Lessons from Adolescence

I watched Adolescence recently. I am an educator who works with children and young adults as a facilitator of philosophy and also as a coach for children in care who are looking to go to university, so I felt that I really should watch this programme that was being so much talked about in my circles. I eventually got round to it!

Firstly, it is brilliant drama and storytelling. But, beyond that, how does it contribute to the discussion about the problem it highlights (among others, the central problem being young male violence towards young females and its connection to one thing in particular: online subculture surrounding the so-called ‘manosphere’). This programme succeeds in doing more than most TV shows, dramas or films: it goes beyond merely raising questions or preaching even though it does do both of these to a greater or lesser extent. 

From a narrative point of view, it asks two main questions: did he [the 13-year-old boy accused] do it [murder a girl from his school of a similar age]? And, if so, why? [Spoiler alert!] By the end of the show these questions are, on one level, answered: yes, he did it and he did it because a) ‘he has a temper on him’, b) he was bullied and goaded by the victim and c) he was influenced by an underground subculture, both online and among his peers and friends at school, towards harbouring an attitude of resentful misogyny. 

In one of the most probing scenes in the show, the attempt to understand what happened and what led to it happening goes much deeper. In episode four, the father and mother speak at length, and while in some distress after their son changes his plea to ‘guilty’, about their own role in what led to his crime. I think a really sophisticated analysis is offered to encompass the full range of possible causes in this discussion. To help illustrate how the show does this I need to refer to a psychological model and give it a philosophical twist. 

There is an idea in positive psychology, popularised by Jonathan Haidt In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, known as ‘the happiness formula’: H = C + S + V. In line with Haidt and others, I will use H to refer to ‘happiness’ but will mean by this something closer to ‘flourishing’ or ‘well-being’ rather than merely a feeling of pleasure, a meaning that we might use more commonly in everyday language.

Thus, the formula means: 

Happiness (the flourishing of a human being) is achieved by a suitable combination of good Conditions, the right biological Set point and appropriate Voluntary actions.

This can be understood, first simply, if we compare this to the flourishing of the seed of an oak tree: the seed will grow into a large, healthy, reproducing oak tree (H) if it has good genetic stock (S) and is well placed in the environment to get the most of what it needs, nutrients from the soil, enough (but not too much) water (rain) and light (sun) and is not beset with fatal diseases or infestations and the like (C).

I have not included voluntary actions (V) because this is not applicable to a plant. 

So, now we move to understanding this in the context of a human being: a human being can flourish (H) (that is, become the best it can become) if he or she is born into a good set of conditions (C), including a stable and comfortable home, a loving family, is educated, has friends and opportunities etc., if he or she has a good biological set point (S), that they have a physical and chemical capacity for well-being (e.g. is not clinically depressed), that the conditions make the set point settle at the optimum end of its range (the set point is not a single fixed point, according to Haidt, but a moveable range), and that the right choices (V) are made to ensure both the optimum conditions and set point. 

In the show, the questions raised at the outset are: does Jamie have a good set of conditions (C)? What is his genetic and biological situation (S)? What choices are made (V)? From the point of view of upbringing, the conditions come from the parental home and from society (represented in the show through the environment of the school he attends). Jamie’s set point is explored via the scene with the psychologist who visits Jamie to make an independent psychological assessment of him, in which it seems to suggest that an attitude and disposition of anger, loss of control of temper and resentment due to low self-esteem are established. This is also explored when his father (and mother) describes his father’s own temper and violent background, suggesting that Jamie’s dispositions towards violent temper may come from his father’s genes and past experiences, these things being passed on via both means, nature and nurture. His father recognises that he could have carried on the ‘family tradition’ of violence that he was ‘gifted’ by his own father, but he was under the impression that he had put a stop to that particular line by his own choices; he describes how he vowed not to beat his own children and he emphasises how he did not break this vow. 

This example shows how the V aspect of human flourishing begins with the choices not of the agent but of the agent’s parents, making the formula complex: my H = C + S + V includes a V which is not my own voluntary actions at the early stages of my life. This is slowly transferred so that by the time I become an adult, the V refers to my own actions and choices, but at around the age of 13, the age of the accused boy in the show, it is what we might describe as a gray area, where the V still includes a lot of other people’s choices and actions but where my own are starting to become salient in the effectiveness of the happiness formula. It is precisely this gray area - adolescence - that the show focuses on and its salience in determining our fate and wellbeing. 

With regard to the voluntary actions (V), there is a relationship between these and the conditions (c) that creates a ‘feedback loop’ where the conditions act upon our actions and choices and where the actions and choices act upon the conditions. For example, whether I am educated or not allows for greater choice implementation, but I can also sometimes make choices that mean that I become more educated, thereby allowing for greater choice implementation. There is, of course, a question to be asked and distinction to be drawn between choices that are free choices and those which are not. I’ll come back to this in a while. But one way I like to think of this is that a human being, unlike the tree-seed, can ‘water itself’ and walk from one spot of the garden to another. This image, I have borrowed from one of my young adults I’ve been coaching. 

Now, I’d like to talk about bedrooms and wardrobes. In Harry Potter, there is a wardrobe (of sorts) in the form of a closet under the stairs in his Muggles’ house, where Harry is often put into isolation. When he is in there, he is in a controlled environment, controlled by his foster parent, Vernon Dursley. Now compare this to the wardrobe of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Here, when someone enters, they enter a completely new world. Not only that, but when different people enter it, they do not necessarily meet the same people or events; Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus etc. while Edmond meets the evil White Witch, where he is given, as a ‘gift’, an enchanted Turkish Delight that renders his will entirely subject to his desire for more of this Turkish Delight. 

I believe that the culprit, if there is one, in the show, is ‘the bedroom’, or a certain kind of bedroom. It is not the bedroom of old, a (relatively) parentally controlled environment, where, once their children were in it, the parents could rest assured (again, relatively!) that their children would not get into trouble on the streets with their friends. The bedroom in Adolescence is the wardrobe into Narnia (in the real world: the internet, social media and information, good, bad and ugly). This is a whole other world into which children can disappear and roam around at will, to bump into a Mr. Tumnus or a White Witch. But, ominously, they do not have to meet the White Witch to get hold of the enchanted Turkish Delight (social media etc. that has been designed to catch and retain our attention); the constant and all-pervading desire to go back into Narnia is a confectionery all our children are given for free the moment they go into their wardrobe and open their box of Turkish Delight (computer or phone). So, if the bedroom is not just a bedroom but a way in which society reaches our children without parents’ cognisant consent, then it is part of the conditions that act upon our children's capacity for free choice. And, given that they ARE children and that they are under the spell of this special brand of enchanted Turkish Delight then we might call into question what sort of subspecies of choice or voluntary action this really is. Are our children really as capable of exercising autonomous free choice as we think they are during this gray area that is adolescence?

If there is one, the implied message of the film by the end is: attend to your children, be present with them, know what they are doing in their bedrooms and perhaps, we as a society, need to take more control of what is happening in the bedrooms of our children, particularly online. Why? Because they are still children, and although we have to let them grow up (and part of that is the norm to grant them privacy when in their rooms), our job is to water them and not poison them. We would never deliberately poison our children, but, perhaps, simply by letting them disappear into their bedrooms and into their phones and computers (and subject to algorithms) under the values of autonomy and privacy, we - society as a whole - may end up paying a huge cost.