The 13-year-old’s ravenous hunger for knowledge is reflected in the early glimmerings of modernism in the Elizabethan age. For the first time writers like Christopher Marlowe were publicly skeptical of religion. Atheism was openly discussed while Christian dogma was being undermined by Copernicus’s heliocentrism. (Colin Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind, 1984, p.381)
Elizabethan drama plunged the ordinary punter into a different world where they were encouraged to think for themselves and it didn’t take long for those newly independent minds to start demanding rights. (Ibid p.405) This revolutionary spirit of individualism continued to manifest in the plays of John Milton whose Comus, in 1634, demonstrated “… that the individual’s conscience is the most powerful weapon.” (Ibid p.406) According to Wilson, Puritanism was less about religion than freedom to not have your conscience dictated to by a distant cleric. This spirit of tolerance was not confined to Europe or Elizabethan England. In 1555 a 13-year-old, Abu’l-Fath Jalal ud-din Muhammad Akbar, (aka– deservedly so– Akbar the Great) who couldn’t read, inherited the Mughal throne, but that inability did not deter him from encouraging a rich intellectual engagement with art, history, philosophy and religion. His embrace of Hinduism and Christianity indicated more than mere tolerance for non-Muslim culture, it laid the foundations of multicultural India which lasted until the British, in their nasty adolescent disrespect for the other, sowed the seeds of division until the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947. (Since writing I have read a very thorough analysis of the British in India which paints a complex picture of confusion and ineptitude rather than a coherent picture of deliberate colonialism. Peace Poverty and Betrayal, by Roderick Matthews, Hurst and Co, 2021.)
Before humanity emerged blinking into the sunny uplands of the Enlightenment it had to grind its way through the most comprehensively catastrophic century ever. (Notwithstanding the dire predictions for the 21st though the descendants of the dinosaurs might disagree.) Just as the early teenager can do little about raging hormonal activity with the onset of puberty so 17th century humanity had to just cop the cascading disastrous effects of the mini–Ice Age caused by decreased sunspots and increased volcanic activity resulting in more El Niños. As devastating as pestilence, plagues, famines and floods were the human decision to be at almost perpetual war made life even worse. The simple fraction of a third of the world’s population being decimated cannot convey the scale of the grief endured. Then as now it’s the suffering of women and children that are the most poignantly affecting. None more so than the practice of abandoning week-old children to foundling hospitals when the price of bread went up. In Milan women could place their infants on a wheeled contraption which, when rotated, conveyed the bundle of misery from outside to inside the walls of the hospital. This they often did at night for anonymity. (Parker 2013, p. 98) Even more desperate were the mothers in Henan Province, China, who were forced to sell their children for a pot of rice in the famine of 1630-2. (Ibid. p. 404)
Just as the early teenager can make the wrong choices about how to negotiate with peers, parents and institutional office bearers so too did the rulers in the 17th century. The key task of the early teenager is to distance itself from the care givers to create an independent identity. Apart from the Dutch who were engaged in a legitimate war of independence from the Spanish, the causes of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) can be attributed to the desire of 1,300 principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, like the teenager, to assert their independence.
The chief component in this key adolescent task is the formation of strong friendships. Thus far in your short life you haven’t experienced care, recognition, love and respect from a non-parent. Sure, teachers have heaped professional encouragement, as per current pedagogical aspirations, but that closeness and intimate nurturing has really only been provided for by a parent. Of course, part of that nurturing is boundary setting, which is often resented as the teenager, probably accurately, has grown up more than is appreciated by the parent. Exchanging similar experiences about anachronistic strictures on one’s freedom, creates a substitute bond around which your independent identity can begin to form. That bond is characterized by fidelity. As we shall see later blind faith in some doctrinaire regimes lead to catastrophic consequences.
An example of this process in 17th century Europe – reaching out to others– is the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which at the time only briefly interrupted armed conflict in 3 out of 7 European countries. However, the reason Gareth Evans and others singled out this date as a milestone in collective human behaviour is because it was the first time in European history peace was negotiated between states whose independent sovereignty was recognized. Before that, merciless rulers of mega rich empires simply crushed any opposition, bought off the nobility and taxed everyone else. Also, the monkey of religion was finally lifted off the European back. There were clauses in the Treaty which specifically guaranteed the right of Christians not from the established church to practice their particular brand of Christianity freely. Perhaps it’s a pity the two warring Islamic factions–Shia, Sunni– did not also achieve a similar officially sanctioned tolerance.
