Chilhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke’s epic sci-fi novel Childhood’s End centers around the disappearance of all children from the Earth, leaving behind only bewildered adults. It turns out in the novel that the children have been transported into membership in a galactic civilization, a kind of Biblical “Rapture”, which the adults are deemed unfit to possess.  The supreme irony of course is that it is the children who have become galactic adults, while the human adults are left behind to squabble “like children” over the broken toys of politics, ethnic differences, finance, nuclear armaments, etc., all vainly  seeking to satisfy their own desires at the expense of others.  The children have gone beyond.

My sister-in-law, who struggled through life fighting the necessary battles of the “feminist revolution”, hates Freud.  She gets particularly irate at his many put-downs of women (a vice of his time and place), and derides his now substantially superseded views of the psyche. Many of Freud’s concepts do seem antiquated after 100 years, but it is a mistake to toss them all. Some are timeless, and his social psychology, particularly that in Civilization and its Discontents, is both memorable and dangerous to forget.  Freud particularly speaks to our current times by pointing out that civilization itself is based on deferred gratification, a term he coined.  I was reminded of that last night while reading an article by Paul Roberts in The American Scholar, entitled “Instant Gratification”, for it deals extensively with what Roberts sees as a vicious societal feedback loop in which we as a society are being trained by our own inventions to surrender to our individual impulses at the expense of the society itself. We, according to Roberts, are victims of our own successes in devising things that control us and that we cannot control.

Roberts’ article is actually a condensation of his recent book by the same title, and deals with the effects on American society of the accelerating pressures to act impulsively. Roberts places some of the blame on the pressures of the computer and the internet, but traces the beginnings back to warnings in the 1970s by sociologists such as Daniel Bell. Those first warnings were based on the emerging effects of mass marketing, which later were compounded by the efficiencies of the computer. He notes that the typical grocery store which in 1950 marketed about 3000 products became the 1990’s supermarket with a product list of 30,000 items (and is morphing into the online Amazon whose offerings become uncountable.)  When so many offerings compete, nothing stands in the way, especially scruples. Roberts emphasizes my old theme of runaway Capitalism operating without a brake and destroying everything it hits along the way (I must admit it gives me warm and fuzzy feelings for him.)

Roberts cites a Madison Avenue marketer as claiming that marketers have discovered the shortest route to your wallet is through your lower “reptilian” brain which evolved in an age of survival by blood, claw and dominance at whatever cost to others, and mass marketing is designed to stimulate this urge for dominance by aggressive action. The future is always discounted in favor of immediate personal reward through impulsive action.  Egged on by marketing, an addiction to impulse develops. When this mentality inevitably creeps into other spheres, then societal institutions cease to restrain unsocial behavior, and finance becomes preying on the weak. Roberts notes that management compensation has become inextricably tied to share value, and that – consequently? - between 1992 and 2006, the number of SEC filings implying a prior possibly fraudulent misstatement of corporate earnings increased from 6 annually to 1200. Peaceful solutions to global conflicts are discounted, climate change becomes part of an inconsequential future, politics becomes libertarian denial of mutual responsibilities or extreme statements aimed only at short-term wins, and community is replaced by isolated individualism.  In short, Freud’s deferred gratification as social glue no longer binds, and societal disintegration proceeds.

If that were the total picture, Roberts’ warnings could be discounted like those of Malthus and Marx as showing the right concern but the wrong long-term vision.  For new technologies like mass marketing and the internet force value shifts and always cause temporary societal upheavals berated by critics and lauded by advocates that later become merely another strand of living. Reading was a revolutionary skill after Gutenberg, and fueled the Protestant Reformation, the modernization of Europe and the writings of Casanova and Rabelais; now we take it for granted in a six-year-old. The new technologies are used well, like the use of mass marketing to support individuality, and poorly, like the appeal to the “reptilian brain.” Society adjusts to both. Roberts himself notes that millennials are beginning to react against some of the worst excesses, and hopes that points to a brighter future.

We have to take account, though, that Roberts is describing a problem of advanced societies, but we are emerging into a global society. He has pinpointed a cultural lag problem in one area of a world beset by differing cultural lag problems everywhere. While we struggle with mass marketing, Africa struggles with how to enable its cultures to handle AIDS, Malaria and Ebola, parts of the Middle East struggle with how to transform a 12^th century worldview into one viable in the 21^st century, and the whole globe tries to work on common problems like climate change, extreme hunger, migrations and ethnic hatreds which require communication and cooperation among all. We can no longer afford to “play alongside” other societies, like toddlers. That is the really big problem Roberts did not address – how to adjust, and help other societies adjust, to our own and their cultural lags as we integrate the globe. If we limit our own world view to the dominance through bloodshed perspective of the reptilian brain, we help neither ourselves nor the Middle East, and 30,000 grocery items are not a solution to world hunger. It is time to leave our societal childhoods behind. We have adult tasks to accomplish.