Putting Away Childish Things
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
—Corinthians 13:11“In the epoch in which we now live, civilization is not an ideal or an aspiration, it is a video game.”
—Benjamin R. Barber
I am not one to gush, especially when it comes to American presidents and their speech writers, but there is something about Barack Obama’s inaugural invocation of St. Paul’s call to “set aside childish things,” that demands comment. Although he may not have intended it, Obama’s obligatory nod to scripture actually offered a surprisingly subtle and much needed critique of the sorry state of our American culture. “We remain a young nation,” said Obama, “but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history,” adding
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
Clearly, Obama’s speech was meant to instill hope, not shame, in the hearts of his record-breaking audience that day, but his words seem to have offered a kind of indictment as well, for in calling out the lazy slackers, the pleasure seekers, the leisure enthusiasts (think John Kerry wind-sailing), the greedy and the fame obsessed (“Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”), the president seemed to be saying in the gentlest and most indirect way possible: “knock it off and grow up already!”
While it’s hard not to agree with the spirit of Obama’s inaugural address, I’m afraid I am far less optimistic than our new president that the nation is actually capable of changing its ways. Although the metaphorical path described in Obama’s speech is not really any more rugged, steep, or treacherous than it’s ever been (it seems unlikely, at least for the short term, that our current recession will reach depression-era levels of poverty and unemployment), the stuffed and complacent consumers that comprise the mass of the American polity hardly seem up to the challenge. Like the fools that make up so much of our reality television we too seem destined not for greatness and fame but petty unhappiness, humiliation, and self pity.
Over the last four decades American culture has grown increasingly irresponsible and childish and it is amazing that our entire civilization, if we can call it that, hasn’t collapsed under the weight of its own collective stupidity. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button, we seem to be growing younger and more immature every day, even as the negative effects of our immaturity become increasingly more burdensome for the other cultures with whom we share the globe. The saddest part of this however, is that our cultural youthfulness is actually devoid of any truly youthful virtues. Instead of the healthy open-mindedness and kind-heartedness of a normal child; instead of the spirited and creative rebellion of a healthy and independent adolescent, our culture seems to have embraced only the negative aspects of youth and its selfish desire for quick and easy satisfactions, devoid of complexity, challenge, or struggle.
Indeed, our cultural immaturity has become so prodigious and all consuming that none of us, including me, seem to be immune to its narcotic effects. As Benjamin Barber, the prescient author of Jihad vs. McWorld, describes in his latest book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole:
This infantilist ethos is as potent in shaping the ideology and behaviors of our radical consumerist society today as what Max Weber called the “Protestant ethic” was in shaping the entrepreneurial culture of what was then a productivist early capitalist society. Affiliated with an ideology of privatization, the marketing of brands, and a homogenization of taste, this ethos of infantilization has worked to sustain consumer capitalism, but at the expense of both civility and civilization and at a growing risk to capitalism itself. Although we use the term democratic capitalism in a manner that suggests a certain redundancy, the reality is that the two words describe different systems often in tension with one another. Consumerism has set the two entirely asunder.
In our post-industrial consumer society, Barber suggests, the distance between what we want and what we need has become so drastically contracted that our entire economy seems to depend upon and demand immaturity and consumer allegiance to the useless and increasingly unsatisfying products that surround us, few of which serve any purpose beyond offering an enchanting and temporary sense of novelty. Consider, for instance, the number of grown New Yorkers who pass their commutes, not reading or conversing with their friends or family, but playing video games, watching television programs on their phones, or listening to puerile pop music. Just like a child we seem to need constant stimulation and so we fill in all the otherwise thoughtful spaces of our lives with these kinds of media. Because healthy humans are not naturally inclined to such acts of stupidity, and because our consumer economy has become too big to fail, as it were, we therefore find ourselves deluged with a never-ending and increasingly conspicuous barrage of advertising that plays to our most base and, as Freud well knew, consequently our most childish desires in an effort to keep us in a permanent state of distraction. Like the child who sucks his thumb and cannot seem to move beyond the comforts of oral satisfaction (the increasing presence of sites like thumbsuckingadults.com seem to indicate the number of adult thumb suckers may also be on the rise), we seem to be stuck in our own consumerist stage of capitalist development, unable to mature beyond our most infantile and base desires. The feedback loop of advertising and desire, consumption and dissatisfaction has left us with little in our daily lives that is real or meaningful and so, like a child who doesn’t know any better (or an alcoholic or drug addict), we fill that emptiness with more of the same, eventually taking comfort in the very thing that we are trying to put behind us.
Obama’s call for service then, his call for “a new era of responsibility,” although a noble gesture, may very well be falling on deaf ears, for it is hard to believe that a people used to such easy distractions and insipid amusements as “Jackass” and “Nanny 911,” easy listening and smooth jazz, or the special effects train wrecks that pass for most Hollywood blockbusters, are intellectually capable of anything as profound as public service and personal sacrifice. As Barber makes clear, our post modern consumer culture, which promises total liberty and narcissistic individualism through the cathartic ritual of constant shopping, is a threat to more than just our happiness; it is a threat to democracy itself. We are so habitualized to the rituals of evening television and weekend shopping, the thought of spending an afternoon at a city council meeting, or a weekend volunteering for the parks department seems practically un-American.
As long as our economy continues to rise or fall based on the number of plasma screens or Nintendo Wiis that we collectively purchase, there is little hope that we will find either the time or the penchant for true democratic participation. John Dewey’s dream of a great community where every individual would have “a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which [he or she] belong[ed]” now finds its greatest expression in the Mall of America, where every individual is obliged to do his share of shopping according to the capacity of his wallet.
If there is a way out of this dilemma it won’t be easy and it probably won’t be something that we choose for ourselves. No economy can sustain itself exclusively through merger, speculation, acquisition, and reckless consumption. If we do not, as President Obama suggests, actually begin to make things again, it is clear that the system of capitalism as we know it is destined to reach a point of crisis from which we will not be able to return. This “tipping point,” as Malcolm Gladwell might call it, is possibly the best hope we have of actually recovering some sense of dignity and meaning in sacrifice and the challenges of a strenuous life. Until then we seem destined to a life of “quiet desperation,” cloying comforts, easy satisfactions, and hollow victories.
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