We are upon the year and month of the 37th anniversary of the release of the fairy tale film, “The Princess Bride.” Who is the Dread Pirate Roberts and could he really be nearing the age of 70, like some of our other great teen idols of the 1970s and 1980s? Or, are some of our great film and music idols more like the Dread Pirate Roberts than we like to think – replaced every decade by a new, youthful Dread Pirate Roberts look-alike to play the “person” of the Dread Pirate? In that way, the film tells us, the Dread Pirate Roberts’ name can go on attached to an ever-youthful face in a new actor or personage. I wonder on the model of the Dread Pirate Roberts and its possible application in look-alikes across the entertainment industry.
As Sardenberg tells us, the personal is political; thus, her – or my – personal embodied experience of being female may not be just anecdotal or sui generis, but perhaps, rather, something closer to archetypal. And, since I, myself, am approaching a big-0 birthday in years ever more quickly impending, I am brought to wonder what such a model of entertainment glamour would say about our society, social order, and values? Are we fixated on youth to such an extent that some of our super-heroes in Hollywood, Bollywood, music, and elsewhere must be replaced, like character names, by new look-alikes every ten years to maintain the illusion (should I say, delusion?) of a youthful eternity? Is our desire for youth related to our own ability to dream ourselves younger in our own lives; or does it reflect something more sinister, say, an obsession with ogling young people scantily clad in epic films, film dance extravaganzas, or on stage in concerts?
There are important books in social theory (as Anthony Giddens calls it) such as: On the Genealogy of Morality by Frederick Nietzsche; or Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida (with translation by Spivak and introduction by Butler). Perhaps it is time to think “On Gerontology”. Perhaps we can find pursuits more fitted to a moral, ethical, civilized society than a dangerous mystification of the line between desiring youthfulness in our ageing selves, and what is illegal and irrational to a civilized society, the desiring of young persons.
Fostering innocence in young persons, and giving them the ability to create civilized, legitimate lives for themselves, is more “rational” in both Nietzschean and Kantian terms in the general sense of desire as relating to first-order needs, and philosophy or reason as relating to higher-order thought or application of principles; and “interests, desires, and needs” (see p. 169) as defined and associated with one another in a more complex manner than thinking only in terms of first-order needs.
I would posit that it is unlikely that an obsession with youth – in the manner just described – would be approved by either Protestantism or Roman Catholicism. Nor approved is it by Rabbinical Judaism; the six to seven major legal schools of thought in Islam; nor, I would venture to suggest, the range of Eastern Orthodox Christian churches and communities of the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Why, then, is it so prevalent today?
That is, we have lost our roots, somehow, in our search for (eternal) youth. The Dread Pirate Roberts is only one example – and method – in our search. Ponce de Leon was, by legend, obsessed with the search for eternal youth in the sense of a fountain or elixir to counter ageing in the body (and it turns out that it was not Ponce de Leon, historically, but another figure). Our obsession with youth dates, at least, to the Bolshevik movement’s historical focus on the same (as against ancien régimes of all types, as well as its later effort to control youth); and to a shift from a pre-Vichy France that emphasized adult authority (see pp. 56, 154-155) to a post-World War II global highlighting of the rights of youth (among other rights). So, we have some antecedents for this infatuation. And there is no error in emphasizing the rights of the young. Nonetheless, searching for something other than watching our young on television and in music videos bandying about in ways that may harm them decades later is neither becoming nor a necessity to the upstanding of our civilization. Indeed, such youth may have no say in the matter(s) of artistic discretion as minors, or even as young adults. I say so not against dance; the raising of youth; nor youthful, appropriately-applied and lawful freedom(s).
That said, the turn to a Gaga Feminism, which in some ways creatively and necessarily disrupts existing categories, may take it too far. That is so all the more to the extent that it encourages young people to enact, for stage or for screen, such disruptions so that the ageing audience can live vicariously through them. Youth enacting their own creativity, anger, and joy is useful. However, the 1970s-type experimentations dreamed up by adults (sometimes of generations who were adults in the 1970s) and being foisted upon youth are, in many cases, unhealthy. Nor are these new paths; such experiments were made (violently) in prior periods, cultures, and civilizations and have been largely debunked as those cultures fell into decline. We will not raise ourselves by sinking, once again, into an age of crimes against children, adults, the aged, or, otherwise, of degradation (or “decadence”). Throwing our youth into it in order to appease our personal ideologies is not a good path.
A search might be in order, that is, for something more legitimate and uplifting than ageing persons ogling youth to enliven the youthful self. An emphasis, instead, on graceful ageing might be in order. Perhaps a shift-of-focus is needed to a valuing of elders (without the alternate extreme of allowing them to be despots over individual, younger lives). Perhaps we can try to find a wholesome alternative that uplifts everyone without destroying our youth. Few societies appear to want to own up to it, but a quick perusal of work on human sacrifice suggests that it was a secretive and much hidden, yet, cross-cultural practice in ancient history at the least (more on this topic at a future opportunity). Perhaps this particular, more artistic and symbolic form of human sacrifice of our young is neither becoming nor appropriate as a defining characteristic for our civilization. A culture of such a preoccupation is not that for which we want to be remembered.
To return to the subtitle of this article, I would like to posit that we do not want to be called, years or millennia from now: the Generation of Decline, the Logan’s Run Generation, or the Gaga Generation (although the latter has a nice ring for some feminists for acknowledging women). I would rather that we be remembered as The World Civilization, or The Wilsonian Peace, or The Arts, Sciences, and Religion Rapprochement, or Culture and Positive, Organic Law (wherein almost everyone willfully embraces law and order in daily practices rather than the wholesale non-use of any repressive law where laws are broken). Any of those would be wonderful in my view. Or perhaps we could be called the Generation of Individual Self-Restraint and Civilized Freedoms.
Like many others before me, “I have a dream.” It is not the organized degeneracy (taken as a transitive verb) of our youth; removing from them all real agency; and the disruption, disorienting, and damaging (morally, if not otherwise) of every generation in so making. Likewise, while the views of youth are important for consideration, sometimes a little bit of elder wisdom and experience also matters. But those elders should be morally upstanding and self-restrained in their actions and critiques, not the very people selling hedonism and social experiments upon children. We can tell the difference. That is, we have not just upset the apple cart in our ideational fix on fostering (sometimes vastly harmful) youth cultures to the exclusion of all else. In some ways, in this cultural fixation we are positing that the Sky (Tengri?) is beneath the Earth (Lady Madonna?) rather than above it; or that science and the “Big Bang” are not contiguous with, or did not emerge from, Creation.
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