DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY
To be juvenile, to think of oneself as always young, has an attraction to it. We're never responsible for anything. Responsibility is always outside in the realm of the parents. They're the experts, they take care of things. We can even pretend we have no parents protecting us. We're all alone. That's part of the fun.
In our society we're treated like children in essential ways. Reasonably simple notions are put in technical jargon or "legalese" and intentionally obscured. We have to hire someone to help us make sense of it. Buy a radio, it has ten pages of warnings and one sentence of directions: "turn knob until sound comes on." You buy a ladder and it's plastered over with cautions. Which are the steps, which is the way up, how not to climb a ladder. Fear of liability is the immediate cause, but the premise, apparently accepted by the courts, is that we need continuous imbecilic instruction. We need to be minded and warned like children. We are not responsible for ourselves. We need guidance. But we chafe against it. Just like children who rage against parental restrictions, we always want a bigger life, a later bedtime, a further reach -- but we can be bought off with a promised toy. And we run in terror from the prospect of becoming our own navigators on our own long journeys. Going it alone is not childlike.
We're actually kept back from taking responsibility, warned against it. Responsible action is an almost unattainable goal without a cadre of therapists, advisors and experts to counsel us. Before making a move we have to consult with the authorities. But to be deprived of the quest for meaning by running to perpetual immaturity out of fear of loss of self is obviously self defeating. It deprives us of the genuine testing action we need to get to the deeper significance of our own lives. We go to the movies. We take a cruise. We dream of romance. We talk about ourselves, but we have an insipid story to tell. Are we becoming vacuous and inane like the citizens in Huxley's Brave New World?
JUVENILIZATION
A world of permanent child's play, run by machines. Juvenilization seems a possible global outcome after the population crunch happens, a life in which the learning period for competence in the culture is indefinitely extended, with competency repeatedly postponed because it is not needed, as invention and engineering hopscotch ahead of us. We would be living a life in which we have been trained to be fearful of the intensities and reversals which are the crucibles for meaning. This would likely be a world that has lost its sense of connectedness with the past, though this would be disguised by Disneylands on every conceivable historical theme. Direct loss of knowledge of the past follows from this, lack of caring about it, a childish disregard for precedents, perhaps relinquishing language to the fast play of sounds and images. In affluent societies life would become a scamper in the aesthetic dimension, with most labor superfluous, with most poverty exported to the overpopulated continents and kept out of sight. We wold deal with all things hard and bitter by facing away from them.
To be able to whirl, go fast, not get tired, to hop here, jump there, its all part of the perpetuation of youth that has come from being made vestigial by our own creations. As long as we're in full career, running around pretending to be busy about something, that's good enough, it counts for meaning.
We're forever immature, like domesticated dogs who never grow up but remain perpetually adolescent, barking, chasing, carrying sticks, trying to appear useful, but utterly dependent on their masters.
THE QUEST FOR LIFE
The reductio ad absurdum is that our REAL heroic struggle is not for the meaning of life or great quests for virtue or excellence, but for the extension of biological life itself. With the world's population pushing towards its upper limits we are trying to be forever young. We hate aging and death. The natural sequence of life stages repel us. Our quest to end natural aging generates a vast medical technology crawling with bureaucrats and experts into which the suffering enter as into the lists of a tournament to do battle with death as an adversary, the most absurd offshoot being the maintenance of intubated, unconscious life for long periods without purpose or hope. And the obligatory good cheer which occupies patient, family and staff alike in the great medical centers (our battle zones) is offensive and callow, hardly a place for soulfulness. There the struggle against illness has substituted for the struggle for meaning, as if the maintenance of biological functioning is the meaning of life, not simply the precondition for meaning.
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Copyright 1999 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 08/23/99 (rge)