INFANTILISED : HOW OUR CULTURE KILLED ADULTHOOD

By Keith Hayward

Constable. 422 pages. £25. ISBN 978-1-4087-2059-2

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Recently I watched a television programme in which two “celebrities” worked their way across Spain, the end purpose of their visit being to see the mother of one of them who lived in Barcelona. Neither of them are Spanish, nor did they seem to have much interest in where they were, its history, customs, and culture. Instead, what we mostly saw, apart from a few glimpses of Seville, Granada, and one or two other obvious places, was them behaving like a couple of teenagers, giggling and pushing each other, fooling around with hand fans, and joking with a few locals. Both I would guess are in their thirties or perhaps forties, and I’m told that they appear as dancers on TV.  Inevitably, we were treated to the sight of them attempting to fit in with a group of flamenco performers.

It’s possible to argue that the programme wasn’t meant to be more than light entertainment and, as such, shouldn’t be expected to do more than appeal to an audience whose expectations rarely, if ever, extend beyond the easy and the frivolous. To have tried to say anything significant would have fallen on deaf ears. Better to have “a bit of a laugh”. If you want history or art you can look elsewhere. Perhaps you can, though too often the looking may take a little longer than expected as you try to locate something of substance among all the channels now available. I’m not someone who believes that “whatever is gloomy must be profound, and whatever is cheerful must be shallow”, but there are times when the determination not to be serious appears to be about to overwhelm the feeling that there might be more to life than what lies on the surface. 

I couldn’t help reflecting on what I’d seen on TV as I read Keith Hayward’s provocative and insightful book. He writes of a “contemporary culture driven by infantile preoccupations and let’s pretend distractions”, and of being “talked down to by barely educated politicians or, even worse, told what to think by entirely uneducated celebrities”.  According to Hayward our world is being turned into “a giant pop-cultural playpen”, as we see on TV a “constant parade of emotionally incontinent sports personalities and delusional reality stars”. That’s just a sample of what he thinks, and should anyone assume that he’s simply another old  fogey sounding off, page after page offers examples of the “dumbing down” of everything from advertising to art galleries, music to politics, ways of dressing to attitudes to other people. Very little seems to escape Hayward’s attention in terms of his determination to demonstrate that the drift into infantilism is almost unstoppable.

It’s worth saying a few words about him, at least from the point of view of how and why he came to write his book.  He’s an academic criminologist (University of Copenhagen) and says that he began to notice that “the newly arrived eighteen year-old undergraduates on my criminology courses resembled less mature teenagers on the cusp of adulthood and more fearful children adrift in a world of adult autonomy.......I had been teaching a class on terrorism for over a decade, but now I was getting student emails claiming the context was ‘too challenging’, the images in my lecture slides ‘upsetting’ and ‘disturbing’ “.  And he adds that “parents started popping up on campus, fussing about their child’s workload”.

Evidence like that might be seen as selective, and I have only ever had a very limited experience of university life, so I’m not in a position to challenge it. But it does seem to bear out what academic friends and associates have told me about student behaviour, along with stories of  those studying literature who rarely read a book. And who have no real understanding of history. As Hayward says, “to make sense of the present you must know something of the past”. But for “the infantilised actor, ‘doing history’ is often viewed as a chore, an unwanted distraction from the personalised, always-on world of consumer stimulation and digital diversion”.

Hayward does direct some of his most critical comments at television, perhaps rightly so in view of how great an effect it can have on the way people think and how their attitudes are formed.  His argument is that it’s responsible, both in its programming and in the advertisements that disrupt the continuity so that it’s hard to sustain concentration, for breaking down the division that once existed between childhood and adulthood. He refers to “the concept of life stage dissolution, a merging process that makes it increasingly difficult for many young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them -  and indeed vice versa”. In other words, we see children wanting to be adults before their time, and adults wanting to revert to their childhood years.  In a list of programmes, “best described as children’s TV for adults”, he includes “All I Want(ed) for Christmas, in which adult celebrities reminisce about Christmas past and finally get to open the toy they always hoped to get in their childhood stocking”.

