I'm trying really hard not to be the old man fuming about These Kids Today. But a lot of them make it difficult. There was a piece on one of the big news sites, maybe the NYT, a few days ago about the deterioration of the whole concept of adulthood, and I do think there's something to that. The piece was wrong-headed in a lot of ways but I found it interesting that the idea had taken hold even there.

It does seem objectively the case that there's been an overall decline in education.

The Shallows? Don't remember you mentioning that before, though, old as I am, I might well have forgotten it.

Part of the problem is that us grownups have ceased to believe in the wisdom of the elders, indeed in our own wisdom. I mean WE don't believe that older people are wiser and we don't tell the smart-aecky kids that, either.

My wife supervises teenagers and I am constantly amazed that when there is a disagreement between my wife and the kids, the attitude is not, "Kathy is much older than you; she knows what she's talking about. You are still wet between the ears."

This shift in adult self-confidence seems to have begun in the 60s. We allowed that fact that adults do make mistakes and that some are bad or stupid lead to an acceptance fo the leveling of the field.

And our kids get the message. "My opinion is as good as yours. It is my opinion against yours. That fact that you are 30 years older and much more experienced is irrelevant because I'm smart and can figure things out."

The Shallows is Nicholas Carr's book from a couple years back about how the internet affects its users' thinking processes. He's a neurologist or a neurobiologist -- something along those lines.

Wet behind the ears, not between. Although maybe....

British culture ... is the crudest, most aggressive, and most lacking in refinement of any of the Western cultures

This has certainly been my experience. And I suspect many British people are secretly proud of it.

As to the young, what so often surprises me with my students is how bad they are at following simple instructions. If you say, "This has to be submitted in a card folder", half of them will hand it in in plastic. Only when you say "We have to archive this for six years because it's assessed for your degree, so put it in an acid-free card archive folder before you hand it in, not in plastic, that will leech the ink," will they deign to follow your instructions. Because just doing what you ask, why would they do that? The idea that there is a reason for something even if they don't know it never seems to occur to them.

Part of the problem is that us grownups have ceased to believe in the wisdom of the elders, indeed in our own wisdom. I mean WE don't believe that older people are wiser and we don't tell the smart-aecky kids that, either.

I think maybe this is the crux of the whole thing. And it reminds me of how confused I was when I first saw Rebel Without a Cause as a teenager in the 1950s. The message seemed to be that the parents of the kids in the film were the cause of all the unhappiness. The ones most focused on were James Dean's parents, who really didn't seem all that bad to me. But the father was ineffectual, and prone to tears. What lay behind that picture of parents? The two world wars? In any case, it was light years away from the father in the Andy Hardy films of just the previous decade.

Couple of clips for comparison:

Here's Andy Hardy's father talking to Andy about fidelity in marriage.

And here's James Dean confronting his father, who's wearing a pinafore apron and cleaning up a spilled tray of food.

I wondered if Dalrymple's view of British culture was accurate. That's pretty sad, because in the U.S. we still tend to see the British through the filter of BBC costume dramas etc.

I hate admit, but have to admit, that a lot of the stuff we're noting here, e.g. your observation about students not doing what they're told unless given what they consider a good reason, really got its start with my generation. As Robert said:

"This shift in adult self-confidence seems to have begun in the 60s. We allowed that fact that adults do make mistakes and that some are bad or stupid lead to an acceptance fo the leveling of the field."

It wasn't only push from the kids that made that happen, it was a tendency of the authorities to give in to it. At the level of the average family, there might have been an Archie Bunker sort of situation, but the fact that the All in the Family deck was very much stacked against Archie was more significant: the elites were on the side of the kids, and happily joined in labeling those who resisted as cave men.

Those two clips are really striking, Marianne. I'd never seen an Andy Hardy movie, but I saw Rebel as an adult ten or fifteen years ago and was really struck by the weird and pathological portrayal of the father. I think there was some kind of vogue in the '50s for a psychological theory that dominating women and passive men were the root of all sorts of problems in the youth of the day, and figured that the movie was more or less preaching that. I disliked the movie precisely because it romanticized the young and caricatured the middle-aged.

