I don’t mean by ‘adult’ the sorts of stuff once restricted to the combat zones of major cities, the sorts of stuff which wasn’t to be found in most small towns but for back closets of certain stores also dealing in numbers and sports bets, the sorts of stuff once hidden in boxes under the beds of some fathers and of some sons.
My thoughts on this matter came to life in a way because of a short note written by Graham Greene as an introduction to a novel, Loser Takes All published in 1955, the year of my birth. In that short note, Greene writes:
Unlike some of my Catholic critics, you, I know, when reading this little story, will not mistake me for ‘I’, nor do I need to explain to you that this tale has not been written for the purposes of encouraging adultery, the use of pyjama tops, or registry office marriages. Nor is it meant to discourage gambling.
This short note combined with a thought about the turn of Hollywood, once capable of accidentally making a serious and adult movie, to movies about Flash Gordon with better special effects, recycled cartoons with human actors and better special effects, and movies in which seeming adults show all the moral maturity of a Ferris Bueller who is now 40 and hasn’t learned anything from a lot of day’s off. In fact, being a ‘full-fledged adult’, he now feels free to act out more of his dreams and nightmares.
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off wasn’t particularly dangerous because it was about an escape day, a day of irresponsible play, for which the price had to be paid. And it wasn’t presented as an ideal about how we should behave, though it was perhaps something of an ideal about how we should freely misbehave for one great day in our lives.
The rest of the stuff pumped out by Hollywood in recent decades has been aimed at the already weak American mind, shaped by the public schools, by Saturday morning cartoons, by the likes of Leave it to Beaver. (I did have a weakness, and still do, for Bullwinkle and Rocky and for various flavors of Bugs Bunny and his friends, but those were remarkable entertainment products by current standards in requiring the viewer to sometimes know something about history and culture before he understands the jokes. You could say that Bugs Bunny compared to Scooby-doo was like the Marx brothers compared to the Three Stooges.) In any case, I had preferred to spend my time reading a variety of books about nature, books about life in other countries, idealized biographies of prominent Americans, and even collections of fables and fairy-tales. As I grew up, I started trying to read mathematics and science books but floundered badly without either adult guidance or a like-minded friend of my own age. I had more success with adult historical fiction and some straight historical works. And I was probably ready for college at the age of 13 or 14 and most certainly not ready for college at the age of 18 after my enthusiasm and work-habits had been destroyed by a run-of-the-mill American high school.
I wanted to be an adult. I was ready to take on learning as my job, but the pressure was on me to stay at the level of the textbooks and the classroom instruction. I didn’t have either a naturally tough or a properly nurtured moral character, the strength and courage, to move forward on the path which attracted me. It wasn’t that I knew what the real issues were, only that I was attracted to being an adult, one with some talent at learning a wide variety of material and one who enjoyed doing so though I had needed some guidance to help me to develop the perseverance necessary to stick with difficult material until it’s somewhat conquered. (Actually, I’ve since learned my ways of learning difficult material don’t match up well with classroom-style instruction. Among other problems, I like making one or two false starts at serious mathematics and physics. Apparently, that prepares the soil for a more successful effort to plow ahead.)
The problems with my lack of a properly developed moral character only increased with college where I found myself free of most adult guidance and also struggling with the serious freshman courses after my high school experience had led me to believe schoolwork was easy. I was also struggling with too many opportunities to drink beer, play cards, and just toss the bull. I had learned a path to success in high school: go to class, do homework when you had no choice, and ace the course. It didn’t work when I found myself in real classes with fellow-students who knew how to work.
We Americans wish to live the adolescent life from 13 to the grave and we do all we can to slow down the maturing of our youth.
What’s cause-and-effect? Do we set out to remain adolescents and thus adopt an adolescent life-style, including juvenile movies and music? Do we find ourselves in a society which presents us with an adolescent life-style when we should be adults and we adopt it and continue with it as the advertisements and other forms of propaganda encourage us to remain immature? I doubt there’s any clear answer when we’re considering complex systems such as higher organisms — where I leave the word ‘higher’ loosely defined in this context.
Most modern human beings will claim to be creatures of free-will, creatures made for freedom of various sorts, when it suits their purposes. Most of those human beings seem to have entrapped themselves in ways of thought which represent false responses to God’s Creation, but those ways of thought are very convenient to that loosely defined class often labeled the ‘power elite’. The basic problem seems to be a seduction of willing victims rather than a rape. Tocqueville was right that Americans are self-censoring and self-brainwashing creatures who would likely create what we’d call a benevolent totalitarian society. Hawthorne was right that Americans prefer promises of financial security to any true sort of freedom. Melville was right that Americans are morally insane, refusing to perceive Creation honestly and believing they can do better than the Creator. Twain was right that Americans aren’t preparing themselves for any Heaven compatible with Christian beliefs — we prefer DisneyWorld with a Superbowl stadium on the grounds. Ray Bradbury was right when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1950 and predicted that television would be sufficient to push us into that totalitarian state feared by Tocqueville.
