Now We Are Six

There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age.

“Odyssey” is the new stage.

During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.

Well, yes. It’s true. But only to a limited extent. Liberal 20-somethings do all that.

And you can go back a couple of hundred years and see the odyssey years emerging in the children of the educated middle class in the early nineteenth century. Take Marx and Engels. They were traveling around Europe in their twenties having a grand old revolutionary time. Then they settled down to write a manifesto.

But there’s a problem. Adolescence and odyssey only make sense for the children of the educated middle class, the kind of people who do sixteen years of education straight off the bat and then look around for a creative quest to engage their adult years. For everyone else adolescence and odyssey are a waste of time,

Often the adolescence and odyssey years are worse than a waste of time, they are actually profoundly harmful.

Take the young man who hates high school. He’s really learning stuff, isn’t he, as he sits in high school wanting desperately to get out into the world.

Take the twenty-something slacker. He’s really having an odyssey hanging out in Austin, TX, or Seattle, WA, doing nothing much.

Take the thirty-ish career women. She’s got about eighteen months to get married and start a baby before fertility problems start to set in.

The worst thing is that this adolescence/odyssey culture has been forced on our youth more or less at the point of a gun. Unless you organize your life in the approved liberal fashion, this society really isn’t set up to help you.

In fact it actually hinders you. Suppose you are the son of a building contractor. Best thing for you would be to get out on the building site at about age 12 and drive equipment around. Maybe you would take time out for a few courses in drafting and business finance.

But you can’t do that. The operators’ union will be after you for underage equipment operation, and the school district will be after you for truancy.

So you are left just hanging out until you are allowed to start your life by the liberal gatekeepers.

Brooks is right. Our society does have an “odyssey” decade. But now we need to relax the liberal cultural hegemony so that other life paths are allowed.

Or even encouraged.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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