Toynbee: Mall Teens & a Sense of the Future

[James Brody]

Bacteria, especially when challenged by a poison, dissolve their membranes and swap their DNA in one big cloud. A useful mutation eventually comes from this bath, the little folks adopt it, put their membranes back up and return to whatever they do in order to get to their future. I think mall kids want the same goals as bacteria but it takes the mall kids more time.
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I found a reality show at the local mall, especially on a Friday or Saturday evening when the weather is cold and the rain comes down. The mall is also a good place for an old whitebread guy to put away a coffee and ice cream and reflect on human purpose.

First, there is constancy. In the food court, for example, you can change the lights, flooring, and ceilings faster than you can change the old guys who sit there and with whom they sit. Stores come and go but not the graybeards and their arrangements. There is also a certain regularity in the timing and size of swarms that adults and teens form: the adults are driven by boredom and holidays, the teens driven by boredom and the weather. The adults come every few months, some of the kids come two days out of seven. And fifty years from now, a very few of those kids will take their turn sitting at the tables. (Look around, see your future someplace other than at a viewing...)

Second, young adults in the mall rarely sit in the food court, protected from the swirl: instead, one of them pilots a baby stroller as if flying an X-wing through a meteor swarm. Such occupy a boundary between what they did yesterday as a teen and what they have to do tomorrow. Still young enough to enjoy the kids but too old to act like one of them, the young adults constitute a self-adjusting boundary between change and permanence, between the kids and the old farts at the tables.

Third, there is a churning phase, one that I find to be fascinating and supplied by teenagers on Friday and Saturday evenings. More than a hundred teens swarm, often in smaller clumps that move past and flow through each other. They buzz in circles in a swarm, its center near the food court but its periphery reaches the length and width of the polished corridor between the stores.

Costumes vary. The black guys all look expensive, the white guys all look broke. And, just as males vary more than females on nearly any characteristic measured, the guys seem to have a wider range of costumes than the girls and run less from one friend to another one.

Female costumes include Alaskan-styled fur boots, tights, exposed upper hip bones and stomachs, low tops with one spaghetti strap drooped down a bare shoulder, and razor-cut hair. There are also young ladies in sweat pants and fluffy bunny slippers or, one of them already very tall, in three-inch heels, leotards, and a microskirt. Three-toned lipstick seems to be out. Some of the allure goes, however, when one of them stoops to tie her shoe and reveals her kinship with a plumber.

One girl tonight advertised "Free Hugs" in letters twelve inches high on her wife-beater T-shirt, her bra suspended a pair of forty-two inch breasts. Miss Hugs called to her guy and her two friends, "Let's go up to Victoria's Secret." (I can't understand why.) Her face, however, was no more than fourteen years old. Her waist and hips matched her face and were between nineteen and twenty-four inches around. She wore a glue-on tattoo under her right eye and a light coating of goth-black around her eyes, and black hair partly piled high and partly hanging down to one shoulder. Her impact at a distance depended on her black makeup and hair having the same brainstem-clutching quality as a black-and-white photograph in a colored collection. You will notice the image every damned time, no matter how far away!

The girls appear to be hubs in the Swarming: each of them attracts at least two other girls or a ring of males. I am told that many of the girls also consider it a compliment, not an insult, to be called "slut" and, if so, they may compete for the number and uselessness of the boys around them. Hugs are not only advertised but also frequent, initiated by girls who sometimes run fifteen feet in order to make ventral-ventral contact with a boy. Perhaps for reasons given below, relatively few of the guys exert ownership during the Swarm.

Three guards (rent-a-cops, in teen jargon) and four police officers maintain civil order for the shoppers and young parents with baby strollers. The guards are old, the cops are young. The guards walk alone through the crowd and strive for eye-contact with each kid; I saw no instance of a teen making eye-contact with a guard or, for that matter, greeting one of them. Clown too loudly or block the flow of traffic and the guards will ban you for a year and remember that they did it. Sentencing is immediate, certain, and without appeal. Twelve teens sitting at a table in the food court elicited a laugh from one guard who then waved his hands upward and with this one gesture, threw all twelve of them out. I wonder what was said and where they went. And if they merely went where they would have gone anyway but earlier than planned. The cops, in contrast, stand near center court and act like telephone operators: apparently doing little, talking endlessly, noshing often, and remembering less. The guards may have an ongoing dominance contest with the teens; there is none with the cops.

