I just finished reading Senator Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age-Crisis – and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance; I really enjoyed this one and will want to re-read it. Technically, I listened to it in audiobook form from my library, but I’ll likely pick up a copy and go back through parts in more detail as it’s really excellent.

I got this one on a bit of a whim (I’d seen his speech in the Barrett hearings, as I discussed here, and enjoyed it), but it is really outstanding. Going into it, I expected from the title it would be a bit of a screed against pop culture and helicopter parenting but, really, it is anything but.

Sasse focuses on the habits and virtues which have made America a success since its founding and have led it to have such an impact on the world stage. At some level, he’s dealing with a “coming of age” crisis in America. One in three 18-34 year-olds live with their parents, 30% of college students drop out of college after their first year, and only four in ten graduate from college. However, this is only a symptom, Sasse says, of larger problems which should concern us more – lack of self-reliance, less involvement with community and societal institutions, less knowledge of history, etc. At some level, Sasse is interested in understanding why and how this has happened, and what we could do as a society to change these trends.

At another level, though, this book deals with much more than just growing up well. It’s about engaging with the big ideas of history and our time; he wants us to really wrestle with questions about how we can grow as people through engaging with the tough questions of life and how we can help our children do so as well. To a large extent, openness to debate about these tough questions forms the foundation of our great American experiment and of our democracy.

Sasse takes a close look at many of the factors which have contributed to the broad changes in our society. His concerns include taking a close look at how we got where we are, such as the rise of American public education and how it’s changed over time. A lot of this content was new to me, but it’s important. (It also led to my recent post on a lecture of Machen’s)

Sasse argues that we can better help our young people be ready for adulthood by exposing them more to certain key events, milestones, or ways of developing the requisite traits. Some generations and previous cultures have even formalized this process by creating “rites of passage” that form markers between different life stages, designating different transitions between childhood and adulthood. Sasse doesn’t advocate formal rites of passage, but argues that young people (or, really, all of us) really grow and mature through experiences in several key areas:

  • Hard work of progressively increasing difficulty, to develop independence and ownership
  • Travel, to better understand the difference between what we need and want, and to learn from other cultures
  • Reading deeply and broadly, to have a broader view of our world and our place in it
  • Interacting with multiple generations and engaging with tough topics like death, to provide us with examples to inspire and teach us about our shared human experience

While Sasse seems to be a strong Christian, the book is written to appeal broadly to the general public; while his faith comes through frequently, this is a book anyone can benefit from and enjoy. It’s not a coming-of-age book, but a look at the broader cultural trends facing our society and what we might do to address them and help ensure we make the best of America and our society.

I also really enjoyed Sasse’s engagement with great books throughout history; he quotes many and interacts with diverse sources from the ancient Greeks to the present. This connects well with one section where he actually recommends a core set of roughly 60 books he thinks every American should read. He presents this as a starting point for debate, not an authoritative list, and he does so in the context of his lament about how such canonical lists have disappeared from our educational system. Hearing his list was inspiring because it covers a lot of great ground – ranging from books I know well to those I now think I ought to read. It also includes books he thinks are dangerous or wrong, like “The Communist Manifesto”. Typical of his approach, he wants to understand the ideas he disagrees with as well as those he agrees with. I plan to update my own reading list, and possibly work on building a list for my kids.

If I had Sasse’s physical book on hand (I’ll get a copy) I’d be quoting from it at length here, but since I don’t, I’ll instead refer you to this article on the book, which gives some more details. As quoted there, Sasse advocates

…rebuilding a culture comprised of resilient, literate, thoughtful individuals…

and seeks to see us return more to self-reliance and self-governance, rather than seeking Federal solutions to most of our problems. This, he believes, will do wonders for our society. He believes our children have to be taught and learn self-governance; right now, he worries, we (and they) are too often looking for someone to come in from outside or above to solve our problems.

In any case, I highly recommend the book. One additional plus if you listen to it in audiobook form, as I did, is that he actually provided the audio himself and did an outstanding job at it.