Nonage

               In his essay What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant discusses the concept of “nonage.” Nonage is the inability to think for oneself. As Kant argues, we subject ourselves to nonage because it’s easy and convenient; nonage is comfortable. Because this way of living requires minimal exertion, we have even grown to like it, and we have lost the ability to expand our own understanding.

               In college, our teachers and advisors convince us to follow a particular path that will lead to success. They tell us that it’s dangerous to stray too far from this path; we might not achieve success if we do. Due to our self-imposed nonage and narrow-mindedness, we agree out of intimidation. We drive ourselves into panic trying to get straight A’s, find an internship, be involved in “x” number of clubs and complete “x” number of volunteer hours. We conform to this predetermined path and get into a rhythm, forcing ourselves out of any notions that we might be able to try something new or different. We revert to what our advisors said. They’re our superiors, they know better. This is nonage at its finest.

               It is unclear why we choose to submit to this one path to success that has been laid out before us. It is easy to see that the people we recognize to be the most successful are the ones that completely skew from the generally understood “path to success”. These are the people that cast off nonage and decide to think for themselves. I have an example in mind. My roommates are in the Alpha Epsilon Delta fraternity and hear various health professionals speak at their weekly meetings. My roommates have never come home and shared a speaker’s story about getting a 4.0 in college, going straight into medical school and then residency, and then working in the same hospital for 20 years; although they hear these stories all the time, they’re not interested in them. Yet these stories are the ones we are working so hard to create for ourselves.

The speakers my roommates come home eager to tell me about are the non-traditional ones; they are the speakers who did not oblige to nonage and did not follow society’s traditional path to success. My roommates’ favorite speaker grew up in Harlem, did not graduate high school, had awful grades, and was not involved in any clubs. This speaker didn’t follow a laid-out agenda. He taught himself everything rather than learning what teachers told him to learn. He volunteered in areas that interested him, such as nursing and fire-fighting. Due to his own hard work and true passion, he made it to medical school, graduated in three years, and eventually became Surgeon General of the United States. People like this are the people my roommates see as being truly successful. Yet I am sure that even after hearing these stories, we will all continue to stress about grades, plan how to get into medical school right after college, plan the year we will be done with our residencies, and live in fear of branching out of our comfortable path that society has laid out for us. We have imposed nonage on ourselves, and are too scared to dispose of it even though we have witnessed the benefits of casting off this narrow-minded view of the world.

               Kant is optimistic, though; he states that “the hindrances against general enlightenment or the emergence from self-imposed nonage are gradually diminishing.” While that may have been true during Kant’s time, technology may now be returning us to this self-imposed nonage. We are again losing the ability to think for ourselves because we allow our computers to do the thinking for us. One might think that technology should help us to widen our world view. The internet allows us to learn about anything and social media allows us to connect with and engage in conversation with anybody. Technology should be making it easier to cultivate our own minds. But I argue that technology also makes it easier to be narrowly-minded.

               We are no longer forced to confront other opinions. We can pick and choose our media and select who we want to interact with online. It has become easy to let the computer think for us; as Kant says, “I have no need to think, if only I can pay.” We also feel the need to “obey” to society’s norms of participation in social media. In these ways, technology may actually impose nonage upon us. In our discussion in class, I thought about the 2016 election. I had no doubt about who would win the election because every post that reached my feed was leaning one way; when the election didn’t turn out how I expected, I was shocked. I had allowed myself to believe that the narrow view I got from my social media was the truth. I didn’t bother to investigate other sources because I was comfortable with what I was seeing and was too lazy to live outside of the reality that my media had created for me.

               Nonage is indeed comfortable. It’s easy. Nonage has become second nature for us. We do what our superiors tell us to do without a second thought. We participate in the technology that society tells us to; we fear missing out if we do not. We allow computers to decide our world view. Nonage allows us to be narrow-minded and prevents us from cultivating our own understanding. Yet, as Kant argues, we must find ways to cast off nonage and stop living in fear of thinking for ourselves. This will allow us to expand our viewpoints and allow us to better relate to the world and each other. As Kant says, “A man may postpone his own enlightenment, but only for a limited time.” Eventually we will have no choice but to confront reality and expand our own understanding.