"The hard way to grow, not on the internet, not in social media, even in the current state of the economy, of course, these issues make it harder to grow, but the key problem is that our culture no longer offers any model of an attractive adult."
The first batch of post-90s will soon be 30 years old,
Do you feel like you've grown up?
Text | Chen Sai
<h1>Adulthood is a subversive ideal</h1>
In today's society, many adults live like children, and they want to enjoy the freedom and casualness of their youth forever, and avoid taking on responsibilities in work or relationships. They may be married and have stable careers, but that's just the appearance, and deep down they're still a child with unrealistic dreams, hoping to write the greatest novels, or find the perfect lover, but not really giving action or taking responsibility for it.
Why is that? In Why Grow Up, american philosopher Susan Naiman put forward the idea that "the difficulty of growing up, not on the Internet, not in social media, or even the current state of the economy, of course, these problems make growth more difficult, but the key problem is that our culture no longer provides any attractive model of adults." ”
In the American psychologist Erik Erison's theory of the eight stages of life, adolescence (from the age of eleven or twelve to seventeen or eighteen) belongs to the fifth stage of personality development. The core issue at this stage is the determination of self-awareness and the formation of self-role. At this stage of life, their self-perception has not yet been established, and multi-faceted exploration and experimentation are needed, but society (especially parents) has stipulated and expected the role he wants to play, so the two often constitute a huge conflict.
What is the picture of adulthood? When I was a child, I imagined that life after adulthood should be omniscient, omnipotent, and have all the possible money, love and happiness in the world. This picture of adulthood is less vulgar than childish. Another picture of adulthood is the opposite—adults living a life of silence, desolation, despair. Adulthood means giving up one's hopes and dreams, accepting the limitations of established realities, and succumbing to life, even though it is far less exciting, valuable, or meaningful than initially thought.
The popular 19th-century coming-of-age novels describe the process of a young man's search for the soul and discovery of himself, adulthood means the growth of an independent self, leaving its mark on society, and in the 20th century, especially after World War II, almost all novelists, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rose, John Updike, their adult lives, without exception, are broken dreams, broken marriages, unattainable ambitions, workplace alienation, family estrangement.
The protagonists of "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men" are all kinds of narcissistic, grown-up children
In his book The Best Of Years: A Contemporary Adult History, American historian Steven Mintz analyzes the evolution of "adults" in the United States over the past 400 years, arguing that the devaluation of the "adult picture" began with the countercultural movement of the 1960s, "Don't trust anyone over the age of 30."
Adult fiction, also known as enlightenment novels, originated in Germany and is an important and common genre in modern Western literature. To put it simply, this type of novel deals with the protagonist's journey from childhood or adolescence to adulthood, from innocence and ignorance to maturity and sophistication: perhaps entering society and suffering hardships and gradually understanding the hardships and dangers of the world, or experiencing some major event that makes life understand and change; and when the realization and change of "growing up" is completed, the story also reaches the end (complete, or incomplete but still called relieved).
For the American philosopher Susan Neiman, the depreciation of adulthood came earlier and the form was more secretive. In her view, Peter Pan was a real turning point. Written in 1911, the novel is not so much about "romanticizing" and "idealizing" childhood as it is about describing how bad the adult world is. By the time Spielberg adapted the film, adults (Peter Penning) became even more pathetic and ridiculous.
Stills from Captain Iron Hook
True freedom means taking control of your life, learning to make plans, commitments, and decisions, and taking responsibility for the results of your actions. How could a child, such as Peter Pan, learn this if he was at the mercy of desire, and how could he develop a self capable of dominating freedom? ”
Susan Naiman is in her 60s and has settled in Berlin. She said that when she was 50 years old, she often heard people compliment her and say, "You look really young." As a philosopher, she immediately captures the problem behind this compliment—not only as a fetish to youth, but also as a hint that you only look good in a state where you are not what you are (youth).
"We live in a culture that celebrates immaturity." "Adulthood is a daunting picture," she says. Adulthood means giving up one's hopes and dreams, accepting the limitations of established realities, and succumbing to life, even though it is far less exciting, valuable, or meaningful than initially thought. ”
Stills from "Kai's New Life"
She even argues that the current rise of Islamic extremism in the West is also related to the "crisis of adulthood" in Western civilization. The lack of moral purpose and the inability to find meaning in modern experience leads young people to turn to those terrible religious dogmas. "The act of obeying those religious authorities is not an adult, but what other options can we offer?"
In "Why Did You Grow Up," she tries to answer the question: Is it possible to find a mature model in philosophy, not to succumb to inevitable loss, but to be the person you want to be?
