Bumper Bowling into Adulthood

A culture that prefers security to freedom

In the game of bowling, your score depends on where you roll the ball. You either knock the pins down or you don’t.

For toddlers, bowling alleys invented bumper bowling.. If you roll a ball that would have landed in the gutter, scoring zero, it instead hits a bumper and ricochets toward the center of the lane. You get points every time, whether you are good at aiming the ball or not. I see bumper bowling as a metaphor for what our culture is looking like nowadays.

Matthew Crawford writes,

Today’s Leviathan conceives its subjects as fragile beings afloat in a field of incipient traumas. Such a governing entity will look with suspicion on the unsupervised play…

His long essay, which also appeared on Unherd, looks at the steady increase in adult supervision of children, starting with the movement to put them into schools. Over the past 150 years, our society has reduced the scope for play, for risk-taking, and for self-government. We recently experienced this during the pandemic, as Crawford notes,

With COVID, we acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert-like supervision into every domain of life.

It reminds me that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was not about mental institutions. It was Ken Kesey’s protest against the bureaucratic mindset writ large. Nurse Ratched would not let you explore, would not let you experiment, would not let you experience “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” in the phrase coined by sports announcer Jim McKay. And that is what Kesey saw our society coming to.

Kesey’s novel pits the rebellious Randle McMurphy against the Big Nurse. The conflict is highly gendered—his power to organize and inspire a coalition against her power of propriety (to use Lorenzo Warby’s term).

Crawford also points out that what I am calling the bumper bowling culture reflects feminine personality characteristics.

the therapeutic para-state is today staffed disproportionately by women and routinely addresses its expectations to us in gendered terms, sometimes casting dissent from the programme as an expression of toxic masculinity.

…They are found in corporate HR, the Office of Student Life in universities, mandatory “Relationships and Sexual Health Education” in schools, lifestyle magazines and countless other sites of adjustment.

…the norm-setting, psyche-tending, world-describing and narrative-generating professions are staffed predominantly by women

Jonathan Haidt writes,

The central idea of my forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation [not until March 2024], is that we have overprotected children in the real world, where they need a lot of free play and autonomy, while underprotecting them online, where they are not developmentally ready for much of what happens to them.

We are witnessing the arrival of a Bumper Bowling generation, not ready for adulthood and with naive hopes for supervision by government. I was fond of saying that 17 is the new 15, but then I read Jean Twenge’s Generations. She says that it is more like 18 is the new 14.

I hope that before too long we will take the bumpers out of the gutters and get back to being a culture that bowls like adults.

substacks referenced above:

@

Play Deprivation Is A Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis

@

What is vitalism?