Why are adults acting increasingly like children?

An excerpt from the late Carl Sagan's highly-recommended book The Dragons Of Eden:

So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume. Modern men and women have braincases twice the volume of Homo habilis'. Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent. The American anatomist C Hudson Herrick described the development of the neocortex [as] "one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy."

Sagan speculates that the Eden myth is a metaphor for the evolutionarily sudden growth of our neocortex and our subsequent civilization.

Perhaps the Garden of Eden is not so different from Earth as it appeared to our ancestors of some three or four million years ago, during a legendary golden age when the genus Homo was perfectly interwoven with the other beasts and vegetables. After the exile from Eden we find, in the biblical account, mankind condemned to death; hard work; clothing and modesty as preventatives of sexual stimulation; the dominance of men over women; the domestication of plants (Cain); the domestication of animals (Abel); and murder (Cain plus Abel).

Civilization develops not from Abel, but from Cain the murderer.

A modern citydweller in the wealthy industrialized world experiences more informational novelty in a week than a hunter-gatherer on the Serengeti a hundred thousand years ago did in a lifetime. We need to retain neural plasticity well past the developmental phase, all the way through our recently much-extended lifespan. Childishness has become a necessary adaptive quality for me and my fellow Americans, the way that opposable thumbs and bipedalism were for our long-distant hominid ancestors. My physical prime is behind me and my slow decline is in progress, but my ability to form novel mental models of the world is just now beginning to really hit its stride, and barring some disaster, should continue to improve for decades hence. As our society becomes more complex, it takes longer to learn all the ropes. We are putting off childbirth to the last moment biologically possible, because there is so much preparation to be done.

Overgrown children with active imaginations can be like Björk, or like George W Bush; like Jon Stewart, or like Tucker Carlson. Childish metaphors can be extremely apt and useful generalizations. Superheros, for example, are a useful way to get a handle on some of the processes underlying ordinary consciousness. For example, there's a universal human tendency to anthropomorphize, to ascribe humanoid form and human motivations to every complex thing we encounter. Antonio Damasio says that our giving human form to abstract concepts like Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are a consequence of the imaged body states that give rise to all abstract concepts in the brain. Hence my sister's utterly apt superhero metaphors in her and Karen Pittelman's book Classified:

You can extend Molly's superhero model to any human trait. They're already on the case in Japan. In the capsule store in Kyoto, we saw action figures not just of giant robots and space beings, but also scary porn imagery and completely ordinary Japanese guys sitting on a sofa playing Playstation. Kawaii is a Japanese term which means "cute" in the action-figure sense, and young people there are great admirers of American comics and cartoons. The cartoon version of America is the outsider's version. Cartoon characters are useful bodily images of mental schemas. Bugs Bunny is handy visual shorthand for the concept "wisecracking Jewish guy with a penchant for drag." Calvin and Hobbes are shorthand for "contemporary suburban kids and their imaginary friends." Note that Calvin is Hobbes and Hobbes is Calvin. Charlie Brown is "a certain flavor of fatalistic depressiveness."

Not everything childish is so Kawaii. Childhood is also where we get the really vivid horror, and it comes from everyday things. The scariest things I can think of would have been the most mundane features of daily life for our stone-age ancestors: death, privation, pain, carnivorous animals, insects, flesh-eating bacteria, violent death at the hands of a rival tribe of humans or an unscrupulous member of my own tribe. Kids of my age don't have nearly so much firsthand experience of any of these things, but they continue to feature heavily in our imaginative lives. And we still have plenty of fear for tribal authority figures, especially our parents.

A print ad for Star Wars, Episode III that appeared in the New York Times around (ulp) Father's Day, with no apparent irony. Speaking of dudes with daddy issues: did you see the lightsaber duel between George Lucas and Stephen Colbert? How awesome was that?

There's a strong selective pressure on humans right now to retain greater neural plasticity longer. Like most evolutionary advances, this one will carry some costs. First of all, there's the obvious problem of adult power and responsibility running up against childlike fantasies, as exemplified by the Church of Scientology and the presidency of George Walker Bush.

Remember how this actually happened? I know, right?

Prolonging adolescence means delaying the separation process from your parents. The separation stage will be even harder if the connection was tenous to begin with, as I imagine was the case between Bushes elder and younger. It's true of a lot of guys I know, including me. I had a much closer emotional relationships to cultural figures standing in for my father than my late father himself at various times:

Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and really any trustworthy white male in a suit with an understated regional twang to his baritone voice

William Shatner, as Captain Kirk and throughout his career

Seth MacFarlane, particularly as Brian and Stewie on Family Guy

Mark Twain, both as Samuel Clemens and in his avatar forms Tom and Huck

Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim

John Cleese, especially as Basil Fawlty

Dr Mark Green on ER, especially what with the untimely death from a brain tumor and all

Bob Dylan, especially as he comes across in prose on Chronicles Volume One

Steven Spielberg, especially in ET and AI

Hank Hill on King Of The Hill

John Lennon

Albert Einstein

Garrison Keillor, particularly with regard to Lake Wobegon

Bob Wills

Björk

Miles Davis

Duke Ellington

John Coltrane

Jerry Garcia

Richard Dawkins

Charles Darwin

the actor Ron Livingston, more in physical appearance and demeanor than anything else

Nathaniel Fisher junior and senior on Six Feet Under

All the male characters in Star Wars

All the male characters in Lord Of The Rings, especially Frodo and Gandalf

Bill Murray, especially in Rushmore and Lost In Translation

All of the characters in The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

PG Wodehouse

Stephen Colbert

William H Macy's character in Fargo; also Frances McDormand's

Douglas Adams

Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of Super Mario Brothers

Keita Takahashi, designer of Katamari Damachy

Here's a passage from the Autobiography of Mark Twain, describing his reactions when he was told of the death of his daughter:

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dim sense of vast loss -- that is all. It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By an by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself balked, hampered, by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

I think that's how my dad felt toward his birth mother, and at times how I've felt about my dad. But if we aren't forced to differentiate from our parents, we can never settle our conflicts with them as adults. We're able to extend that anaesthetized, dissociative trance out over long periods, much to our lasting harm.

Our society is not set up well to encourage healthy attachments to form between children and their parents. Very few parents are raising their children themselves, and many are trying to do parenting-by-proxy without the help of a spouse, partner, aunts and uncles or any other trusted family nearby. The basic ability of Americans to form and maintain close attachments is severely compromised by the structure of our economy right now, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. Talk therapy and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have done wonders for me, but it's an expensive and time-consuming process. I think more preventative medicine would be a better solution.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top