Teen-age Relationships: The Need for Maturity
Kenneth C. Barnes
Address to Marriage Guidance Council,
London, May 14th 1962.
What do we mean by maturity; what is our concept of a mature person? To answer this question we must go down to fundamentals, to the very roots of our belief and feeling about the significance of human life; we have to ask ourselves what we believe to be possible in us – possible precisely because we are human. There cannot be a complete answer to this question, because at no point do we ever reach a complete fulfilment. Human life is creative, it is always becoming, it is always capable of transcending the present; there is no ultimate pattern which will mark the end of human development.
When, therefore, I try to say what my concept of maturity is I shall necessarily be tentative and partial, I shall try to describe dynamic qualities rather than patterns of behaviour. I would begin by saying that a mature person is one who has reached a condition in which he can begin to make full use of his own potentialities and to act objectively in relation to his environment. He is one who does not swing back to a childish condition when facing difficulties nor project on his environment false appearances and qualities arising from his own subjective demands.
But I must go further, and it is difficult to do so without using religious terms. I cannot avoid a Christian judgment, indeed not one of us can avoid this. We cannot truly discover our Christian heritage; even the most arrogant atheist is profoundly affected in his judgments by the fact that our history and our thinking are everywhere penetrated by concepts of personality that are Christian in origin. When the atheist condemns organised or official Christianity it is often obvious that he is doing so from a point of view that is more Christian than the organisation he condemns. A former pupil of mine, a distinguished nuclear physicist, rejects everything religious that I write, but he asserts the supreme importance of personal relationships and their quality. He is in fact asserting the Christian concept of human relationships as against the Greeko-Roman.
This Christian concept, though glimpsed by many outside the Christian tradition, did not come easily into the world, and it does not survive without a struggle. It has often been rejected, and in modern times. Nazism had a concept of human fulfilment and it made the fullest uses of people’s capacity for self-sacrifice and devotion; but its values were utterly different. They involved a rejection of the personal in favour of an impersonal ideal - an ideal that gave primary significance to a mystical concept of race and state. I must hasten to add that many so-called religious movements have been guilty of the same misdirection of idealism. It is possible for concepts of “faith” and “Church” to be a bogus and as impersonal, and to demand actions that are as wicked as those of the Nazis.
The Christian would say that we are on our way to maturity when we recognise that the two great demands of Jesus take precedence over all others: Thou shalt love God.......and thy neighbour as thyself. These “laws” are often seen too narrowly by Christians as involving a credal statement of belief, a formal act of worship, saying one’s prayers, being kind and unselfish and going about doing good, generally being “holier than thou”. They mean far more than that. They are a statement that relationship – deep and immediate and intimate – is of primary importance, dwarfing every other aim: power, social importance, scholarly distinction, success.
The use of the word “law” in relation to these demands is unfortunate. They are not laws in the sense of something we are told to do. Indeed, we cannot love because we are commanded to do so. They are more like laws in the scientific sense; they state something that is true about human life. If we do not make relationship, with its feelings of friendship and love and commitment, primary, then we are not human.
Not all of those listening to me are Christians. But is there anything in what I have said that a humanist or an agnostic would want to disagree about? If he wants to cut out “thou shalt love God”, perhaps he can at least agree that in relationship, in all our loving commitment to service, our attempts to meet human need, there is something universal, something we can’t adequately express but which we must all assent, just as scientists as a group must assent to a truth about the physical world that is the same for all. In the physical world there are not many truths but one truth; in the world of persons there are not many Gods but one God.
In my work in education I accept the primacy of the personal, but this does not imply that one should all the time educate consciously for personal relationships. This would make our work among persons more like the development of a technique; “How to Make Friends and Influence People”! No, it is rather recognition that all the time our work is taking place in a personal setting. Something is happening all the time to our pupils as persons. Even when we are dealing with subjects that seem impersonal - mathematics or physics – something is happening between teacher and pupil as persons. (Mathematics is of all subjects the most deeply disturbed by emotional upsets, maladjustment, failure of personal contact). A personal relationship can be positive or negative; it is never neutral, for that would be a contradiction in terms. It is always constructive or destructive. Something therefore must be kept sensitive in ourselves so that we know what we are doing, know what is happening to ourselves and to our young people below the superficial level.
