“There is deep infantilism in the culture,” laments actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Indeed, the ways in which opinions are formed, framed and expressed today often reflect a troubling lack of cognitive and emotional maturity. This creates a toxic environment in which reasoned discourse becomes increasingly impossible.
One example is the current epistemological emphasis on lived experience at the expense of objective reasoning. The insistence that my truth be treated as though it were the truth suggests a childlike myopic subjectivism. The following experiment comes to mind:
The experimenters invite young children into a lab and hand them a candy box. Expecting to find candy, the children instead find the box contains pencils. Ultimately, the children not only believe that other children entering the lab will expect to find pencils rather than candy in the box, but will say that they themselves knew all along what the box really contained.
There is something quintessentially totalitarian about the way people who think in this way attempt to eradicate the past and impose their view on others. Consider the following passage from George Orwell’s 1984:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Recent efforts to remove statues of historical figures whose views and actions do not align with the moral standards of today can be seen in this light. The defacing and toppling of these statues in the name of anti-racism or anti-fascism may best be understood as juvenile vandalism in pursuit of a utopian fantasy.
It is hardly a coincidence that such a movement should arise at a time when sophomoric tendencies dominate public discourse. Such tendencies are at the heart of today’s outrage and cancel culture. Ideas that challenge preconceived beliefs are perceived as potentially traumatic and therefore suppressed or—as in the case of safe spaces—actively blocked out. This widespread lack of emotional resilience makes rational debate impossible and thus impedes intellectual progress.
Infantilism appears to be especially prevalent in the gender debate. The idea that gender identity has little or nothing to do with biological sex and everything to do with subjective feelings not only flies in the face of science, but also translates into an unreasonable demand on society to deny objective reality. Gender fluidity and nonbinarism, in particular, involve an infantile denial of a developmental inevitability—that we, as a sexually dimorphic species, grow up to become either men or women, depending on our birth sex. Gender dysphoria appears to be a genuine condition, especially among prepubescent children, but evidence suggests that most of them grow out of it.
Yet, when it comes to gender identity, there is a tendency to take children’s claims at face value. This approach not only implicitly sexualizes prepubescents (part of a concerning trend); it also inverts the roles of children and grown-ups. While there is something to be said for taking cues from a child’s curiosity, imagination and creativity, parents would be ill advised to take their kids’ lead when it comes to decisions the consequences of which children clearly lack the mental capacity to understand. After all, we do not even trust our kids to make the right dietary choices. We simply accept that they do not yet know what is best for them.
The line between childhood and adulthood has become increasingly blurred. Take welfare politics, for example. A social safety net can help individuals in need get back on their feet. The prevailing approach to social welfare, however, presumes victimhood, fostering dependency rather than empowerment. Individual agency and responsibility rarely enter into the equation. This is not to reiterate Margret Thatcher’s contention that poverty is “a personality defect.” But if we treat adults like children they will probably behave like children. Paternalism breeds infantilism.
This principle is by no means exclusive to welfare. Take the patronizing tone of voice in which many media outlets address their adult audiences and the advertising industry’s appeal to infantile desires, which promotes impulsive behavior.
There is also a tendency to idealize childhood. However, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was mistaken when he stated, “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” At no point in life are we less free than in infancy, when we are completely dependent on adult care and guidance. Growing up means taking on obligations and responsibilities. This is crucial not only for our personal development but for society as a whole.
Failure to grow up makes for a toxic personality. As Jordan Peterson has remarked, “People who don’t grow up don’t find the sort of meaning that sustains them through difficult times … and they’re left bitter and resentful and without purpose and adrift and hostile … and vengeful and arrogant and deceitful and of no use to themselves and of no use to anyone else.” In short, “there is nothing uglier than an old infant.”
Infantilism is pervasive in our culture. So how can we outgrow it?
For starters, it is imperative to emphasize self-control and decency in our public discourse. Since it would be self-defeating to impose these values on other people (thus infantilizing them), the best way is to lead by example. Certain lessons need to be hammered home.
Life Is Not Fair
As Stephen Fry has noted, “It’s so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated.” To expect an equal distribution of anything in life is naïve. It presumes that life would produce roughly equal outcomes for everyone, were it not for unjust treatment. This often manifests as a tendency to blame others for one’s grievances.
Immature people tend to resort to self-pity. In today’s victimhood culture, grievances serve as social currency. However, “self-pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have, and the most destructive,” says Fry. Self-pity stifles human development on both the individual and the societal level.
Young children tend to display a strong sense of entitlement. They make demands on the adult world—in particular, their parents—without having done anything to earn what they desire. As we grow up, however, most of us learn that we have to earn the things we desire by behaving in ways that benefit others. This is how society functions.
