How to Be an Adult (on Facebook…)
Let’s ignore the ironic elephant in this week’s NYT piece about posting photos of your kid on the internet — that sharing conversations conducted in presumed confidence as anecdata for your personal essay is quite the same as posting a pic — and delight that the topic is getting wider consideration. The most interesting and glossed-over gem in the piece is this:
Aristotle saw children as essentially moral beings in training, while Kant viewed morality as a simple matter of relationships between free and rational beings.
So what does Aristotle say about the intellectual components of adulthood? From my understanding, it’s less about the morality of the child in question, and more about whether it exists in great enough quantities for the adult in the relationship to be considered an adult. The piece hits on precisely what I’ve said before — publishing images and details of your kids’ lives is a fishing expedition for ego strokes for yourself. While Aristotle does mention that while virtue is a mean, yielding to every immediate desire is what makes a child, a child. The “moral being in training” part mentioned in the Times’ piece is the move away from that, toward temperance, morality, and adulthood.
QED: It feels good to post cute pictures and get likes. Adults don’t cave to that desire.
Aristotle also talks about the role of being the “responsible agent” for children and animals. Children and animals act from simple desire. “Responsibility requires a state of character, since responsibility requires a capacity for choice, and the capacity for choice requires a state of character.”
QED: An adult is a being capable of action. Kids and animals are capable of motion. The former is the responsible agent for the latter.
I know St. Klosterman has taken up this ethical debate of guardianship and responsibility in the same pages (and erred on the wrong side) so the less slippery answer is to deal with the concept of desire. Do I WANT to post pictures of Frankie on the internet? Of COURSE. A) It would implode with her adorableness; B) It would streamline my daily 1500 filing deadline for “photos to ancestors;” and C) I KNOW “Likes” feel good. Validating.
But I’ll add that as my coda to the Aristotelian equation, and as a TL;DR Times’ summary:
Adults earn their OWN validation.
Notes
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