Bywater has astutely conceptualized how ridiculous English speaking societies have become, and how its citizens both entertain and domicily consent to participate in such illogical methodologies. Simply put, we are allowing ourselves to act like Big Babies instead of grown ups.

By: Kindah Mardam Bey

January, 2008

Michael Bywater, a grown up, and collegiate Professor at Cambridge (Magdalene College), tells me at the top our interview that he's reread his most recent book Big Babies Or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?, an analysis of how society has manifested itself into serial infantilism, and reflects ‘was I being a miserable old sod?' I hope that isn't merely the case as I've felt inspired that Bywater has astutely conceptualized how ridiculous English speaking societies have become, and how its citizens both entertain and domicily consent to participate in such illogical methodologies. Simply put, we are allowing ourselves to act like Big Babies instead of grown-ups. Bywater goes into great detail in Big Babies about how this reveals itself in society and also examines the ideas of what it is to be a grown up.

Most importantly, Bywater's searingly good wit has generated a pleasant afternoon of interviewing for myself (sometimes I simply love my job!), and an incredibly interesting read for all of you. Foremost a journalist, and broadcaster, Bywater has wrote for such reputable publications as The Observer, Times, The Daily Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Women's Journal, The Independent on Sunday, and the venerable Punch, when in its latter part of existence. Mind you, when reading the authors profile at the start of Big Babies, you know early on you are dealing with an intellectual pro that ignores censures and people who take themselves too seriously. The biography reads as such:

‘Michael Bywater is a writer, broadcaster, culture critic and seditious malcontent. His previous books include The Chronicles of Bargepole and Lost Worlds (Granta Books). Michael Bywater lives in cashmere, feeds on honeydew, and occasionally stirs himself to teach the odd spot of Tragedy at Cambridge. He has got his eye on you, so stop it.'

In Big Babies, Bywater manages to take that shadow on the Platonic caveman's wall and help us laugh at ourselves for thinking its reality, he also points out at times, that we have the most amazing ability to turn ourselves around and see what is actually making the shadows we have become so captivated by, appear.  

A new year has just begun, but it doesn't happen to be exciting for everyone, as Michael Bywater is hard at work trying to complete his next book. Bywater is reminded of a comment his good friend Douglas Adams (among many works, the author of The Hitchhicker's Guide To The Galaxy), who said "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.'" I hate to take up the precious time dedicated towards a deadline, but if Bywater feels the same self-imposed crunch at the finish that I often do, I know he'll be grateful to talk about something other than the book he is completing.   

The most burning question when reading Big Babies is simply, what is wrong with us? Why are we conducting ourselves accordingly and why are we allowing ourselves to get away with it? Bywater explains

"I had a double conclusion to this, and since I’ve wrote this book things have got a lot worse. I recently saw somewhere that England, Canada and the US are almost at the bottom of the world's list of countries for protecting their citizen's privacy. Just above China and Russia I believe. Where Eastern European countries are seeking out how to protect their citizen's privacy after the recession of communism, now we are going into a sort of information dark age. So, two things are going on now; we have baby boomers running the show, and baby boomers were born after the Second World War, and after two World Wars parents decided they didn't want this to happen again. They wanted to look after the new batch of kids as no other generation had done before and decided ‘we are going to make this really safe world for the younger generation.' As a result you have a whole generation who think that they have a huge sense of entitlement. That nothing can go wrong, and that if something goes wrong someone has to pay. That death is God punishing you for doing something wrong and that life must be perfect. That being young is perfection, and so they don't want to get old and they don't want to be older than they already are. You see these parents saying ‘people say me and my son are more like brothers then father and son. Well how horrid. I didn't want my father to be like a brother to me, I wanted my father to be like a father to me! And then the second thing is that this generation don't trust anyone. Go to the US and people are monitored because of the ‘war on terror.' I mean, I'm not terrified, are you terrified? Are any of your friends terrified? Do you hang around in cafes saying ‘God, we're terrified!' Nobody's actually terrified, but what happened is a dozen or so hot heads on 9/11 gave the governments of the world access to penetrate into the details of their citizens lives. A chap I know at Cambridge said ‘The point of all this stuff is not to keep us safe, it's to keep us frightened.' Government's like keeping us frightened"

Bywater reiterizes that Baby Boomers attitudes have a lot to do with how our world has been fashioned and  shaped today. "Think, a hundred and fifty years ago most people in their forties or fifties were considered old and thinking they were ready to die, but today people in their forties, fifties, and sixties are thinking ‘I'm not old yet and no reason I should behave as old.' Now we are told to be nice, and the most important thing is health and safety. The Dangerous Book For Boys is a runaway best seller in England. Why? Because it's saying lets bring some danger back into childhood. Now it should be called The Dangerous Book For Boys & Girls because we all need it. Why is the book so popular? Because it is saying ‘no safety isn't the most important thing, acting like a grown-up is pretty important too.' Adults don't want cartoons on their food. I had a jar of marmite called ‘squeezy marmite' on the label it said ‘this way up, or I get dizzy, not squeezy.' What have I done? I felt embarrassed for me, I felt embarrassed for the company. I feel dirty. It refers to itself as ‘I.' There is no ‘I' in this bloody bottle of marmite! Who is addressing me? Why am I being addressed like this? Why does an inanimate object get ‘dizzy'? Why haven't I been consulted?"