 As for advertising, I’ll point to just one area that Hayward deals with.  “Neoteny – the retention of youthful and baby-like features within adults – is a powerful driver of attractiveness among humans. Now, it seems, the advertising industry is striving for something similar in the marketplace – cuteness, prettiness and baby faced lovability as psychological brand associations”. To back up his argument he uses an illustration from an Evian “Live Young” campaign, which was aimed at “those who refuse to settle for just one path. It’s for the multifaceted, and we define it as those people who want to live young, be what they want to, try what they want to and do what they want to”. It is, he says, “a perfect illustration of the blurring of neoteny and fresh-faced adulthood”. And, in my view, more to do with adolescent dreams than any concept of an adult life. “I want. I want”, is the cry of the spoiled child.

When it comes to music, which,  for me these days,  is almost like a tyranny as it’s forced on us whether we like it or not, Hayward mentions the Muzak that, at one time, could be heard in “shopping malls and other retail spaces”. He asserts that now we have “an altogether more sophisticated form of sonic branding” to contend with : “From the use of audio-visual screen advertising in toilets, taxis, and coach headrests to the ubiquitous ‘rhythmic contemporary’ and ‘adult urban’ playlist blandcasts that saturate pubs, bars, restaurants and shops, the contemporary urban experience is one marred by digitally compressed formulaic noise pollution”. I’d go so far as to say that many people are uneasy unless they have this noise in the background as they go about their daily  routines. Like children, they need to be reassured by its presence and they worry if it isn’t there : “The twenty-first century kidcult must be constantly sonically stimulated, if not via socially isolating ear buds or noise-cancelling headphones, then via the aural pacifier of piped-in musical earwash”.

Turning his attention to the contemporary art world, Hayward is scathing about such celebrities as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.  He is of the opinion that Koons’ “creative thought process” is summed up by his comments on Balloon Dog (Orange) : “he hoped it recreated and celebrated  the experiences that evoke a child’s enjoyment of the world”. As for Hirst, his “oeuvre seems to grow more juvenile in orientation. In 2017, for example, his Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable turned around a ludicrous ‘the legends are real’ premise that mixed comic book fantasies with ‘fossilised cartoon characters‘ ”. That adults would go and look at this stuff, and pay extravagant sums for it, tends to bear out Hayward’s theories of infantilisation. It can be argued that there was justification in the early-twentieth century  slogan of “Make it new” as an effort to change art, and perhaps even society, but now it seems more a case of “Make it a novelty”. It won’t change anything, but it will make money. Because that’s what the art world is about.

To add weight to his arguments, Hayward reproduces a photo of an exhibition space at Tate St Ives : ”After various rooms of art from the nineteenth century that explore themes such as community, work and metaphysics, this is what visitors to Tate St Ives encounter in the final exhibition space as the exemplification of twenty-first century artistic expression”. It has exhibits akin to the “nearest adult romper room”. I have to say that I had a nagging doubt about “rooms of art dating from the nineteenth century” at Tate St Ives, which, judging  from the experiences of my visits there, is more dedicated to twentieth century art. You need to head to the Penlee Gallery in Penzance to see splendid examples of the kind of art produced in Cornwall in the nineteenth century.

It would be interesting to know what Hayward thinks of the fine abstract art produced around St Ives in the mid-Twentieth Century period?  We do know what he thinks of the “graffiti artist Banksy , whose sixth form-style radicalism is so lionised by latte liberals and bourgeois tastemakers that in 2019 he was voted ‘Britain’s favourite artist of all time’ ”. Though it’s obviously not directly connected with art, it occurs to me to mention Hayward’s reference to Russell Brand “who in 2013 was inexplicably voted ‘the fourth most significant thinker in the world’ by Prospect magazine”.  Being by nature always a little wary of liberals and intellectuals, I’m never surprised when they come up with cockamamie ideas. It’s fiction, but not too far removed from reality when, in the satirical novel Art by Peter Carty,  the cognoscenti gather in a fashionable gallery to view the latest work by an acclaimed young artist. One of the knowing addresses his companions as they stand at a distance from the canvases on the walls : “Excretion is inextricable from being. It’s our original spoor or mark, outside of any social hierarchy, beyond any cultural norm. It is the primary creative medium. It’s the summary of our existence, the proof that we are alive. It is what all art is. If there’s a better material to work with, I’d like to know what it is. Tell me”.  It doesn’t sound much different from some of the nonsense I’ve come across in academic art criticism over the years.    