Good Things Are Easily Destroyed, but Not Easily Created
Young people are more prone to radical thinking than those with more life experience, who understand that “good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created,” as Roger Scruton puts it. Revolutionary movements throughout history have had to learn this lesson the hard way, killing millions in the process. Yet, there are still those who seek to dismantle the institutional structure of society, arrogantly or naively thinking themselves capable of constructing a better alternative from scratch.
As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, human progress is a matter not of absolute solutions but of incremental trade-offs. Even Friedrich Engels recognized that “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”
Given the complexity of our world, no one group or individual has enough knowledge to devise a perfect plan for society. If we want real, lasting progress, it is imperative that we mature out of such delusions. Some of the most calamitous retrogressions in history—in particular, fascism and communism—were caused by people who, convinced of the absolute righteousness of their plan, felt justified in stubbornly imposing their will on society.
Now such ideologies only exist on the margins of contemporary politics. However, the idea that complex issues can readily be solved with the wave of a political wand still has a surprisingly large number of subscribers. The childlike Greta Thunberg, for example, has been lionized for demanding simplistic solutions to the complicated problem of climate change. It is highly unlikely, however, that she understands the far-reaching social, political and economic implications of her demands. What is most surprising is that world leaders play along with her.
Donald Trump’s impulsive, thin-skinned reactivity and apparent lack of self-reflection make him appear like an overgrown infant. Indeed, “the way he processes information appears qualitatively different from an adult mind,” writes psychologist Noam Shpancer:
The president, if anything, exhibits a characteristic inability to see much beyond his own ego preoccupations. He appears to have no real friendships, habitually belittles those he sees as weak while denying any weakness of his own, and is perennially insecure, desperate to bolster his ratings, numbers and stats by bending the facts to assuage his fears; he has little demonstrated capacity to joyfully laugh at himself (or laugh at all), and has professed to being uninterested in self-reflection and insight; the only problem he seems genuinely interested in (and truly capable of) solving is the chronic threat of his own waning relevance, and his guiding moral principle is that whatever works to make him “win” is the right thing to do.
In the wake of the 2020 presidential elections, Trump has, unsurprisingly, shown himself to be a sore loser. Not only has he tried to bend the rules to his advantage; he has torpedoed the democratic process by spreading disinformation. Arguably the most powerful reaction to Trump’s electoral defeat has come from political commentator Van Jones: “It’s easier to be a parent this morning,” he said, amid tears; “it’s easier to tell your kids that character matters. It matters. Telling the truth matters.”
There Is No Such Thing as Your Truth
To navigate reality, we want the most accurate map available. The recent emphasis on standpoint epistemology obstructs this. Identity politics encourages us to clutch at immutable characteristics and subjective feelings for epistemological orientation, having abandoned the guiding principles of objective reasoning and rational debate. Trumpism is the flip side of the same coin.
Part of the reason infantilism is so widespread in today’s society may be that many of the pressures faced by previous generations—war, deprivation and rigid religio-cultural norms—are absent. Their absence is the result of a long maturation process from infantile superstition to enlightened thinking. However, we appear to have entered a new age of toxic infantility. It is time to change course. But that will take an adult mindset.
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Every article in modern publications must feature at least one criticism of Donald Trump. Them’s the rules. Anyone who thinks Trump has no ability to laugh at himself has obviously never listened to the stories he spins at the rallies. But at least the modern rules were followed.
In my 21/11/2020 at 9:56 pm comment on the “Life Is Not Fair” section of Stephen Ambrosch’s article, I remarked that while life may indeed be unfair, it has nevertheless also been my own long-time observation that people who like to intone the “Life is not fair” aphorism generally seem to be counseling passive resigned fatalistic acceptance, an uncomplaining surrender to the way things always have been and probably always will be. The alternative to this passive fatalistic resignation, I noted, is not necessarily self-pity, as Ambrosch seemed to imply, but rather an active effort to change things. Human progress, I added, has been the work of men and women who neither submitted passively to Fate nor gave in to self-pity–but took positive action!