This concept of maturity as a condition that puts relationship first does not imply a pattern of conduct nor the expression of a catalogue of desirable virtues. It is a continuing experience, a never-ceasing growth. It is the reverse of the achievement of a pattern, precisely because you cannot foresee what you will become, what situations you will have to face or how you will deal with them. Love is the central maturing experience, but you can never predict where it will take you. There is no guarantee that it will lead you only into actions that will be approved by your neighbours and society, or by the Church and the Scribes. In loving we commit ourselves to the unknown. We abandon plans and become creators.
If you make the achievement of power or wealth your objective you can indeed follow a plan. If your main desire is an empire of newspapers you can bulldoze your way into achieving every detail of your plan; you can foresee the possible future and make it come into being – at a cost. But if you commit yourself to relationships and love you do not know where tomorrow will take you; you will need the sensitiveness to feel your way into the real nature of each new situation, discovering what you can make of it, what it has to teach you about life and about yourself.
I should try to add now some other characteristics of maturity that are, however, closely related to what I have already said. I’ll use another statement from the Gospels: I have come that ye might have life, and that more abundantly. This Christian concept of man’s destiny is in no way out of accord with, for instance, the hopes of Sir Julian Huxley, expressed in The Humanist Frame. It is in the nature o man to transcend his nature. He is not like an animal, for an animal remains limited by the pattern of its own nature. Huxley wants to see mankind, by taking thought and by a clearer perception, achieving a higher and very different level of culture. Jesus saw the limitless possibilities in man, set free from fear and pride; you will in fact “inherit the earth” – the whole earth, with its manifold gifts and interests.
In the immature condition a man’s vision is restricted. He see only what his condition will allow him to see. There is fear, withdrawal, in the face of what is new and challenging. He cannot reach beyond his nature but is imprisoned within it. This condition is often associated with psychological difficulties having their origin in childhood, but it can also be associated with idealism and pattern-thinking, with a devotion to morality or an intellectualism that is impatient with what doesn’t for into the pattern. Difficulties are therefore a nuisance, instead of – as they really are – an opportunity to expand experience.
The mature person finds fascination in difficulty and variety. He welcomes the surprising and the unexpected. He does not expect life to be like a Roman road running straight to a destination but to be like finding a path through largely unmapped country, taking him into unexpected places from which he has to find his own way out. The mature person is ready to cope with dismay and disappointment and failure; these are part of the experience of creative living, inevitably part of the attempt to meet life whole and generously. He is ready to face reality, even at its ugliest and most terrifying; for him there is no retreat into fantasy or a feigned blindness. Most definitely the mature person has come to terms with fear – not to suppress it or deny its existence, but to face it, to recognise what it is and discover release from its power.
There is yet another Christian concept closely concerned with maturity: the idea of being “born again”. I emphasised at the beginning that to achieve maturity is not to arrive at a final stage. Maturity does not consist in knowing the wickedness and difficulty of life and putting up with it because of the promise of a radiant hereafter or through stoic fortitude. It is not a state of elderly wisdom, the achievement of a Platonic philosopher-king. It is not the conquering of emotional urgencies and their subjugation to what is socially or religiously tolerable.
No, maturity is a release – a release into life. It is a condition of being born again, of achieving a new innocence and directness of perception. It is a condition in which we experience delight – delight in what life and relationships bring to us. It is not passionless but full of passion and intensity – precisely because it is a release of energy, the energy that Blake described as “eternal delight”. It is a condition in which we are not afraid to go astray, because, having been “born again”, we are once more in a position to learn from experience. And it is not one re-birth, but the possibility of repeated re-birth and the renewal of joy in life time after time.
All this must seem to contradict the conventional ideas of maturity, associated as they are with authority, decision, power, and all that is outwardly “impressive” to an audience. There can be no maturity without humility.
Now look at the life of the teenager, at his relationships with other persons and his environment. There is a constant temptation to judge by appearances instead of reality and to substitute appearances for true growth. Reality cannot be seen and felt because it is distorted by subjective valuations that are false and often impersonal – valuations that result partly from the incidious (sic) attack by social forces on an impressionable adolescent searching for a means to make himself significant. To the boy, power tends to become supremely significant and appealing because of its unconscious link to his sexuality. He becomes fascinated by machines and techniques, by what glitters and works smoothly, rhythmically and powerfully. The situation is symbolised with frightening crudity of the obsessions of the black-coated motor cycle obsessives, worshiping their throbbing machines and subjugating their “dames”, their girl-friends, their love-relationships, to the relationship of saddle-and-pillion.
