Epiphyseal Platitudes

"Trying hard to fit among you
Floating out to Wonderland"

 

Garbage - When I Grow Up

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"whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics,* and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience [...] no real conviction in these other sciences, but only say the words, whereas the nature of mathematical objects is clear to them."

 

Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics

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"It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired."

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love

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Unbelievable as it may sound the concept of adolescence is a fairly recent contrivance, a 20th century effort to explain the process of behavioral maturation by inserting an intermediate period of development. (Which is to say teenagers were invented quite recently; it was in all the papers.) Blame Piaget for his whole notion of multiple developmental stages. In preindustrial societies you might at most just get a party upon turning fourteen or fifteen; then have fun shitting out babies or getting limbs hacked off for the rest of your short, miserable life.

 

I should be doing something important right now and I'm not. I'm playing computer games and telling you about how I'm not doing the important thing. This is not adult behavior. The adult thing to do would be to lounge about dozing, find something to eat or wander around checking if any of you are musclin' in on my vittles an' wiminfolk.

...

I should probably clarify we're talking about adult animals in general, not just humans.

Humans are weird. Freaky naked pole-monkeys that act like wolves without canines.** And one of our weirdest features is retaining curiosity into adulthood. Adult mammals rarely play. In fact they generally avoid novelty on principle. From the myriad haphazard gambols and caterwauls in which a developing brain indulges, maturation prunes down to a handful of instinctively satisfying or environmentally adapted motions... and for the most part keeps performing those few motions, by rote, for the rest of the animal's days.*** But our brains are more customizable, thanks largely to our childishness, letting us assimilate more advanced concepts and for longer to boot. Daniel Dennett continued learning new ideas at an age when most people do nothing but watch sitcoms from fifty years ago, yet in every speech he somehow reminded me of that friend in grade school who used to wet his finger and stick it in your ear.

This train of thought is brought to you by one of the latest of the many adaptations of Pinocchio. I was... not impressed. (In fact Guillermo del Toro's name has lost its shine for me by his latter output.) Both the hokier-than-Disney family drama and the presumably unimpeachable anti-fascist era shift are gratuitous audience-friendly concessions extraneous to the story's original setting and charm, for which they leave no room. Worse though the deliberate vandalism of Collodi's basic message. If you hate an old story for its outdated moralism and want to provide counterpoint, great, but you don't get to claim you're adapting it any more than what comes out of my own ass is an "adapted" pizza.

Pinocchio's original adventures were very much in keeping with old fairy tales' didactic messages like "don't talk to / go anywhere with strangers" and so forth, only adapted to a social milieu in which literacy and technical know-how were gradually replacing traditional peasant life. All of a sudden the world was more complicated than hitting dirt with a stick. There was more to learn. Diverse opportunities for mischief. More temptations. Wider repercussions. More confusion. Collodi's solution was to tell you to be a good little boy and mind your elders until you learn how to be a productive citizen. Not a message that ever resonated with my chaotic neutral self, and the book was never one of my favorites growing up, but at least it made some sense of its premise.

 

The latest maladaptation does not.

Instead they turned it into yet another tedious noble savage myth in which all evil comes from some conveniently external source letting the audience know just when to throw popcorn at the screen. The utterly ignorant hero is somehow always right and anyone smart or educated must be a sinister cackling villain subverting that childish state of grace. But the message "you're perfect just the way you are" doesn't mesh with the simple observation that... you're not. You might be tempted like the rant below this comic to strain at parallels to fascism because Pinocchio is made to fall in line with the rest of humanity, conveniently ignoring Collodi's repeated demonstrations that Pinocchio's ignorance first and foremost endangers himself. Remember one of his first actions, after letting his creator get dragged away to jail under pretense of mistreatment and murdering the cricket for giving him advice, is to burn off his own wooden feet trying to dry them. In fact, children's natural need to learn from adults is rooted not in prosocial finger-wagging but in self-preserving information like "don't eat the red berries" or "stoves are ouchy" or in the case of my school-age self "don't climb atop grandma's house because those shingles aren't actually glued to the roof!" (Good to know.)

There's a word I keep finding myself applying to modern pop-culture: infantile. It grew especially pertinent when every single snowflake started demanding censorship unto its own personal safe space, but long prior we'd been hearing comments that twenty-somethings were not living stable lives, or that universities had become day-care centers, that adulthood was being delayed, etc. If it is true that preindustrial societies' teenagers didn't use to experience the same intensity of "sturm und drang" and parental conflict as they do now, it's not unreasonable to look at the earlier achievement of personal agency as at least partial explanation. On the other end of the spectrum, the word "Senate" was born of the observation that no matter what else may change in the world over a long lifespan, human nature does not, and even if age confers wisdom in no other sense, experience with the antics of one's fellow apes is directly cumulative. If a child does not automatically metamorphose into an adult upon hitting 18 or graduating high school or college, this only mirrors the equally insane popular perception of "retirement" as cessation of public life altogether.

Can a wooden boy ever grow up? How old must a man get before entish tree-ish wooden unconsciousness takes over? Most seem willing to frame Pinocchio staying wooden at the end of del Toro's rape of a classic as somehow hopeful and personally empowering, you're perfect just the way you are, yadda-yadda. But Pinocchio remains conspicuously static, stagnant**** in his gullibility and recklessness, his imprudence, until the very end. He's not just "not a real boy" but a marionette, something requiring the intent and effort of others to operate. The compulsive hedonism of childhood, aside from not being quite fully human, is nonfunctional, and progress comes when Pinocchio stops needing babysitters to save him from the gallows.

And then what? A lovable flammable scamp unto eternity?

Maybe it's my half-bestial nature talking, but I really don't like either conclusion, either Collodi's enforced maturity or del Toro's enforced childishness. Rare is the coming-of-age story which truly presents a youth as individual, not merely the target but also the impetus and process of becoming. In fact, just as consciousness itself is process and not state, we should remember there are no children. It's a temporary condition in individual life. Adult/child actions are potential in both but enabled by development and circumstance. (I've certainly met quite a few fifty-somethings who could stand to grow the fuck up.) You might say 16-year-olds shouldn't vote because they don't know anything, but be honest: neither do 20-year-olds. Most monkeys needn't worry about statistical analysis of carbon deposition trends in ice core samples from the late pleistocene, or about the effect of expansionist policy on regional financial stability in late Roman governance. Shit takes time to wrap yer head around. If many official grown-ups make such poor decisions, maybe it's because they never had that time.

 

Neoteny helps brain plasticity, but mental flexibility comes with instability. If we need adults to remain more flexible, to keep learning and adapting, then we are also asking them, implicitly, to remain more childish. You might consider it problematic that adolescence keeps getting pushed later into adulthood, but if anything, we need more layers. Or at the very least admit the phrase "he/she's an adult" means far less than we've always assumed, and the line between real/wooden boy... might be a dotted one?

 

Wow, that ran a lot longer than I expected. Who knew I had so much to say about the woodenness of boys? Smell ya later, I need to go adapt a pizza.

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* Wow, young people wise in math? Aristotle really did live 2300 years ago!

** No I was not talking about strippers, get your mind out of the gutter. I was obviously talking about lupae.

*** Ironically "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" is one of the worst examples, as we've selected them for playfulness.

**** This is, incidentally, why I always hated Data's Pinocchio schtick on ST:TNG. Data was not wooden. He did not stagnate. His inhumanity did not hamper him. Becoming a real boy would downgrade him.