Growing Up

Why are we so afraid to grow up? To look as though we have some experience? To tell each other how old we are?There are obvious reasons. If we are still in the working world, people assume younger workers will be more attuned to the current technology, that they will be more creative and have more energy. This is often not the case.

If you are looking for a partner, it matters if you want to start a family. But somehow people have become obsessed with looking young, spending large amounts of money to fix the lines in their faces, their teeth, their muscle tone. Of course we all wish to be attractive and healthy at any age. Part of this perception is in ourselves, and part in the thoroughly enculturated person glancing at us.

When I was a kid, we would note a person trying to look younger than their age, dressing flirtatiously. “Mutton dressed as lamb,” we said. We felt sorry for the person, sorry they had lost their dignity in trying to be something they were not. People in the Midwest where I grew up probably still think this.

Gary Snyder posited that the “surface culture” we all experience is an anomaly, a fragile layer of industrial capitalism, entertainment and consumerism on top of the deeply indigenous relationship to the land of our 10,000 to 40,000-year-old ancestral human cultures. Remnants of the ancient culture surface in agrarian cultures such as the one I grew up in. In these cultures, you can call a spade a spade. Objective reality rules and folk wisdom is as good as any other.

This makes sense to me. And explains some of our current political problems. We are all humans with human bodies and needs. We don’t want to go back to a time before the medical progress we have made, or before the powerful communication capabilities we now have, or before the struggles for equality we have all been through.

But at this point, the “surface” corporate culture has crept into every aspect of life in the West. In Merced, California, people watch Netflix and get things delivered from Amazon. In Mankato, Minnesota, people use Uber and eat canned and processed foods with the best of them.

But now, as I am making large statements, I would like to say that the dominant “surface” culture is bankrupt. We are in a tumultuous time when it is hard to see what is going on. But it seems that Romanticism, which has held sway in the arts for 250 years, is broken. 

When it began, Romanticism took on the Enlightenment, which threatened to make reality into a purely physical, visible, measurable and knowable state. Romanticism valued freedom, pluralism, creativity, youth and the will. But it was based on the premise that objective reality didn’t exist, that we could make our own. If you want to know how Romanticism has run culture, how it helped, but also results in many dangers, look at this lecture series by Isaiah Berlin on “The Roots of Romanticism.”

Modernism and post-modernism are variants of Romanticism. These variants serve the dominant corporate culture by slicing us into individualized units scarcely answerable to anyone but ourselves, with the object of making more money. Corporate culture has been very successful, taming and pulverizing most of us into thinking there is nothing else. It makes children of us, preventing us from growing up and thinking for ourselves. It dishes out whatever we want and keeps records of it. We eat this up, but it keeps us from having an interior life of our own. People are beginning to see what is going on, however. They are beginning to fight back.

And it is easy to see why the dominant “surface” culture values youth over age. When a young person signs up as a card-carrying member of a capitalist society, he or she is seduced by dreams, catered to and market-surveyed for the rest of their lives.

With age comes wisdom and the suspicion that the “surface” culture hasn’t gotten everything right. We are not atomized individuals without a context. Experience, responsibility  and dignity, grown up virtues, begin to kick in. Older European cultures, agrarian and indigenous cultures may not be as enthralled with “the new” or as exciting, but they have classical staying power. We can learn from them. They have their roots sunk deep into the truth. They can better withstand corporate pressure.

And why did I want, as a kid, to move from the Midwest out to the Coast? I was driven to it. I wanted to participate in the “surface” culture. Why? Because I wanted to learn how to frame life, how to make art of it. Because, most generally, people have difficulty seeing themselves. They need their lives to be “framed” in art, in stories, as everyone does.

But I don’t hold with the Romantic concept of life. I’m interested in families and groups, not in the private dreams and obsessions of individuals. As a teenager, I found bohemian poets and rebellious guys in black leather jackets on motorcycles exciting, but no longer! Give me the grandmother with a head full of stories, the threads in a community I can follow back in time, another take on history which someone has unpacked. We all have a lot of growing up to do.