Academic Asininity

Gnawing Regrets

Apparently the human race is entering a new evolutionary phase. Academics have "discovered" a new stage of human development, entitled "emerging adulthood". What is that, we hear you ask? It is a new phenomena of young (emerging) adults putting off the responsibilities of adulthood as long as possible. Previous generations had a word for this: indolence. Now it is being seen as a new and higher stage of evolutionary human development.

Apparently, these restless, unable-to-settle-down, self-indulged, perpetually puerile twenty-somethings will eventually find themselves. In discovering their true selves, they will then be more successful, happy, better adjusted human beings than all the generations which have gone before. The previous generations were oppressed by circumstances beyond their control. They were compelled by circumstances to take a job, go out to work, marry, raise a family. These unfortunates were consequently unable to reach a higher stage of self-awareness or felicity, and so remain lower down the evolutionary chain. This is the latest offering up of asinine academic soup which has got everyone a-twittering, or is that tweeting.

According to a recent article in The New Atlantis by Rita Koganzon,

Extrapolating primarily from the statistics on the increasing age of marriage and childbearing in the United States and refusing to lament them, (Clark University psychologist, Jeffrey) Arnett argues forcefully that emerging adulthood is a positive development. Free from external constraints (and often supported financially by their parents), twentysomethings have the opportunity to try an array of temporary jobs, relationships, educational paths, and residences to find which of these are most to their preference. In winnowing down the options, they are also able to “find themselves,” a discovery that will serve them well as adults, assuming they ever decide to become adults. Armed with the self-knowledge gained from a decade of working at Starbucks, joining the Peace Corps, and sharing a basement studio in Brooklyn with four other emerging adults, those at the end of emerging adulthood will better make the family and career decisions they had been putting off, resulting in a future of greater life satisfaction and stability.

(Editor's note: the US is still way down the evolutionary and developmental chute. Emerging adults in the US are usually supported in their time of extending indolence by parents. Here is the much more enlightened antipodean paradise we call "God's Own" we have moved well ahead. Here in New Zealand, emerging adults are supported all their long indolent lives, should they wish, by the public purse and by productive citizens through the taxation system. Way to go. Far more advanced.)

This startling academic discovery of a new evolutionary phase of human development was profiled in New York Times Magazine article back in August, in a piece written by Robin Marantz Henig. It was full of breathless wowerism over this new "discovery" of human development.

Henig’s and Arnett’s argument about the benefits of emerging adulthood rests on an understanding of human authenticity as freedom of the will from external constraint. The most (in modern parlance) “self-realized” person is the one who most freely chooses his course and has the least imposed on him by necessity. The notion of childhood as a time of freedom from obligation plays into this conception of authenticity, since it seems to create a socially accepted hiatus from otherwise ubiquitous necessities. Thus, in Henig’s cursory history, there was a time before the periods of adolescence and even childhood were recognized, a dark age when people had to marry and bear children young, start working early and never stop, and otherwise do the things that we can now put off; otherwise, they would starve to death or be eaten by bears. Because these young people were not free to choose these burdens for themselves, they were never truly happy. But then man developed technology, and through it, luxury and a growing GDP, and found that he no longer had to subject himself to the grinding impositions of nature for his entire life. . . .

Now emerging adulthood is here to advance the upper limits of human freedom by a few more years by casting off later necessities: “fewer entry-level jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation, and birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.” Newly free from these externally applied burdens, people in their twenties have more space to shape their lives according to their own arbitrary wills.

This is the future of a society besotted with evolutionisms idiocies. In moving up from the primordial sludge mankind evolves from slimeball to tool wielder; then as emerging technocrat he stands astride Nature itself, able to take charge of his own evolution, able to support and sustain himself without work to a higher order of self-actualisation and happiness. Well, actually there is a bit of the old sleight-of-hand in there. Not "able to support himself" but rather, "sufficiently cunning to con other people into supporting him" would be more accurate.

And here is where the US reaches the cusp of gigantic evolutionary quantum leaps. It is on the verge of becoming like, you guessed it, New Zealand. You can see the ineluctable flow of evolutionist ratiocination "emerging", if you would excuse the pun. If higher stages of human evolution are achieved by non-compelled, self-actualised decision making by twenty-somethings who are left free to "find themselves" before being compelled to do anything by circumstances or necessity, then modern society is arguably anti-human if it does not ensure that all its citizens are adequately supported during this emerging adulthood stage, crucial to their higher evolutionary self-actualised development. So, our authors:

There aren’t institutions set up to serve people in this specific age range; social services from a developmental perspective tend to disappear after adolescence. But it’s possible to envision some.... How about expanding programs like City Year, in which 17- to 24-year-olds from diverse backgrounds spend a year mentoring inner-city children in exchange for a stipend, health insurance, child care, cellphone service and a $5,350 education award? Or a federal program in which a government-sponsored savings account is created for every newborn, to be cashed in at age 21 to support a year’s worth of travel, education or volunteer work.... It requires only a bit of ingenuity — as well as some societal forbearance and financial commitment — to think of ways to expand some of the programs that now work so well for the elite, like the Fulbright fellowship or the Peace Corps, to make the chance for temporary service and self-examination available to a wider range of young people.

OK, so it's not anywhere near our advanced stages of evolutionary ascendency. We would retort--hey, cut to the chase. The dole. Just pay all these emerging adults the dole in perpetuity until they discover themselves. That's what we do in New Zealand. It works a treat. We have all these higher self-actualised beings running around. They are inspiring to behold. All covered in tats, smoking weed, having had so many sexual partners they can't count them, let alone their own the children they have sired. But whatever else, they are free, and being free they have made far better decisions than the rest of us lesser backward mortals. They did not get to be where they are today by being compelled to do anything.

And the actual outcome of all this emerging adult self-realisation and self-actualisation? We know it well. Self-absorption and narcissism that spawns indolence and laziness--a trap once entered that places most beyond manumission. Here is the Scripture's image:

The sluggard says, "There's a lion in the road! A lion is in the open square!"
As the door turns on its hinges, so does the sluggard on his bed.
The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is wearing of bringing it to his mouth again.
The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer intelligently.
Proverbs 26: 13-16

The chains of indolence can only be broken in most cases by an act of divine grace.

Critics of the emerging adulthood theory point out the hopeless pettifogging question-begging the theory entails. Allegedly, free, non-compelled decision making is superior to decisions made under expectation and necessity. Brain development is allegedly enhanced if one is not compelled too early to take on responsibility. But, critics ask, What if it is the exact opposite? What if decision making under necessity and assuming responsibility actually enhances not only decision making but brain development?

But underneath it all there appears to be a deeper religious animus driving the academics. A suppressed premise is timelessness. People have lots and lots and lots of time to "find themselves" and eventually take on adulthood. Really. So, time apparently is not like an ever rolling stream that bears all its sons away? Apparently, the Bible has it exactly wrong when it says, over and over,

As for man, his days are like the grass;
As a flower of the field so he flourishes.
When the wind has passed over it, it is no more;
And its place acknowledges it no longer.
Psalm 103: 15-16)

We will leave the last word to the author of the piece in The New Atlantis, Rita Kagonzon:

Advocates of emerging adulthood share in common with children a proclivity to see the future as nearly infinite and themselves as, for all practical purposes, immortal. In their view of themselves and their world, it is never too late and there is never any rush. But a few-year increase in the average life expectancy has bought us much less time than they think, and it has done nothing to mitigate our potential to make irreversible errors and experience gnawing regret. The indefinite extension of childhood doesn’t even approximate the immortality required to free us from these miseries.