A World of Half-Adults

It’s the worst of times; it's the best of times. That’s how we feel as we navigate from a paternal society, now discredited, to a society in which impulse is given its way. People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be; we human beings limp along, running after our own fantasy. We can never catch up, and so we defeat ourselves by the simplest possible means: speed. Everywhere go there’s a crowd, and the people all look alike.

We begin to live a lateral life, catch glimpses out of the corners of our eyes, keep the TV set at eye level, watch the scores move horizontally across the screen.

We see what’s coming out the sideview mirror. It seems like intimacy; maybe not intimacy as much as proximity; maybe not proximity as much as sameness. Americans who are 20 years old see others who look like them in Bosnia, Greece, China, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia, wearing the same jeans, listening to the same music, speaking a universal language that computer literacy demands. Sometimes they feel more vitally connected to siblings elsewhere than to family members in the next room.

When we see the millions like ourselves all over the world, our eyes meet uniformity, resemblance, likeness, rather than distinction and differences. Hope rises immediately for the long-desired possibility of community. And yet it would be foolish to overlook the serious implications of this glance to the side, this tilt of the head. “Mass society, with its demand for work without responsibility, creates a gigantic army of rival siblings, ” in German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich’s words.

Commercial pressures push us backward, toward adolescence, toward childhood. With no effective rituals of initiation, and no real way to know when our slow progress toward adulthood has reached its goal, young men and women in our culture go around in circles. Those who should be adults find it difficult or impossible to offer help to those behind. That pressure seems even more intense than it was in the 1960s. Observers describe many contemporaries as “children with children of their own.”

“People look younger all the time.” < … > People watching Ken Burns’ History of Baseball remarked that faces of fans even in the 1920s looked more mature than faces of fans now. Looking at those old photos, one sees men and women who knew how to have fun, but they had one foot in Necessity. Walk down a European street these days and you will see that American faces stand out for their youthful and naive look. Some who are 50 look 30. Part of this phenomenon is good nutrition and exercise, but part of it is that we are losing our ability to mature.

Perhaps one-third of our society has developed these new sibling qualities, the rest of us are walking in that direction. When we all arrive there may be no public schools at all, nor past paradigms, because only people one's own age will be worth listening to.

We know that the paternal society had an elaborate and internally consistent form with authoritative father reflected upward to the strong community leader and beyond him to the father god up among the stars, which were also arranged in hierarchical levels, called “the seven heavens.” Children imitated adults and were often far too respectful for their own good to authorities of all kinds. However, they learned in school the adult ways of talking, writing, and thinking. The teaching at home and in school encouraged religion, memorization, ethics, and discipline, but resolutely kept hidden the historical brutalities of the system.

Our succeeding sibling society, in a relatively brief time, has taught itself to be internally consistent in a fairly thorough way. The teaching is that no one is superior to anyone else: high culture is to be destroyed, and business leaders look sideways to the other business leaders. The sibling society prizes a state of half-adulthood in which repression, discipline, and the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system are jettisoned. The parents regress to become more like children, and the children, through abandonment, are forced to become adults too soon, and never quite make it. There’s an impulse to set children adrift on their own. The old (in the form of crones, elders, ancestors, grandmothers and grandfathers) are thrown away and the young (in the form of street children in South America, or latchkey children in the suburbs of this country, or poor children in the inner city) are thrown away.

When I first began to write about this subject, I found it hard to understand why a society run by adolescents should show so much disregard for children. And yet, in an actual family, adolescents do not pay much attention to the little ones or to the very old.

The deepening rage of the unparented is becoming a mark of the sibling society. A man said to me, “Having made it to the one-parent family, we are now on our way toward the zeroparent family.” The actual wages of working-class and middle-class parents have fallen significantly since 1972, so that often both parents work, one parent the day shift, another at night; family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place.

