Who’s Up for Building a Cathedral?
Ecocentric Human Development, the Hero’s Journey, and Cultural Regeneration, Part III
Friday, April 14, 2023
This is the third part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).
What Exactly Do We Mean by “Mature”?
So far, in this series of Musings, we’ve considered the contemporary rendering of the “hero’s journey” as being an adolescent and egocentric frame on human development. And we’ve explored how this take on the hero’s journey informs contemporary societies and reveals them to be patho-adolescent. I also offered a definition of a “true adult human.” This led me to wondering what exactly we mean when we speak about maturity.
For guidance through the turbulence of our times, Charles Eisenstein recommends “other mythic arcs based on mature archetypes.” But there’s exactly the rub: Not primarily the question of where we might find such myths and archetypes (they’re everywhere) but rather how would we recognize and understand as such a mature archetype or myth if we encountered one? What would enable us to identify what exactly is mature about it?
We shall fail to recognize a mature myth or archetype even when we’re in the presence of one if we’re not able to answer this essential question: What exactly do we mean by “mature”? If, in contemporary societies, all that most people have (like Campbell did) are adolescent frames (whether they be pathological or healthy versions thereof), then we’re fated to endlessly understand through an adolescent lens all myths and archetypes, no matter how mature their elements and themes may be.
And this brings us right to the heart of what I most want to share with you in this essay: The difficulty for any given person in accessing or recognizing a mature framework (a framework for true maturity) is not only that person’s culture but, even more so, their developmental stage. Maybe it’s just obvious: If someone has not themselves matured beyond early adolescence, then their lens, too, will necessarily be adolescent; everything they experience will be seen and understood through that lens. The caterpillar cannot truly imagine the life of a butterfly.
As one example, one that has cut close to the bone for me, personally: Some people who have appreciated my first book, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, and have graciously shared with me what they like about it, appear, nonetheless, to not understand it. They see it as offering a path to nature connection, inner peace, a more fulfilling job, or perhaps an improved social or sexual life (all of which are genuine and wholesome early-adolescent desires). And I’m not saying that Soulcraft doesn’t support those quests. But the book was actually created as a manual for ruining your early-adolescent life (if you are among the relatively few contemporary people prepared for such a dissolution), for undermining whatever initial happiness you had so painstakingly achieved in your life. It is, in other words, an introduction to the hazardous and harrowing journey of soul initiation, the journey that takes place during late adolescence and that eventually culminates in true adulthood. [12] I don’t intend this in any way as a criticism of some of my readers; it’s simply the unavoidable reality of attempting to understand — or, for that matter, to articulate — a worldview that lies outside that of egocentric-dominator culture (aka conformist-consumer culture) and the consciousness of people in early adolescence.
Another example of early adolescent framing is, quite frankly, the entire field of contemporary Western psychological science (or at least its mainstream), which, for the most part, attempts to learn what it is to be human by studying the behavior of actual human beings (the “empirical method”). Take, for example, science’s inquiry into what it is to be an “adult” human: If most “adults” being studied by psychologists are actually in the stage of early adolescence — and if most researchers are as well — the entire discipline of psychology becomes a psychology of adolescence. And that, I believe, is exactly what we have. [13] One particular dynamic to note: Due to ease of recruitment, most humans studied in research by university psychologists are college students, usually sophomores enrolled in their first psychology class, with the assumption that college 20-year-olds are representative of human adults, more generally. The irony here is that the results might not be appreciably different if the research “subjects” were older people but still, psychologically, early-adolescent.
I’ll say it again: Due to the dynamics of egocentric-dominator societies, in which most humans now come of age, the majority of contemporary post-pubescent humans are stuck in the developmental life stage of early adolescence.
A culture has to take some major hits and be unraveling for many hundreds or thousands of years to keep a majority of its members from reaching true adulthood. Such a culture is severely degraded. But not by accident. By design. Why would egocentric-dominator leaders do this to their own cultures (and why has this been perpetrated in so many societies for so many thousands of years throughout the world)? Long story, but here’s the short form: Human maturity is bad for business (by which I mean the obscene profits and despotic power of patho-adolescent tyrants). [14]
If what we have is rampant developmental arrest, it’s not the fault of individual humans. Rather, it’s due to the fact that most people now live within the confines of psychologically and socially unhealthy cultures (some of which are, nevertheless, technologically, hygienically, and jurisprudentially advanced, politically stable, and economically wealthy). Consider the depravities — sporadic to frequent — on display every day most everywhere in the world: mind-boggling cruelties (as part of unjust wars or otherwise), outrageous injustices (racial, gender-based, class-based, etc.), unconstrained corruption, rampant greed, extreme inequalities, political insanities, politician juvenility and crudity, [15] and unrestrained eco-destruction: This is never how mature humans (or even healthy adolescents) treat themselves, each other, and this holy Earth.
But in order to make our way toward something more psychosocially wholesome, it helps if we avoid the temptation to frame the dilemma as smaller than it is. What we are facing is not simply a quandary of democracy, economics, diplomacy, or religion. And it is certainly not a mere technological problem to solve with more technology. It is much bigger and deeper:
What we’re facing — and must address — is a catastrophic and nearly ubiquitous failure of cultural health and of human development, each being both cause and effect of the other.
The problem, in short, is not an absence of mature myths and archetypes — they are plentiful and readily accessible — but rather the absence or at least rarity, of a genuinely mature lens, a truly adult or elder lens, which would enable us to understand and recognize mature myths and archetypes. More generally, such a lens is needed in order to support full-spectrum human development and to thereby gradually grow truly mature cultures.
In short, it’s not mature archetypes we’re in need of; what’s missing is maturity.