Conclusion

So the conclusion, to get to the point, returns to this book’s subtitle. Of course, this is not a minority view. A veritable industry, partly inaugurated by the aforementioned Neil Postman, has emerged in recent decades to surmise the corruption of childhood. The diagnoses vary. For some the seeds of corruption lie with the moral degeneration effected by changing mass media. For others, the source of degeneracy rests with a crisis of the family as time spent at work increases along with divorce rates. For others still, the source of pathology rests with a fragmented, secular society.

For what it’s worth, whether subscribers to these views lean towards the Tory Scylla of children as prone to evil and so demand more discipline or the liberal Charybdis of a society failing its children, these are not totally off track.

But this is far from saying they are right. For one thing, they see an ideal of childhood as worth saving. But at the very least they offer some intuition of a changing reality even if they overlook its central sources. First, the material conditions in which the concept of childhood arose are currently undergoing fundamental mutation. But second, they betray a collapsing political imaginary in the present.

With regard to the latter claim, it’s frequently observed in recent years that the possibility of human extinction or planetary collapse today stands in for a missing radical break in history. This is, in other words, a fantasy of immunity: the future is either indistinguishable from the present, or else it can’t be imagined as arriving at all.

Such a view betrays a desire to neutralise the horizon of what is possible; things must stay the same or they’ll fall apart altogether. Or in our context, to twist a recently oft-repeated phrase, it is easier to imagine the end of childhood than the end of capitalism. Of course, the two might go hand in hand.

Indeed, the declining investment in a future that would be radically different from the present that contemporary mourning of lost innocence usually implies – and that by most accounts comes into view in the early 1970s – might present us in the context of a discussion of childhood, as crises often do, with an opportunity.

To take such a view though, one should affirm that whatever would replace childhood is not predetermined and need not be experienced as a loss. This would entail, first and foremost, rejecting any nostalgic longing for childhood. But it would also require refusing its obverse: the trajectory to adulthood into which the rest of us are exiled along with the life of toil it implies.⁷⁴ These are difficult ideas to intuit. Sometimes pop sees them with greater clarity than the rest of us.