Читать книгу Arrested Development - Anthony Moorehead - Страница 5

We’ll be looking at a number of changes which occurred over the last (few) decades that have facilitated or engendered arrested development, both in individuals and collectively. We’ll start with philosophical changes, as they are the most serious; for it is the way that one’s mind perceives life, the world and truth that determines his attitude and behaviour. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

This belief is a popular favourite among those who would argue against the subject of arrested development even being raised, much less discussed. Our pop culture celebrates and prizes youthfulness, while perceiving agedness as undesirable and dreaded. This is characteristic of our 21st Century Western Civilization. Other societies, removed either in time or geography, have held agedness and the maturity, experience and wisdom that are usually commensurate with it, in high esteem.

Nobody, and I include myself here, relishes the physical deterioration that comes with aging. Like so many others, I try to keep physically fit and mentally stimulated. Yet there is a difference between this and the mindset of today’s society that celebrates, embraces and aspires to everything redolent of what is deemed youthful. One’s dress, perspective on life, pastimes, taste in music, relations with the opposite sex, etc., which previously distinguished the generations, have now become blurred. The Bon Jovi song, “18 Till I Die,” is the dictum of our day, whereas the admonition to “grow up and act your age” is considered prudish, repressive and anachronistic. These changes in attitudes and expectations have led to a condensing of the generations, resulting in a somewhat indistinct, homogenous soup. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. I thought as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things”¹ is a better point of view.