An Infantile Culture
Even the advertisements are cartoonish likely to appeal to children instead of the adult target market of parents and grandparents, so what exactly is happening here.
Look at the one too many bizarre blogs along the lines of; what Harry Potter can teach us about……….just insert your personal preference in the blank space.
Granted the Harry Potter series was popular but the books’ target market was children for flips sake, or at least pre-pubescents and teens.
Even if many people once enjoyed reading the books as children, it’s hardly here nor there and certainly not an excuse or a topic for stimulating adult conversation now.
Whatever happened to giving up childish things?
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”
To be sure, technology and social media in particular have normalized and accelerated our culture’s infantile tendencies and this is really bad news.
Society-wide arrested development
People can become fixated at a particular stage of development and fail to reach an age-appropriate level of maturity and psychologists attest to this.
Also when facing unmanageable stress or trauma, one can even regress to a previous stage of development.
Although this is not problematic per say because people self-adjust down the line.
The problem is current culture routinely infantilize large swaths of the population.
Frankfurt School scholars such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and other critical theorists suggest that — like individuals — a society can also suffer from arrested development.
Certainly, this moves along with a lot of help and encouragement by society’s gatekeepers.
According to these scholars, adults’ failure to reach emotional, social or cognitive maturity is not due to individual shortcomings.
Rather, this state of affairs is due to deliberate social engineering.
Visiting America in 1946, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss commented on the endearingly infantile traits of American culture. He especially noted adults’ childish adulation of baseball, their passionate approach to toy-like cars and the amount of time they invested in hobbies.
However, as contemporary scholars note, this “infantilist ethos” has become less charming and more pervasive over time.
There have been reams written about higher education’s tendency to infantilize students, whether through monitoring their social media accounts, guiding their every step, or promoting safe spaces on campuses.
The same peculiarities are endemic in company culture ‘gatekeeping’ employees 24/7.
Then we witness the rise of a “therapy culture,” which, as sociologist Frank Furedi warns, treats adults as vulnerable, weak and fragile, implying that their troubles rooted in childhood qualify them for a “permanent suspension of moral sense.”
He argues that this absolves grown-ups from adult responsibilities and erodes trust in their own experiences and insights.
Researchers in Russia and Spain have even identified infantilist trends in language, and French sociologist Jacqueline Barus-Michel observes that we now communicate in “flashes,” rather than via thoughtful discourse — “poorer, binary, similar to computer language, and aiming to shock.”
Others have noted similar trends in popular culture — in the shorter sentences in contemporary novels, in the lack of sophistication in political rhetoric and in sensationalist cable news coverage.
While we might find it trivial or amusing, the infantilist ethos becomes especially seductive in times of social crises and fear.
Its favoring of simple, easy and fast betrays natural affinities for certain political solutions over others.
What’s a fast, easy and simple alternative to this political process?
It’s not difficult to imagine an infantile society being attracted to authoritarian rule.
Unfortunately, our social institutions and technological devices seem to erode hallmarks of maturity: patience, empathy, solidarity, humility and commitment to a project greater than one-self does.
All the above are qualities traditionally considered essential for both healthy adulthood and for the proper functioning of democracy.