I finished my ice cream and now sip my hot coffee. The mix of sugar, protein, and caffeine starts my neurons popping: what have I missed in what I see? The answers, in clumps like the teens, almost find each other.

First: the kids most likely to have trouble with academics find each other every Friday and Saturday night. Russ Barkley, neuropsychologist, philosopher, and the academic god of attention deficit disorder (ADHD), commented once that impulsive boys and girls have a more limited "sense of the future" than average teens do. (Barkley, 1997) They are more apt to take short term gains instead of delayed ones and to minimize the value of future punishments and, again in Barkley's words, they know what to do but fail to do what they know.

Impulsive girls and boys, for example, usually have different reproductive careers. (Barkley, 1990) The girls get pregnant early and often; the boys are usually jerk-offs in several aspects. The girls correctly judge the boys to be unreliable and unproductive whereas the girls are seen as dopey and easy marks by non-ADHD guys, including the bipolar, the narcissists, and the psychopaths. In my view and, I think, Barkley's, immediate, relevant consequences and positive adult examples are not just for school. (Did we better educate our youth when we made fewer distinctions between teachers and extended family? Did we do better with teens when we consistently "adulterated" them?

Second: these kids are not only impulsive (end the world right now and they pay attention) but also leaderless. The guards may impose conformity but neither kindle nor sustain a hunger for purpose. The teens most apt to get into trouble mill like bacteria until they find a prophet in a pulpit, movie, cell, or cave. Further, one of the lessons of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, and Buchenwald is that a link to the future prevents not only cynicism and cruelty but also suicide, at least for individuals. I think the same pattern exists for cultures. (While a prisoner in Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl noticed that, given a choice between extra soup or an extra cigarette, a prisoner intending to commit suicide always chose the cigarette.)

Third: my thoughts about the Swarm link up with what I know of changes in American and European demographics. (The coffee and ice cream are working hard!) Mark Steyn (America Alone, 2006) pointed out that Muslims average six children to the couple and any country that now gains population, no exceptions, is Muslim. In contrast, an average American couple may have three televisions but only two and a tenth children, keeping our population steady but not growing. Demographics, therefore, might give America to an invading religion for Darwinian reasons, a religion that will promptly erase the Darwinian views that made it welcome! (Europe, per Steyn, is already lost: Greeks produce about one kid per couple as do the Dutch, Russians, Belgians, and Italians. According to Steyn, "Funiculi, funicula, funic-yourself" because, if you are Italian, by 2050 you will have no choice!)

He also points out that conversion is also a second, powerful contributor to Islam's growth. Islam recruits in American colleges, jails, and inner cities...places where the poor, the impulsive, and the disconnected gather. As for the next generation of Muslims in enclaves in Jersey City, Dearborne, or Los Angeles, Saudi-funded Madrasses imprint young brown kids with hatred. (See also Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower.) American schools often allow no contact with Christianity and sometimes view American history as a story of evil conquest by white guys who really should feel guilty.

Impulse and instinct hold hands. Religion has an instinctive foundation and impulsive teens will move in sync with a primitive faith and a charismatic leader. (Sometimes, these are called "concerts.") Many teens for developmental reasons tend to be Dionysians rather than Apollonians and more inclined to wear brown shirts, jack boots, and swastikas, or burquas and headbands instead of gray flannel suits. Christianity, however, is banned from public schools and Islam, instead of Christianity, may well become the antitoxin to Hollywood, rap, Britney, and hedonism. As Steyn points out, however, Islam is a one-way, intolerant attractor: the only way to leave it is to die.

What to do?

One possibility is to follow Jane Goodall's example: set up a kiosk, sit to one side, and throw fries to the wildlife instead of bananas. Eventually, the kids will trust, answer questionnaires, and let Flinn, Nisbett, and Sapolsky measure the testosterone and cortisol in their spit. Ethologists, however, may measure souls but won't inspire them.

