The neoteny pattern

Children are getting older.

This is another major theme I’d like to write about here. It’s been crazy around here this past week, so this may not be the cogent introduction I wish it were, but here goes.

Childhood as a phase of life is growing longer: adolescents are treated as children, and people in their twenties act adolescent. There’s a new book on exactly this topic, The Case Against Adolescence by Robert Epstein. As Jason Kottke quotes when talking about the book, Epstein has evidence that adulthood is now beginning as late as 27, which certainly makes me feel better about only just now entering what feels like the adult phase of my life. Hopefully I can grab a copy and share any insights it informs.

As Kottke also notes, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood claims the idea of childhood itself comes and goes in waves. Part of the current swing may be the resonance of this pattern in popular culture. It’s similar to Devo’s core theme of devolution, the idea that modern society with its lack of true challenges allows us to become dumber, worse people; that society’s natural direction is downward. The same idea plays out in Mike Judge’s recent film Idiocracy: thousands of years into the future, America has devolved into a purely consumerist society run by cyborg corporations and a government that’s more a line-up of reality TV series than a ruling body.

There are several phenomena crucial to understanding our world today that seem (at least to me) related to this idea of bringing childhood into adulthood. For a convenient name for the general pattern, I like neoteny, the term in biology for keeping youthful characteristics into adulthood (“as among certain amphibians”). I keep seeing neoteny as the possible motive force in a bunch of phenomena, enough so that it seems like a hint to some underlying system of the world.

Neoteny is related to the fairy tale morality that currently polarizes our public discourse. It’s a child-like view to split the world into unambiguous virtue and vice, and the job of adults to discern the good intentions in bad acts and forge compromise. There seems to be precious little of this among the people we give power.

Another apparent ramification of epidemic neoteny could be the focus on materialism we see in our culture. We Americans are generally not so hot on waiting for things we want, and as a result spend $1.22 for every $1 we earn (claims the American Bankers Association in an undated statistic they ascribe to the Myvesta Foundation, a “consumer finance assistance” organization). That you can’t have everything you want is the basic axiom of economics, yet we’re extremely eager to except ourselves from it, assuming economics happens only to everyone else. It seems peculiarly adult not to partake of the “free money” credit card companies spam out.

Geek chic is another possible result of neoteny. Comic books and video games are adolescent media that my generation is bringing with us throughout our lives, to say little of the stereotypical nerd who lives with his parents ‘til 30, who is simply still adolescent. To be broadly generous instead, to be a geek about something is to show enthusiasm for it, and enthusiasm tends to be the province of youth; the cliché is child-like wonder for a reason.

The relationship we’ve developed with our corporations can put people in a child’s role at times. While science fiction still has a monopoly on corporations gaining sentience and acting independently, it rings like a bell the fear of superhuman legal fictions with rights. Focusing on corporate speech (which is, after all, one of the few ways we interact with them), we picture child-like susceptibility to advertising in other people. It’s in the interests of the corporations that want to sell us things to infantilize us into material consumers.

I’ve been reading The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer, a layman’s overview of his and others’ psychological research into the authoritarian behavior of both leaders and followers. (It’s available on Altemeyer’s web site.) He describes aligning with a strong authority as if it were an identifiable pathology. Some of the authoritarian behavior we see in contemporary societies (both leading and following, which Altemeyer takes pains to explain are quite different) can be explained in terms of the strong father figure, which allows it to map conveniently onto ideas of neoteny. While, as ever, the behavior of particular human people is more complicated, it seems like a useful metaphor.

Perhaps neoteny of itself isn’t a major thread in the fabric of our world; it could be a mere result of a more primal component, like positive feedback. Even so, it comes up enough in various guises that it’s worth understanding.