"I'm always going back to the various times of enlightenment that have been criticized, because that's where we are. Before enlightenment, it was hard for you to imagine that growing up was a problem because there was no choice at all – your fate depended on your father. No wonder for Rousseau and Kant, growth was a central issue. Rousseau's father was a watchmaker, while Kant's father was a saddle maker, and they never imagined that their son would become a great philosopher. ”
Rousseau and Kant are the protagonists in Why Grow Up. Rousseau lived a wild and uninhibited life, while Kant lived a rigid and boring life. But Kant said that Rousseau changed his life, and the only photograph in his room was a portrait of Rousseau. Rousseau wrote the world's first parenting book – many of our modern ideas about parenting come from this book, such as that children should be raised by their mothers, children should have the opportunity to play, and education should not be based on mechanical learning, but on respecting children's interests and curiosities. It was also rousseau's first proposal that childhood has its own importance — it is the stage of life that is closest to the "state of nature" of mankind, and the period when nature is most fully preserved. It is not a tool, but an end in itself. But his goal was not to romanticize childhood, but to lay the groundwork for a free, self-conscious adult. But at the same time, he also recognizes how difficult it is to raise such a child in a society that does not want free citizens. It was this question that led Kant to write What is Enlightenment?
In What is Enlightenment, Kant defines "maturity" as the liberation of reason from its self-imposed immaturity.
According to the logic of growth, a person is just a helpless baby at birth, but with the development of body and mind, we will gradually control life and the world that accompanies it. We will gradually integrate into the world and secure our place in it, and then become more and more independent and experienced until we can become self-dominated adults. But on the other hand, our worst instincts are always preventing the process of destruction – being passive is a comfortable thing to do. We chose immaturity – it's far more comfortable for someone to make decisions for you than it is for you to make your own decisions.
"If there is a book that takes care of my comprehension, a priest who takes care of my conscience, a doctor who prescribes my diet, I don't have to bother myself. As long as I can pay, I don't need to think, and others will help me take care of everything. (Kant)
But Nyman argues that Kant's deeper insight is that not growing up is not just our fault, but the social structure in which we live keeps us "childish." Because we do not grow up and remain in the mental state of youth forever, it is in the interest of society that even the best governments find it easier for naïve, passive subjects to rule than independent, rational citizens. The desire for state control and our desire for comfort have created a society with less conflict, but this is not an adult society.
Stills from "The Edge of Growth"
In Kant's day, this certainly meant censorship and punishment, but consumer society invented better and more secretive methods. Defining a person by consumption rather than production – growing up means being able to buy expensive toys, more expensive cars, newer phones, more fashionable shoes... Building a just and humane society has been dismissed as a childish dream. So, we are surrounded by all sorts of information, and half of that compels us to be pragmatic, stop dreaming, accept the world as it really is, and portray the adult world as a compromise with the status quo. The other half of the information is about how to stay young and advice. This method of "diverting attention" is more effective than censorship — "If you prevent people from getting information, there will always be some brave people who will revolt, but if you flood them with a lot of meaningless options, they just want the noise to stop." ”
Because of this, true growth is not a submissive, but a subversive ideal. Like all ideals, it can never be truly realized, but that doesn't mean it can't guide our actions. Naiman said.
For Kant, philosophy plays the opposite role in helping us grow. It won't comfort you or relieve your pain; in fact it will certainly make your life harder. Because reality is irrational, the task of reason is to ensure that we do not forget this. Through the dialectic between assertiveness and skepticism, philosophy leads us to respect the curiosity and anger that both contain. It requires us to confront the fact that we will never get the world we want, while at the same time refusing to give up the world we want in our hearts. ”
So, in Kant's adult model, "growing up is more about courage than knowledge: all the knowledge in the world cannot replace your courage to use your judgment." Judgment is crucial because the questions that really touch us can't be answered by following a certain rule. We need the courage to learn to trust our own judgment, not rely on the judgment of our country, our neighbors, or our favorite movie stars. That is to say, independent thinking is the key to adulthood. Second, have the courage to accept the cracks that run through our lives. Rational ideals tell us what the world should look like, but experience tells us that reality is often not the ideal. Growing up requires us to face the gulf between the two – neither of which we give up.
Yes, adulthood is bound to suffer loss. We lose our youth, we lose our appearance, we lose our health. Parents die, friends leave, marriages end, children grow up, and eventually leave. For most adults, even the most intimate and important emotional attachment will prove to be short-lived, with half of all marriages ending in divorce.
But, as Li Jian, a Chinese philosopher, told me, "To become an adult means to be a person with human dignity and to live a life of human dignity." This includes being able to love, to grieve, to experience the anger of longing, gratitude, and justice; to be able to form ideas about goodness, to be able to reflect critically on one's own life; to be treated equally and respectfully, and so on. ”
<h1>"Coming of age" in history</h1>
Professor Robert Harrison has a more complex mindset and reflection on the "adolescent obsession" of this era than Susan Naiman.
When I interviewed him at Stanford University a few years ago, he expressed a deep concern about Silicon Valley's youth culture. One of the scary things I remember saying about this era is that modern people are allowing their culture to be led by a bunch of "Silicon Valley kids" (between men and boys) who can rewrite the rules of society and determine the way we live. This is exactly the opposite side of the same coin as Susan Naiman's Why Grow Up, criticizing adults for giving up hope for a supposed, better world, and worrying about the reckless transformation of the world by young people.