I also wonder: what would be the effect if evangelists set up kiosks in the mall, supplied a cleric and a telephone, and put up signs listing the number to call? Adults, for example, sometimes pay well for a "telephone coach" whom they will never meet in person but who is available for weekly conferences and crisis calls. The kids have cells, would they use them to seek adult help? I think they might, even if impulsive. After all, teenagers and adults are coevolved products: adult interests in teaching are surely matched by a corresponding interest in the students for instinct-relevant information, including their instinct for a cause.

On the other hand, I fear if the kids respond well, the better their response, the louder the protests from the ACLU or the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Furthermore, parents who can't get their kid to go to church would worry about his finding a church and religion on his own! (High IQ, when it discovers secularism, really is an adaptation for suicide and a welcome sign for invaders.)

The point: religion can be an imposed environment, one influential for right now. It can also be a chosen environment, influential for life. (Plomin, 1994) The milling kids want a set of ideas that have the same impact as a change in DNA sequence. And for those that must, for reasons of genetics, be moths that flit between candles, instincts might keep them in a purposive cloud after one forms around them.

The caffeine fades. Time to go home and roll up in the electric blanket and under the cats.

JimB

References:

Barkley R (1990) Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment. NY: Guilford.
Barkley R (1997) ADHD and the Nature of Self Control. NY: Guilford.
Bronowski J (1977) A Sense of the Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bronowski argues that the development of behavioral inhibition gave humans a "sense of the future" when, before acting on impulse, they compared the delayed outcomes for alternative behaviors. Barkley picked up on this idea and made it the theme of his 1997 book.
Colson, Charles. Interviewed in early November 2007 by Bill Bennett on his radio show, "Morning in America." Colson finds Christianity to be an effective beacon to the future in prisons. The public schools don't allow it and high IQ kills our culture one more time. See also Prison Fellowship Ministries at http://www.prisonfellowship.org/contentindex.asp?ID=8.
Fraga M, Ballestar E, Paz M, Ropero S, Setien F, Ballestar M, Heine-Suner D, Cigudosa J, Urioste M, Menitez J, Boix-Chornet M, Sanchez-Aguilera A, Ling C, Carlsson E, Poulsen P, Vaag A, Stephan Z, Spector TD, Wu Y, Plass C, Esteller M (2005) Epigenetic differences arise during the lifetime of monozygotic twins. Proceedings National Academy of Science, 102:30, 10604-10609. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0500398102. (Experiences turn genes on and off. See also Jacob, F. (1998) Of Flies, Mice, and Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, for an explanation of this effect.)
Frankl V (1959/2006) Man's Search for Meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hamilton WD (1971) The geometry of the selfish herd. Journal of Theoretical Biology 31: 295–311. In Hamilton, WD (1996) Narrow Roads of Geneland: The Collected Papers of WD Hamilton, Vol 1, Evolution of Social Behavior. NY: Freeman, 229-252. (Stay on the fringe, you get picked off because you are closer to predators. Hamilton may have missed the possibility that life in the middle requires conformity with and inspection by other herd members also in the middle.)
Kauffman S (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity. NY: Oxford. See also: Kauffman S (2000) Investigations. NY: Oxford. The oldsters in the food court, the young adults, and the teens overlaps somewhat with Kauffman's descriptions of stasis, phase transitions, and chaos. May not be a coincidence!
Levi-Montalcini R (1988) In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, NY: Basic Books, 140-141 (On apoptosis and neuronal specialization. She and Stanley Cohen shared a Nobel Prize in 1986 for their discovery of a nerve growth factor for the sympathetic nervous system, secreted not by neurons but by the targets for those neurons.)
Plomin, R. (1994) Genetics and Experience: The Interplay between Nature and Nurture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Great introduction, not much money.
Steyn M (2006) America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Washington DC: Regnery. Funny, provocative, scarey, and makes you want to get laid with someone of the opposite sex and without a rubber.
Toynbee AJ (1958) Civilization on Trial and The World and the West. NY: Meridian. Best known for his determination that religion, a conspicuous actor in the rise and fall of civilizations, is the serious business of the human species.
Wright L (2006) The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. NY: Knopf.