Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I know I bang on a lot about growing up in these columns. I hope you’re not too heartily sick of this yet, because I’m off on that one again.
Mostly, the difference between being a grown-up and looking like one is more or less innocuous. We don’t have a law that differentiates between grown-ups and their look-alikes, and everyone’s got equal rights now. The two questions here are – how do we tell the difference, and what do we do about it?
I think that the defining characteristic of growing up is the ability to see things from another perspective. These come in many forms, and almost any of them would help profoundly in the growing-up process. I think I feel a list coming on.
Because we want to prolong our lives
There’s the interpersonal perspective. We imagine what it’s like to be someone else, and then we can turn it round, so we can imagine instead how we would react to certain events. So someone who beats another person up is both refusing to imagine the effect on the beatee, and also failing to imagine how they would feel if the roles were reversed.
There’s a temporal perspective too, when we think about what the future consequences of our actions might be. Most of us try to keep healthy because we want to prolong our lives. This also stops us taking silly risks or taking life-changing decisions without a lot of thought.
In the light of a great idea
We can take a moral perspective too. Soldiers in the First World War managed to over-ride their utter terror because they believed that their cause was right. Refusing to fight is also a moral perspective, as is any moral stand in the face of persecution against injustice or intolerance.
There is even a philosophical perspective, which is similar to the moral standpoint. Some people live their lives in the light of a great idea, such as free speech or equality or justice. Occasionally this goes very wrong, if the great idea turns out to be horribly flawed or is twisted into something unpleasant.
Think further than our own immediate gratification
I’m sure I missed out a lot of available perspectives. You can supply your own. You can tell a grown-up because he/she takes a broader view when making decisions. There’s more of a “What’s the appropriate thing to do here”, rather than “What do I want?” It’s an acknowledgement that the world is complicated and we need to think further than our own immediate gratification.
We all have brains and intelligence and souls and spirits, however we like to characterise these qualities, but we don’t make proper use of them. It’s a bit like having a racehorse in your stable, and using it to push a cart. What’s got me going lately is that we see whole countries behaving like selfish ungrown-up children, just as individuals do. The trouble with these countries is that they justify what they do because they have a lot of weapons and too much power in the wrong hands. And they get away with it.
It’s the civilised thing to do
Everyone gets a bit hot under the collar sometimes about family members or colleagues or neighbours, but we usually restrain our more violent rages. This is partly because it’s a disproportionate response, but mostly because we still have to live with them and we don’t want to make it worse. We also fear the consequences if we do release our inner maniac. So we behave ourselves. It’s the civilised thing to do.
Also, in our own lives, when things do get a little over-heated, there’s always a higher power which we can defer to. We can find ourselves resorting or answering to our parents, or the Police, or the Law. We expect some justice from these authorities, even when we know that justice is often the hardest thing to achieve.
Occasionally we get things right
We make great efforts sometimes to do the right thing. We pass laws to abolish capital punishment, even though most people say they want it kept. We join groups of nations to help prevent further damaging wars and stimulate peace and understanding between nations and races and creeds. We abolish slavery. We fight injustice and tyranny in the name of democracy and freedom. We give our empire back.
Unfortunately, we still sell arms to dictators. Often we give those dictators credits so they don’t have to become embarrassed by actually having to pay for them. We turn blind eyes to torture and repression in the name of trade. Our news programmes bend over backwards to produce “balanced” reports instead of discussing the actual validity of these views on any human level. We sit in our sitting rooms and watch the news, feeling terrible, until the next programme comes on.
It’s his fault! He made me do it!
We are a precocious species; we’re still in our infancy. In so many ways we’ve become brilliantly adult and made huge progress, but we haven’t paid enough attention to the need to include everyone. We need to start making the world safe and free for everyone, not just for ourselves.
I’m completely sure that we’ll manage this one day, but sometimes, when I see what’s being perpetrated in the Middle East and other places, and when I hear how they justify the disgusting things that whole countries are doing to each other, I can only see small children pointing to each other, saying – “It’s his fault! He made me do it!”
The trouble is, these particular children are heavily armed and in a dangerous temper. Where are their parents? Where are the Police?
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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