“Would you like to choose your hold music?” inquires the automated voice. The tone is solicitous, therapeutic, and infantilizing. You are not addressed as an adult citizen conducting business, but a vulnerable subject whose emotional state must be stabilized before anything substantive can occur. 

This logic now extends far beyond call centers. Contemporary institutions often present themselves as gentle, conflict-averse, and therapeutic, even as they exert quiet forms of compulsion. I recently received an email from a university learning-support officer, copying in a student who had missed every dissertation meeting to date. The purpose, I was told, was simply to “introduce us,” since the student felt anxious about having fallen behind. The tone was friendly and reassuring — but it carried an unmistakable instruction: the student was not to be penalized, or even questioned, for non-attendance. A relationship between two adults — and one in which there was clearly a teacher–student hierarchy — was subtly recast as one requiring mediation and emotional cushioning.

Call it the West’s collective infantile disorder.

This institutional style did not emerge by accident. It reflects a longer cultural process in which adulthood itself has been steadily hollowed out. The social critic Neil Postman diagnosed a trend toward cultural infantilization in the West as early as the 1960s in The Disappearance of Childhood. His argument was that mass media, particularly television, were eroding childhood as a distinct life stage and, with it, adulthood, which depends upon childhood as a sort of apprenticeship. For Postman, adulthood consisted of hard-won capacities for self-restraint, delayed gratification, conceptual thought, historical awareness, reason and order.

A culture increasingly organized around spectacle, immediacy, and emotionalism undermined these qualities. And thus, Postman contended, childhood and adulthood merged, producing adultified children and infantilized adults. Adulthood is no longer a stable moral category that can tolerate ambiguity and regulate the self.

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The American thinker Benjamin Barber extended this diagnosis by locating its causes in neoliberal capitalism and the transition from a productive to a consumer economy. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Barber described the “radically individuated” consumer as someone free to choose from among endless options, while remaining powerless to change the “menu of the world” itself. Under these conditions, the Protestant ethic of restraint and effort gave way to an infantilizing ethos of immediate gratification. Citizenship was eroded, as shopping displaced civic participation as the defining mark of freedom. Political life, in turn, was reduced to preference, feeling, and grievance. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the heterodox scholar Christopher Lasch similarly diagnosed the emergence of a narcissistic personality type in which “the egomaniacal, experience-devouring, imperial self regresses into a grandiose, infantile, empty self.”

Together, these processes have produced a pervasive therapeutic culture enveloping education and major institutions alike. Management styles, DEI regimes, and pedagogical practices have become increasingly risk-averse and emotion-managing. Universities routinely affirm their commitment to free speech, for example, but only insofar as it does not disrupt “campus relations” or generate complaints. Teaching is increasingly framed as “trauma-informed,” with trigger warnings, flexible deadlines, opt-out provisions, and student-led choices over how — and sometimes whether — difficult material is encountered.

Mass media — whether Postman’s bugbear of television, or today’s social media —  accelerate but do not originate this process; it is more true to say that we evacuated adulthood, and technology filled the vacuum. Before the advent of TV sitcoms, people weren’t all reading Kant — they were reading penny dreadfuls, romances, and Westerns. 

Some blame this institutional malaise on a spreading “feminization” — emotion over logic, sympathy over rationality, softness over necessary rigor. The error in such a diagnosis lies in confusing the presence of women with the feminization of authority — a moral and institutional condition that is neither caused by, nor reducible to, women themselves. 

Feminization is exemption from existential adulthood — an exemption women were long denied the right to refuse, and is now being visited upon us all. It’s a structural position in relation to authority that borrows the language of care while stripping adults, of either sex, of responsibility and choice.

The adult understands that responsibility for her life ultimately rests with her. The child, by contrast, lives in a world organized by others: what time she wakes, what she eats, where she goes, who she may see, what counts as “good for her.” Decisions are presented as facts of the universe, rather than as choices made by someone else. Because she lacks autonomy, the child experiences limits as givens — as natural, immovable constraints — rather than as contingent arrangements that could be questioned or changed. Children submit to this position innocently. Women, however, have historically been required to inhabit it: denied legal and political autonomy across much of the West, and still so in many societies today.

