By Selwyn Duke

Many years ago, I was told a
story by a woman I knew whose son had been diagnosed with “A.D.D.”  She said that she finally had to take from
her boy a book a therapist had given him about how an A.D.D. child acts.  The problem? 
Her son was reading it and then imitating the behavior of the child in
it!

Then I remember when someone I
know well told me about her 13-year-old’s reaction to being confronted about
his misbehavior.  He said something to
the effect of, “Well, mom, you know, I’m at that age.”  But how did he know he was at “that age”?

There is also all the anxiety
adolescents are supposed to feel over the “changes in their body,” and we’re
told about how tough it is to be a teenager. 
I don’t know, but I remember my teen years well, and I experienced no
such thing.  I knew I was moving toward
manhood and was happy about it.  And
whenever the topic might have arisen, it was apparent that my friends were happy
about it, too.  Why wouldn’t we have
been?  If you think it’s tough becoming
bigger, stronger, faster and better each and every day, try the other side of
that hill, when you have to trade in the rollerblades for a Rascal scooter. 

This brings me to the book The Catcher in the Rye, which is in the
news again after the death of its author, J.D. Salinger.  Like so many others attending high school in
the early 1980s, I had to read Catcher.  Now, I guess I was “supposed” to relate to
it, but I never did.  I didn’t experience
teen “angst,” and I didn’t think everyone was a phony, either.  Furthermore, if any of my friends related to
the book, they certainly never said anything about it.  Nor did any of my friends — or the teens I
would work with later in life — exhibit angst or a preoccupation with the
phoniness of others.  In fact, I think
the young are better epitomized by a starry-eyed idealism, where they expect
some virtue, heroism and idealism in others. 
For sure, the millions of youth who chanted “Yes, we can!” in 2008
expected those things (although it’s rumored that many have now become Holden
Caulfield).

Now, mind you, I don’t imply
that Catcher tells us nothing about
people in their adolescence.  I simply
say that its popularity — just like the other social phenomena I mentioned —
tells us even more about a civilization in its twilight.    

For one thing, there was a time
when telling kids how they were “supposed” to behave meant drawing from Sunday
school or the Bible, not the Kinsey Institute or the DSM-IV.  We taught the morals we expected, not the
misbehavior to be expected (and, by inference, accepted).  This makes sense, too, as morality needs to
be taught.  Problems just happen
naturally.

Unfortunately, they can also be
induced unnaturally.  I believe that much
(not all) of the modern narrative about the problems of youth is the projection
of adults.  It doesn’t well reflect teens
as a group because it only reflects certain former teens as individuals, people
who, though now grown, may sometimes just be repressed adolescents
themselves.  Even insofar as Catcher goes, who really made it
popular?  Do you think kids would be
reading it today if educators hadn’t made it a staple of curricula?  Of course, in all fairness to Salinger, he
did write the book for adults — and those adults then made it popular among the
kids.

Ironically, while Catcher was once the bane of
traditionalists, it now finds a few foes even among the left.  For example, Oberlin College English
professor Anne Trubek is quoted as
saying that the work is “not so contemporary anymore” and that “most
American teenagers will find it rather tame and sort of laughable the things
that were once considered so controversial.” 
She says that Holden Caulfield is not such a “universal voice for
American teenagers” because he’s an “upper-class white man.”  Then, echoing the last point I made, she
opined that since all classics are man-made there’s “[no] reason why we couldn't
do the same with some of the things that have been written in the last 10
years.”  Yeah, hey, why not get with the
times?  Or, is the problem that we’ve
long been getting with the times and away from the Truth?

If this sounds oh-so
absolutist, understand that for all our modern talk about letting kids spread
their wings and not imposing values, we certainly do preach messages.  We diagnose children with A.D.D. and then
tell them how A.D.D. kids “should” act, or we tell them how they “should” feel
about their changing bodies.  We say it
is a given that they’ll be rebellious and angst-ridden.  We create a blockbuster movie with strong
anti-corporate, anti-Western and pro-feminist themes.  And we preach messages for a very simple
reason: It’s almost impossible to do otherwise. 
Society and its art and literature will always project values, either explicitly
or implicitly.  The only question is, what
should those values be?     