In his 23/11/2020 at 10:42 pm comment, ccscientist replied that the “point” about “life is unfair” is “not that one should just be a good sheep,” but rather “to be realistic,” not to be like the girl he knew in college “who was going to be a singer but never sang or took voice lessons,” so that “nothing came of her fantasy.” This observation followed ccscientist’s disquisition on “most work” in the past being “physically demanding, hot (or cold), noisy, and dangerous,” with long work days, always subject to mishaps like farm animals stepping on and breaking your foot, machinery ripping off a finger, or paddlewheel boilers exploding killing 200. It was thus “obvious to everyone that life was hard and few thought it could be easily fixed,” ccscientist noted. “In contrast,” he continued, “we now have many people working at conceptual jobs where there is no physical hardship,” and “it seems as if just wishing for something might make it so.” This, he suggested, “helps promote immature thinking because you never have to risk your life or face tradeoffs.” On the other hand, he felt, “If you have helped build a barn or spent all day fishing for your dinner, you may be less likely to believe in free stuff and easy answers.”
ccsientist’s sermonette about most work being hard and dangerous in the past, while so many people now work at easy “conceptual jobs” with no “physical hardship,” curiously echoes a similar though less finger-waggingly moralistic observation by the late British social philosopher Ernest Gellner. In his book “Nations and Nationalism” (Blackwell, 1983), Gellner noted that “work, in industrial society, does not mean moving matter.” Our time’s “paradigm of work,” Gellner observed, is no “longer ploughing, reaping, thrashing.” It is mostly “no longer the manipulation of things, but of meanings.” It usually involves “exchanging communications with other people, or manipulating the controls of a machine.” The “proportion of people at the coal face of nature, directly applying human physical force to natural objects,” he noted, is “constantly diminishing.” Most jobs these days, “if not actually involving work ‘with people’, involve the control of buttons or switches or levers which need to be understood,” and are “explicable” in “some standard idiom intelligible to all comers.” [Gellner, “Nations and Nationalism” (1983), pp. 32-33]
The chief result of this change in the nature of work in modern industrial societies, for Ernest Gellner, was not so much the “just wishing for something might make it so” attitude and “immature thinking because you never have to risk your life or face tradeoffs” bewailed by ccscientist. Rather, it was the need for some basic linguistic and cultural uniformity within modern industrial societies to get the work done.This, Gellner argued, was the real underlying source of modern nationalism. “If you have helped build a barn or spent all day fishing for your dinner,” it might perhaps be true, as ccscientist feels, that you may “be less likely to believe in free stuff and easy answers.” Gellner, however, had less interest in worrying about reducing physical toil helping “promote immature thinking because you never have to risk your life or face tradeoffs” than in noting that you could pretty much get by on the frontier back then just speaking Slovak or Swedish and never having to learn English–whereas if you went into a steel mill or auto plant you HAD to at least learn enough English to understand your boss’s orders! Same went, in Gellner’s view, for learning, say, French, German, or Russian in a European factory as no longer just an illiterate peasant on your family’s farm getting by with your parents’ Breton, Basque, Czech. or Lithuanian! As Gellner put it, you had to learn “some standard idiom intelligible to all comers” in your particular geographic area of the worldwide industrial capitalist economy!
Aphorisms of the “that’s life,” “life is not fair” type have long struck me as reflecting a kind of fatalism and absolutism that have been debatable since the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, technology, and democracy. The same goes likewise for clichés and “saws” of the “boys will be boys,” “death and taxes,” “you can’t fight city hall” kind, and confident assertions that people “working at conceptual jobs where there is no physical hardship” will thus “believe in free stuff and easy answers,”that “just wishing for something might make it so.”
The scientific, technological, medical, and economic advances and social & political changes of the last few centuries have made life increasingly safe, healthy, easy, comfortable, and less arduous for people in many parts of the world (especially in the industrialized West), and shown many hardships once believed to be inevitable and universal seem instead to be perhaps not quite so universal or inevitable after all. These changes and advances have increasingly made the idea that life might be made a bit less unfair seem not so totally absurd or chimerical as it might have very plausibly and reasonably once seemed. The so-called “human condition” has increasingly appeared with some plausibility in the past couple of centuries to be perhaps not so eternal, timeless, or unchanging after all. It has increasingly come to be felt that it is not so much “life” in general as a kind of universal blanket all-embracing metaphysical entity that is “unfair” or “tragic,” but certain specific features which may or may not be changeable or remediable, that to talk about “life” as a universal collective metaphysical concept distinct from specific conditions and circumstances is meaningless.
It might be interesting in this connection to look at the late American economic historian Robert Heilbroner’s 1995 book “Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.” Heilbroner argued in “Visions of the Future” that throughout all of human history, despite the vast differences in social organization, technological development, and cultural achievement dividing us from the earliest known prehistoric “Homo sapiens,” there have really only been three distinct ways of looking at the future–what he called the “Distant Past,” “Yesterday,” and “Today.”
