In a podcast I listened to recently, the speaker made the familiar point that the age of adulthood in our culture has been pushed back, so that young people live in a state of arrested development. With no real grip on the meaning of their lives, they play video games, watch movies, hang out with friends, and so on, and use irony as a shield to keep it all from getting depressing. He didn’t mention it, but my sense is that becoming a parent is what’s supposed to jump-start you into adulthood.
Fine and good, but reflecting on this a bit, I started to think that it’s not so much a case of ‘arrested development’ as ‘frustrated development’. Here’s a sketch of what I have in mind:
As we move from infancy to childhood and beyond, there is a natural widening of horizons. For the infant, there are no boundaries between self and world; it’s all about ‘me’. Then a sense of self begins to emerge. A true ego is probably a later development; what happens instead is that I identify with my family, then my neighborhood and school, then (though this is not strictly chronological) with my nation or people or religious group. Later there may be a retrenchment, as I identify with my friends, my class, or those with whom I share interests.
All that is mostly on the social level. What about the rest of reality? Here the drive is toward emerging into a world that is meaningful. In other cultures, and earlier in the history of our own, this meant waking up into the religious dimension of life. As a child you learned that God was in His heaven, guiding events and informing reality with meaning. In our own culture, that particular account is increasingly unavailable, at least for many people.
Does that mean that young people give up on the realm of what is truly meaningful? It depends. Young people generally do decide on their own set of values, and may choose to act in accord with those values above all else. Yet they see those values as self-created, and when they discover in early adulthood that the world does not really honor the values they values, they often retreat into the alternatives our culture offers: irony or anarchism, competitive achievement, simple hedonism, or romantic love. When the phrase ‘arrested development’ is trotted out, that’s what it usually refers to.
But that’s not the whole story. For the fact is that in our own time children are introduced early on into worlds that are meaningful, worlds where good and evil are principles that shape reality, instead of being values we impose on a universe that lacks them. I am thinking, of course, of the worlds of fantasy and game-playing. Starting with Santa Claus and continuing through Star Wars, Harry Potter, World of Warcraft, and the overpopulated lands of the comic-book superheroes, we have no shortage of meaningful accounts of the universe.
Here is where the frustration comes in. Children are introduced to worlds that do have meaning, and they are invited into them; they are even given a choice of meaningful worlds. And then, bit by bit or suddenly, that claim to meaning is taken away from them. They learn as they grow older that the sources of meaning they relied on are nothing more than fantasy or fairy tales, fictions manufactured for the purpose of entertainment. Every larger claim to meaning is a lie.
This is what I mean by ‘Frustrated Development’. Like children everywhere and in all times, our children are introduced to worlds where good and evil matter, where heroes fight for what is right, where the path to the good and the meaningful life lies open before them. And then we let them discover–force them to discover–that all this has been a lie. We start them out on the road to a meaningful life, and them we slam a gate shut in their faces and tell them it was all a big joke.
Do we truly offer no alternatives? Well, there is romantic love. But can we blame them if they enter that domain with fear and suspicion, trying to make it serve the purpose of true meaning, but fearful from the start that it is only another fantasy? Later, the inescapable realities of children and the responsibilities that come with a family do offer a possibility for meaning, but it is meaning of a watered down kind, for we have stripped out of it the realm of ultimate values, as surely as we strip the yellowed wax off a beat-up kitchen floor.
Arrested development is bad enough, but frustrated development is worse. For we take away what had been so freely offered; we destroy what was once freely available. How many of the young ever recover from the loss?