This brings us to an important
point: Moderns have lost sight of the purpose of art and literature.  And this is why, for instance, people will offer
that tired old defense of rap music and say, “Hey, they’re just tellin’ you
what’s goin’ on out there [in the streets].” 
Now, I could point out that this standard would justify the showing of
porn and snuff films to kids, too; after all, sex and serial killing are “goin’
on out there” also.  But the point is
this: If something is supposed to tell you what’s going on out there, it’s not
called art.

It’s called news.

And there is a reason why
people complain about the news: It’s not exactly uplifting.  Yet one of the purposes of art is to do just
that, uplift man, not degrade him.  Is
this disputable?  Do we want our art to
lower us morally?

Our lips will answer no, but
our actions say otherwise.  The art we
create today seems not just like the fruits of Holden Caulfield, but of
seventh-grade ne’er do wells who mock the straight-laced A-student until he
crumbles or sinks to their level.  G.K.
Chesterton alluded to this with a quip that could be applied to all the arts, “Savages
and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than
themselves.  But the artists find it
harder.”

In point of fact, anything
wholesome today is mocked as a goody-goody (G rating?) work and dismissed as
simplistic.  For instance, consider the remarks
of an aging and quite liberal Stephen
Talbot, the fellow who played tow-headed troublemaker Gilbert
Bates on Leave it to Beaver.  Obviously very embarrassed by his association
with the show, he took pains to emphasize that it contained stereotypes and was
completely unrealistic. 
Unrealistic?  Perhaps, but what
work is completely realistic?  Is the
current practice of consistently bucking stereotypes — of portraying thoroughly
anomalous characters (e.g., masculinized women) — realistic?  The point is that artistic license exists and
should be used responsibly.  This means
to promote good, not evil; to elevate, not degrade.

So realism is a poor excuse for
degradation.  After all, in real life, we
all must answer nature’s call, but does this mean we must show television characters
using the toilet?  Yet we seem to believe
that we must show them washing their dirty laundry.  And the end result of this philosophy is that
Hollywood is using the whole world as a toilet.

So what is the purpose of
art?  To entertain?  That’s fine, but its higher calling is to
teach lessons about good and evil and to encourage virtue.  It is supposed to reflect Truth.

Once this is understood, it
becomes clear why moderns can benefit from reading millennia-old Greek
classics, works about long-dead people written in antiquated ways.  Truth transcends time, place and people.  And this brings us to our problems today.

Because the West has fallen
victim to moral relativism, it no longer believes in transcendent Truth.  Thus, stripped of the eternal yardstick that
should govern art and curricula, we use emotion as the yardstick and try to
provide what makes a given group “feel” good. 
This is why we hear about how something isn’t relevant to most because
it’s about an “upper-class white man” or was penned by “dead white males.”  It’s why we try to give each group its
particular flavor, such as feminism for girls and afro-centrism for
blacks.  It’s why we talk about the times
and not Truth, saying that a work is no longer “contemporary.”  It’s why education has degenerated to a point
wherein all we can do is give everyone a lie that, supposedly, he can relate
to.  But this tragically misses the
point: Everyone needs the same thing, Truth.  
Thus should our goal be to relate it — and help everyone to relate to
it. 

Doing otherwise is pointless.  After all, if morals are relative, how could
it be wrong to not be contemporary or sensitive to feelings, or to be
provincial?  More significantly, though,
if we accept the relativistic lie that all is taste and we each have our own
flavor, we’ll never be able to relate to the same things or, tragically, to each
other. 

Thus
does relativism yield division.  If you
want brotherhood, seek Truth.

                     This article first appeared at American Thinker

                        © 2010 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved