The Cherishing of Childhood Excursion

In this excursion we can look more closely at why childhood is so cherished and plays such a major role at Disneyland. We will do that by looking at neoteny, the retaining of juvenile traits into adulthood. First, we will look at neoteny as a cosmological calling to childhood, as what “the Universe is asking of us” to paraphrase Brian Swimme (1995, cassette). We can then take a brief tangent or mini- excursion into the history of neoteny. Finally, we will look at the face of neoteny, which not surprisingly looks like Mickey Mouse! Remember, as Walt said, "It all began with a mouse."

Neoteny--Cosmological Calling to Childhood
Mini-Excursion--The Roots and History of Neoteny
The Face of Neoteny

J. C. Wolf (1979) argues that the desire for eternal childhood “may be the cornerstone of the American concept of utopia” (p. 75). Although J. C. Wolf views this pathologically, there is another way to view the desire for eternal childhood, in a depth psychological way, and ask: What is so important about childhood that we would erect places like Disneyland and essentially make pilgrimages there? I can answer this in one word: "Neoteny," but perhaps I need to say more.

In the movie The Graduate (Nichols, 1967), Mr. McGuire, a friend of the family, gives Ben (Dustin Hoffman) a tip for his future. Mr. McGuire takes Ben outside by the pool and says “I just want to say one word to you . . . . Plastics . . . there’s a great future in plastics.” Well I would say "neoteny, there’s a great future in neoteny." Tom Robbins (1990), my favorite author, writes about neoteny in Still Life With Woodpecker, because his typewriter, the Remington SL3, so enjoys the word:

Neoteny is “remaining young,” and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals—although a case could be made for the dolphins—because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. (pp. 18-19)

Neoteny, the carrying juvenile traits into adulthood, is one of the things our species is most famous for, and neoteny and plastics it turns out, have a lot in common. Our neotenous heritage allows our behavior to be flexible, and adaptive; allows for many different things to occur and increases our options. Thus, I feel there is a great future in neoteny.

Montagu (1983), who wrote the book on neoteny, appropriately titled Growing Young says that plasticity of traits and educability is “beyond all other traits, the most neotenous” (p. 74). Montagu then describes why neoteny is so important:

Success of individuals in most societies has depended and continues to depend upon the ability speedily to evolve behavior patterns that fit them to the kaleidoscope of conditions encountered. One is best off submitting to some, resisting others, compromising with some and escaping from still other situations. Individuals who display a relatively greater fixity of response than their fellows suffer . . . and tend to fall by the way. Suppleness, plasticity, and—most important of all—ability to profit from experience and education are required. No other species is comparable to the human in its ability to acquire new behavior patterns and discard old ones. (p. 74)

The fact that we can learn, and have plasticity of mental traits makes us unique as a species and has freed us from “the constraint of a limited range of biologically predetermined responses” (Montagu, 1983, p. 77). So, neoteny it is!

Neoteny—Cosmological Calling to Childhood

Disneyland is a very nostalgic, utopian place. [Learn more about this on the "Looking-Back, Looking-Forward" excursion located in Tomorrowland]. Maybe this back and forth between nostalgia and utopia that is evident at Disneyland is the secret to our future as well. Wakefield (1990) points out that “it is the imagination of the child that is conceived as the past and future utopia of the adult” at Disneyland, where adult attendance in the initial decades outnumbered children by four to one. Wakefield further notes that:

The child is seen to represent a state of nature forfeited by the complexity of adult life. The omnipresence of animals within the Disney world also helps to reinforce the suggestion that it is nature itself that pervades and determines the whole complex of social relations. (p. 107)

Indeed, neoteny and the return to childhood are intrinsic to our nature as Brown (2002, unpublished manuscript; 2003 unpublished chapter) and Swimme (1995, cassette), both of whom are very neoteneous, share.

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, in Canticle to the Cosmos (1995, casstte) notes that “if you go back to the beginnings, that’s where all the creativity is.” Whether the beginning of a person, a species or even the universe itself, the core of creativity exists in this childhood state. Why is this true? Because Swimme explains, as time goes on in development, specialization occurs and this limits the possibilities of creativity. As a species, we do not have as many “fixed action patterns” or instincts—we have consciousness (sometimes at least) and that provides us a pause to be able to choose different possibilities. We are designed to be able to choose different possibilities and to more easily do things differently than other species whose behavior is more instinctual. Swimme points out that biologists discovered that creativity takes place under stress and that new species are created when a species is under tremendous stress:

It is then that the great return takes place, there’s this eternal return that takes place within life, it’s the return to the origins, the return to creativity, so that is a return to novelty, something new under stress, something new is tried and if what comes forth out of the origin of creativity is effective, it's allowed to go forth. Hominid types came about in this way.

Swimme (1995, cassette) remarks that all creativity is similar to the dynamic tension of the earth, in the balance of tensions between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces. Quoting the anthropologist Krober, Swimme argues “the proper condition of the human is not bovine placidity, it is in fact the highest degree of tension that can be creatively born.” Well, it is nice to know that stress is good for something!