Women, in short, had to be consciously feminized. This was especially the case for women at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That moment saw a transition away from the household as the primary sphere of agrarian production (in which both men and women had to participate) toward the male-dominated factory. Meanwhile, the household, as Lasch argued, became exclusively the site of family reproduction. It was expected to function as a refuge from the competitive brutalities of the industrial world “outside.” Women — especially middle- and upper-class women exempted from factory life — were now to serve as nurturers: to become feminine, as wives and mothers themselves and creators of future wives and mothers.

All this meant, to a great degree, that they had to be infantilized: think of the dreary submission to authority and repression of sexuality demanded of Victorian girls in Jane Eyre. Now, amid the decline of manufacturing and the rise of a services-led consumer economy, both sexes are being similarly infantilized: the authorities are the virtue police, and the repression extends to our language, our professional behavior, and even our thoughts.   

Even where the feminine position is not imposed, it may still be chosen, because it is safer. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it can feel easier to “take shelter in the shadow of men”: to relinquish hard responsibility for life’s decisions, to play happy families, to lose oneself in prescribed feminine roles, whether as wife, mother, or, more recently, trad-wife fantasy. This is not something to which men are immune. Since everyone has been a child, human beings are susceptible to nostalgia for a time when life felt carefree: when responsibility could be disowned. Men, too, may hide behind given masculine roles, treating them as unquestionable, rather than chosen.

Within this framework, it is understandable to connect institutional weakness to the growing presence of women in the professions, particularly as women now outnumber men in college education. The consequences of the growing presence of women are said to include decisions driven by emotion, rather than rationality; an exponential growth of wokeness; and, most seriously, institutions losing the capacity to accomplish their own stated goals.

It is possible to quibble with the empirical details offered in support of this claim. While female medical students now outnumber men, for example, male doctors remain overrepresented in the most prestigious and highly remunerated fields, such as surgery, and are considerably less likely to shift to part-time work, particularly when they become parents. At the same time, the feminization of professions, as sociologist Paula England has shown, tends to be associated with declining pay and prestige, a pattern observable in fields such as biology and computer science. But this “feminization effect” is quite different from the one at issue here: namely, the extension of the way women used to be treated — as child-like creatures — to all of society.

Similarly, proponents of the feminization thesis warn that the legal profession is losing its capacity for impartial judgment as a result of women’s presence on the bar and the bench. Yet it is worth noting that in Britain, the most controversial human-rights asylum rulings, including cases involving migrants with serious criminal histories, are not typically issued by women acting on sentiment, but by male judges applying what they understand to be established jurisprudence within existing human-rights frameworks. 

For example, The Telegraph has recently published several investigations into how immigration judges apply the European Convention on Human Rights to allow migrants and foreign criminals to remain in Britain. These decisions are not “heart-led” so much as procedural, risk-averse, and insulated from democratic accountability — they are not feminine, but represent a feminized form of authority.

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Women’s participation in public life has often strengthened institutions rather than weakened them, particularly in roles requiring long-term stewardship rather than short-term display. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks and financial institutions sought to increase the proportion of women at board and executive level, reflecting evidence that more mixed leadership teams were associated with greater caution and institutional stability. At the highest end of technological and organizational complexity, this pattern is even clearer. At SpaceX, Elon Musk appointed Gwynne Shotwell as president and chief operating officer precisely because of her capacity to translate ambition into execution. While Musk embodies risk, Shotwell has been widely credited with providing the operational discipline that turned SpaceX from a visionary startup into a functioning aerospace institution. Critics of feminization misidentify a moral collapse afflicting both sexes as one caused by only one: women.

Today, infantilization is both forced upon us and is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike — because freedom, once attained, has proved exhausting, bleak, and unromantic. Empowerment arrived without a handbook for existential ethics and choice was steadily reduced to consumption. Institutional infantilization works through compulsion masked as care; individual retreat into infantilized roles works through consent. The two reinforce one another.

