Ponce de León was not looking for the legendary
fountain of youth when he made landfall in Florida in 1513. Gold and slaves
were his primary concern—and he found plenty of both. But legend was right to situate
the mythical fountain in the New World, the future global wellspring of corporate-crafted
youth culture. And five hundred years after de León, New World technological
innovation has pushed the envelope to the genetic limit and beyond in terms of
extending the lifespan of an elite minority, some of whom are no doubt the
distant heirs of conquistadores, with winter homes in Florida.
Of course merely to live forever has never been the point of
the fountain of youth. Merely to live forever, to continue to exist, is to
become old beyond all reckoning. Such a fate would be a curse not wished upon
your worst enemy. The mythic appeal of the fountain of youth is not the
conquest of death, but the conquering of the aging process itself, the promise
of eternal youth. The reward for consuming the potent water is to be permanently
transported to that imagined state of youthful perfection at the very fulcrum
of maturation just before the degrading erosions of time take hold. It is in
this, not in the evasion of death but in the eternal paralysis of aging, where
the technological fount of modern civilization has been most successful.
Sure, we have several methods for maintaining youthful vigor
and extending a more youthful appearance well into what was once considered to
be old age—some more effective than others (diet and exercise programs, hair
dyes and implants, plastic surgery, Botox, Viagra, joint replacement, etc.). But that’s not what I’m referring to here
when I claim that civilization has succeeded in paralyzing the aging process. A
more youthful appearance and participating in activities traditionally associated
with youth are just the superficial trappings of youth. Where the technology of
modern civilization has delivered on the fountain’s promise is in preventing
people from actually becoming adults in the first place: forced dependence on mass
technology prevents the development of adult patterns of social, emotional, and
psychological maturity.
Maturity can be defined simply as an increase in the
capacity for self-regulation. A newborn has virtually no capacity to
self-regulate. An infant can’t stifle a cry or keep itself awake, and its
emotional state is entirely a function of internal and external environmental
conditions. A toddler can direct its body in the pursuit of its own goals, but
is unable to override the dictates of its emotional state, and has extreme
difficulty redirecting its behavior or disengaging from a particular activity once
begun. It is only with looming puberty that the child gains some proficiency at
severing behavior from the dictates of its immediate emotional state. Over time,
we see a proliferation, expansion and extension of the behaviors, domains, and
venues in which the child is able to exercise a modicum of self-control. Maturity
in this sense is parallel with autonomy: a mature person is one who has the
capacity to engage in independent thought and self-regulated behavior.
The machine of civilization functions by tightly restricting
and directing (and redirecting) the behavior of its human components. Independent
thought and self-regulated behavior do not merely run counter to the efficient
operation of the physical and bureaucratic systems of mass “society,” they pose
a direct and potentially catastrophic threat to these systems’ continued
existence.
Modern global mass society—through the development and
increasingly irresistible implementation of uncountable psychological, social,
physical, and bureaucratic technologies designed to increase compliance and inhibit
self-regulation—has managed to engender a more or less static state of
immaturity among its “adult” participants.
Ours
is a society of chronically immature children.
No comments:
Post a Comment