What the young need − stability, presence, attention, advice, good psyche food, unpolluted stories − is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them As we look at the crumbling schools, the failure to protect students from guns, the cutting of funds for Head Start and breakfasts for poor children, cutting of music and art lessons, the enormous increase in numbers of children living poverty, the poor prenatal care for some, we have to wonder whether there might not be a genuine anger against children in the sibling society.

Human beings often struggle to preserve a given cultural group through stories it holds in common, its remembered history of fragments of it, and certain agreed-on values and courtesies. A gathering of novels, plays, poems, and songs − these days wrongly called “the canon, ” more properly “the common stories” − held middle-aged people, elders, and the very young together.

That most adolescents these days reject the common stories is no surprise. More often than not, they reject them without having read or heard them. When adolescence lasted only three or four years, the youths’ refusal to support the commonly agreed on novels and poems did not affect the long-range commitment of the group to the reservoir; but now, as American adolescence stretches from age 15 or so all the way to 35, those 20 years of sullen silence or active rejection of any commonality, in literature or otherwise, can have devastating results. One can say that colleges and universities are precisely where the gifts of the past are meant to be studied and absorbed, yet those very places are where the current damage to the common reservoir is taking place. Men and women in their 20s take teaching jobs, and if they are still adolescent in their 30s, their hostility to the group's literature and to the group itself becomes palpable.

We know it is essential to open the cabinet of common stories to include literature from other cultures besides the European, and to include much more women’s literature than the old reservoir held. That is long overdue. But inclusion, one could say, is a job for adults. When the adolescent gets hold of it, a deep-lying impulse comes into play, and it says, “I’m taking care of people my age, and that’s it! My needs are important, and if the group doesn’t survive, it doesn’t deserve to.”

What is asked of adults now is that they stop going forward, to retirement, to Costa Rica, to fortune, and turn to face the young siblings and the adolescents − the thousands of young siblings we see around us. If the adults do no pull the adolescents over, the adolescents will stay exactly where they are other 20 or 30 years. If we don’t turn to face the young ones, they will say, “I am not of this family, ” and they will kill any relationship with their parents. The parents have to know that.

During the paternal society, there were “representatives” of the adult community: highly respected grade school and high school teachers, strong personalities of novels and epics, admired presidents and senators, Eleanor Roosevelts, Madame Curies, priests untouched by scandal, older men and women in community, both visible and capable of renunciation, who drew young people over the line by their very example. But envy and the habit of ingratitude have ended all that.

The hope lies in the longing we have to be adults. If we take an interest in younger ones by helping them find a mentor, by bringing them along to adult activities, by giving attention to young ones who aren't in our family at all, then our own feeling of being adult will be augmented, and adulthood might again appear to be a desirable state for many young ones.

In the sibling society, as a result of the enormous power of the leveling process, few adults remain publicly visible as models. Because they are invisible, the very idea of the adult has fallen into confusion. As ordinary adults, we have to ask ourselves, in a way that people 200 years ago did not, what an adult is. Someone who has succeeded better than I could name more qualities of the adult than I will, but I will list a few.

I would say that an adult is a person not governed by what we have called pre-Oedipal wishes, the demands for immediate pleasure, comfort, and excitement. The adult quality that has been hardest to understand for me, as a greedy person, is renunciation. Moreover, an adult is able to organize the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story. It is an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.

The true adult is the one who has been able to preserve his or her intensities deluding those intensities proper to his or her generation and creativity, so that he or she has something with which to meet the intensities of the adolescent. We could say that an adult becomes an elder when he not only preserves his intensities but adds more. In the words of the Persian poet Ansari, an adult is a person who goes out into the world and “gathers jewels of feeling for others.”

The hope lies in our longing to be adults, and the longing for the young ones, it they knew what an honorable adulthood is, to become adults as well, It's as if all this has to be newly invented, and the adults then have to imagine as well what an elder is, what the elder’s responsibilities are, what it takes for adult to become a genuine elder.

Robert Bly