In the comments to “The President of MIT emailed me“, Natalia suggested the book Pussycats: Why The Rest Keeps Beating The West, And What Can Be Done About It. The author, Martin van Creveld, is a 71-year-old Dutch-Israeli military historian.
This review is mostly a response to Natalia (and thanks for being a loyal reader!), but perhaps others will be interested. Note that nearly all of the excerpts below contain references to journal articles supporting the author’s assertions. I’ve removed these for brevity/clarity. But keep in mind that when he says “Americans are likely to do X” it is something for which he has cited a social psychology paper or military report.
My thoughts after reading 10 percent: So far he has anecdotally come to the same conclusion as the academic psychologist who wrote iGen: young Westerners are taking much longer to grow up than previous generations did. Thus an American, European, or Israeli 18-year-old today is like a 14-year-old back when I was a kid (i.e., before cities were electrified, etc.). This is bad news for Western militaries because they are essentially sending 14-year-olds into battle where they lose to grown-ups who are barely armed and equipped.
The author is good at describing the military problem:
The outcome [of the West’s feebleness] was the Vietnam War. Judging by the amount of ordnance expended or dropped, and the number of people killed, no colonial war in the whole of history had ever been waged with greater ferocity. All to subdue an opponent whose leader looked like a poor relation of Santa Klaus, wore black pajamas and sandals made of old tires, subsisted on the proverbial handful of rice, and operated an electric grid so small that even destroying eighty-seven percent of it made no difference. A quarter-century later the Americans, encouraged by the aforementioned victory over Saddam (as well as the much smaller one over poor little Serbia in Kosovo), compounded their error by invading first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Neither country was in any condition to fight back. The former, indeed, hardly deserved to be called a country at all. Both were overrun quickly and at very low cost. Yet the wars in question, far from producing quick and easy victories as President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their advisers had confidently expected, became protracted. Before they were over they produced tens of thousands of casualties, and while most Western troops have been withdrawn an end may not be in sight. The financial cost, including that of looking after wounded veterans and replenishing the depleted forces, is said to have been anything between 4 to 6 trillion dollars. So heavy is the burden that it is most unlikely ever to be fully paid. All for no gains anyone could discover.
The roots of the “lifelong childhood” problem?
Never in the whole of history has the age in which such people started counting as adults been as high as it is today. The origins of the change are to be found during the 1820s. According to that invaluable research tool, Google Ngram, this was the time when writers suddenly started using the term “childhood” much more often than before. Sixty years later, the term “adolescence,” which two anthropologists define as a period during which young people are “kept in the natal home under the authority of parents, attending school, and bedeviled by a bewildering array of occupational choices,” followed suit.
[Note that Lifelong Kindergarten is now a goal!]
Why did we do this?
After centuries and centuries during which their main function had been to levy taxes, bureaucrats were flexing their muscles in quest for greater power. Doing so, they found childhood and education fertile fields in and on which to operate. This was carried to the point where, in all modern countries, child welfare and education have been turned into some of the largest and costliest fields of state activity. Others represented organized labor trying to keep wages as high as they could. Or else they spoke for large corporations seeking to force smaller, often family-based, competitors—who were better able to employ youngsters for low wages—out of business. In time, almost everybody got involved in the act. Government passed all kinds of legal restrictions, and set up special agencies to ensure they were observed.
Next came business, which in the US alone makes hundreds of billions a year by helping create and perpetuate a separate “youth culture.” They were joined by international organizations, both state-run and others, many of which seem to consider any kind of work children may do harmful and exploitative. … Regardless of what their motives were, all these people and organizations developed a vested interest in controlling young people. The latter had to be made to spend as large a part of their lives as possible in a state where they would be unable to work, take responsibility, and look after themselves.
[Interesting but not relevant to the main theme is that keeping kids from working may be the root of their problems:
The same applies to the Amish people. As long as most of them were still engaged in agriculture, they made their children work. Children who helped with the family finances felt needed. Feeling needed, they suffered from few of the problems afflicting other American youngsters, such as delinquency, drugs, and teenage pregnancy[ 36]—so much so that a Google Scholar search combining “Amish” with “youth delinquency” yielded hardly any hits. To this day there is no proof whatsoever that children in “developing” countries, many of whom do work, are less happy than those in “developed” ones where the law prohibits them from doing so. Judging by the percentage who are referred to psychological treatment or filled with drugs, the opposite may well be the case.