There are many others who spoke from the viewpoint of historians seeing patterns of decay emerging in the modern world — such as Hannah Arendt and Paul Kennedy and Jacques Barzun and many others. There was Solzhenitsyn who spoke of Americans as being uniquely evil, less evil at that time in acts than most powerful peoples of the modern world but seeing ourselves as morally pure because of those abilities to self-censor memories and to wash our brains of inconvenient contents.
Our public disorder has increased. We tolerate dirty language. We tolerate ill-behaved children on the streets. We tolerate the intrusions of corrupted bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies which act in the way of police-state thugs. We tolerate constant wars against peoples who haven’t harmed us, though we’re willing enough to accept the most unconvincing propaganda so that the war can begin. We tolerate, no — we honor, politicians who have committed the same acts as foreigners we’ve hung as war-criminals.
I’d suggest that the real problem is that the Western mind has decayed. We can’t establish or even maintain moral order because doing so in the complex modern world requires a good bit of knowledge and some high levels of thinking skills. And we can’t even reach the level of our ancestors from the early periods of the Modern Age, when the world was growing larger and more complex and more complicated faster than could be chronicled.
In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun has given us a history of the previous 500 years in the West, showing that there has been a relatively steady, certainly relentless, decline in quality literacy, that is, the mental and visual skills necessary to read serious books. I’d certainly argue that that sort of quality literacy is necessary for the abstract reasoning which is a part of the sort of advanced civilization our ancestors built and left to our irresponsible selves. In a sound-bite: without Goethe, there will be no Einstein.
We have entertainment at the level of a morally perverse adolescent because that’s the level we’re at, the level we choose to be at. Individuals can rescue their minds and moral characters from states of decay. There are few in the modern West who have chosen to do so. It’s not a matter of ‘higher-level’ learning but of basic learning about God’s Creation, the sort of learning we were supposed to get in our schools after acquiring basic reading skills. To be sure, it helps to read a few narrative histories about any turbulent period of history. Read about World War II if you always wondered why your father couldn’t speak much about what he experienced on the front-lines at the Battle of the Bulge though he spoke about the fun they had in the latter days of boot-camp after the training had eased off. Read about the Revolutionary War or the writing of the Constitution if you want to know what’s at issue in current attempts to rein in a government of men who have no limits on their desire for power over other human beings. Read about your own town or region and ask yourself, “What happened to the local tribes of Native Americans?” and maybe “Did the workers in the local factory, including Grandpa, participate in the violent wars of unionization during the 1930s?” Maybe pick up some older and more sophisticated historical novels — the so-called middle-brow novels of the pre-1970 period were often surprisingly substantial and the historical novels were often well-researched. When you have a grasp of some facts of history, return to the meta-historians I mentioned earlier: Hannah Arendt and Paul Kennedy and Jacques Barzun. Then pick up the Bible and read the books of the prophets and meta-historians Isaiah and Jeremiah to make some greater sense of the sound and fury of history.
Then you can start to go outside and see God’s Creation in its most tangible form, children playing tag and trees swaying in the breeze. Learn to pray or maybe refresh any existing habits of prayer. Learn to think along with the Creator, sometimes emptying your mind that it might be better filled and sometimes trying to make sense of those playing children as being part of the same story as were the young aristocratic women beheaded upon stages during the French Revolution as the crowds cheered. Then remember the children who’d starved in prior years while those aristocrats lived well and try to find out why.
I think the world would be a better place if we’d had adult entertainment these past few decades. I think it would have been a better place if we’d had better new history books in the public libraries, or if we’d just kept the old books. I think we didn’t have those better things because we weren’t better people.
They say that history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. I say that our literature and our arts, including music and movies, help us to find those rhymes in history and those rhymes help us to move appropriately, to move in potentially good directions and to move at proper paces. They teach us how communities form and fall apart through the ages. They teach us how to shape, first, our own souls and moral characters and, second, our communities. Who wants to shape their souls to the moral chaos of modern movies and television shows and novels? Garbage in and the garbage stays there.
I guess I meant to say that Graham Greene wrote about sin from an adult viewpoint rather than from the viewpoint of a perverse and confused adolescent. We would benefit from more books written by adults and entertainment made by adults, even when it deals with terribly sinful adults.