In a recent conversation on the podcast Anchored from CLT, Dr. Cornel West offers insight on the explosion of the childish and the erosion of the adult. West, in a style as varied and unique as his thoughts, pinpoints a philosophical error at the root of our culture’s problems.
A truncated education
West explains that education in the true sense requires a dying to self, the ideas once prized, in favor of encountering lived experience more fully. Modern schooling forms an obstacle to education. Instead of educating for freedom, much of the modern classroom is focused on technical skills and practical accomplishment. The questions of the human person left unaddressed leave a void which will not go unfilled. In that void of questioning comes a sorely lacking and inadequate philosophy of who man is and what the purpose of his life is. West articulates this as a kind of Manichaeism.
He said, “When I talk about the spiritual decay and the moral decline and the intellectual narrowness, I’m really talking about the ways in which Manichaean views of the world proliferate when you deny complexity, humanity, nuance, ambiguity.”
Childishness in place of growth
West continued, “We’ve got this addiction to innocence. You think that somehow your innocent. And see anytime you make an appeal to innocence you’re on your way to a Manichaean view of the world. By Manichaean what I mean is all the good’s on one side, all the bad is on the other side. You’re on the good side. You can do no wrong which means you don’t take any responsibility, which means you live in a state of denial.”
This is the childish “adulting” in which experts tell you what to do. Absent bottom-up thinking, you rely on others to chart your course through life, never encountering the existential for yourself. As the perpetual child can simulate maturity through “adulting,” West notes the sin of those “grown rich without growing up.” In a marvelous turn-of-phrase, he said, “it’s Peter Pan life, it’s Disney Land-like.”
In an aside, West affirmed the difference between being childish and child-like. He said, “Child-like is very important: awe and wonder.” In the true child-like state is also true innocence. Like Adam and Eve before the fall, only the true child can be naked without shame. That full appreciation of awe and wonder that is the essence of innocence is inaccessible to one who has lost it. The addiction that West speaks of is then perhaps a grasping at a state that appeals to us but is foreign to us. Estranged from child-like wonder, we are unable to comprehend innocence, much less experience it.
If we are childish, then, we are simulating maturity but also immaturity. Not only are we “adulting” but we also pretending that we can be newborn, untainted by experience and compromise that comes with living.
Virtue rendered unattainable
West noted the need of those ensnared by Manichaeism to identify themselves with innocence. He said, “Once you make the move that somehow you’re pure, then either everybody’s pure or everybody’s so tainted that you can’t move forward. You’re paralyzed; you’re debilitated; you’re discombobulated.” Is this not the state of the climate warrior seeking purity? If veganism is your only virtue, your identity is flimsy. If your goodness depends on clinging to a narrow set of measurable behaviors, your sense of self will be thin.
Much comment is made about the virtue signaling of our time. By virtue signaling is meant the conspicuous display of socially-favored behavior in an apparent effort to seek approval. Generally, virtue signaling is seen as a calculated move to garner praise Maybe it is more. Disturbingly, virtue signaling may be a sincere attempt to emulate truly virtuous behavior. Absent the divide between public and private life precipitated by social media, many people may be blind to true virtue and left with only empty gestures meant to align them with what is good against the forces that are deemed bad. The troubling reality is that all of human life occurs somewhere in between those poles.
“Habitual vision of greatness”
The alternative to this dualism, West suggests is, using Alfred North Whitehead’s phrase, “habitual vision of greatness.” In this pursuit, there will be, West says, “joy as well as anguish,” but the journey makes a life worth living.
As always, it’s not enough to impose virtue and maturity on our children. The realities must be lived in us with verity in order to have a hope of being transmitted to the next generation. As West concludes, “You’re not a spectator; you’re a participant in this formation of your soul, you’re a participant in this attempt to be a certain kind of human being before the worms get you.”
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