In Heilbroner’s “Distant Past, stretching from prehistory to the appearance of modern nation-states in 17th century Europe and the 18th century rise of industrialism, no one had any notion of a future measurably and materially different from the present or the past. From the Stone Age to the Bronze and Iron, Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome, and throughout the Middle Ages, as well as in the pre-modern Middle East, India, China, Japan, and Southeat Asia, a continuum of cultures and civilizations (what Ernest Gellner called “Agro-Literate” societies) all shared the common absence of any expectation of material progress for the great masses of people. Empires and dynasties might rise and fall, but the conditions of life changed little if at all for the great mass of people.
It was only in the period Heilbroner called “Yesterday,” from roughly 1700 to 1950, that he saw the future as entering into human consciousness as a great beckoning force. Capitalism, continually reinvigorated by the apparently endless forward march of science ant technology and by an evolving sense of democracy, seemed “Yesterday” to promise all levels of society some expectation of a future at least somewhat better than the past.
It was this unwavering faith in the superiority of the future that separated “Yesterday” in Heilbroner’s view from the age we have now entered, that of his “Today.” While we are still driven towards tomorrow by the same forces that determined “Yesterday,” the lessons of Hiroshima and Chernobyl (as well as Auschwitz and Dachau), the chaos in the former Soviet Union, the economic stagnation of the West, and the anarchic rage unleashed in our inner cities and in hot spots around the globe have, in Heilbroner’s view, brought on an anxiety and uncertainty very different both from that the ”Distant Past’s” resignation and from “Yesterday’s” bright optimism. Heilbroner saw “Today’s” anticipations of “Tomorrow” darkened or at least by challenges like the threat of nuclear blackmail, global warming and the growing commodification of life represented by video games, voice mail, and VCRs.
At first I was confused about the point of this article, but then I think I got it – People who disagree with me are infantile. Is that it? Did I get that right?
But seriously folks, the psychologizing of political discourse, as evidenced by this psychobabble baloney, is a weak rhetorical ploy. Donald Trump is a psychopath. He suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. No, no, no – he’s a bad president. Let’s vote him out of office. Oh…we did. Political problems have political solutions.
The so-called “psychologizing of political discourse” has an illustrious pedigree, as for instance in works like Harold D. Lasswell’s “Psychopathology and Politics,” Theodor W. Adorno and his colleagues’ “The Authoritarian Personality,” Erich Fromm’s “Escape From Freedom,” and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” As for “psychobabble baloney,” I always thought the term “psychobabble” was originally invented specifically to designate the lowbrow Pollyanna pop self-help positive-thinking self-help psychology of writers like Wayne Dyer, Werner Erhard, and Steven Covey nattering on about “self-esteem,” “liking yourself,” “being your own best friend,” “taking responsibility for your feelings,” “not needing anybody else in order to be happy,” etc. !
To T. Peter Park:
I don’t use Areo much. I don’t see any way for me to respond to your reply to my comment. Am I not supposed to?
Anyway – Psychobabble is a form of speech or writing that uses psychological jargon, buzzwords, and esoteric language to create an impression of truth or plausibility. That’s from Wikipedia. Love Wikipedia.
I haven’t read the books you referenced, but I have read Christopher Lasch, whom I’ve always loved. It’s been decades. I’ve recently started rereading his books to answer for myself the question you’ve raised – is the kind of psychoanalytical sociology he wrote psychobabble or legitimate social criticism? Here’s my preliminary answer – Lasch was writing as a social critic. He didn’t have any particular political axe to grind. He wrote about how changes in how our society is structured can lead to changes in how our minds are structured. That seems right, and important, to me. The author of this article, and many others these days, like to throw around psychological jargon to make their political judgements seem credible. It’s intellectually lazy and it pisses me off.
As I said, I’m rethinking these issues.
Really great article! However, Is the Pinker link (I think it’s the first link in the article) the right one? Pretty sure it’s a link to the wrong experiment that you’re citing.
The Rousseau quote is surely rather unjustly mistreated. Man is born free is not a prosaic denial of the reality of infant dependency, but a statement about the ultimate existential condition of the mental life of a human being. We are born with the innocence to be able to think and perceive unencumbered by the cares of the world which would under ideal circumstances persist through life and maximize mobilization of the innate virtue found in every individual to the good of the commonality – is how I think Rousseau sees it.
In the past, most work was physically demanding, hot (or cold), noisy, and dangerous. Farm animals would step on your foot and break it. Machinery would rip off a finger. Boilers on paddlewheels would explode killing 200. Work days were long. It was obvious to everyone that life was hard and few thought it could be easily fixed. In contrast, we now have many people working at conceptual jobs where there is no physical hardship and it seems as if just wishing for something might make it so. This helps promote immature thinking because you never have to risk your life or face tradeoffs. If you have helped build a barn or spent all day fishing for your dinner, you may be less likely to believe in free stuff and easy answers.
