The art of growing up
Christopher Booker
I hesitate to hang a discussion of perhaps the most fundamental crisis confronting Western society today on one of the most trivial and absurd news items of the week, but it is not without its relevance. On Monday, the BBC reported that the proposed reunion of the Beatles to perform in three charity concerts for the Vietnamese 'boat people' is jeopardised by certain difficulties surrounding the home life of Mr John Lennon. Mr and Mrs Lennon, according to a spokesman (wife M/s Ono) are 'currently in a sex-role reversal situation'. It would be impossible for Mr Lennon to contemplate taking part in the concert because these days 'he stays at home doing the washing and cleaning' while Mrs Lennon goes out to run the family business.
In recent weeks I may have baffled readers of the Spectator with my continual references to confusion over gender as a clue to so many of the morbid symptoms of our present social and political decay. The trade unions I argued, for instance, have got into their present near-psychopathic state of destructive negativity, because they are 'Mother's Boys', frozen in a state of infantility, where they expect 'Mother' to provide, resent everything to do with 'Father' (discipline, authority, economic reality) and throw childish tantrums whenever their. increasingly fantasy-based ego demands are not gratified. The IRA, more overtly psychopathic, are likewise 'Mother's Boys', acting out a fantasy of masculinity, hating 'Father' (in the shape of the British armed forces). Lord Mountbatten, as I argued, was particularly likely to incur their hatred because, to a degree which is now exceptional in our soft, flabby society, he was a 'real man'. While only a few weeks earlier, in an article on Germaine Greer, I had been arguing that the trouble with Women's Lib was that it expressed a rejection by women of their femininity, and encouraged them to behave like a parody of the most negative characteristics of men.
Altogether it is perhaps time I came clean and expressed rather more clearly what has lain behind all this sexual analysis.— because it is far from being a joke, and may, as I say, provide us with one of the most important of all clues to understanding just why our society seems these days in such a sick and confused state. At the heart of the matter lies the real problem of our collectivised, over-mechanised age which is that, for all sorts of reasons, it seems much harder for people to grow up, to become properly mature. When I say that, I speak quite technically. The fully mature person, regardless of sex, is someone who has fully developed the different parts of his or her personality, and that means developing all the main psychic functions, both masculine and feminine. The 'masculine' functions are, firstly, what Jung called the 'sensation function', to do with the body, our physical relationship with things; secondly our rational, intellectual function, our capacity to order the world around us mentally. Our 'feminine' functions are, firstly, sympathetic or compassionate feeling; and secondly intuition, that sense rooted in the unconscious, which gives us an awareness of the true, overall relationship between things.
Now what happens when a man remains in this immature state is two-fold. He is unable to relate fully and easily to his own masculinity (although, as the 'boy hero who cannot grow up', he may over-compensate by indulging in all sorts of pseudomasculine display activity). He also becomes possessed by the negative side of his own femininity — he may be vain, petulant, irrational and to a greater or lesser extent 'effeminate'. A woman, on the other hand, who cannot relate properly to her own femininity becomes possessed by the negative aspect of her masculine qualities, by what Jung called her animus. She becomes strident, over-assertive, rationalistic, in a word 'bossy'. And is there anything more characteristic of our society these days than that it is full of weak, self-indulgent men who are not really 'men', and overassertive bossy ladies who are not really 'women'?
Let us consider one or two very obvious examples. There was a Widespread misconception that when Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister she would somehow bring a 'feminine' influence to bear on our national affairs. The whole point about Mrs Thatcher, with her legal and scientific background, her habit of always seeming even in the most friendly interview to be straining to make some over-insistent point, is that it is the 'masculine' qualities in her which are most obviously developed. It was not her deeply feminine sense of compassion which led to her two best-known political nick names, the 'Milk Snatcher' and the 'Iron Lady' — it was her preoccupation With such masculine concerns as financial prudence and defence. She has enjoyed her preeminence in the Tory Party in recent years precisely because she seems more of a 'man' than the rather emasculated crew — Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, William Whitelaw — who surround her. Her whole political stance reflects that resurgence of a desire for more 'masculine' values which has characterised British politics in the late Seventies — for firmer leadership, less placation of the unions, more economic common sense and so forth. And it is a measure of just how far we travelled in that weak, placatory, narcissistic era dominated by the 'boy hero who couldn't grow up', Wilson, Heath, Thorpe and Co., that we now have to turn to a woman to give.us some semblance of 'manly' leadership.
But it is not only in Britain (any more than it is just in politics) that we have seen such a diminution in real masculinity in recent decades. In terms of the present vacuum of leadership in America, it was no accident that Nicholas von Hoffman's article on Carter and Kennedy last week was headed 'Mama's Boys'. Here are another two weak men, one overtly playing on his 'feminine' side as the compassionate peace-maker, the other actually just as weak and mentally unstructured, but playing on that growing appetite in contemporary America for a resurgence of 'strong' seudo-masculine) leadership which is potentially even more dangerous, because it leads to reckless, lough-guy' displays of what is so revealingly these days called 'machismo'.
What we are seeing, in effect are the consequences of 20 or 30 years when our Western societies have progressively and collectively slid into a state of infantility on an unprecedented scale. Both our prevailing political ideologies, State Socialism and Consumer Capitalism, are equally to blame (although in turn they are themselves really only symptoms rather than causes) — turning everyone into rebelliously dependent children, playing with toys and expecting everything to be done for them. It is hardly surprising that the sex roles have become so confused in such a society, because when men are no longer growing up to be men, and women are no longer women, they regress more and more into the status of androgynous juveniles. The trouble with our culture is not as simple as that we have 'over-developed the masculine at the expense of the feminine' as is often said it is that, unless all the functions are developed, none of them can operate properly. Where in our society today does one find true authority or intellectual rigour, the consequences of fully-developed masculinity? In politics? In the universities? In the churches? Among the very few candidates who come to mind are Solzhenitsyn and the Pope. Otherwise we are left with nothing but the pursuit of infantile images of masculinity, in our obsession with sport, in the advertisements for after-shave and on the cinema screen (Steve McQueen on his beastly motorbikes). Where is true femininity? The feminine functions, too, are transmuted into their mere fantasy-substitutes, into the 'collectivist compassion' of the social worker, sentimentaljty over zebras starving to death in Rome, Fairy Liquid Mums on the telly — while the place of intuition is reduced to our egocentric mass-obsessions with gambling and pseudo-astrology. We have become nothing mOre than a lot of squabbling, selfindulgent infantile-regressives, and it is time we again began to discover the lost art of growing up.
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