"...commercial interests were very much in favor of setting up a divide..." I think it's too much of a leap to hold them responsible, but they certainly took advantage of it, and effectively encouraged it.

"the general propensity to reject limits on personal freedom) is in very large part a function of our unprecedented wealth"

Yes, St. John was definitely onto something when he linked "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life," a thing that's very difficult to get a certain sort of conservative to see. As someone I recently read put it, we spend a lot of time attempting to breed exceedingly small camels or to manufacture very large needles.

Anne-Marie, I once read an interview with Blixa Bargeld, a German musician who played with Nick Cave for many years, among other things. The only reason I remember it (it was over ten years ago) and the only bit of it that stuck with me, was him saying something like "We hate all that--Mozart, Beethoven [and he named several other German artists]. That's all fascist stuff for us." The "we" was his young Germans. I was shocked at anyone describing Mozart as fascist.

American rebels blamed their parents' generation for Vietnam, but that didn't have anything like the same place or effect that the revulsion against Nazism no doubt did for Germans. We were more interested in denouncing middle-class-ness in itself: "the gray despair of your ugly lives", as Frank Zappa put it. This was often a rather disgusting level of ingratitude. But I think one less-remarked engine of the rebellion--maybe not a major one, but present--was damaged families. I once counted up the number of divorced and otherwise messed-up households that my radical friends came from and the number was higher than average. Not a decisive thing, certainly, but an influence.

Not that Britain is entirely like that - there are wonderful people doing wonderful things, and the general level of politeness in day-to-day interactions is, if anything, higher than elsewhere. But the category of people who seem not to share, even to resent, the civilised values of the society they live in is much larger and more obvious in Britain. And as a prison doctor this is the class of people that Dalrymple knows best.

The most worrying thing about walking round certain foreign cities at night is the possibility of encountering British football supporters or stag parties. You wouldn't necessarily want to come across a bunch of German skinheads or Italian hooligans, but the ratio of them to Germans and Italians as a whole is an awful lot smaller.

I disliked the movie precisely because it romanticized the young and caricatured the middle-aged.

The characters played by Dean, Wood, and Mineo did not strike me as 'romanticised'. The Mineo character in particular was a mess.

I do thing the Jim Backus character was a contrivance, but the other adults were not (as far as I can recall). Twenty years later, I'm fairly sure I was acquainted with all of them.

"Some entrepreneur still in his twenties admitted that he didn't even consider hiring anyone much older than himself, and said, "Let's face it: young people are smarter. That's just a fact.""

LOL!

How often have I said to myself "that was when I was young and stupid"?

"I mean WE don't believe that older people are wiser and we don't tell the smart-aecky kids that, either."

I do. But you know, it doesn't help that there are a LOT of extremely foolish older people around. I'm 45, for those who don't know and some of my parents' acquaintances etc... well!

And I will excuse foolishness and even arrogance in the young (I remember being young) but I am pretty intolerant of those same qualities in older people.

No doubt there was a Greek expression for "these kids today."

"But you know, it doesn't help that there are a LOT of extremely foolish older people around."

Yep, as the saying goes.... I saw that coming a long time ago, as my generation got older. I remember thinking, probably when I was forty-ish, that eventually there would be a president of my generation, and I probably wouldn't like him. And history coughed up Bill Clinton.

Interesting that the actor, Jim Backus, who played the father in Rebel, went on to become the voice of Mr. Magoo and then had a key role on Gilligan's Island. Don't think he ever tackled another straight dramatic role.

"No doubt there was a Greek expression for "these kids today.""

Well, Nick and I often say "O, the lawlessness!" when the young'uns are being naughty. It comes from "The Clouds" by Aristophanes, I think. IIRC, it referred to "the young people today."

Well, you do make it sound considerably more interesting than I'd given it credit for. Writing this on a phone so will be terse, but: implicit (not necessarily deliberate) dismissal of the value of the father's work is something that began to be prevalent in family portrayals then. Would be interesting pop culture study. Also, did any of the families practice a religion? I don't recall any.

