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IS our culture stuck in childhood or adolescence? Are we disregarding the depths or pleasures of maturity? CultureCrash’s guest columnist weighs in.<\/p>\n
“Arrested Development”<\/p>\n
By Lawrence Christon<\/p>\n
The late, great acting coach Stella Adler was holding a master class on Jean Anouilh\u2019s \u201cWaltz of the Toreadors,\u201d a play in which a mousy general is completely tyrannized by his bellowing wife, who is no less a titanic force for being bedridden. Adler didn\u2019t even look at the actress playing the wife, but instead peered out into the auditorium and said, \u201cWhat is it with you women and your little teenage voices? You\u2019ve all had sex. You\u2019ve had abortions, children. Why is it you pinch your voices into this teenybopper chirpiness. You\u2019re women, for Christ\u2019s sake! Open up!\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought of that moment while reading my colleague Scott Timberg\u2019s July 3 interview with philosopher Susan Neiman in Salon. The subject was the cult of youth and the American obsession with emulating it, particularly among those who no longer have it.<\/p>\n
Neiman was illuminating in her comments on not only how grueling it is to get through one\u2019s twenties, and how adulthood is so easily misconceived\u2014and dismissed\u2014but she also discussed how Jean-Jacques Rousseau an![\"51KY-vrSG5L._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/51KY-vrSG5L._SX330_BO1204203200_-200x300.jpg\")
d Immanuel Kant turned the eyes of western philosophy on the subject of youth. What struck me was her contention that political leadership likes its constituency young, meaning, or implying, dumb. It strengthens their hold on power. Voila! The kids are not only all right, they\u2019re always right.<\/p>\n
I think this is way more than a political strategy, despite the bread-and-circuses template device used by Roman emperors to hide imperial rot, and I suspect Neiman does too and would say so if she had another shot at the question. For modern American culture has always been youth obsessed, at least as far back as the 1920s when, despite WWI, the estimated count of up to 850,000 Civil War dead\u2014the effective loss of a generation\u2014saw its numbers not just restored but partying hearty in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called, \u201cthe greatest, gaudiest spree in American history.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Great Depression and another world war (or the first one re-staged) brought the party to an end.\u00a0\u00a0The \u201850s introduced suburbia and the inward turn toward the self, aided by this newly popularized psychoanalysis thing and the theories not just of Freud, Adler (the other Adler, not Stella) and Jung, but Fromm, Erikson, Horney, Menninger, and a host of others to tell us who we are and how we got that way. Youth, in particular adolescence, also entered the close psychiatric\u2014and sociological\u2014gaze, though Jean Piaget had begun bringing it into relief in the \u201820s. Advertisers, the first Mad Men generation, began to take notice. Hence the perennially pampered, self-infatuated 18-49 demographic.<\/p>\n
The Boomer \u201860s brought us the nuclear cloud of generational\u00a0\u00a0explosion, but instead of radioactive fallout we saw fragments of tie-dye shirts and birth control packets, droplets of patchouli oil, slogan remnants like \u201cTurn on, tune in, drop out\u201d and poster bits of psychedelic derangement marking a Dionysian, countercultural revolt that was essentially romantic in its sweep and wonderful in its pantheistic embrace of the moment\u2014but blind to its destructive naivety and unaware of the crooks and hustlers in its ranks.<\/p>\n
Now in mid-to-late middle age, the Boomers still hold the economic clout and the romantic myth that makes Fitzgerald\u2019s age a mere Tupperware party. We\u2019re in bad shape, Mr. and Mrs. America, but the forces trying to hide the fact are in the culture, not just the body politic (which 75% of the American voting public has turned its back on), as we\u2019re promised leaner bodies, better sex, smoother skin, fuller hair, and enough Botox and replicant transplant surgery to keep us bouncing indefinitely through time like bright, indefatigable racquetballs. In short,\u00a0\u00a0we\u2019re being sold the illusion of eternal youth.<\/p>\n
This is nothing new, of course. Ever since Tithonos discovered, to his horror, that Zeus\u2019 dispensation of eternal life didn\u2019t include youth in the benefits package, the purity of youth, the ardor of youth, the transports and abandon, the hunger for life (and sex) and the tirelessness of satiation, have always tended to take top billing in the highlight film of memory, however long it grows. And I never know what to make of people who meet through every decade of their high school reunions, whether it\u2019s courage to face or folly to ignore time\u2019s cruel ravages of the flesh.<\/p>\n
But we\u2019re old a lot longer than we\u2019re young, and Neiman reminds us that adulthood has its own satisfactions and discoveries that are just as full, if subtler, than first love, or that first touchdown drive. Even Fitzgerald, the eternal party animal, looked at Christ and Lincoln and saw in their model that honor and glory (and in our media-crazed era, fame) aren\u2019t the reward, which is reserved for consciousness of the struggle.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not shilling for AARP perks. But the youth mania, particularly in the arts and entertainment, where the numbers-fuelled radar dish is always turning toward The Next New Thing, leaves a lot of talent and even genius behind in the consumer detritus of the used and prematurely discarded. The culture suffers the loss without knowing it.<\/p>\n
Writer Stanley Crouch said it best when he observed of traditional societies, \u201cThe goal of a boy is to be a man, and the goal of a man is to be a wise man.\u201d The parallel same with women. To break up the equation, as pop and media culture have done, puts us in disequilibrium. We\u2019re in free fall; we feel it everywhere outside of Wall Street, Madison Avenue, K Street and Silicon Valley. But to try and go back to the way we were is to find nobody there to catch us.<\/p>\n
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