The great apes were under stress and fragmented into gorillas, chimps, and humans, Swimme remarks, “a very strange creature that never leaves by very much the origin of creativity.” At the beginning of every species, Swimme recounts, and also in the young of every species, there is tremendous activity to create, but then specialization steps in and creative capacity is not as present as before: “all this groping” and exploration take place. Humans, Swimme (1995, cassette) maintains are born perpetually young in that our adult characteristics are similar to the juveniles of other species. They grow out of these characteristics, we do not:

Deep within genetic structure of mammals is the opening of creativity, called youth and then a closing down called adulthood. What life does with the creation of humans: is to say we’ll just take infancy and stretch it out and call it a species. We’re constantly in the creative motion and movement and exploration of a mammalian infant or juvenile.

In many other species, creativity closes down, and they do not play as much, but human beings are designed by evolution to be perpetual players. This is where we are "blowing it big time" and what Disneyland is possibly seeking to compensate for. However, by beginning to specialize earlier and earlier, we are closing down play, our evolutionary gift and heritage. By not giving play the time and space it both needs and deserves, we may be in great danger as a species. Swimme (1995, cassette) continues that when we opt for a closing down of creativity, “a kind of death takes place within the human—a fossilization takes place that isn’t in our genes, actually a different destiny is called for by the human.” In the "Mary Poppins" chapter, we will further explore neoteny and play in action, as Mary works her magic on George Banks to reverse this closing down of creativity.

Stuart Brown, a friend and colleague of Swimme’s concurs, and actually introduced Swimme to the concept of neoteny. In the 1960s, Brown (1969) became aware of the dangers of play deprivation in his research with the “Texas Tower Shooter.” Brown (2003, unpublished chapter) says that the neotenous play state of being is our evolutionary design, and notes that Konrad Lorenz found that neoteny also calls forth tenderness, a nurturing response and invites play in others. Witness our reactions to children and puppies. Montagu (1983) explicates quoting philosopher Mary Midgley:

“Creatures that have to deal with helpless and demanding young must be capable of genuine kindness and tolerance. This makes it possible for fellow adults to tap these resources if they behave in a childlike way.” Mutual relations, she points to can be formed in which both parties can on occasion play both roles. “It is at the point,” she adds, “long before the emergence of the primates—that nature ceases to be Hobbesian. Friendship becomes possible. And it is on such a foundation (however unsuited to human dignity) that the serious business of social life is actually grounded.” (p. 108)

Disneyland taps into these resources in precisely this way. [Explore these ideas more in the "Art of the Show" excursion located in Fantasyland.] Through domestication, dogs have been bred for neotenous traits and so retain juvenile features and immaturity into adulthood. We humans are the dogs of the ape world, and we have the honor of being the least specialized, most designed to play of all species, including the dolphin, according to Brown (2002, unpublished manuscript; 2003, unpublished chapter), because our brains hold onto the flexibility, adaptability, and non-specialization our whole life cycle. Brown states: “the defining characteristic of our species is this capacity for, (and need of play).” The bottom line from Brown is: "we only have play: we risk it at our peril" (personal communication February 2005).

In addition to the plasticity of mental traits-- being more flexible in habitat, and less specialized in habits, neoteny is expressed in physical characteristics which include a smooth flat face, wide-set eyes, a short nose, non-jutting and smaller jaw, large size of brain, lack of heavy brow ridge, and round-headedness. Montagu (1983), in addition to setting forth these physical characteristics, lists the neotenous drives of the child and devotes almost a quarter of the book to a discussion of these traits in turn. These traits are are: the need for love, friendship, sensitivity, to think soundly, to know, to learn, to work, to organize, curiosity, the sense of wonder, playfulness, imagination, creativity, openmindedness, flexibility, experimental-mindedness, resiliency, the sense of humor, joyfulness, laughter and tears, optimism, honesty, trust, compassionate intelligence, dance, and song (p. 131).

Brown (2002, unpublished chapter) relates the benefits that neoteny can confer on us if we allow play into our lives and cultivate a playful way of being:

Our “immaturity” helps us handle paradox, allows us to live with inevitable disorder and chaos, keeps us enjoying repetitious variations on a theme--those qualities we most honor as human. It even insures, if we keep playful, a wide, wide range of non-specialized behaviors, including the capacity for telling humorous stories to our great-great grandchildren. Not bad.

Mencius, the Chinese sage, writes: "the wise man retains his childhood habit of mind” (Montagu, 1983, p. 127). Swimme (1995, cassette) maintains that the deep dynamic of the child is what our species is all about: “We’re to be at the core of creativity, to recapture the mind of a child, we find it flooding us, it’s a movement of the cosmos.” Unfortunately, many adults are not so wise, as Montagu notes:

Adults fail to understand that those childlike qualities constitute the most valuable possession of our species, to be cherished, nurtured and cultivated [all the days of ours lives]. They fail to realize that the child surpasses the adult by the wealth of his possibilities. In a very real sense infants and children implicitly know a great deal more concerning many aspects of growing than adults; adults, therefore, have more to learn from them about such matters than the later have to learn from adults. (Mendizza and Chilton Pearce, 2003, p. 127)

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