This helps explain the growing pattern in which sexual libertinism and conservative domesticity appear not as opposites, but as forms of retreat. Women who move seamlessly from radical sexual politics to idealized visions of wifehood and motherhood do so without contradiction, because both positions offer refuge from the demands of moral authorship.

Masculinity has developed its own evasions. On the Right, many propose a return to masculine “thumos” — the warrior virtues of hero, king, or strongman —  as an antidote to supposed feminization. Mary Harrington has framed this in terms of masculine archetypes; N. S. Lyons and R. R. Reno see it embodied in figures such as Donald Trump, representing “strong gods” against a civilization weakened from within. 

The internal abdication of authority leads to Nietzschean ressentiment, as Douglas Murray rightly insists. Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create. We see this truth all around us in the spread of ugly, untalented graffiti in urban centers; not street art, but defacement: the scrawling over of buildings and of genuine murals alike by those incapable of producing art of their own.

Ressentiment thrives where agency has collapsed and adulthood has been hollowed out. It is the product of a culture that no longer expects individuals to act, choose, or bear the consequences of freedom. It is immaturity embodied: a sneering hostility towards achievements that required long years of labor, discipline and self-control.

Murray rightly extols humility and gratitude, which are supremely adult virtues, once cultivated during childhood when that stage was understood as an apprenticeship to adulthood. Properly understood, gratitude is not passivity or deference, but what Hannah Arendt described as augmentation: the capacity to receive an inherited world, to build upon it, to criticize it where necessary and to extend it without obliterating it. 

Authority, in this sense, does not demand obedience but presupposes responsibility — a willingness to take up what has been handed down and make it one’s own. But this prescription only works if the goal is properly understood. The task is not to overcome feminization or to revive masculine aesthetics, but for men and women alike to relearn how to live as adults, with courage and without refuge.

And how tempting to go further: to suggest that the presidency itself was an aberration, a disaster brought on by Putin, or Racism, or other forces, dark and malign, that gripped the hands of the voters in polling stations around the nation and made them vote Trump in 2016.

But this is a trap. Democrats were told to take Trump seriously but not literally. They should take his supporters seriously and literally. They should offer them respect for their choice, understanding that it was mostly a genuine choice freely made – they literally did vote for Trump and all that he was — but calmly and pleasantly suggest they think again next time.

A book out this autumn provides a model in how not to approach the Trump folks. Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America is quite a relief in one respect: it is not about the Russians. Or even the Ukrainians. It does at least see this White House as an American phenomenon.

But, then, it gets whacky in a way that, for me, epitomises the failings of the false consciousness approach to Trump-ism.    The book is by a TV critic, James Poniewozik of the New York Times, who, like the President, watches too much TV.  He tells us:

“Trump got elected.  But TV became president.”

And:

“Fusing himself with culture’s most powerful force, he became possessed by it.”

Oh do come off it. This is a thesis aimed at, and much praised by, the kind of folks who inhabit Woody Allan films: cultural commentators who spend their weekends power-walking around Central Park in Birkenstocks. They are discombobulated by The Donald (who isn’t?) and they seek solace in sociology.

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How tempting it is to overcomplicate the Trump presidency. This book serves as a warning against doing so — though it does, I have to admit, have some compelling moments. In particular, his ‘TV is boss’ thesis is well-argued.

“As long as TV has existed,” James Poniewozik, tells us, “science fiction has imagined it as a handmaid to dystopia.” Think Orwell or Huxley. But always, in the various ways in which TV would assist in the suppression of the masses, the relationship was clear: the oppressors would be separate from TV and use it to get their way. The masses would be consumers. And in the television age, oppression could come via seduction: as the brilliant American sociologist and
media watcher Neil Postman put it, “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother doesn’t watch us by his choice, we watch him by ours.”

What Poniewozik suggests is that even Neil Postman (and Huxley) failed to grasp the way in which the oppression would evolve. Instead of Big Brother remaining aloof, and TV remaining a tool, a situation arose which the dystopia prophets had failed to spot: “They foresaw leaders who would wield media as a weapon. They did not foresee media that would select for a certain kind of leader who shared and would propagate its psychology.”