In an address given earlier this year to the Association of Assistant Mistresses I spoke at length about the difficulties that our society puts in the way of a girl’s development. Perhaps I should summarise what I said, because it is very relevant to this subject of maturity. The last hundred years have brought the possibility of a new freedom for women, the prospect of true equality with men. But the freedom so far achieved has been largely unreal. Women have been released into a man-made world, a world largely shaped to accommodate the interests and energies of men, and a world whose frustrations and evils peculiarly express maleness at its worst and most destructive. In our patriarchal society there is no real place for women. Women have therefore had to vie with men by imitating men and thus denying searching deep in their own nature, or they have had to seek status by chasing and attaching themselves to men. Through this perversion and distortion of their nature, they achieve not true womanliness, but feminity (sic) - often in a lamentably trivial form. Woman had a kind of security in a world that accorded them a sentimental reverence and guarded their chastity. Freedom has launched them into insecurity and they react to this – as does a child – with aggression. The feminity (sic) of woman has taken on a disturbing and assertive character. It is a feminity (sic) that shrieks and stabs at the world; that has little modesty and no reticence.
I need hardly point out how the teenage girl now has to face a situation in which her sexuality is endlessly exploited (largely by men) for commercial purposes, and in which it is extremely difficult for her to see other people and her own nature objectively. She is encouraged to think of relationship wholly in superficial terms and of the expression of it in trivialities. And far more than a boy, a girl is encouraged to put on the appearance of being grown up when she is in fact a mere child, when she has no wisdom and hardly any control. What hope has a girl in this condition, of understanding what maturity is and how it is to be achieved?
During the depression of the thirties there were many of us who became sharply critical of an economic system that seemed inherently unstable and necessarily neglectful of human need. It seemed to have something evil at its core. We wondered whether it would ever achieve stability or prosperity again. To-day, through our system of checks and controls, free enterprise seems to have provided us with prosperity and affluence, and we tend to become insensitive and complacent. But you have only to read the “Hidden Persuaders” to recognise that there remains something inherently vicious in our economic system and that our young people are paying the price of affluence in an almost total loss of real freedom.
If we are really concerned with the achievement of maturity in young people and the encouragement of relationships that are deep and sincere we must once more clear-sightedly criticise the motives of commerce and industry and the ethics of private-enterprise; and we must demand a society that is a product of man-and-woman in co-operation, and that will cease to be an expression of the aggression, competition and ruthlessness that are so characteristic of men when they have it all their own way.
Apart from this, and recognising the kind of society we have for the time being to put with, what conscious guidance and help can we give young people? What we have called the moral code, or conventional morality, is almost completely ineffective in its appeal. It is too concerned with the superficial, with what is respectable and supposedly approved by society. The fact that it is presumed to be Christian in origin no longer carries any weight, because Christianity now has to stand on its own feet; it no longer produces any snob-appeal or exerts any social pressure. Any young man or woman can now without shame disavow Christianity and with it Christian morals.
Members of the Marriage Guidance movement may tend to think of the preservation of marriage and family life as the focus of moral thinking. But even this can seriously mislead us. In spite of the weakening of traditional Christian attitudes there is still an inclination to think of the marriage relationship as sacred. But is it? No. It is no more sacred, initially, than any other relationship. It is sacred only if the relationship of the two people concerned makes it so. It is this unjustified reverence for institutions or customs, ceremonies or traditions – a reverence for social externals – that in the end destroys the appeal of Christianity and confuses our thinking about moral problems. Jesus brushed aside almost casually the externals of relationships, even the most reverenced family relationships, in his concern for relationship in its most intimate form.
Our morality has failed to meet the need of young people precisely because it has been a morality of externals, of appearances. I need hardly say to marriage counsellors that the relationship between the partners in a marriage can be as deeply unsatisfactory as in a sex relationship outside marriage. Perhaps it is less courageously recognised that a relationship outside marriage can sometimes be as tender and devoted, and as genuinely loving, as a good marriage can be. This is not to encourage relationships outside marriage but to emphasise that if we are to work for stable and creative relationships, we must turn our attention away from categorical moral judgments and concern ourselves with the inherent nature of a human, loving, relationship – with its most intimate character. Many of the educational workers in the Marriage Guidance movement are vigorously concerned with this now; had we given attention to this in earlier generations we should have had much less of a moral problem to-day.
