How progressives have upended the idea of maturity
The rejection of older generations is doing serious damage
One of the things I did in The Tribe was to show how ‘the liberal-left’ had upended the meanings of many common political concepts (like ‘equality’, ‘tolerance’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘racism’) so that the positive ones come to describe what they do while the negative ones attach to their opponents.
I wrote of how,
the various positive terms come to blur into one another as variations on a single theme, assigning positivity to politics which explicitly favour a favoured group, while the negative terms blur into a general disfavour towards those who support different forms of politics. Any intrinsic meaning the words might have disappears into the politics, by which the other side appears as absolute evil while our side appears only as good.
In this chapter, The Control of Language, I also spoke of how George Orwell identified a similar thing in his essay Politics and the English Language. He pointed to words including ‘fascism’, ‘reactionary’, ‘progressive’, ‘science’ and ‘equality’, saying they “are often used in a consciously dishonest way.”
I’m not sure about the ‘conscious’ part of it. Some of the cruder ideologues are certainly guilty of conscious dishonesty, however probably more so back in Orwell’s time when progressives hadn’t developed the sophistication they have now. Rather I think the moulding of language to suit political agendas generally takes place on a borderline unconscious level, appearing as possibility and familiarity, aided by a general slackness and lack of genuine understanding of the meaning of words.
Who really knows what ‘progressive’ means after all?
As I’ve realised in the years since writing The Tribe, there is an awful lot of this stuff going on, but much of it is so difficult to pick up since it’s baked into everyday speech.
One example I’ve identified recently – that now seems obvious – is a shift in the meaning of maturity.
This one is even more hidden,less conscious and less orchestrated, than many of those classic concepts mentioned above. It concerns not so much the word itself (‘maturity’, or ‘mature’) as the universal idea behind it: that having developed more over time is a good thing and, consequently, that older people are more qualified to decide things than children.
In this sense, maturity isn’t so much a key term as an implicit social value - and progressives have turned it on its head by their classic shift of emphasis from the present to the historical. They haven’t rejected maturity per se, but have rather reframed it around ideology - seeing it not in terms of an individual maturing as they get older but as history doing so. Time is a vehicle of improvement for them, so the more time passes, the more mature society is and the more mature people are within this society.
A major logical consequence of this is that younger people come to appear in a sense as more mature – as better in a very general sense– than older people, because they appear in history later. They are by definition more progressive, less backward than their parents and grandparents. They are ‘the future, not the past’. Far from having anything to learn from their ancestors, they are responsible for overturning the inheritance that has been passed down to them. Their mission is to change society, even to change the world. And this often means rejecting their parents, backgrounds and cultural inheritance.
The popularising of these progressive ideological assumptions among teenagers and young people has some serious negative consequences, as I was reminded yesterday watching Neil Oliver interviewing Louise Perry on GB News.
Perry is the author of the recently-published book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Towards the end of the interview, around 11 minutes in, she points out that the idea of progress,
. . . cuts generations off from each other, and it means that young women today for instance are kind of primed by that ideology to reject what their mums have to say and to reject what their grandmothers have to say, because ‘oh, whatever, it’s in the past.’ . . . And everything new must necessarily be better than what’s old.
This means that teenage girls and young women (and indeed their male equivalents, though that has a different dimension) are not learning from those who have been through the whirl of sex and relationships before them. They are blank slates, free agents, free choosers. But this leaves them prone to meekly follow what is fashionable – which is variations of the idea of free love, so casual sex, without much responsibility to each other beyond satisfying each other’s sexual ‘needs’. And this tends to benefit those who aren’t much interested in lasting relationships and children – principally men.
Liberals of the right may think smugly that this is all the fault of lefty ideologues, but not so fast.
Free market ideology has also made a lasting contribution to the dismissing and discarding of older generations and their wisdom and expertise by the younger. The latter are after all egged on not just by left-wing activists and politicians but by corporate promotion and advertising, seeking to overturn existing social relations in order to craft new ones around their products.
Change, choice and economic relations prevail over trust, inheritance and social relations wherever you look in our public life, and this constantly feeds into our private lives, particularly of those who don’t have many other social tools to hand.
The whole idea of maturity and wisdom attaching to older people has pretty much gone. And, as much as you might think that young people are indeed ‘the future’, this isn’t completely a good thing.
How progressives have upended the idea of maturity
Having spent my life trying to grow up - not an easy task for anyone - I find it infuriating that my children tend to characterise me as naive or backward or, yes, immature. Perhaps this has ever been the cry of youth - although when I was a teenager, despite the fact I reacted against my parents, I never saw them as immature. This is a very good piece, I think.
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