Karen Palasek’s Daily Journal op-ed on Friday referenced C. S. Lewis’ indictment of American education in 1959 through a demon named “Screwtape”:
Screwtape celebrates what he observes to be a striving for Liberty but a ?deep hatred? of personal freedom (a la Rousseau), a government that either prescribes or proscribes most activity, such that “a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool-shed in his own garden…”
Hugh Hewitt’s new book?(A Mormon in the White House?) quotes?a similar observation from Theodore White’s The Making of the President, 1968:
The new culture … is the child of prosperity and the past decade [i.e. 1950’s and 1960’s]. Characterized by an exuberance of color, style, fashion, art, and expression flowing from the enormous excess energies of American life, it defines itself best not by what it seeks but by its contempt and scorn of what the past has taught. Its thrust lies in the direction of liberties and freedom, but with an exaggerated quality of aggressive infantilism.
— a?characteristic which can be easily observed on the Internet today.
