Freddie :
I gotta tell you, I’m such a fan of sweeping ideas and idiosyncratic solutions to social problems that I’m naturally kind of attracted to Newt Gingrich’s new grand scheme , even if it is from one of the more odious people in American politics. Certainly, I think teenagers are much more equipped to maneuver in the world than we give them credit for, and we have such a schizophrenic vision of adolescence anyway— for example, the routine sexualization of adolescent girls in media and culture, but the absolute horror at actual sex by adolescent girls— that maybe something like this is natural.
It’s sex, though, that would scuttle this idea from ever happening. (I’m sure that Newt is not taking this idea 100% seriously, at least as a policy goal, but still.) If we emancipate children at thirteen or so, it’s inevitable that these adolescents would choose their sexual partners as freely as other adults would. Some of them would choose conventional adults as their sexual and romantic partners, and I don’t know if society is going to accept that. I’m fairly liberal, as far as those things go, but I certainly don’t want thirteen year olds having sexual relationships with thirty year olds.
Awesome open question there as to why , right, but I want to zero in on Newt’s concept of abolishing adolescence in the context of Locke’s all-too-crisp demarcation of children and adults. For Locke, in order to adequately demolish the fake paternalism of absolute rule, it was essential that real paternalism — the rule of father over child — broke off cleanly and completely when the child ‘came of age.’ (This may be a mild overstatement, but maybe not.) If maturity wasn’t amenable to bright-line demarcation, the case could be made — Apatow! cough; cough — that adults, and especially men, might well remain emotional, psychological, or dispositional children well into their (sexual) maturity . . . and that none but the state can properly handle the scale of that situation.
So Newt’s modest proposal has all the appeal of throwing any couch potato fledglings out of the nest: you can’t make an omelet without breaking some chicks, in other words, and it’s plain enough that we’ve got lots of shattered — or at least bruised — peeps poking around the national social scene. But the natural rejoinder to the Second Would-Be Gingrich Revolution (interestingly, yet another proposal on the right to resituate the site of conservative action in culture instead of politics) is one that should be familiar to conservative critics of libertarianism — who often characterize clever libertarians as basically liberalism’s Darwinists. Given that hyper-Lockean liberalism has eroded the cultural fabric, how can we maximize our fitness and survive? Or, to sensationalize things — but I think this is pretty accurate — how can we ensure that our kids grow up to be Angelina Jolies instead of Ben Stones ?
The silly thing here, of course, is that as any libertarian will tell you we aren’t all cut out to be Angelina Jolies — not even in a hugely permissive cultural milieu, and not even with the State trying to force things. Any attempt to egg on that kind of world would actually involve doing huge damage to the college-for-everyone system. And that’s what I’m not sure "society" would "accept." There’s no doubt that college has become our institutional embodiment of (long) adolescence; taking even a few steps down Newt’s road would call deeply into question the whole ideology of upward mobility in this country — including the adult endpoint that is considered the legitimate outcome of that process . Kids without adolescences, especially long ones, don’t turn into the kinds of adults who did have them. One of the more interesting questions about the appropriate location of Locke relative to a lockbox is whether Locke’s Lockean individuals — swiftly, crisply matured, with no adolescence — transformed for some reason we can understand into our Lockean individuals — slowly, messily matured, with a long one.
