{"id":1463,"date":"2009-10-16T13:11:35","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T17:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2009-10-16T13:11:35","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T17:11:35","slug":"qotd-maturity-fading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/10\/16\/qotd-maturity-fading\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Maturity, fading"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>Maturity as a general virtue, however, declined in the Sixties when indiscriminate sexual liberty, detached from responsibility and emotional engagement, became a human right from puberty forward. With no need to defer the gratification of appetite, there was no further need for patience, maturity&#8217;s hallmark.<\/p>\n<p>And yet what stage of life could be worse for indefinite prolongation? Adolescence is a period marked by extreme intellectual callowness, thrall to raging hormones, obsession with appearance and social caste, contempt for authority, fascination with the transgression of rules, immoderate self-righteousness and intense sensitivity to perceived offence.<\/p>\n<p>For the negative physical consequences of adolescence as a cultural norm, consider the body-sculpting, porn and plastic surgery industries. Our culture&#8217;s obsession with youthful appearance and limitless, Dionysiac sexuality is pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>For the more pernicious negative intellectual and political consequences, consider the universities. In academia one finds a ruling cadre of grey-haired, jeans-clad university teachers pickled in Woodstock-nostalgic revolutionary amber, still rebelling against their parents&#8217; conformity and hypocrisy, still contemptuous of their parents&#8217; institutions and values, even those that stabilized family life and nourished communitarianism.<\/p>\n<p>The political correctness these ideologues embody, Epstein shrewdly notes, is a peculiarly adolescent phenomenon: &#8220;Political correctness . . &mdash; from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory &mdash; could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: . . . Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses [and] the possibility of slights, real and imagined.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Barbara Kay, <a href=\"http:\/\/network.nationalpost.com\/np\/blogs\/fullcomment\/archive\/2009\/10\/14\/barbara-kay-the-decline-of-maturity.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The decline of maturity&#8221;, <em>National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2009-10-16<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maturity as a general virtue, however, declined in the Sixties when indiscriminate sexual liberty, detached from responsibility and emotional engagement, became a human right from puberty forward. With no need to defer the gratification of appetite, there was no further need for patience, maturity&#8217;s hallmark. And yet what stage of life could be worse for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,41],"tags":[311,351,43],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-quotations","tag-1960s","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-nB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1464,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions\/1464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}