I’ve recently been reading Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin Barber.*  The book basically expands on a premise first put forth by Marx: market economies, in an effort to encourage consumption, breed artificial “needs”.  Barber suggests that adults are infantilized to make them more receptive to child-like products (and make them more malleable purchasers), while children are made into adults so that they can become little consumers.  I’m still trying to figure out how much of his argument I buy, but clearly Barber is a progressive who thinks the market is eeeeeeeeevil (*said with sinister voice*).

I hadn’t really seen much in other sources about this supposedly pervasive infantilization.  But, as it turns out, there’s also a conservative infantilization movement that points out all the devolving tendencies that Barber does, but instead blames it on the government.  Now even one of my favorite economists, Thomas Sowell, is trying to sell this argument:

The most childish of all the things being said in the august setting of a joint session of Congress last week was that millions of people can be added to the government’s health insurance plan without increasing the federal deficit at all.

. . .

What is equally childish is the notion that the great majority of Americans, who have medical insurance and who say they are satisfied with it, should be panicked and stampeded into supporting vast increases in the arbitrary power of Washington bureaucrats to take medical decisions out of the hands of their doctors – all ostensibly because a minority of Americans do not have medical insurance.

But I just want to step back and ask, before we launch into a great debate about our devolving society (a la Idiocracy): are people really acting more childish?  I recognize that we’re engaging in a few more child-like activities, many of which are pointed out by Barber.  (Barber’s favorite example is video games! video games! video games!)  Even so, we’ve also advanced in some important ways.  One could argue that adults are more informed about goings-on throughout the world, as technology makes access to news almost instantaneous.  Our economy has shifted from one focused on manufacturing and agriculture (i.e., a brute force eoconomy) to one focused on the provision of complicated services, like information technology and financial services.  Those who decry the lack of civility in today’s world forget that men were once beaten on the floor of the Senate.  Children and adults have become adept at using technological tools that our grandparents never even dreamed of.

I perfectly understand how some authors conclude that there is an insidious infantilization movement; I’m often shocked at my own generation’s frequent sense of entitlement, laziness, and lack of intellectual curiosity.  Even so, I suspect that generations of the past also carried these characteristics, even if they manifested themselves in different ways.  Perhaps we shouldn’t rush to diagnose the root of our society’s reversion to childhood until we’re certain that the “devolution” is not just our own sense of nostalgia for the good ‘ole days getting the better of us.

-Michael

*I’m not reviewing Consumed in this piece, but I have to say that I completely agree with this review on Amazon:

If there wasn’t a photo of him on the dust jacket, you would swear the author was a college freshman with a thesaurus writing his first serious essay. The writing is so pretentious, it makes the book hard to wade through. It’s a shame since Benjamin Barber has clearly given his subject considerable thought.