Maturity in the age of Adulting
Why Civilizational Perseverance Requires an Appreciation for Beauty, Knowledge and the Maturity of Adulthood
My classroom is a front-row seat to youth anxiety. Many pupils are afraid, more than usual, of adulthood. What does it mean to be mature? Our society is confused about this; just look at the way the word is used in art. The prurient and salacious are masked under the terms adult and "mature audiences," but often, the behavior involved is anything but mature. Overgrown juveniles masquerading as adults are the gatekeepers of culture. How did that happen? This is partly because the youth are not taught how to pursue adult endeavors other than "get a job pay and pay your bills." The difference from childhood to adulthood is conceived in economic terms, and thus, you lose everything else that was understood about being a grownup. It is not the kids' fault; the adults are to blame.
This came to mind after conversations I have had with artists and designers in the last few years and in very different settings. Each time, they were lamenting that builders were making ugly things. In one case, an architect I knew said there was no concept of beauty among many of his peers. They could build something with four walls and a roof that would not fall over, but there was no grace or delight. In another, it was with an engineer trying to get his students to understand that the things they build need to look nice and appealing and not simply function.
However, the final incident was earlier this week when a colleague who teaches advanced mathematics discussed how he immigrated to the US and was helped by a well-off man who aided him in adjusting to life in America after living in the Eastern bloc. He said the American was a real gem, a smart engineer who made it big. My colleague visited this man after the American retired and found him in his home with a lot of construction going on; my colleague didn't get it; the guy's home was already huge. So he asked him what was going on, and the American said that after retiring, he really wanted to do something he wished he had done earlier: study history and philosophy. He was building an old-style library with the classic fireplace setup. Well, me being me, I thought that was the story, and I excitedly told them that it sounded like a cool way to live, and my colleague let me know he wasn't finished with the story. He told me he revisited his friend after the library was completed, and true to form, he was sitting in the library with an adult beverage in hand and a book in his lap. But a few years later, he noticed he did not get a Christmas card from this friend, and he called him. The American's wife answered and said that he sadly had Alzheimer's and was not up for sending cards or much talking. And then my colleague hit me with why he told me the story; he said, "Albert, the is moral is don't wait to pursue the things you want to learn, you don't know what will happen in life."
History and the Mature Mind
Maturity is associated with emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage one's own emotions and the emotions of others. A mature person is generally expected to exhibit self-control, patience, empathy, and a strong sense of responsibility. Maturity also involves the capacity for delayed gratification, making decisions based on long-term benefits rather than short-term desires. A mature person can engage in healthy relationships based on mutual respect, trust, and communication. They are capable of understanding that relationships require effort and compromise, and they are willing to put in the necessary work to maintain them. This ability to navigate the complexities of relationships is a hallmark of emotional and social maturity. The lessons of social maturity are taught through heritage studies. History, artistic traditions, and philosophy, including theology.
The transition from adolescence to adulthood is often seen as a rite of passage, but it is not always a smooth or predetermined linear process of adulting into maturity. Many young adults struggle with the demands of adulthood, finding themselves ill-prepared to handle the responsibilities that come with it. This can lead to a prolonged adolescence, where individuals delay taking on adult responsibilities or fail to develop the maturity needed to navigate them successfully. Or to appreciate all that life has to offer.
My students know that I don’t like half-quotes or paraphrases: give me the whole thing in context. In this case, I’ll pick on the whole “those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.” The full quote is from George Santayana’s 1905 book Reason in Common Sense. I have put the important bits in bold:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain because unpractical repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
Learning and acting based on acquired knowledge is the mark of maturity. The youth don’t know, and the old forget, leading to vulnerability and increased capacity for error. The mature and vigorous person or civilization stays honed to produce rational outputs based on valuable inputs of experience and study. Age is inevitable, but remaining immature is a choice. A civilization survives because even as it ages or instead endures throughout the centuries, a new generation of mature individuals takes the place of their elders. The duty of the elders is to train and uplift their replacements, who are their posterity by blood and adoption. The art and literature of a civilization are appreciated by the mature who know what they see, taste, touch and hear. And I do not mean in the scholarly sense, I mean you know when something is beautiful because you have acquired an awareness that beauty is real and should be pursued and enjoyed.
The ancients also taught how people move to the stage of deliberateness that