Conversely, to prevent young people from engaging in [work] is cruel and can be dangerous. Insofar as it excludes them from what is normally the most important adult activity of all, it also goes a long way to prevent them from growing up. Nor are the restrictions limited to child work only. In all “advanced” countries, probably not a day passes without some new law or regulation specifically aimed at the young being enacted. Ostensibly the goal is to help the people in question. In fact, they often hamper them in all kinds of ways. Anything to prevent them from doing as their elders do as a matter of course. And anything to prevent them from competing with those elders and, by doing so, taking over some of the latter’s resources and increasing their own independence. No wonder that, apart from gangs, they seldom organize and engage in activities of their own.
The same can be said of adults. Folks who don’t have full-time jobs seem to be the ones most likely to consume psychotherapy, get diagnosed, and take pills. Imagine how many people would love to be mentally ill, but are too busy making widgets or dealing with customers!]
The Baby Boomer author is not impressed with today’s brats:
Coming together, the two kinds of pressure produce the kind of child who, at the age of ten, is convinced of his self-importance and genius and will suffer a mental crisis each time he is criticized, but who still cannot wash himself and depends on his parents to give him a bath. They are like hot-air balloons that need to be constantly re-inflated. Yet they do not succeed in taking off. And how can they? Superficially the two parenting styles—the one concerned with overprotecting children, and the other with smoothing over any problems and pushing them forward at almost any cost—appear contradictory. In fact, they go hand in hand. Both originate in the idea that, whatever “it” may mean, young people cannot handle “it.” That in turn obliges parents to put in almost superhuman effort, foresight, supervision, and moralizing. In the US, the same role is later played by the colleges. They act, and are expected to act, in loco parentis. The objective is to make the world that young people inhabit predictable, safe, and secure against sadness, pain and, perhaps most important of all, failure.
Young snowflakes who are upset by the above will need to chill out with their legal recreational marijuana and/or medical marijuana and wait for this old guy to die!
The author, presumably fluent in at least three languages, loves to look how people use words and what that says about them:
From 1840 to 1920 males enrolled in institutes of higher learning were known as “college men.” The interwar period saw the emergence of “college kids,” a term which refers to people of both sexes. Rising steeply, by 2000 it had overtaken “college men” and “college women,” both of which seem to be heading towards obsolescence. There even is something called “college child.” … “trauma,” from the Greek “wound,” used to mean a physical injury. Only after 1945 did it extend into the field of psychology as well. There was a time when “oppression” used to mean “unjust or cruel exercise of authority of power” and was almost always backed up by violence. But now we also have verbal oppression, emotional oppression, psychological oppression, and cultural oppression.
Conversely, anybody who is “offended” and is “upset” immediately becomes a “victim.” The implication is that he, and even more so she, is helpless in front or either bad luck or bad people and cannot defend himself or herself. That in turn has given to three new terms, “victimization,” “victimology” and “victimhood.” The first two took off during the 1960s; the third followed in the 1980s. Since then, it has embarked on an even more spectacular career than its older relatives did. Other words that have moved in the same direction are “abuse” and “survivor.” Combining the two, there is even a book about “verbal abuse survivors” who dare to speak out.
He’s particularly sad about how “courage” has been stretched to cover conduct that entails no physical risk and that is engaged in to benefit oneself.
Stepping back from this, consider that Black Elk was 13 years old when he killed (and scalped) at least one U.S. Army soldier at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He later described how good he felt about this accomplishment, not about suffering PTSD (he was later greatly saddened by his tribe’s defeats, though). Compare to today when parents of teenage boys sue school districts for millions of dollars in cash compensation, claiming that their sons have been irreparably damaged by having sex with a teacher in her 20s or 30s (somewhat lurid example; a more conventional example).
Pussycats was published in mid-2016 and therefore presumably written at least two years ago. Nonetheless, as Natalia noted, it is in sync with the Zeitgeist:
As of 2014 the US military was said to have had more sexual assault response coordinators (SARCs) than it had recruiters. … between 2005 and 2013, almost one third of all officers fired lost their jobs because of sex-related offenses such as adultery and “improper” relationships. … many servicemen are more afraid of being falsely accused of harassment than of the enemy. And with good reason; the number of cases reported each year is incomparably larger than that of troops killed in action.
This is consistent with my experience visiting a local Air Force base at least weekly (our flight school helicopters live in a hangar on the military side of Hanscom Field). Every building has at least a few posters about sexual assault, but I’ve never seen a poster advocating for aggression against the enemy (or even for any kind of success against an enemy).
Why can’t Americans work together or have sex without needing to lawyer up and sue?
As political scientist Francis Fukuyama pointed out, the breakdown of trust is one of the outstanding characteristics of many if not most modern societies. As so often, the US heads
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