Looking back to an earlier decade, Hayward takes a swipe at the legacy of the 1960s. He sees that it led to “an unnecessary intellectualisation of popular music”, (oh, how I agree and I’m  happy to hear someone say it) and he points out how much of the so-called radical content of the music was spurious : “But for all its rebellious intent, Sixties rock music did little to undermine Western society’s established geometries.......any subversion that rock and other contemporaneous musical genres did manage to generate was not just accommodated by corporate culture but often served as its soundtrack -   and not just after the fact..... but right from the outset”. Anyone who was around in the Sixties, and not fooled by the razzmatazz of “flower power”, “underground culture”, “alternative society”, and all the rest of the slogans of the period, will know how easily it was all quickly taken over by commercial interests and used to make money. I wish I could remember the name of the African political activist who, when asked about white rock performers visiting his country and pontificating about its problems, said, “Pop music is for children, politics is for adults”. Which ties in with the suggestion that, for many involved in so-called radical protests, “generational consciousness was as important as class-consciousness”.

I’m not sure anyone would want to make the comment about pop music and politics today, when politicians pander to the public by claiming to be great pop muisic fans, and say they listen avidly to the lsatest groups. Their reading lists also aim for the popular, as if they’re afraid to admit that they’re likely to take on anything that might be seen as serious. One of the most dispiriting things I came across in a newspaper not too long ago was an article about what politicians had been reading. One man’s choice of a couple of history books and the biography of a statesman,  was described as “pretentious”. Perhaps it would seem that way to a readership of adults whose tastes run to the Harry Potter books. Hayward notes that “contemporary bestseller lists are regularly dominated by Potter-esque and Hunger Games-style titles commissioned specifically to tap into the Millennial (wo) man-child book market”. And he refers to the Irish novelist John Banville’s worry that the “infinitely wide world of adult fiction is being eclipsed by childish fantasy stories and other magical narrative tropes”.

But we live in an age when, during the run-up to the recent general election, the leader of the Liberal Democrats toured the country engaging in bungee jumps and the like. There’s a photo in Hayward’s book of two Labour politicians, Andy Burnham and Ed Balls, dangling from a tyre swing at the opening of a children’s playground. He says it is “a physical manifestation of the new politics of the playground if ever there was one”. I suspect that admirers of Burnham’s useful work as Mayor of Greater Manchester might well object to Hayward’s employment of a single photo to suggest a wholescale sellout to infantilism, but it is, on the other hand, possible to see the point he’s making. It is part of the general trivialisation of almost everything, and as such moves us into dangerous territory. With talk of extending the vote to sixteen year-olds we could be looking to a future where the prime minister might be whoever tops the pop music charts during the week of a general election.   I’m exaggerating, of course. Or am I? When the public were invited to suggest a name for a new Polar scientific research ship they voted for “Boaty McBoatface”, a childish choice if ever there was one.

I’ve moved around Hayward’s book and admittedly selected just a few aspects of it to write about. He covers a lot more ground, and in doing so builds up a persuasive case for claiming  that creeping infantilism is a threat to democracy : “an infantilised culture is one that leaves its flanks open to the incursions of soft authoritarianism”. He quotes the words of the  sociologist Simon Gottschalk : ‘while we might find it trivial or amusing , the infantile ethos becomes especially seductive in times of social crises and fear....It’s not difficult to imagine an infantile society being attracted to authoritarian rule”.  

Hayward isn’t the first to write about infantilisation,  and he pays tribute to other authors who’ve touched on the subject. Christopher Lasch’s various books (The Culture of Narcissism, in particular)  are worth referring to, and I recall reading Andrew Calcutt’s Arrested Development : Pop Culture and the Erosion of Adulthood some years ago. But he’s provided a powerful and well-argued case for the prosecution and it will be interesting to see if  anyone can come up with an equally convincing argument to rebut his claims of decline. There will, no doubt, be defenders of pop culture, particularly among those who make a good living from exploiting the naive faith of its adherents, young and old, but that wiil not be the same thing as deconstructing his text to challenge it. And, as I observe the creeping introduction of news and features about pop singers into Radio 4’s programming (“the Beatles wrote some of the greatest lyrics ever written”, announced a participant in one show, making me wonder if he’s ever listened to any songs composed before 1960?}, and I see Tate Modern advertising “An art adventure playground for all ages”,  I think that Keith Hayward may well have got it right.