pity the children

I pity the children. I mean not only children in the literal sense, but the many millions of minds being actively entrained towards an increasingly childlike, indeed infantile, relationship with the world, with others and, ultimately, with themselves. A technocratically mediated culture rewards and reproduces the simplification of the self most likely to sustain and reproduce that culture. It offers ready-made identities, ready-made enemies, ready-made virtues, ready-made vices and, above all, ready-made explanations. An ascendant ideological caricature, some hybrid of “greed is good” and “might is right”, teaches that selfishness is strength, kindness is weakness and domination is evidence of merit. Many of those who cultivate fear and hatred still speak fluently of compassion, love and charity. The contradiction is not incidental. It allows dependence to masquerade as conviction, cruelty as righteousness and obedience as virtue. There is, after all, a profound difference between being called to be as children and being encouraged never to become anything more.

The deepest tragedy is not what this world teaches children. It is what it teaches adults to become. Increasingly, maturity is presented not as the difficult work of becoming more thoughtful, more responsible or more capable of living with complexity, but as the freedom to remain psychologically uncomplicated. Simple identities. Simple enemies. Simple moral certainties. Simple responsibilities. Better still, responsibility itself is transferred elsewhere. There is always another authority willing to explain the world, another institution willing to think on your behalf and another technology promising that understanding is unnecessary. It is an extraordinarily comfortable arrangement, right up until reality sends the bill. I pity the children because the version of adulthood increasingly being held before them is one that quietly ensures their infancy never ends.