Cultural neoteny

Date: 3/11/14
Distance: 5.5 miles
Location: Carrboro, NC
Catalyst: A Cracked Podcast about alien life

You know neoteny, right? It's the evolutionary pressure to retain juvenile traits longer. As I understand it, human head size is big but women's pelvises are about the same so there's pressure for babies to be born sooner (or less developed) than they used to. That means babies come out "younger", developmentally-speaking, than they used to (in evolutionary terms). And that means that we modern humans are kind of like less mature phylogenetic versions of our pre-modern-human ancestors. I'm no evolutionary biologist, I'm just aware of this notion.

Anyhow, so what if the same thing is true for culture? I know I get impatient with my 9 and 10 year-olds when they make certain kinds of jokes or ask certain kinds of questions. Those jokes and questions seem really immature to me and I don't like them. But they probably aren't really immature from a 9 and 10 year-old's perspective. Those kids are objectively immature. I'm too impatient. But seriously, those jokes are so dumb. It hurts to have to tolerate them. Please forgive me.

Here's the thing: my girls want to please me, or at least not annoy me too much. So they feel some pressure to figure out what those jokes and questions are before they open their mouths because they don't like to see my impatient annoyed face. That pressure is formative for them. They are internalizing my voice into their little psyches (God help them) and I will forever follow them around in super-ego form.

Now this happened to me, too. And my super-ego is really just my own parents' sense of decorum as modeled by my mind when it was a young kid's mind. So in a sense, my impatience is a function of my parents' impatience, and (I assume) their parents' and theirs' and so on and so on. When I hear a funny fart sound, I have generations of ancestors rolling their eyes at while I suppress my giggles. World without end, amen, amen.

But I'm an adult now and I know that and I know I can laugh at a funny fart sound if I damned well please thankyouverymuch, so I have the freedom to ignore that super-ego and be a bit more fancy-free. My kids see this, too, of course. And it must be insanely confusing for them: sometimes dad is silly and sometimes he is serious. They want to know if there is a pattern to it. They ask me about it a lot.

Is there neoteny here? Am I sillier than my parents? Will my kids inherit less of a severe super-ego than I did? Is my own sense of adultness contributing to my children's immaturity? Is this an inevitable consequence of our psychology?

I had to stop on an uphill at the 5.6 mile mark or so. I was simply too tired. I know I can hit the 6 mile mark next time.