The TV really is in charge. Yikes! That’s why the presidency has been so full-on crazy, so punctuated by cliff-hangers and dramas and subplots. Big Brother is not Trump, it’s the tube. That TV our parents kept in the corner of the sitting room — sometimes modestly boxed — has broken out and now controls the entire political life of the world’s most powerful nation.

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And the result is the pickling of the minds of a generation. Poniewozik quotes the great Hannah Arendt on the dictatorships of the mid-20th century: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true.”

Remind you of anything happening right now? On both sides of the Atlantic? It’s persuasive and well-argued. Trump as TV monster. Trump as TV anti-hero.

“After 9/11, antihero culure,” Poniewozik points out, “openly raised the question of how much goodness we required in our
protectors, and how much was a liability.”

Back in 1981, the pioneering TV cops show Hill St Blues had included a scene where a policeman, in order to catch a criminal, smashes a coin box in a laundry to make a phone call. It was cut because NBC forbade any depiction of the police being casually indifferent to the law.

Now we live in the world of 24 — the hugely successful series on terrorism-busting — in which the hero does plenty more than plunder coin boxes in the public good.

And Trump, when he ran for office, tapped into this change of mood. He made the case that kindness was a liability against enemies who would see the world burn. “Someone like him, outside the normal structures of power, someone unencumbered by scruple, needed to be given a free hand,” Poniewozik tells us.

But here is my problem with this and with the wider picture of the presidency as a ghastly mistake caused by this force or that, impacting on dim-witted deplorables who ultimately had no agency because, well, Putin, or Racism, or The Power of The Telly.

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Could it not be the case that Donald Trump was elected because, well, folks just thought it was time for a change? And the drivers of that thinking was not television, but rather a skewed elite culture that had made these people feel small. Not television, but an economy that was shackled by regulations that many felt were onerous. Not television, but an utter and perfectly reasonable disgust at a Democratic candidate who appeared to regard large numbers of her fellow citizens as pond life. Not television, in other words, but reality?

They just made a choice. It wasn’t controlled by their TVs, it was controlled by them. After all, they had made pretty much the opposite choice only four years earlier — also in the post 9/11 age and also in the age of reality TV. So they changed their minds. They elected a man widely regarded as a corrupt racist because they fancied giving him a go. Maybe we all just have to get over it.

False consciousness is the last refuge of the befuddled intellectual. I am not suggesting it is always foolish or wrong. Plainly (as Hannah Arendt did indeed point out), societies can go awry in the most ghastly ways and mobs can believe any old nonsense with horrifying ease. But all the Trump voters I have met have been pretty capable of seeing through him, and all politicians. The danger, it seems to me, is that we overcomplicated Trump, and overcomplicate politics.

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“On one level, the level of gut and story and memory,” Poniewozik tells us, “politics is an ongoing battle of cultural criticism. Beyond politics and laws, it’s an argument over what our canon is and how to read it.”

Well, ok bro. That might be the case in Manhattan. Seems to me if you want to dump Trump, you want to get a Democratic candidate with charm, a decent set of policies and a believable schtick about what they want to do and bingo! It’s really not that complicated.

The Trump presidency is currently doing a passable impression of one of those shocking videos you sometimes see of helicopter crashes, a shaky picture of wild rotation while the muffled voices of onlookers in the background can just be heard – “oh God, Oh no!” As it plummets downwards, the need for focus among its critics seems to me to be never more vital.

Did he commit an impeachable offence? Have taxes for most people gone up or down? Is healthcare better or worse? Is North Korea a reduced threat or not?

Boring, eh? But overcomplicating Trump is a condition of our times. It creates employment for authors but fine words and fancy theories butter no parsnips when it comes to understanding The Donald. Someone should write a book about that…

Audience of One: Donald Trump, television and the fracturing of America will be released in the UK on 8th October 2019.

When my wife suggested that we consider homeschooling our daughter, I was aghast. I had been to school. Everyone I knew had been to school. My only experience of home education was seeing Ruth Lawrence on the back of her dad’s tandem, cycling round Oxford. I knew that homeschooling was not for the likes of us. It was odd. It was possibly dangerous. It was certainly wholly other.

