Book Review: Infantilised, How Our Culture Killed Adulthood

Keith Hayward's new book on why our culture is so childish, narcissistic and obsessed with safety

Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood. Keith Hayward. 2024

“By now it should be clear that infantilisation is a ubiquitous element of contemporary culture. It manifests itself in everyday vernacular through now-popular childish terms used by adults, such as ‘forever home’, ‘girly girl’, ‘ickle’, ‘bestie’, ‘yummy’, ‘crib’, ‘man cave’, ‘my bad’, ‘aah, bless’, ‘funemployment’ and ‘X sleeps until Y’. It is evident in contemporary business culture in juvenile initiatives like corporate ‘sleepovers’ and ‘rage rooms’ (designed to allow businesspeople to vent pent-up anger). And it is a consistent feature of many of the new youth subcultures that society today spawns. It used to be the case in criminology and sociology that the subfield of subcultural studies traced the relationship between youth subculture and deviance. Today, however, the talk is of ‘post-subcultural theory’ and the idea that, rather than deviant subcultures, youth culture is now increasingly associated with hyper-conformity.”

I downloaded Keith Hayward’s new book on infantilisation after I read online that certain banks would soon be replacing the traditional format of addressing their customers as “Mr Smith” with the more informal “Hey John”, in the name of making people feel more relaxed and creating a more ‘accessible’ environment. I devoured it within two days, and it left me thinking about the political and social problem of cause and effect. Are we more infantile because of some particular circumstances, or are we in these circumstances because we are more infantile? For Haywood, an academic criminologist, the question of whether our (Western, Anglosphere) culture is more childish is no longer open for debate. For him, the question is why, what is driving it and can it be reversed?

The book is a fascinating insight into the totalisation of infantile behaviour, its origins in the 1950’s youth movements and the particular effects it is having as it ripples through the generations. It is also revealing just how little our academic class has researched this topic and how few theories there are to explain it. If I had to summarise the main thesis it would be this:

In a post-war period of material abundance, the teenager was created as a concept through market forces. Through the collapse of political organisation into a cultural narcissism of the Self, the West has become progressively more immature, culminating in its specifically infantile current character and, paradoxically, dissolving the boundaries between life stages.

The opening chapter hits you like a gut punch, speeding through every aspect of modern culture and highlighting how degraded and puerile most of it has become - television, music, art, literature, politics, speech, clothing and food - to name but a few:

Unable to perceive moviegoers as anything other than big children, the corporate infantilisers who run Hollywood are doubling down on stories involving children’s toys and action figures. Following the success of Barbie (2023), toy manufacturer Mattel has signed up Lena Dunham and J. J. Abrams to develop films based on their top-selling Polly Pocket dolls and Hot Wheels toy cars respectively…

Children’s TV for adults also extends to a host of food/travel shows, including Man V. Food, Kid in a Candy Store, Monster Munchies, Outrageous Food, Carnival Eats and Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, all of which turn around a preoccupation with children’s food (doughnuts, burgers, milkshakes, etc.), and promote the idea that more always means better…

Infantilised music and lyrics now encompass everything from babyish ditties like ‘We’re Just Babies, Man’ by hip-hop act Digable Planets to the gummy-bear-and-gingerbread world of Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls’ video. Perry, soon to enter her forties, is especially interesting in this context because of the way she embodies a practice common among many female celebrities of ‘ageing backwards’

While this certainly closes down any question of how childish current mass society is, these surface effects are actually the least dangerous. Hayward identifies two key features of contemporary society - firstly that the concept of ‘life stages’ has broken down, and secondly the awful consequences of this are something he terms generational mulch. The life stage - ie, infant to child, child to adolescent, adolescent to adult - no longer functionally exists in a world where all the behaviours and material attributes of each stage are blended together. He correctly perceives the danger, that children are increasingly treated as adults as much as adults have retreated into childhood. His examples include the inability of policy makers to determine when childhood ends for criminal and even terrorism purposes, the rise of overt politicised messaging in children’s toys and books and the creation of categories such as ‘queer children’ and ‘trans children’.