Perhaps a century long global disaster focuses the mind. The 17th century produced many examples of the questioning teen age mind challenging the status quo. The most cosmologically significant of which was Isaac Newton noticing gravity, labelling and writing about it. His Principia Mathematica (1687) finally supplied the equations to prove Copernicus and Galileo’s conception of the universe correct. His methodology leant on the earlier work of Francis Bacon who in 1627 ushered in the first science institute which recognized physical observation and reason as the only basis for scientific enquiry. Across the ditch philosophical questions that mirrored Bacon’s rejection of Aristotelean Scholasticism were answered with as much scientific certainty as possible by one Rene Descartes. Both these thinkers shared the same task of unfettering science from religion. In this effort Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode quoted Bacon – ‘rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking for truth in the sciences.’ (Towards the Light, A.C. Grayling, 2007, p.103)
A teacher at a Sydney boys secondary school remarked that adolescent boys learn to go beyond grunting. That steadfast obdurate attitude is represented in the 17th century by the hold religion and the monarchy still had on even the most fertile minds. As a young man aged 24 Descartes demonstrated his devotion to Catholicism by joining a Catholic League sponsored army run by Maximilian of Bavaria to invade Bohemia. Even though his writings concerned the nature of mind and body by overturning the exhaustive but turgid Scholastic method he still tried to prove the existence of God. Despite his intention to separate religious orthodoxy from physical laws and wanting his scientific works to be adopted by the Jesuits his writings were still put on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Roman Inquisition. (Ibid p.98). Such was his respect for or fear of the Church he said, in response to Galileo’s imprisonment, “…although I think [Galileo’s assertion] is founded on very sure and very clear proofs, I would nevertheless not want to sustain them against the authority of the Church.” (ibid p.654) Thanks a lot, Descartes!
Another fertile mind at that time went as far as to say that not only was monarchical rule necessary but that it should be singularly absolute. Perhaps it’s a little unfair to bracket Thomas Hobbes as an exemplar of teenage obduracy as his influence on political philosophy especially in regard to human motivations is well documented. Given that he penned Leviathan during a time when continental Europe was tearing itself apart as in the ‘brutish’ state of nature and in England the Civil War, which ended in regicide, was equally merciless, one may have had sympathy for his insistence on power being invested in a monarch albeit socially contracted to act on the people’s behalf. According to Daniel Kapust in a paper titled The Problem of Flattery and Hobbes’s Institutional Defense of Monarchy (Journal of politics vol 73No.3, 2011) it was only the very undemocratic unitary structure of the sovereign which could secure peace and stability. Hobbes’s monarch “resists flattery [and therefore self-interested influence] because he reasons alone.” (ibid) Moreover, Hobbes’s justification for absolutism is his quite reasonable observation that “…passions increase as the number of individuals involved in governance increases.” That maybe so but if the concentration of political power in a sovereign was not tempered by the shift to parliamentary democracy in England and revolutions in the rest of Europe then the backward turn to totalitarian rule would have been much earlier.
Luckily for humanity Hobbes’s pessimistic view of humans in a ‘state of nature’ being ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’ was tempered by John Locke’s view that everyone including kings and Popes was equal under God’s law. In Locke’s case on the one hand his belief in God is illustrative of the teenager’s refusal to budge from a strongly held position but on the other hand that belief allows for a transformation from natural law to natural rights. Also, his insistence on the application of reason to religious choice contributed to the drive towards liberties of conscience so he can be illustrative of the creative optimistic teenager as well. However, the turn to absolutist monarchies in the 18th century shows that Hobbes was the greater influence. The arrogance of our putative teenager was later tempered by the influence of a bunch of French intellectuals who drew out their idealistic side which ushered in the Enlightenment.
