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America's Crisis of Maturity
Published in Reclaiming Quarterly Winter 2003
by Jessica Murray
October 2002
Ours
is a notoriously immature culture. One could even go so far as to say
we pride ourselves on our adolescent ethos. Youth is king; juvenility
is cool. Our president was not offended when he was portrayed as a comic-book
super-hero on the cover of the satirical German magazine Der Spiegel.
He was flattered.
Our
mass obsession with physical youthfulness has been widely noted; the very
word "mature" has become a euphemism for "no longer young
and beautiful". But far more insidious is the damage our cult of
immaturity has inflicted upon the non-physical aspects of our beings.
As a group, we lack a maturity of mind and soul.
Maturity
is not the same thing as intelligence. Americans suffer no lack of intelligence,
if only in the classical sense of the word: access to education and information,
of which we have a surfeit. If we do not read deeply enough in our newspapers,
behind the puff pieces and beyond the infighting of national politics;
and if we do not listen between the lines of the blaring television lead
stories to see patterns of meaning, that is a problem of maturity.
The
American mind suffers from a deadening superficiality. Our religious institutions
have calcified into bureaucratic dogmatism, as institutions will, and
have lost their ability to engage the numinous imagination. Church theologies
do not help us to form the questions that would lead us deeper into our
soul-lives; instead they offer pat answers to only those questions church
fathers say should be asked. Religious seekers are not encouraged to seek
at all; we are supposed to learn our answers by rote, as children recite
the ABCs.
Theology
in its most simplified form is fundamentalism, which one can find everywhere
except in a social context informed by spiritual maturity. Were we encouraged
from childhood to develop our spiritual selves, to cultivate our own unique
cosmologies with increasing subtlety and artistry as we aged, the notion
of a literal, static Paradise would find no takers. Such a reductionistic
picture of the infinite inter-cyclic universe would be seen as a bizarre
attempt by clerics to keep people in arrested development spiritually.
If
philosophical maturity were valued in this country, a policymaker would
be hired for the subtlety of his or her ideas. An elected official would
be laughed off the podium if he came out with the kind of absurd black-and-white
pronouncements that we have recently been hearing under the auspices of
authoritative decree. Bad-guy/good-guy characterizations would be confined
to kindergarten discussions, just as stick-figure drawings are appropriate
at only the very beginning levels of making art. For a leader to declare
that the rest of the world is "either with us or against us",
or that his enemies "hate freedom" (this, from a government
that is starting to detain peace activists at airports!), would be considered
insulting to the intelligence of his listeners.
Were
political maturity valued in our civilization, pundits would be judged
on the basis of their critical thinking. Government spokesmen would not
dare to tell journalists to "watch what they say", as if they
were naughty children at a dinner party. Were ideological maturity the
goal in public discourse, sound bites would be relegated to selling chewing
gum, not used to sum up world affairs. Historical complexity would inform
what was written on the Op Ed page. Any mention of Saddam Hussein's current
weapons capabilities would logically be accompanied by at least a fleeting
mention of the fact that the Reagan/Bush administration helped him plan
and execute chemical weapon attacks against Iran in the '80s. As it is,
information-vendors blatantly indulge the public's alarmingly short attention
span, instead of doing their job: expanding our understanding by providing
intelligent context.
It
is no accident, of course, that TV commentators do nothing to challenge
the public's ignorance. The American telecommunications industry has fundamentally
changed over the past few years. A few immensely powerful conglomerates
now control all the major media outlets, and the industry's ties to Washington
have never been tighter. Consumers of the evening news who imagine that
this will not skew the information they are receiving have not heard the
one about the fox guarding the hen house.
And
what about consumer maturity? In a capitalistic society, free-thinkers
are a liability. They are less likely to follow orders as to what to consume.
Fashion, whether in clothes, tech toys or foreign policy, depends upon
suggestibility and conformity; and both are more likely when the self
is insecure or undeveloped. Blue jeans manufacturers may insist that by
buying their jeans, purchasers are making a wild and crazy statement of
uniqueness; but the truth remains that self-aware individuals are less
likely to throng into Macy's to acquire the latest self-image prop.
Youth
is by definition a phase of life with a shaky ego-structure, and it is
to youth that most of the advertising in America is directed. When we
are teenagers, our relative identity-lessness and yearning to fit in with
our peers make us a Madison Avenue gold mine. By the time we reach chronological
adulthood, we have theoretically developed the requisite ego cohesion
to be able to say, "That may be a nice pair of jeans, but I do not
need them in order to have an identity." It is the mature buyer who
is more likely to beware.
However,
in a cultural milieu where chronological age does not guarantee true maturity--
indeed, where most forms of maturity are suspect at best and despised
at worst-- it is questionable whether this discernment ever fully develops.
Without discernment, we are left with insecurity. And we buy, blindly.
As
I write these words, the clique of oilmen who run this country are trying
to bully us into war, despite immense and obvious moral, financial, international
and even military counter-indications. Beginning their big media push
the day after September 11th 2002, the president's viziers made no bones
about trying to "sell" the war, blandly admitting that their
timing was "a centerpiece of the strategy"; that is, the strategy
to exploit the fear and grief of the citizenry. Mention was made of the
conventional marketing wisdom to delay the introduction of a new product
until after Labor Day.
Being
targeted, pitched at, and gulled is so much a part of the life of the
average American consumer that as we listen now to our businessmen-cum-politicians
smugly discussing the details of their plan to sell us a campaign of massive
death and suffering, we are almost numb enough to accept it. The movie
"Wag the Dog", which presented as laughable just a few years
ago a situation very similar to what is happening now, would fail as satire
today because the scenario has lost its giggle of implausibility. The
perversely ridiculous has become the perversely unremarkable.
It
is time to reclaim our adulthood. We must summon up an emergency dose
of intellectual maturity in order to expose and denounce the appalling
onslaught of propaganda polluting the mass media, and to inform ourselves
through alternative means, for example, the international press, as to
what is really going on in the world. We need emotional maturity, too,
an example of which would be to modify our recent 9/11 mourning rituals
to reflect the reality that throughout these months of American bombing,
the Afghani people have suffered as a percentage of their population more
than twice the deaths we suffered that dreadful day.
Spiritual
maturity would mean refusing to be infantilized by morally bankrupt leaders.
We must try, like big girls and boys, to rein in our fear and reactivity,
and opt instead to follow a planetary vision bolstered by a genuine curiosity
about what is going on outside our country's borders. Such maturity would
mean rousing ourselves out of denial and credulity, and taking stock of
what our government is doing in our name. It would mean using our thinking
minds independently, grounding ourselves in the facts while centering
ourselves in the heart.
It
is urgently necessary that we grow up now. Within every one of us at birth
is a magnificent potential, a maturity designed to be grown into, to be
lovingly cultivated as we age. We must take another look at our particular
version of adulthood, re-interpret it, embrace it and put it into action.
If we do not, we will suffer, and cause suffering, like lost and dangerous
children.
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