I have said that a mature person is prepared for an uncertain life, for unforeseen situations. This applies perhaps more than anywhere else, to sexual relationships, which unavoidably challenge all our tidy patterns – always have challenged them and always will. An external morality leads to a frightened withdrawal, or cracks under the strain, opening the way to the furtive and the squalid. As a person moves towards maturity in the sense I have described it he will develop a more fundamental morality, based on a wide sensitiveness, that will seek a loving and constructive way in all circumstances.
Criticism of the moral code is often taken to imply the condoning of sexual laxity. It laxity is simply the breaking of the code then this is inevitable; but that is to remain preoccupied with externals. What is laxity in a more real sense? It is indulgence without responsibility or commitment, without continuing tenderness. It is taking sexual pleasure but withholding the self, refusing to open one’s eyes to the deeper needs of the other, lest one should become “involved”. It is to make a brief relationship that is not in any sense a consummation.
Needless to say I do not condone laxity in that sense. But I want to plead for a recognition of two truths, as I think them to be.
- That failure to live strictly in accordance with the moral code is not wickedness in the sense that robbery, violence and fraud are unless it really involves injury and exploitation.
- Humanity can never be tidied into a strict pattern of moral behaviour. The strict moralists speak as though this were possible and desirable. No morality that is concerned with the external forms of conduct can ever be more that a rough generalisation of what is desirable in society.
The first of these truths requires that we must stop getting “hot under the collar” about sexual waywardness. We must look at it coolly and objectively if we are to act constructively. We must ask in every individual instances what is the real nature and content of the relationship, what is there that the two people should be more conscious of, what is there to repudiate or to build upon. This is the only way to help teenagers to reach maturity.
To accept my second point is to accept a fundamental fact about what it is to be human. It is not in the nature of human beings to be tidied into a neat pattern, no matter how spiritually desirable the pattern may seem. Human beings will always in some measure be wayward and unpredictable. We should thank Heaven for this, for it is our guarantee against the success of all totalitarian attempts to make man conform. It is our guarantee that we shall always produce great artists, musicians and poets, great scientists, daring thinkers and originators, and awkward rebellious people to shatter our complacency and stir us out of spiritual torpor. You cannot have freedom and variety in some essential activities of mankind and deny it in others. The waywardness of man in sexual relationships often, alas, results in terrible suffering and exploitation, but even here it is the inevitable accompaniment of man’s freedom to discover and understand, to make knowledge his own. Only when we accept this can we work constructively and make possible a redemption of suffering.
It is often the environment that makes conformity impossible. People are overtaken by situations that they cannot manipulate into a moral pattern. Are we merely to criticise and condemn or are we to say that this is in the nature of life and that it is precisely through this kind of experience that maturity and understanding often come? Black-and-white moral judgments make impossible the kind of wisdom that assimilates the unforeseen.
All those who teach children can be sure that a proportion of their pupils will stray from the moral path when they leave school if not before. It is important that the education we give them – and by that I mean much more than knowledge or instruction – should fit them to learn to achieve wisdom and discrimination from whatever they go through. It should not make them feel that any action of theirs cuts them off spiritually from the older generation, for a barrier of this kind is one of the most serious obstacles to the development of maturity. It stops or deflects growth. Nothing should encourage young people to feel that they are of different clay from their elders. There should be the greatest possible sharing – sharing of our common humanity. We should share with teenagers an awareness of the complexity of human relationships and our humility in the face of it – if we have this humility. If from our own experiences we have found joy in living and a faith in the resilience of mankind, we should share that too.
There is bound to be conflict, but there should never be acquiescent defeat. We may have to stand up to the younger generation for values we have come to believe in, but this will do no harm if it is accompanied by an underlying humility and if our values are deeply and sincerely rooted in experience, not repetitions of conventional, habitual or traditional judgments. On the other hand, the worst that can happen is to wash our hands of responsibility and let matters take their course because we feel we can’t cope any longer. This is to earn only the contempt of those who need help, bu do not find it in us.
Archive reference PP/KCB 6/6/4 document 09