Harrison - Juvenescence : a cultural history of our age

Juvenescence

Robert Pogue Harrison

Juvenescence

A Cultural History of Our Age

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

ROBERT POGUE HARRISON is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian literature and chair of graduate studies in Italian at Stanford University. He is the author of Forests, The Dominion of the Dead, and Gardens, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2014 by Robert Pogue Harrison

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17199-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17204-0 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226172040.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harrison, Robert Pogue, author

Juvenescence : a cultural history of our age / Robert Pogue Harrison.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-17199-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-17204-0 (e-book)

1. YouthfulnessPhilosophy. 2. Neoteny. 3. Maturation (Psychology)

4. AgePhilosophy. 5. AgingAnthropological aspects. I. Title.

BF 724.2. H 2014

305.2dc23

2014029541

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

to Andrea Nightingale

Contents

This book grapples with a simple question that has no simple answer: how old are we? By we I mean those of us who belong to the age of juvenescence that began in America in the postwar period and gradually spread eastward, moving against the westerly drift of civilization that the ancients called translatio imperii.

There is no way to engage that question without probing the phenomenon of human age in all its bewildering complexity; for in addition to possessing a biological, evolutionary, and geological age, humans also possess a cultural age by virtue of the fact that they belong to a history that preceded their arrival in the world and will outlast their exit from it. Like other life forms, we humans undergo an aging process, yet the historical era into which we are born has a great deal to do with how that process unfolds, even at the biological level. We are a species that, for better or for worse, has transmuted evolution into culture, and vice versa. Thus a seemingly simple questionhow old are we?places us in an unfamiliar region where, among all the life forms on earth, we find ourselves alone and without definite coordinates.

Cultures powerful evolutionary force has gone into overdrive at present, transforming our kind in fundamental ways even as we speak. Genetically, humans have not changed for the past several thousand years, or so were told, yet todays thirty-year-old woman on the tennis courts of San Diego seems more like the daughter than the sister of Balzacs femme de trente ans. In my fathers college yearbook, I see the faces of fully grown adults the likes of which I never encounter among my undergraduates. In earlier ages, twelve-year-old boys looked like little adults, their faces furrowed by the depths of time. By contrast, the first-world face of today remains callow, even as it withers away with age, never attaining the strong senile traits of the elderly of other cultures or historical eras. The difference lies not merely in our enhanced diets, health benefits, and reduced exposure to the elements but in a wholesale biocultural transformation that is turning large segments of the human population into a younger speciesyounger in looks, behavior, mentality, lifestyles, and, above all, desires.

How is such juvenescence possible? Is there a biological substrate in our species-being that sponsors it? How can we be getting youngeras individuals as well as a societyeven as we continue to age? And what future, if any, does our juvenilization have in store for us? These are questions that surround and traverse the core question of how old we are from the historical point of view. I have chosen to engage them through a multifaceted approach that takes into account the relevant biological and evolutionary factors, while keeping my primary focus on the broad lineaments of Western cultural history. Indeed, I have found it necessary to offer in these pages what amounts to a philosophy of history as well as a philosophy of age as such, for in the human realm age and history remain inextricably bound up with one another.

This book is at best ambivalent toward the unprecedented juvenescence that is sweeping over Western culture, and many other cultures as well. At the very least, I seek to gauge the risks it entails for our future, assuming we have one. As it convulses the historical continuum with increasing vehemence, our era has rendered the world an alien place for those who were not born into its neoteric noveltiesfor those who are not native to the new age, as it were. At the beginning of his Doggerel by a Senior Citizen, W. H. Auden wrote, Our earth in 1969 / Is not the planet I call mine. This feeling of world-expropriation has grown far more intense for many citizens of the planet since 1969. An older person has no idea what it means to be a child, an adolescent, or a young adult in 2014. Hence he or she is hardly able to provide any guidance to the young when it comes to their initiation into the ways of maturity or their induction into the public sphere, for which the young must eventually assume responsibility, or pay the consequences if they fail to do so. It has yet to be seen whether a society that loses its intergenerational continuity to such a degree can long endure.

One of the claims of this book is that our youth-obsessed society in fact wages war against the youth it presumably worships. It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness, shelter, and solitude, which are the generative sources of identity formation, not to mention the creative imagination. It deprives them of spontaneity, wonder, and the freedom to fail. It deprives them of the ability to form images with their eyes closed, hence to think beyond the sorcery of the movie, television, or computer screen. It deprives them of an expansive and embodied relation to nature, without which a sense of connection to the universe is impossible and life remains essentially meaningless. It deprives them of continuity with the past, whose future they will soon be called on to forge.

We do not promote the cause of youth when we infantilize rather than educate desire, and then capitalize on its bad infinity; nor when we shatter the relative stability of the world, on which cultural identity depends; nor when we oblige the young to inhabit a present without historical depth or density. The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history. It is also the greatest blessing a society can confer on itself, for heirs rejuvenate the heritage by creatively renewing its legacies. Orphans, by contrast, relate to the past as an alien, unapproachable continentif they relate to it at all. Our age seems intent on turning the world as a whole into an orphanage, for reasons that no oneleast of all the author of this booktruly understands.

Juvenescence has no interest in promoting a doomsday vision of the future. I do not offer prophecies here, if only because our age makes it impossible to predict the outcome of the upheavals it relentlessly provokes. At present, no one can say whether the storm of juvenescence that has swept us up in the past several decades will lead to a genuine rejuvenation or a mere juvenilization of culture. All will depend on whether we find ways to bring forth new and younger forms of cultural maturity. Nothing is more important in this regard than resolving to act our age. I mean our historical age. The past does not cease to exist simply because we lose our memory of it. A multimillennial history lurks inside us, whether we are aware of it or not. We may be the youngest society in the history of human civilization, yet we are also the oldestand getting older, decade by decade, century by century, millennium by millennium.