How is it that a culture so cynical about the possibility of change expends so much energy fighting the one fact that there is no meaningful possibility of changing? On ad hoardings in bus shelters across the land, the unfeasibly smooth brows or glossy black beards of middle-aged women and men stare in defiance of the “signs of ageing”, as though appearing to be two ages at once made us look desirable rather than creepy. Or, above the injunction to “Live young” in an Evian ad, a diptych of baby and adult faces sport the same expression (is the ad laughing with or at us? Is its real punchline the infantile credulousness with which we fork out good money for water?).
Idealisation, Melanie Klein posited, is only the mirror image of contempt, and nowhere does her insight resonate more than in regard to our so-called worship of youth. In what sense can a society which subjects young people to unrelenting social, emotional and physical pressures and anxieties, all the while assuring them they are living the best years of their lives, be meaningfully said to worship or even to like youth?
Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? is a spirited philosophical defence of the aspiration to maturity. As she sagely observes, by clinging impotently to youth, we impoverish youth and maturity alike. The vindictive subtext of the message that youth is the pinnacle of life, after all, is that things will only get worse. What better recipe for splitting our lives between an infantilised first act and its increasingly embittered aftermath?
In Juvenescence, a penetrating and impressively omnivorous “cultural history of our age”, Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the same malign ambivalence in the collective drive to make ourselves younger in “looks, behaviour, mentality, lifestyles and, above all, desires”. Our age’s self-defeating ruse is to give the younger generations sovereignty over culture, all the while depriving them of the “idleness, shelter and solitude” needed to cultivate an authentically creative life.
Our world, Harrison argues, has become as rich in genius – in the proliferation of techno-scientific innovation – as it is poor in wisdom, defined by Hannah Arendt as a loving concern for the continuity of the world. Without that, novelty becomes both blind and tyrannical – think of those snaking queues to replace a mobile phone with its barely distinguishable upgrade, signalling at once the blindness of consumer desire and a yearning for even the most sham and threadbare sense of continuity and belonging.
Both books address our era’s tendency to set youth and age in facile opposition to one another, a tendency that gives rise, Neiman argues, to the most pernicious distortions of political life. In a consumer society, adulthood is confused with the capacity to accumulate overpriced toys, while “ideas of a more just and humane world are portrayed as childish dreams”. That water ad neatly captures this sinister inversion; “living young” means regression to the ingratiating cuteness of the baby, to a smiling docility into which anger, curiosity, confusion or any other qualities of an actual young life will never intrude.
Growing up, on the other hand, has come to be identified with the cynical resignation that responds to any protest against the present state of the world, or aspirations for its future, with amused condescension. In the language of moral philosophy, we don’t dare invoke what ought to be against what is, for fear of seeming unworldly. It’s a fear that is itself (a nicely wry observation, this) chronically adolescent, “born of a time when few things feel worse than being less grownup than your peers”.
So how, when the force of an entire culture seems to be ranged against maturity, can we make a serious case for growing up? The question takes Neiman to debates at the heart of Enlightenment moral philosophy. In her version of the story, the chilling and admirable villain is David Hume, the great demolition man of all our fond metaphysical presuppositions – “that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, that killing your father is an unspeakable crime, even that any one event ever caused another”.
Hume’s point is that morality doesn’t belong to the world of facts, so that we’re never authorised to say that something “is” wrong or right. Killing your father is doubtless a messy and distressing business, but any inference of its objective immorality from its subjective unpleasantness is what we would now call a psychological projection. Assertions of right and wrong derive from feelings, not facts, and the outrage you may feel in the face of this claim only proves its point.
This Humean scepticism has crept insidiously into our culture. In today’s travesty of maturity, the conviction that things ought to be different to the way they are is dismissed as chimerical, an effect of the childish narcissism that confuses subjective sentiments with objective truths.
To this disingenuous brutalism, Neiman opposes the precarious task set by Hume’s great philosophical antagonist, Immanuel Kant, of learning “the difference between is and ought without ever giving up on either”. In the face of contradictory demands to “stay young” on the one hand and to “get serious and stop dreaming” on the other, argues Neiman, the most subversive aspiration would be to maintain contact between youthful hope and mature clarity of vision.
Harrison’s sense of our juvenile malaise is not far removed from Neiman’s. Drawing on Stephen Jay Gould’s controversial thesis of biological “neoteny”, which argues for the persistence of juvenile features in the adult organism, Harrison suggests a cultural neoteny, whereby “the synthetic forces of wisdom” are perpetually rejuvenated by “the insurgent forces of genius”. Countless dead civilisations warn us against an excess of wisdom over genius. But the ominous spectre of our own time is just the inverse: genius without wisdom brings not rejuvenation but “juvenilisation”, a syndrome that “gives youth a premature old age and old age a callow youthfulness”.
Juvenescence often seems to want to breathe wisdom into its very diction, not always with the happiest results. Harrison’s prose mannerisms can lurch uncomfortably into unintended self-parody (there is, he writes, “more celestial spheres than general relativity in my projected universe; more ancient Athens than world wide web in my cultural geography”). But perhaps the patrician tone is more canny than it sounds, a conscious antidote to the lazy knowingness and complacency of so much contemporary commentary.
One of Harrison’s quirky side projects is Glass Wave, an alt-rock band made up largely of Stanford literary scholars, who sing edgy riffs on great books from Virgil to Nabokov. They’re actually very good, not least because they don’t pretend to be other than the happily over-read, ageing professors they are (though it helps to have an ice-cool younger woman fronting the band).
Resounding through Why Grow Up? is a more distinctly youthful voice, sounding a little like the inspirational teacher that countless high-school movies make you wish you could have had. Neiman is an impassioned and lucid expositor of some very recondite concepts, with that rare ability, especially evident in her appreciation and elegant dismantling of Rousseau’s Emile, to convey the continued relevance and urgency of philosophy for our distracted times.
Less persuasive are Neiman’s ideas on how best to grow up, an odd way to elaborate her call to critical independence of thought. As tends to happen when a philosopher attempts too swift and direct a translation from theory to practice, the resulting counsel – go without the internet for a week, learn foreign languages, do work you’re passionate about – is leadenly didactic, losing the suppleness and ambiguity of the original ideas.
What these fascinating, expansive, occasionally infuriating books share above all is an interest in maturity as an ongoing internal relationship with, rather than a renunciation of, our younger selves. Given that focus, their minimal references to Freud – the unsurpassed thinker on the child’s hidden insistence in the adult – is surprising. This doesn’t appear to stem from any special hostility to psychoanalysis tout court – Neiman finds a nice analogue for her Kantian model of growing up in Donald Winnicott’s account of the “maturational process” as a process of gradual disillusionment.
But Winnicott is valuable to Neiman in her vision of growing up as a striving for an autonomous, critically rational self. The evasion of Freud is an evasion of the infantile as the excessive, disturbing and finally incomprehensible dimension of our lives. To protest against aspects of our reality, writes Neiman, far from being childish, is to follow “the first law of reason itself. The principle of sufficient reason is simply the demand that the world should make sense. Injustice does not.”
But how reasonable can it be to demand of the world that it make sense in the face of the overwhelming hourly evidence that it can do no such thing? What if the first task of growing up is, on the contrary, to acknowledge our compulsively comic and tragic defiance of this demand to make sense?
To order Why Grow Up?: Philosophy in Transit for £7.19 (RRP £8.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
To order Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age (RRP £17.50), go to press.uchicago.edu
Josh Cohen is the author of The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (Granta).