Bywater pauses for a moment and says ‘One of the great things about me, is I digress all the time. I never give a straight answer.' Ironically, listening to Bywater's ideas can be a delightful type of digressing.

As the Baby Boomers generation appears to be based around English speaking culture. Is the idea of Big Babies just an anglophile phenomena? Do other cultures talk down to their citizens through the bloodthirsty media empire? Do other cultures infantize citizens?

Quick to answer, Bywater states "No, I've spent quite a lot of time in Greece and the Middle East. You are not talked down to in those cultures. The Middle East manufactures a type of authoritarian dignity. Not reducing your citizens to this kind of abject childishness. I do think it is an anglophile thing. India...no. I think it is an isolated case of English speaking culture. As I've heard Australia is starting to have this similar problem as well. Why is that? Not in France, not in Italy." Bywater then cites an example he uses in the book regarding a French advertisements selling women's stockings.

Excerpt from Big Babies:

‘I saw on the Paris Metro an advertisement for Dim brand tights which has stayed in my mind: a photograph of a mini-skirted woman's legs, glossy in her elegant hosiery, her feet in stilettos, the whole enough to, in Raymond Chandler's phrase, make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. And clinging to one of her endless elegant legs: a toddler. A little child. The image impressed itself on me because it was pretty obvious that it could never play in England or the USA.'

The reason being that the ad represented too emotionally complex ideas for our Anglophile, present day, Freudian ‘Oedipal Complex' hypochondriac tendencies. Essentially, we haven't cultivated a grown-up response to certain situations that perhaps has been nurtured in other cultures. Instead, we prefer to look at said add and exclaim ‘Ewww, gross!' With this idea that English speaking cultures are perpetuating Big Baby attitudes, then is our language making us less autonomous? Is our terminology, that are part of our cultural text, directly infanitizing us?

The first thought that springs to Bywater's mind on the subject is ‘Newspeak' from George Orwell's 1984. "If you remove words for concepts, then you can't actually formulate those concepts accurately and so you certainly can't communicate them. If there is an element of that....what does ‘friendly fire' mean? It means ‘I got shot by somebody on my side.' Friendly! Ha. All the military terms that are used to describe death have nothing to do with the actuality of it, ‘Collateral Damage' for example."

Recently, mental-health guru Anthony Robbins suggested that we have lost the ability to converse. As part of this politically correct censuring that seems to exist, have we strayed from good conversation? 

Bywater responds to the idea "up to a point I agree, but I don't think we've lost the ability; I do believe we've lost the urge or perhaps we think that things are beyond our control. Perhaps we don't have the language anymore. If you look at these eminent Victorians who had deep conversations, they were largely governed by the urge for social change and by matter of religion. Now we live in a more or less a secular society and not particularly one that aims for change, and so in that regard, we don't have much need for conversation do we? If you look at more over-exciteable regions in the world who are interested in social change and religion, they don't have conversations either. They take direct action, and cut to the chase. Have we all lost it? I don't know. I think we still can converse well. I think people have a hunger for it now. Look at in New York how you have these philosophical cafes open where people can go and have a serious conversation. I met a Roman Catholic priest and he said he was out for dinner in the US and saw a chap in academic robes sitting down with people having dinner. The ‘academic' eventually came over to the priest and stated he was ‘a conversationalist' and charged so much money per hour. The priest said ‘what do you mean,' well, the conversationalist said ‘I sit down with couples if they don't have anything to say to each other, or are bickering, or whatever the situation is that they aren't speaking, and I sit down and make conversation with them.' Apparently people loved it. Look at 18th century London where your reputation was based on whether you were a good conversationalist or not."

"Something that bothers me is Golden Agery, people for three or four thousand years have been going on about how each generation is worst then the last and how things are going down the tubes, and yet here we all still are. I don't buy into it. I believe that no matter what age you are a part of, certain aspects will always be wrong with the age, and certain aspects will be right with it. People who will have a lot poorer time then us in the future will look back at this time in history and talk about the advanced medical care we had, that we had plastic shopping bags! ‘Now look at us; they'll say ‘the worlds falling to pieces, and we blew it.'"

Bywater furthers his idea of conversations as being linked to our social interactions in English speaking countries. "We appear to have social vulcanizations; how we are increasingly becoming isolated on our personal islands and don't want to bump into each others island. We use IPod as a tactic for being evasive and avoiding human contact within a sea of humans and yet somehow managing to exist within our own isolated communities. At times, we are virtually refusing to make eye contact with each other. Go to Damascus and find me one person in the street who is not talking to somebody else. It's almost impossible. It's as if they've been given larynx exercises by their doctors ‘keep that larynx moving or else that's going to close up!' If you are in somewhere like Damascus and are sat at a café across from someone else and the two of you speak different languages, you are still spoken to and they will try and have a conversation with you in whatever ways possible. You'll see old guys linking arms who have been talking for the last sixty years and have not run out of things to say and for some reason you don't see that in the Northern countries."

One of Bywater's solutions to acting like Big Babies, indicated in the book, is good manners....