In 2014, he wrote "Rejuvenation: Why We Worship "Youth," a philosophical reflection on "age" that cuts to the question of growth from a broader cultural history perspective— "There are many different ways in which humans age: biologically, psychologically, socially, and culturally. If we think about age in this way, we may be much older than we think. ”
He borrowed the concept of "Neoteny" from the American biologist Stephen J. Gould, arguing that our current adolescent obsession is precisely a cultural or spiritual manifestation of "juvenile persistence".
Contemporary evolutionary biology research argues that certain major evolutionary changes are achieved through delays (or blocks) in development, rather than accumulation. When an organism evolves to change so that its adults retain certain characteristics of their infancy, this process is called "juvenile persistence."
Humans are "juvenile persistent" animals. One of the ways we evolved is that we retain the original juvenile traits of our ancestors until adulthood, such as our brains growing more slowly, bones ossifying later, and newborns becoming more immature, and their survival depends entirely on the care of their parents. From an evolutionary perspective, the persistence of juvenile states has brought us many benefits, and our huge brains are at least partly due to the rapid growth rate before birth that continues to later stages.
Professor Harrison argues that if the concept of "infant continuity" is applied to the spiritual level, we can use it to refer to a childhood psychology that has been preserved and modified and extended into adulthood. "If there had been no kind of 'inner child' in the human psyche, there would probably have been no father, mother, or god of all paths in the world. There will be no religion, no Oedipus complex, no art, no poetry, no science, no philosophy, because all these human creations arise from a certain childish sense of wonder in the face of certain phenomena. And many of the human expectations of life —that our existence is important, that someone or something should care about us — are inherently childish. These childish desires, dreams, and disappointments do not end with adulthood, but continue our lives. Such "youthful persistence" is not a bad thing – youth is essential to the sparkle of cultural innovation and genius. On the one hand, the unprecedented prolongation of human youth depends on the wisdom and stability provided by adults, and on the other hand, it is precisely because of this extended, protected youth that we are able to grow, mature, create societies and cultures, and accumulate wisdom sufficient to compete with genius. From this point of view, the development of human civilization depends on the balance and transformation between "youth" and "old age", "genius" and "wisdom" - "genius" focuses on creating new things that belong to the future, and "wisdom" focuses on inheriting the legacy of the past and renewing it in the process of transmission. (The concept of "wisdom" was borrowed from Hannah Arendt and refers to a concern for the continuity of the world.) But he argues that our civilization today presents an unusual character—the civilization of the past, warning time and time again how the genius of youth was oppressed and destroyed by the wisdom of old age. But our time is the opposite, the genius of youth is celebrated, and the wisdom of old age is abandoned.
"I don't know if our civilization can survive on the genius of youth alone." "When innovation and change come too quickly and too recklessly, will the source of civilization renewal be destroyed," he said. ”
In his view, the greatest ruse of this age is that while obsessing with youth, it is at the same time waging war against the youth it thinks it worships—on the one hand, it gives young people the right to dominate culture, but on the other hand, it deprives these young people of the idleness, shelter, and loneliness needed to develop true creativity, which is the root of a person's identity, creativity. It deprives young people of the freedom to improvise, marvel, and fail, and the ability to close their eyes and form their own images outside of the witchcraft of the screen. Deprived of their relationship with nature, without this sense of connection with nature and the universe, life will lose its meaning. Deprived of their relationship with the past, and therefore unable to form their own future. ”
Stills from "28 Years Old"
"Young people in Silicon Valley like to say that we connect the world. Yes, we can connect the world faster and faster, but do they really contribute to the inheritance of history and culture? ”
His greatest fear is that the omnipresent connection, the voice from the so-called "clouds", the collective consciousness that buzzes in your head all day long, is making solitude and solitude impossible, but only in solitude and solitude one can enter into a conversation with oneself, into a dialogue with history.
How do people get history?
"One wants to enter a place where love beyond oneself bridges the past, present and future in a 'living memory'. It is here that one acquires a historical existence that transforms love for oneself into love for the world, and it is this love that turns children into adults, not only on a psychological level, but also at a cultural and historical level. For example, as a Westerner, the more I learn about the 19th century, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, classical Rome and Greece, the more I learn about these eras, the more mature my sense of history and the more mature my sense of culture. ”
"But a place like this requires daily introspection, silence, loneliness. The wisdom of a person's later life is nourished by the time he spends alone when he is young—reading, learning, curious, observing, dreaming, imagining, meditating. It is this loneliness that gives birth to psychological, emotional and cultural maturity. ”
"My ideal adulthood is not infinitely close to young people in appearance, behavior, mind or lifestyle, but after such a historic transformation, you are a young person, but you are responsible for yourself, to others, and to the world; at the same time, you are an adult, but with infinite curiosity and surprise about the world, a young version of adult." 」
(This article is excerpted from the cover story of sanlian life weekly issue 26, 2017, "Thirty Not Standing: Postponed Adulthood")
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