Issue #3: Could We Make Growing Up an Easier Experience for Teenage Girls?
Issue #3: Could We Make Growing Up an Easier Experience for Teenage Girls?
Mead, Royal Inbreeding and Poverty
C.S. Lewis once wrote that ‘the love of knowledge is a kind of madness’. It's a metaphor that brings to mind an indiscriminate hoovering up of information without any discernment or methodology, a kind of delirious irrationality, and it flickered back across my consciousness this week as I found my nose buried into some largely discredited 1920s cultural anthropology. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants.
I’ll share what I've been reading anyway because, even though a lot of the findings have since been heavily contested, there's just something here that held me captive. And it feels true, if that makes any sense. Can a text convey truth without its specific content being necessarily true?
The other thing bothering me this week is work, where the flow of bullshit seems stronger even than normal (my heart is pulled back towards the classroom every time I hear a ‘shift the dial’ or attend a ‘stand-up’ to ‘report back’ on my ‘weekly deliverables’). Being of an exacting spirit, however, I wouldn't want to make any accusation without being sure that it was philosophically sound, so there's some stuff about defining bullshit in this week's issue as well.
Thanks for being here.
In the issue:
Margaret Mead asks whether adolescent angst is culturally imposed #anthropology
Harry Frankfurt works towards a definition of bullshit #philosophy
John Berger on how we view poverty #art
The royals who kept it in the family #history
Classical music you already knew #music
As always, something to think about this week
Could We Make Growing up an Easier Experience for Teenage Girls? Margaret Mead on Adolescent Angst #anthropology
Who would be a teenage girl? Seriously. I've spent a large part of my professional life as a secondary school teacher, and I remember distinctly the day that I overheard two girls hanging around the Key Stage 4 toilets (where else?) engaged in a lively 'debate' about their relative levels of promiscuity. "You're a sl**" was dexterously countered with "well you're a wh***."
I did what any male teacher does in this situation, which was my very best until a female colleague turned up to bail me out (honestly, in my experience, female teachers are always brilliant on this stuff; as I carefully backed away towards the staffroom, I could hear my colleague and friend verbally pinning these girls to the wall with a lecture about female empowerment and self respect, delivered with a ferocity that spoke of personal experience). I was quite emotional as I boiled the kettle.
It occurred to me that these are the same girls who are fed, via the ubiquitous smartphone, a daily diet of influencers teaching them that their value and worth as a person is to be located in their physical appearance (and male response to that appearance). And yet, as the argument I overheard confirms, they are also deeply aware of the shame society attaches onto any girl who acts on these lessons and directs behaviour towards soliciting male attention.
Seriously, who would be a teenage girl?
This was essentially the question Margaret Mead took with her in the 1920s to American Samoa. She was asking, way ahead of her time, about the extent to which the turbulent and emotionally damaging adolescent female experience is a universal one. Surely, a lot of the damage inflicted is cultural? If we were to remove the dangerous and contradictory moral doctrines, would our young women be happier and healthier? In Mead's own words: ‘Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?’
In Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her conclusions were essentially that the transition from childhood into adulthood was a far smoother and less turbulent process for Samoan girls who didn't have that pressure to choose between confused and often conflicting sets of moral values. Who'd have predicted that one?
The way in which she lambasts the contradictory morals of American society, incidentally, is bound to raise a smile:
‘Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which believe different things and advocate different practices, and to each of which some trusted friend or relative may belong. So a girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaller, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that women's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races...’
The only thing that seems certain is that, if you are female, someone is going to have an opinion on how you should be living your life and conducting your social business. But not so in Samoa, or in Mead's Samoa anyway.
Samoan society, according to Mead's observations, was more casual about non-monogamous relationships and offered a greater sense of freedom for girls who wished to explore themselves prior to undertaking the role of child-rearing. The girls, in response, seemed to move into adulthood with relative ease, not suffering the adolescent angst that had come to characterise the teenage disposition in Mead's home of the United States. She summarises:
‘With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives, and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.’
We're offered a comforting simplicity and a uniformity of expectations that is clearly absent from the American experience, but you can't help questioning whether cultivating minds untroubled by philosophical queries or remote ambitions is really a step forward. For Mead, however, the freedom to take ‘many lovers’ and remain free from societal scorn was a significant and positive departure, and one that she rightly focuses a lot of her attention on.
Preaching sexual liberation in the 1920s did leave her open to criticisms and controversy, but it also ensured her place as a leading liberal intellectual voice when the swinging sixties kicked into gear. Her work chimed almost exactly with the liberal zeitgeist, but, for some, it chimed a little too neatly.
In the early 1980s, Derek Freeman continued an infamous academic spat (nobody spats like an academic) by publishing a stern critique of his rival's work in which he criticised her for romanticising a Samoan society which, in his view, was not the sex-positive utopia of Mead's imaginings but was actually characterised by high rates of sexual violence. Follow-up studies in the years since have also failed to rediscover the Samoa that Mead described.
Was her study, after all, informed by her worldview, rather than the other way around? She does, in fairness to Freeman, at one point describe ‘lovers slip[ing] home from trysts beneath the palm trees’ as ‘dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs.’ It's prose that is part of the reason she secured, for an anthropologist, such a huge audience, but it is inevitably going to leave you open to accusations of hyperbole and a romanticisation of foreign cultures.
