to dance my Dad, a guy from Brooklyn, also 18 or 19 years old, around the barracks, singing, “Cheek to Cheek” — a perfect, if quite complex and unconventional, standard by Irving Berlin that had been introduced eight years earlier by Fred Astaire in Top Hat. Now consigned to the rarified strata of “cabaret,” this was the music of the enlisted man in 1943.

Such a fact is no small matter. It’s not for nothing that Plato taught us to “mark the music” to understand an individual or his society. After all, people who hum Berlin or Arlen or Gershwin think they want to fall in love; people who hum (hum?) Motley Crue or the Ying Yang Twins think they want to have sex. People who listen to Mel Torme (Nat Cole, Bing Crosby, or Ella Fitzgerald) don’t want to pierce their tongues; people who listen to Eminem (Alanis Morisette, Kurt Cobain, or Public Enemy) don’t want to pin on an orchid corsage. 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. The fact is, between a world in which romantic love is the ideal and a world where non-marital sex is the goal lies a vast cultural chasm. And not simply in terms of aesthetics. 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”). More than just the time has changed between 1937, when George and Ira Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” was a hit:

We may never, never meet again
On the bumpy road to love…

and 1987, when George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” was a hit:

Don’t you think it’s time you had sex with me
Sex with me
Sex with me.

The changing of the cultural guard that took place in between tells us a lot about the death of the grown-up.

As for adult fun? I dunno — yachting to Bermuda? Sampling wine along the Loire? Trail-riding in Vermont? Trolling e-bay for vintage snare drums? Ordering Chinese food and watching a movie? (This is beginning to sound like a personal ad….) Your choice!

Lopez: What would lead off a twelve-step program for growing up?

West: When I finished writing the book, I realized that most of the people who came in for praise as grown-ups along the way were people who said ”no.”

No, said the Montgomery County parents to cucumber-sex ed; no, said the Scarsdale principal to parentally-pressured transcript tampering; no, said the Queensborough College prof to passing her class-flunking revolutionaries; no, said the Batavia Rotary wife to hubby’s taking it all off charity. So much of adulthood today, such as it exists, seems to be a necessarily negative force, a damper on behaviors no longer constrained by vanished lines and boundaries. After “no” — or, maybe, after enough “no’s” — lines and boundaries begin to reappear. But if “no” can function as a restorative, “no” is not enough.

Drawing new lines and boundaries requires clear judgment calls, choices that reflect a sound faculty of discrimination. Certainly, I don’t mean the definition of discrimination we associate with racial bigotry; rather, I mean the definition in my old Webster’s — “the ability to make or perceive distinctions; perception; discernment.” Here, I think, is where the future of the grownup lies: in the cultivation of that very faculty. Such an effort would be nothing less than revolutionary. The resulting confidence to (I would hope) acknowledge the legitimacy of a Western point of view, would be anathema to the cult of indiscriminate nonjudgmentalism as preached and practiced in our p.c. times; indeed, it would necessarily bust up the multiculti monopoly. Which makes me think that the nonjudgmentalism that dominates our p.c. times is, among other things, one of the leading factors of infantilization. “Growing up,” then, would not only mark the rebirth of the adult, but the end of multiculturalism as well.

It may sound theoretical, but, as I have tried to demonstrate in the book, there are desperately concrete applications. When I started thinking about this project a decade ago, the multicultural assault on the West was still a battle of the books; after 9/11, it became clear that the “real” culture war had started. Having jettisoned the works of our greatest Dead White Males, having leveled the hierarchies that they adorned, and having disabled all Western “constructs” of judgment and reason, we were and continue to be totally ill-equipped to defend ourselves — our Western selves, that is — against a “real” multicultural challenge as embodied by Islam — or, rather, by Islamization. The unchecked expansion of Islamic influence in the West — through both violence (terrorism) and more peaceful means (demographics) — spells the end of Western civilization as we have known it. It is a force to be reckoned with, beginning with debate, discussion, and minute analysis by mature men and women who can face all the facts, and not by children who hide from them.

What to do? It’s not enough to yell, stop, or even grow up — although it’s a start if, in the process, we withstand the likely excruciating growing pains to undertake a serious, candid reexamination of the human condition, circa 21st century: as parents who need to guide children to maturity; as individuals who need to reimpose boundaries on personal behavior; and as nation-states that need to reassert border-control and enforce immigration policies that preserve, rather than transform, this uniquely Western culture. Such an undertaking begins by breaking our silence. And breaking our silence begins by conquering our fears. Which is also a part of growing up. We have nothing to lose. It should now be clear that the civilization that forever dodges maturity will never live to a ripe old age.