“But it’s what she needs,” my wife pointed out.

Like many adopted children, our daughter needed more individual attention than any school could give, even the excellent one she was attending at the time. So we decided to give homeschooling a go – hoping that it would be good for her, making it up as we went along.

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We started by asking her what she wanted to study. “Greek,” she answered. (She was seven at the time.) “And can we have an assembly at the end of the week?”

Not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm, we found some resources for Ancient Greek and launched into an assembly on that first Friday afternoon. It was a reassuringly familiar ritual, so our daughter was happy. Doubly so because she was Star of the Week.

Without ever vocalising the thought in those early days, I assumed that my wife and I had an oracular position in our home school. With several degrees and decades of teaching experience between us, we could fairly claim to be experts. It was a good job I never expressed that view out loud because it’s nonsense. We were just as much amateurs as anyone else.

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At first we tried to recreate school at home. We had bookcases full of resources. We had a beautifully constructed timetable. We had wall displays. Then it slowly dawned on us that not only could we not keep up – Greek soon fell by the wayside – we didn’t need to. Like Neil Postman before us, we discovered that “education is not the same thing as schooling, and that, in fact, not much of our education takes place in school”.

Gradually we came to understand that school is a continuation of education by other means, not the model to which home educators should aspire — so we stopped homeschooling and started home-educating instead. As we did so, we discovered what we had dimly known all along: that everything we do with our children is education. This meant that we could happily jettison the institutional detritus that was weighing us down. We didn’t need to follow a set curriculum. We ditched termly tests. We gave our children – two of them now – the time and freedom to learn.

Dredging our grotty garden pond into something approaching respectability was the first step on our new educational journey. As far as I was concerned, the plan was simply to tidy up an eyesore in the back garden but the unintended consequence was frogs. Dozens of them. My children were delighted.

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And then my schoolteacher instincts kicked in. We need to do a project on this, I thought. We need to write stuff down otherwise it won’t be properly educational. But we didn’t. We allowed the frogs to do their work. Awe and wonder and love rarely make it into Biology textbooks, as David W. Orr has pointed out. But awe, wonder, and a love of nature are surely necessary conditions for scientific enquiry.

So, as the seasons roll, we now give our children time to appreciate, assimilate and reflect. We no longer obey the diktats of the school bell, nor do we pay much attention to the shape of the school day or the length of school terms. Our children sing their history, sometimes in public, to the amusement and bemusement of passersby. They read for hours in whichever part of the house they find most comfortable. They learn while walking the dog or travelling in the car.

This may sound like a homely version of Summerhill but the reality is quite different. Our children can’t do whatever they like and they still have lessons – and, yes, they have friends and socialise perfectly well. But the education they receive is more tidal than industrial. And so is ours.

Home education has forced us to rethink education, but that hasn’t been its only gift to us. Having taken our children out of school, we were surprised to find that our own education resumed. I used to believe that education was something that had happened – an experience that existed only in the past tense. I went to school. Then I studied at university. Then I got on with life. Education ended when paying the mortgage began.

Except it didn’t. Home education hauled it out of the past and back into the present, which is why I don’t look back in anger at my schooldays. Or with nostalgia. In fact, I don’t look back at all. There’s no longer any need.

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The moment we realised that everything we do with our children is education, we began to understand that home education is a reciprocal process. Our children teach us while we teach them. They have an inspiring curiosity about the world. They routinely surprise us with knowledge we have not explicitly taught them. They are the first encyclopedias I turn to when I need information about animals, countries or trees.

I still teach part-time in a school but I teach better now that I am a home educator. My 11-year old daughter has taught me the importance of re-reading books. My six-year old has taught me not to underestimate the importance of simply listening to children. As a schoolteacher, I thought I had education taped. I now realise I have hardly begun to understand it.

Taking our children out of school forced us to make hard decisions about careers, finances and priorities, but the benefits have been enormous. And there has been no greater benefit than spending time with them. Lots of time. So, at this time of year, as students head back to school, we continue where we hardly left off, living an education at home, homing in on education outside. We don’t need to go back to school: we’re already there. There really is no place like home.