From Uncommon Knowledge: Mark Steyn on the loss of the will to live in the West
From the great Uncommon Knowledge blog, here is an interview that should be heard and heeded by all in the West, with Mark Steyn. Peter Robinson, as always, does a sterling interview, and Mark Steyn makes some very important points about two causes of “civilizational exhaustion”:
- We in the West have ceased to believe (in anything), and
- We in the West have yielded most of the core functions of adulthood to government.
About the second of these, Steyn says:
If you take a picture of the average 13-year-old in California today and then you take a picture of a 13-year-old from my part of New Hampshire in 1878 just put those photographs side-by-side, which one would you be willing to leave your house to if you were to go away for a weekend. I do not think it is, I do not think it is a very difficult question to answer there. Now that is fine when you are 13. But what happens when you extend adolescence. The President of the United States has just told us that if you are 26 years old, you can stay on your parent’s health insurance, health insurance plan. So he has basically said at 26 you are still a child…
On your 27th birthday you have got to finally shape up and finally move out of your parent’s insurance agency. But until then you are a child. Uh, what, the problem with that we have essentially created a society of permanent adolescence. Where the important business, healthcare…healthcare, why is it that people can make their own healthcare arrangements 50, 100, 200 years ago, but now the state has to do it for us. And what does that say about us?
Like I said, this is one riveting interview, and it is one that we all need to hear.
Prydain 
Thanks Will for this interview. Mark Steyn, Uncommon Knowledge, and NRO are favorites of mine. This bit from Mark reminded me of the very apt quote from C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man):
“And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Man is by nature a dependent creature. His folly is that he seeks dependence in all the wrong places (to paraphrase an old country tune). Individual responsibility and dependence upon our Creator go hand in hand. We find that which we were created for through dependence on God which allows everything to begin to take its proper role and perspective. All other options are dead ends pursued out of the illusion that we are independent yet not responsible.
Jack
Jack,
That last sentence of yours sums it all up, doesn’t it? That “illusion that we are independent yet not responsible” is very much tied into the Fall itself. Thanks for that insightful comment.