It used to be the case that European nations would condemn barbaric terrorist groups like Islamic State and Boko Haram for failing to draw a line between young people and adults when it came to the use of children as soldiers or executioners in combat zones. Yet, in recent years, governments in the West appear equally confused about this issue. In the UK, in the period between 2016 and 2019, more than six hundred children under the age of six were referred to the Home Office’s counterterrorism Prevent scheme, including one four-year-old boy whose terrorist boasts turned out to be a reference to the video game Fortnite…

In example after example, from the use of paedophilic symbolism by high-fashion house Balenciaga to the dubious content of Drag Queen Story Hour and The Family Sex Show to Netflix series like Cuties (2020) and Sex Unzipped (2021), it appears that some factions in the upper echelons of the culture industry are extremely confused about where adult sexuality starts and childhood ends. Indeed, such is the confusion about children’s place in society that some commentators consider it acceptable to moot the idea of ‘porn for children’, or even worse to publicly promote the acronym MAP [minor attracted person] as a way of ‘destigmatising’ (i.e. shamefully excusing) paedophilia. Likewise, transgender activists regularly speak of the so-called ‘transexual child’…

As a result, we now exist in such a bizarre, upside-down world that a judge presiding in an English court is prepared to accept that an adult teacher who had sex with one of his sixteen-year-old pupils had been groomed by the student rather than the other way round

For a relatively mainstream book Hayward has no issue targeting progressives. In chapter after chapter he excoriates ‘Trump derangement syndrome’, the rise of woke coddling on university campuses, political ideas about emotional safety and the behaviour of politicians such as Justin Trudeau. This may also be the first book of its type to engage with and quote the writings of anonymous internet accounts, in particular the twitter/X user ‘Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost’. But I think ultimately his worldview is that of an old-school liberal-leftist, infuriated by the degradation of traditional collective forms of politics.

Christopher Lasch himself, the historian and social critic, is leant on heavily in the book. As one of the few people who saw where contemporary society was headed, his idea of cultural narcissism is deployed by Haywood to great effect. Moving between the tennis star Naomi Osaka and the response to COVID-19, Haywood builds a case that infantilisation today is more than just generic youth worship, but rather it is a psychological phenomenon whereby adults are incentivised to develop and nurture a sense of vulnerability and combine it with a narcissistic armoury of self-indulgence and self-pity. Hayward argues that advertising plays a prominent role in this, since it is one of the most powerful forms of modern media, and has deliberately utilised postmodern techniques such as pastiche, irony, ahistoricism, spectacle and most of all fantasy.

If Hayward is correct then the entire edifice of adolescent rebellion and counterculture was built on little more than marketing fantasy to young adults. Noting that a consistent feature of youthful demonstrations during the 1960’s and 70’s was the near absence of concrete demands, he argues that the impulses unleashed during those decades inevitably turned inwards, to the Self. Through New Ageism, meditation, eastern philosophies, Jungian psychoanalysis and similar fluff - modern man has been bred as a creature in need of constant therapeutic interventions to help them discover some fantastical true self, which he argues is a fantasy arising from cultural products and their powerful commercials. Thus adults have regressed and the symbolic world of adulthood has been abolished. A man who doesn’t need therapy is suspicious, an adult who rejects cultural immaturity lacks cultural capital.

Whether or not this is true, Hayward’s argument is compelling and will sound novel to many ears. He reserves his most dangerous warnings for the end, where he suggests that liberal democracy cannot possibly survive when its citizens have little autonomy, agency or even the desire for basic liberty. Children need to feel safe, and this is the end result of such infantilisation. Modern students do not rebel against the system, they want more system. Anecdotes abound of university protests in which young adults demand more censorship, more restrictions, more forms of therapy and mental health support - in short, more authority.

In blaming the logic of the marketplace and capitalism however, Hayward has run the risk of fixing the moment on the chain of causation where it feels most comfortable for him. There are much larger forces at work than just marketing and advertising firms. The loss of religion, the post-war collapse of any guiding civilisational principle, the switch from literacy to post-literate digital content. But these would require much larger books where this book can stand alone. Haywood’s list of ideas about how to try and turn the culture around also seem a bit lackluster: go to museums, consume more adult content, reject emotional politics and so forth. A more penetrating insight into how culture can actually be changed is probably needed.

But all in all, if you’re looking for a good, non-sentimental and non-partisan book about one of the defining characteristics of our times, then I do recommend you find a copy of Infantilisation.