Recently A.O. Scott posted a piece
in the New York Times entitled “The
Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” which stirred up online discussion
about whether our grownup culture has shifted into a protracted childhood. What
was largely absent from the observations is where this arrested development is
taking us.
Scott argued that in doing away
with certain iconic TV characters of the last decade – Tony Soprano, Walter
White, and Don Draper – we have “killed off all the grown-ups.” Meanwhile Hollywood
cultivates movie franchises that promote “an essentially juvenile vision of the
world.” The same complaint goes for literature, Scott says; American fiction,
which introduced “a new crop of semi-antiheroes in flight from convention,
propriety, authority,” is all young-adult fiction now. He concludes that we now
perceive adulthood as “the state of being forever young.”
Vulture’s Adam Sternbergh admired Scott’s
piece and responded with “The
Death of Adulthood and the Rise of Pleasure, or Why Seth Rogen Is More Serious
Than Woody Allen,” in which he states that what Scott is really lamenting
is “the death of seriousness.” Sternbergh sees no problem in being unserious
and believes that nothing is more
grownup than rejecting “a bunch of inherited precepts about cultural
seriousness” from the previous generation.
The death of adulthood/seriousness
came over us swiftly, historically speaking. Childhood, as a cocoon of maturation
distinct from adulthood, is a fairly recent cultural development. Prior to the
17th century, children were essentially little adults; life was
nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it, and didn’t afford them the luxury
of a period of protected innocence.
But philosophers like Rousseau and
Romantic poets like Wordsworth thereafter helped spark the relatively new
notion that childhood was an important stage in its own right, and children needed
sheltering before taking on the demands of adulthood. American peace and prosperity
in the 1950s enabled us to establish permanently this phase of childhood as we
know it today: a period of sustained innocence, play, and freedom from responsibility.
But over the course of the few decades
since, we have witnessed the prolongation of childhood and, as A.O. Scott
wrote, “the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form.” This development has
found cultural expression in the accelerated ascent of our youth-obsessed pop
culture and a concomitant decline of “high” culture (some would argue that
there is no longer a distinction, but that’s a topic for another day).
Scott himself isn’t even sure that we
should bemoan this death of adulthood; after all, it can be a lot of fun: “The
world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight,” he says. “I’m all
for it.” Sternbergh believes that seriousness is overrated and we should just
kick back and enjoy “the rise of pleasure.” Neither one addresses what this
means in the long run. If they’re correct that adulthood has morphed into a
childhood without end, then how long can that be sustained? What’s next?
In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the 19th century protagonist travels
hundreds of thousands of years into the future and discovers that humankind has
evolved, or more correctly devolved,
into a childlike race called the Eloi living in a seemingly peaceful paradise.
Facing no dangers or challenges, the Eloi have become artistically and intellectually
apathetic, as well as physical atrophied. But their Eden is an illusion; the
Eloi’s fate is that they exist only as food for the bestial race of
Morlocks.
Our lack of seriousness, our comfort
zone of perpetual childhood, is the death of culture. As rapidly as we have come
to this point, it won’t take us hundreds of thousands more years to become Eloi.
That may be a rather extreme example to make my point, but eternal youth, while
very tempting, is not growth, either biological or cultural. Refusing to venture
beyond the safe shallows of childhood kills our creative and intellectual and
spiritual hunger. It leaves us passively captivated by a culture that increasingly
produces more kinetic spectacle than meaningful art. This apathy marks the end
of curiosity, of aspiration, of change; it leaves us vulnerable to being
overtaken, perhaps even literally, by cultures that do embrace adulthood and seriousness.
Sternbergh, and possibly Scott (who
joked, “Get off my lawn!”), might dismiss me as being hung up on “propriety”
and a “suspicion of cultural pleasure,” but I’m a child of pop culture. I was
raised on The Beatles and Bewitched,
not Beethoven and Bellini, but now I can appreciate both. An adult doesn’t
have to put away the things of childhood forever, only know their place and
limitations. But a child who resists adulthood too long risks becoming, as
Scott puts it, an irrelevant loser. And that’s where the rise of pleasure will
leave us.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 10/16/14)