Mrs. Starke (in her bathrobe, being transported in a police car) enlarges on her domestic problems to the police and does make a reference to 'your children' which includes 'you pray for them'. That's it as far as I can recall. The scene at the planetarium has the astronomer presenting what amounts to an atheist cosmology. I think that detail is significant.

And there's James Webb.

Webb or Manchin would be the best the Democratic Party have to offer. Both know something of how business is done in the federal government, both have experience in public administration, both have some reserve regarding the sillier and more asinine constituencies in the Democratic Party, and both are old men.

On the Republican side, I'd prefer Govs. Jindal or Walker (not listed above) were older 'ere they sought the job. La famille Bush have a history of indifference to immigration enforcement. The disreputable Mr. Derbyshire dissected the sources of that in this review of the book published under the Governor's byline.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-concludes-jeb-bush-just-doesn-t-like-americans-very-much

Without even knowing anything very specific about J Bush I'd be inclined to oppose him. We've had enough of them.

"Just doesn't like Americans very much"--pretty true of most of our upper-upper-crust, in financial and/or status terms.

Not sure I agree that Jeb Bush belongs in that group of elites who just don't much like Americans, or even despises them. Being married to a Mexican woman who comes from a modest background has made him quite sympathetic to immigrant causes, but that doesn't mean he sees other Americans in an exceedingly bad light.

I did read the Derbyshire article you linked to, and I don't think the Jeb Bush quotes he included show that Jeb doesn't think much of Americans. Here are three of those quotes:

"It is essential that we have an ample supply of workers both for labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want and for highly skilled jobs for which there are inadequate numbers of Americans with the skills to fit them."

“Like most immigrants, Hispanics are tremendously entrepreneurial.”

"Immigrants are unlikely to be complacent about the freedom and opportunity that for them previously was only a dream and was gained only through great effort and sacrifice. Our nation constantly needs the replenishment of our spirit that immigrants bring."

Derbyshire faults Bush on the facts underlying much of what Bush says in his book, and he may be right on that. But isn't the rest of his criticism really just the "spin" he gives to it all?

Derbyshire's point is that Jeb Bush's disregard of ordinary working class Americans is so much a part of his matrix that he does not notice it. That's his baseline. It is something with a different texture than a character like Anthony Kennedy or Barack Obama manifests.

The bourgeois are not hurting in this country. Salaried employees are doing well; small business likely has problems it did not in the past due to the accumulation of statutory legislation and regulation which gives lawyers a franchise to make your world worse.

What has happened is a secular decay in the relative position (and sometimes in real earnings, though that's much overstated) of various strata of the wage-earning population. George Borjas has made it clear that the distributional effects are small but clear: mass immigration is not in the interests of ordinary low-skill wage earners.

There are, of course, other sources of the problems that working people are having. One is the hypertrophy of tertiary schooling for sorting the labor market and the shift from hands-on training and apprenticeshp to classroom instruction. These are injurious to certain social sectors (mainly men who learn in a particular way).

People on the right say that a lot about manufacturing patron-client relations, and I always have trouble believing that anyone would consciously do it. Perhaps it happens without being entirely deliberate.

"The bourgeois are not hurting in this country." I never know exactly what people mean by bourgeois, though perhaps it has a clear definition in the world of economics. But at any rate when I refer to the middle class, I don't think it's the same thing you mean by "the bourgeois." I mean everybody between poor, as in not having enough money to cover basic living expenses, and rich, as in having so much money that one doesn't need to work. In that sense, a lot of the middle class is not in good shape at all. I'm sure you know more numbers than I do, but I think they support the observation that things have gotten considerably more difficult for the lower end of the middle class over the past 30 years or so.

Re immigration, one of the ironies of the left's support of unrestricted immigration from the south is that it is essentially the same thing as sending jobs to poor countries, which they denounce. It's just importing the low-wage workers rather than exporting the jobs.

I think for the most part Society does that, though, not the employers, for the kind of low-end jobs we're talking about.

Nor do the employers.

Indeed it does. And I don't think either political party has much of an idea of what to do about it. I'm not sure how much can be done by political means to change big underlying trends.