Youthening

Youthening February 5, 2015

Robert Pogue Harrison glances at his father’s college yearbook and finds that “twelve-year-old boys looked like little adults, their faces furrowed by the depths of time” (Juvenescence, x).

We’re younger now: “the first-world face of today remains callow, even as it withers away with age, never attaining the strong senile traits of the elderly of other culture or historical eras. The difference lies not merely in our enhanced diets, health benefits, and reduced exposure to the elements but in a wholesale biocultural transformation that is turning large segments of the human population into a ‘younger’ species – younger in looks, behavior, mentality, lifestyles, and, above all, desires” (x).

We are youthening, to such an extend that “an older person has no idea what it means to be a child, an adolescent, or a young adult in 2014.”

Harrison doesn’t think that our youth obsession is healthy for the young. He puts the point strongly: “our youth-obsessed society in fact wages war against the youth it presumably worships” because our age “deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish.” Things like “idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the sources of identify formation, not to mention the creative imagination.” Like “spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail. It deprives them of the ability to form images with their eyes closed, hence to think beyond the sorcery of the movie, television, or computer screen. It deprives them of an expansive and embodied relation to nature, without which a sense of connection to the universe is impossible and life remains essentially meaningless. It deprives them of continuity with the past, whose future they will soon be called upon to forge” (xi).

As Harrison says in one of his characteristic aphorisms: “The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history.”


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