6.25.2006
Youthful or Infantilized?
In The Information Bomb Paul Virilio discusses the inherent dangers to the hybridization of generations through technology: "Let us imagine, for example, an adult and a small child climbing a staircase. The child will not be able to cope with the height of the steps and will rapidly be outdistanced and left behind by the adult. By contrast, when the adult and the child get into a lift together, they will ascend at the same speed. Each in his way will be dis-pro-portioned. The adult will have lost a little of his status as a 'grown man' (we might even say he has grown younger or smaller), whereas the child will have grown precociously or -- why should we not see it this way? -- will have aged." Being stunted is cool, heh heh. Yeah! yeah! it's cool!
Now some science guy has come at infantilization from a slightly different angle. Bruce Charlton will soon publish a study on the psychological immaturity that marks people in their twenties who have spent too much time in school (if you want a fancy science name for your over-education, call it "psychological neoteny".) Unlike Virilio's unbridled disgust of adults' infantilization, the linked article is much more ambivalent towards the phenomenon: "A 'child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge' is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world... The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues... These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness... such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality."
I know that I sure like a lot of stuff such as the show with Ze Frank and the Daily Show which is sooper silly but also really intelligent. That would make me lean away from Virilio's wholesale dismissal of psychological immaturity, and yet Virilio has a point when he says that youth has traditionally been the tool of totalitarian states (think the Junior Anti-sex League in Nineteen Eighty Four, or the Hitler Youth movement). What are the inherent risks of widespread psychological neoteny? What happens when the humanities don't meet the real world? And, most importantly, where'd I put that gee dee remote?
