In “Adults aren’t growing up” the ABC reported last Monday on the research of British evolutionary psychiatrist Bruce Charlton. Bruce Charlton is Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses and author of “The Modernization Imperative”. His recent research paper “The rise of the boy-genius: Psychological neoteny, science and modern life”, looks at the rise of ‘Psychological neoteny’ in Western culture, since around the middle of the 20th century. ‘Psychological neoteny’ is the name Charlton’s gave to the phenomenon whereby people “retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages”. Put more simply Charlton is saying Western adults are retaining the psychological make-up of teenagers further into their adult years and in some cases for their whole lives.
From Charlton’s paper:
Whereas traditional societies are characterized by initiation ceremonies marking the advent of adulthood, these have now dwindled and disappeared. In a psychological sense, some contemporary individuals never actually become adults. A child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviours and knowledge is probably adaptive in modern society because people need repeatedly to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. It seems that this adaptation is achieved by the expedient of postponing cognitive maturation – a process that could be termed psychological neoteny. Psychological neoteny is probably caused by the prolonged average duration of formal education, since students’ minds are in a significant sense ‘unfinished’.… the faults of youth are retained with well as its virtues: short attention span, sensation- and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness.
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and (so cultural intellectuals would argue) a pervasive emotional and spiritual shallowness. There are a lot of divorces and broken families. Modern people – it seems fair to say – also lack a profundity of character which seemed commoner in the past. [8].
The ABC article has the following further quotes:
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"The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product, the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity," he says.
"But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility."
"When formal education continues into the early twenties," he says, "it probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age".
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In hunter-gatherer societies, that maturity was probably achieved during a person's late teens or early twenties, he says.
"By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people," he said.
"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."
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This is all well and good if you’re living in some kind of a post-modern utopia. In the real world, however, there sometimes arises the need for boys to become men. What we may get instead is legions of Peter Pans who suddenly find themselves marooned with the Lord of the Flies.
Whatever the romantic attractiveness of the perpetual “student-mind” to the modern pseudo-intellectual, it may only be of temporary benefit to a society convinced of its existance beyond history, but in the long run, if unbalanced with the firmity of maturity, it leads to the weakening of that society. And in the natural order the weak is inevitably subjugated by the strong. The ever learning student ever teeters between “all-knowledge” of the teenage know-it-all and “no-knowledge” shifting sands of endlessly receptive intellectuallism, unburdened by the anchorage of conviction. The direct outcomes of the resulting adult-child culture are the prevalence of naive idealism and a tendency toward self-effacing relativism amongst the highly educated classes. It is like the seasons have permanantly become stuck on the eternal springtime. The ever young society where the cold of winter looks to never come never gets to see the fruits of autumn harvest either. Emotional and spiritual maturity bring with them the ability to make value judgements and the firm grounding of moral certaintly. Ironically these qualities are now actually looked down upon in Western culture. The adult-child looks down on those “closed-minded” enough to be certain of anything, as flexibility of beliefs and moral relativism are seen as attributes of some sort of higher evolution. This is the modern mallaise of the intellectual elites, divorced from the experience of realities that demand the fortitude of conviction.
Ironically, Nature, or God if you prefer, always with its own checks and balances, prescribes the poison as the cure. The very navel-gazing self-obsession of the adult-child is a symptom of the need for certainly that is so lacking, the gnawing emptiness of this spiritual vacuity is the very instinct driving one on and out of the labyrinth. When the glass is always half full the thirst is never satiated. The experience of life is the cure to the sickness of over-intellectualisation.
But this is not a call to the return of the rigidity of dogma. This is a signpost on the road to balance.
The ABC article ends with the following:
David Brooks, a social commentator and an op-ed columnist at The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related phenomenon concerning the current blurring of “the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture,” which Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny.
Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.
I’ll whack his book “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” on my reading list then. Bobos is a contraction of ‘Bourgeois Bohemians’. Nice.