Kant– the idealistic teenager par excellence– whose view that the Enlightenment represented mankind’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity, turned out to be wishful thinking. Had Europeans been so bold as to accept Kantian notions of cosmopolitanism and how to achieve them with his essay Perpetual Peace, they might not have been inclined to assert their newly acquired statehoods from the greatest ‘othering’ project ever undertaken in Europe– Congress of Vienna in 1815– by insisting on domination over neighbours. The ability to attempt domination was bankrolled by the acquisition and exploitation of colonies. As is well known this flexing of industrial and colonial muscleculminated in the tragic and inexorable slide into the first war named after the planet in 1914. This combination of fear of revolution and wanting to restore monarchical status quo with Enlightenment notions of liberty and the rights of man is a reasonable example of Erikson’s stage 5 developmental issue: Identity versus role confusion.
Our hapless teenager continued to experiment with different attitudinal styles and identities throughout the 20th century. He was quite partial to donning shiny black boots, smart black uniforms with lightning bolt flecks of red and white and silver gothic insignia featuring skull and cross bones. Fully fledged Fascism only lasted about 12 years in Germany, but cultish military dictators lingered on all over the world: Franco, Pinochet, Idi Amin and Suharto to name a few. What is it about goose stepping that is still so popular today in China, Chad, Russia and quintessentially North Korea? Maybe it demonstrates iron clad precision through obedience on a massively impressive scale. The display says, “If we can get thousands of troops to endure meaningless but painful discipline on the parade ground imagine what they could do when given the motivation of a war.”
In response to a very unreasonable authoritarian, autocratic and inegalitarian Czar the teenager rebelled and adopted a different style – Communism– the prime tenets of which have long since been abandoned by China except for the totalitarian aspect of governance. From 1st October1949 when Mao Zedong founded the current communist People’s Republic of China the country was treated like a permanently grounded teenager by the West. The country wasn’t admitted to the UN until 1971 then in 1972 relations began to thaw with Nixon’s visit. Oh, and Whitlam’s in 1971. The Chinese version of the teenager may have created billionaires by the week and enjoyed GDP growth rates of between 6-14% for the last 40 years, but emotional wounds run deep. So, despite its immense global reach with economic and soft power and a powerful military to assert sovereignty on any disputed territory in its neighbourhood it still might feel insecure. Therefore, the Politburo Standing Committee probably feels it needs to marshal the country’s financial, intellectual and technical resources to institute an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance that even Big Brother would have blanched at. Much to the chagrin of western style democratic societies who are forever predicting the demise of China’s success because they believe efficient functioning capitalism requires various enshrined freedoms, which China doesn’t have.
In terms of bad parenting with regard to a teenager experimenting via rebellion and negative identities the West imposed a classic do as I say not as I do prescription on the post-colonial world. Ha-Joon Chang’s wonderful exposé of the myth of free trade and how capitalism has always depended on inequality between nations in his book Bad Samaritans (2008) is a prime example. Rich countries, who stand in as parents simply because they had the power, would not allow the poor countries to adopt similar interventionist policies that had proved successful for their economies. The chief institution of post war reconstruction, the World Bank, would supply huge loans to newly independent ‘developing’ nations provided they do two things: use them to invest in industry sectors of ‘natural advantage’ like coffee or sugar and keep government out of the way. No rich country succeeded by relying on a single industry or not using government to impose protective tariffs. As well as mightily pissing off workers in poor countries (ruling elites usually did well) the middle class in rich countries became precarious while the TNCs continue to reign ever more triumphantly as the trading rules and profit shifting loopholes conspire to exacerbate global, regional and local inequalities. Our teenager is going to react by retreating into tribal negative identities fuelling the rise of right-wing populists. Unless of course you’re an actual teenager from Sweden who acts like an adult!
Teenagers do not have the depth of life experience and are therefore unable to see the wood from the trees. An example of this behaviour in the first half of the 20th century is provided by H.G. Wells’ analogy of humanity’s progress over the last 400 years (1866-1946) who said “…like an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams…” “…mankind is still far from awake.” Barry Jones urged us all to wake up as well in the early 1980s. I assume he thought we had not woken up to the threat posed by radical shifts in in the relationship between work and technology especially in the coming information age. As it turned out digital technology turned some adults into clumsy toddlers while teenagers’ fingers fly over their smart phones like skilled professionals in mid-career instantly linking into reciprocal networks of social and commercial utility.
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