The point about “life is unfair” is easily missed. It is not that one should just be a good sheep. It is to be realistic. Don’t be the girl I knew in college who was going to be a singer but never sang or took voice lessons. Nothing came of her fantasy. Admit that you will never be a pro athlete or rock star: what then CAN you do? And do that.
There are many problems in the world that are unpleasant but must be faced to be solved. Sometimes that person with the “bad” ideas will be right and you will be wrong. Sometimes he is just an idiot but in that case leave him be. But if we shut everyone down who says unpleasant truths many evils will continue. Maybe China has Uighurs (sp?) in work camps–but if we can’t mention it we can’t even find out much less fix it. Maybe Covid came from a lab–again if we can’t ask we can’t find out. Maybe there is another way than letting the homeless shoot up on residential sidewalks but options must be allowed out in the open. For decades the grooming scandal in England continued because police were not allowed to investigate and the press would not report it because the perps were pakistani. Dozens of preteen girls were raped.
I think some of the toxic infantility we see comes from the idea that we are entitled to unconditional love. I don’t believe that we should expect to be loved no matter how horrendous our speech or behavior may be. The only persons entitled to unconditional love are babies. Everyone else should learn to behave in ways which do not harm other people in order to be loved. This training needs to begin in early childhood, and I think too many children are not being raised with any expectations of proper social behavior. The idea that one deserves to be loved merely because one exists is a fallacy. I think if babies do not receive unconditional love from someone they may become demanding when they are older of the love they should have gotten as infants. If they do not receive love they don’t know how to give it either. There is evidence of this seen in children who were raised in orphanages where they received little attention as infants. On the other hand, children who are never corrected by their parents or other caregivers expect to be treated similarly by others. When their bad behavior is not tolerated by others, they are both confused and outraged. Early childhood experience is very important in personality development.
Everyone deserves some unfairness.
With the compulsory gender equity in parenting (even before birth), the kids also do not learn physiological calmness and acquiescence.
Gerhard Ambrosch opens his section “Life Is Not Fair” by quoting gay atheist leftie English comedian Stephen Fry’s observation that “It’s so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated.” Ambrosch adds that “To expect an equal distribution of anything in life is naïve” a it “presumes that life would produce roughly equal outcomes for everyone, were it not for unjust treatment,” often resulting in “a tendency to blame others for one’s grievances.” Life my indeed be unfair, but it has also been my own long-time impression that people who like to intone the “Life is not fair apothegm” are usually counseling passive resigned fatalistic acceptance, a quiet “humbly-dumbly-washup” uncomplaining surrender to the way things always have been and always will be. The alternative to this passive fatalistic resignation is not self-pity, as Ambrosch and (in Ambrosch’s view) Fry imply, but active effort to change things. Life may well be unfair, but there are three basic responses to this unfairness: the sort of stiff0upper-lip stoic fatalistic acceptance recommended by Ambrosch, the self-pity condemned by him, or active constructive attempts to change things for the better. Thus, when Rosa Parks was told to move to the “Colored” section back of the bus in Montgomery Alabama in 1956, she didn’t philosophically bow her head in humble devout philosophical resignation to the eternal unchanging unfairness of life or the mysterious inscrutability of God’s will for this sinful world, and she didn’t burst into tears and moan “poor little me!,” but she rather stood her ground and sat down in the White section of the bus–and spearheaded a whole city-wide bus boycott that ultimately desegregated Birmingham’s bus system. Martin Luther King didn’t just passively submit to Fate and life’s unfairness either. nor did Gandhi, nor did the brave German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler. Human progress has largely been the work of men and women who NEITHER submitted passively to Fate (or “just the way things are, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” or God’s supposed inscrutable will), NOR gave in to self-pity–BUT took positive action!
Rosa Parks did not need to move to the colored section of the bus. She was IN the colored section, in the front row of that section. She was told to move for a white person because the white section was full. The injustice done to her was compounded by this fact. She WAS complying with the unjust seating rules and the whites were STILL making her give up her seat. That was the reason for her refusal; the whites were going too far with their BS.
Isn’t Gerfried Ambrosch’s hero the British actor Stephen Fry a gay atheist leftie and therefore a slightly unusual figure to be quoted in support of a basically conservative and traditionalist though not Trumpie message? Just sort of wondering….
Something those of us who work and deal with undergrads daily recognise only too clearly.
Sublime. Passed the link to my three-state-Zoom philosophy discussion group for discussion two days from now.