So where are we left? In all honesty, I'm not sure. I've invited you to join me in filling your minds with information we're not really sure is true, but I don't think it's been entirely without purpose. When Mead points out the ‘diversity of standards’ that confuse the emotions of young girls as they take their first tentative steps into adulthood, we have to accept, almost 100 years later, that her message still rings true. If that conversation outside the toilets is anything to go by, we've got a lot of work still to do.
Defining Bullshit with Harry Frankfurt #philosophy
It’s been one of those weeks at work, and wading through bullshit has got me thinking about bullshit.
In so doing, I found it a comfort to know that a genuine philosopher has spent his time and not inconsiderable intellectual heft considering the intricacies of the term on our behalf - thanks academia.
In his essay ’On Bullshit,’ first published in 1986, Harry Frankfurt takes a stab at giving us a more conscientiously developed appreciation of what this most salient feature of our culture actually is.
In short, he was at pains to make the distinction between bullshit and plain lying. When lying, the speaker knowingly presents false information. The bullshitter, on the other hand, is characterised by a lack of concern for the truth.
Same thing? Well, not quite. A bullshitter is seeking to persuade his interlocutor of something, and doesn’t care if what he is saying is the truth. They could be presenting misinformation or they could stumble upon a truth quite by accident. The point is not the truth-quality of the specific statement, but rather the speaker’s indifference to falsehood as long as their statement is serving their purpose.
So, when Boris Johnson next raises his head to tell us about the benefits of Brexit by pointing towards some obscure trade deal, his status as bullshitter-in-chief isn’t really threatened by the truth of his statement. The point is that none of us really believe that he cares if its true at all.
Extract of the Week #art #politics
Words about reproducing images of poverty, from a man who knew a thing or two about the symbolic power of images:
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous, 1991
Image of the Week #history
Remember when Donald Trump gave his son-in-law Jared Kushner the role of brokering peace in the Middle East? Or when Hollywood tried to convince us that Jaden and Willow Smith were serious actors and musicians?
Nepotism has been in the public consciousness in recent years to the extent that a new term, ‘nepo baby,’ has been coined to satisfy our need to pour scorn on the copious examples of unearned advantage we see every day. Where there is power, there follows, it seems, a desire to keep that power close to home. HBO just finished four series' worth of drama about it.
But nobody, not even the Roy clan, had a penchant for 'keeping it in the family' quite like that ever present force in the European Middle Ages, the Habsburgs.
Famous for the length of their reign and the length of their chin, this ruling family, who found seats of power in Austria, in Germany, in the Holy Roman Empire and in Spain, were extremely strategic in their marriages, which were often to close relatives in order to consolidate power.
Now, academics believe the extent of their inbreeding to be the source of their defining 'Habsburg Jaw.' Studies in 2019 revealed that the higher the inbreeding coefficient for the given family member, the greater the occurrence of dysmorphic features.
Their reign eventually came to an end with Charles II, otherwise known as 'El Hechizando,' or 'the bewitched,' owing to his numerous and debilitating deformities. The genetic impact of intermarriage increased with generations, and poor Charles found himself, according to British envoy Alexander Stanhope, swallowing ‘all he eats whole, for his nether jaw stands so much out, that his two rows of teeth cannot meet.’
Charles was a poorly man, and his genetic background left him infertile. With no royal 'nepo baby' to receive the reigns of power, the Habsburg dynasty would be brought to an end, with the utmost irony, by the very same impulse that had kept it afloat for more than two centuries.
The Collection | Classical Music You Already Know #music
Have you ever found yourself wishing you were more knowledgeable about classical music? Well, maybe you know more than you think:
10. Puccini, Nessun Dorma, Turandot
You know it from... Italia 90
9. Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra
You know it from... 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many films referencing it since, including Barbie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Toy Story
8. Rossini, Largo al factotum, The Barber of Seville
You know it from... Robin Williams in the opening scene of Mrs Doubtfire. Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!
7. Johannes Brahms, Wiegenlied
You know it from... Every toy with a built in speaker claiming it can put children to sleep
6. J.S. Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
You know it from... Fantasia, and tonnes of 'Halloween episodes' of US television programmes
5. Antonín Dvořák, Largo, From Symphony No. 9 in E minor
You know it from… That Hovis advert that was on T.V. for what felt like decades
4. Amilcare Ponchielli, Danza delle ore, From La Gioconda
You know it from… Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh. Here I am at Camp Granada.
3. Johann Strauss, An der schönen, blauen Donau
You know it from… Looney Tunes, the Titanic and 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Giuseppe Verdi, La donna è mobile From Rigoletto
You know it from… Football fans of teams featuring Paolo Di Canio
1. Francisco Tárrega, "Gran Vals"
You know it from… The Nokia ring tone
The Examined Life
Let’s take this opportunity to be honest with ourselves about bullshit. Do you ever engage in it? Have you ever engaged in it? If so, what was the driving force steering you towards that disregard for the truth? Do you ever encounter situations where truth is less important than getting your point across? Are there situations where bullshit might be a necessary evil or, as with Kant’s murderer at the door, is adherence to the truth always and inevitably the preferred approach?
If You Enjoyed It…
Go further by exploring this week's reading list:
Mead, M. (1928) Coming of Age in Samoa
Frankfurt, H. (1986) On Bullshit
Berger, J. (1991) Keeping a Rendezvous
Rady, M. (2023) The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power
Or share with your people here:
Thank you so much for your time. Next time, we’re back with a fleeting glimpse of the Adriatic and a look at psychological trauma.