The Loss of Adulthood as the Decline of Virtues

Why Freya India is right about adults and how virtues can help

Photo by NONRESIDENT on Unsplash

Earlier this month,

Freya India

wrote a popular post titled “The Need for Adults” which persuasively argued that contemporary adults are acting more like teenagers in some critical ways and the results are disastrous to the younger generations (and not so pretty for the adults, either). Freya’s argument is mostly build on anecdotes and personal observations, so it’s the kind of argument you either resonate with or you don’t. There’s no hard data to prove that adults today are different from adults in the past. For myself, I find the description of contemporary adults to be fairly accurate and the effects on younger generations to be very accurate, so I strongly resonated with the article. But your mileage may vary. In Freya’s argument, I think we see an incisive reminder of the loss of order in the contemporary world along the lines I described in You Are Not Your Own, but also the tremendous need for a return to order through Christianity and with it the virtues.

Freya’s central claim is that adults have abdicated their roles as authority figures. In part, this is because they have no principles, or what Charles Taylor would call Higher Goods, to submit to:

Never before in history have so many adults been wedded to nothing, vowed to nobody, belonged to nowhere, had nothing to live or die for. They have political positions, sure, but not principles. Sides in the culture war but not convictions. We live in a world of adults with little faith in anything, least of all themselves.