Legal Childhood
I have, theoretically, been writing a new novella called The Department of Evil over the last year or so. I'm about halfway through the story, and I've decided to give up for now. It's no good--words without poetry.
The story was inspired by an image I have in my mind of a young man standing on a hill overlooking a somewhat otherworldly town in the valley below. It's dusk, and the town is new but at an important turning point. The world feels fresh and clean, though not necessarily in a positive (or negative) way. Beyond that, I don't have a strong sense of the story. I wanted to capture the young man's maturation in that moment of a hard choice, and the founding of this new world, but what I ended up focusing on is completely separate from that image: the concept of Legal Childhood.
Legal Childhood--otherwise normal adults (not the mentally unsound or criminal) declaring themselves children before the law, bestowed with rights but not burdened with any responsibilities--does not exist currently, to my knowledge. And I don't want it to exist. But I can easily imagine a campaign in the near future to make it a possibility, a human rights campaign, even. In my story, the main character's mother is the one who forces the creation of the legal fiction. Legal Children largely live in pleasant, themed towns managed by an enormous corporation that is losing its power to independent machines. The Department of Evil exists to ensure the proper balance of resistance in the Legal Children's lives because, despite the relatively congenial circumstances, the Legal Children are failing to thrive.
My main character's best friend has willingly chosen to become a Legal Child, and my main character is intent on rescuing him by working at the Department of Evil in the company that runs the program. One of the main questions for my character to confront is whether his mission is righteous. If someone chooses Legal Childhood willingly, which seems plausible to me, what is the right thing to do? For various reasons, I suspect we will soon have to be more honest about the inherent slavishness of most of us (I include myself in this at various points in my life), so this was a concept I wanted to explore.
Lest you misunderstand me, when I say the inherent slavishness of humans, I do not mean that anyone is or should ever be a slave. What I mean is that our default state is slavishness: the unwillingness to take responsibility for ourselves while we nonetheless expect rights and resources. Learning to take responsibility for our choices, as Aristotle and the Jewish and Christian religions (and other thinkers and institutions) have traditionally taught, is an enormous and extremely difficult human cultural leap. It's one of the foundational elements of the Western concept of virtue. It's what we struggle to instill in our toddlers and teenagers before they leave us for the wide world. It's the root of most relationship issues. It's painful.
Most people would prefer not to take responsibility for their actions, always or sometimes. You can see this every day, all over the place. Maybe you can recognize it in yourself sometimes. It's the great human divide. So, if a life is available that gives us what we want without that burden, I can easily imagine many people signing up. That appears to be what some tech leaders are promising for the future, and I dread the prospect. But in a digital future unmoored from reality and a cultural and political moment that is increasingly comfortable with polite fictions, it feels like only a matter of time before someone makes this proposal. Am I crazy? Let's hope.
So, I didn't finish the story, but you heard it here first. (I will finish the story someday. I take responsibility for my creative failure.) How to ward off this sort of future? There's a lot to be said for the sweet truth of cold lake water or the briny character-former of the cold sea when we're tempted to give in to polite fictions. Reality is hard to tolerate sometimes, but it is the greatest gift.