Robert Harrison:

A previous book, "Forests", examined the cultural impact of forests (how they impacted the religious, political and social evolution of humans) using, rather than archeological/ scientific evidence, a number of literary and philosophical works spanning from the ancient Middle East to contemporary poetry ("Gilgamesh", Homer's epics, Dante's "Divine Comedy", Shakespeare, the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, Wordsworth, Thoreau, all the way to 20th-century Italian poet Zanzotto and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright). This way he can show the spiritual values of forests and of the gods of nature, and how their elimination led to a different concept of life itself. Along the way he penned sentences such as “Because we exist foremost outside of ourselves, forests become like an ancient and enduring correlate of our transcendence" and “Somewhere we still sense... that we make ourselves at home only in our estrangement". A similar approach led to his books "The Dominion of the Dead" and "Gardens", to which one must add his book of poems "The Body of Beatrice".

"Juvenescence" is about how old we are. He argues that we are both old and young. We are young because we live in a youth-obsessed society that makes us younger than humans have ever been (barring health problems, a 60-year-old man is still expected to live a youthful life). We are old because we contain in ourselves the entire culture in which we were born, a culture that is thousands of years old. Culture sets us apart from other animal species. Genetically, humans haven't changed much over the centuries, but our lifestyles are completely different from what our ancestors' lifestyles. There is also another way in which Western people are young: the pace of change is such that we don't have time to assimilate the past and we tend to live constantly in the present like children. And there is another way in which Western people are old: thanks to cosmology, Darwinian theory, DNA and carbon dating, and archeology, we are more aware than any other generation in the history of humankind that the universe is billions of years old, that life was born a billion years ago, that humankind was born hundreds of thousands of years ago and that civilizations are thousands of years old (contrary to what the Bible claimed for two thousand years). We are physically old because the atoms of our bodies were formed a few seconds after the Big Bang. Harrison points out that the cultural evolution of humankind is due to the interaction between genius and wisdom: genius causes disruption and revolution while wisdom preserves the lessons of the past. He relates genius to the Greek volcanoes and wisdom to Egypt's river: Greece's volcanic civilization started the West on a path of discontinuities, while Egypt's stable civilization represents the continuity with the past. Another way to look at his process is as the dialectic between innovation and tradition. When the pace of innovation increases, there is the risk of not having time to absorb and process the innovations, at the expense of wisdom. Hence, Harrison thinks that modernity deprives young people of the time to become wise. He calls them "orphans of time", and feels that "our age seems intent on turning the world as a whole into an orphanage". This is a sort of forced “juvenilization” that keeps the younger generation from appropriately learning from the past of the species. He blames also on information overload: modern society is good at cataloging large amounts of knowledge but the "amount" is precisely what makes it difficult to absorb. Harrison sees as positive the delayed/relayed development of the human being, the long gestation that precedes adulthood, so long to be unique among animals. It is the time required for spiritual, social, political and moral maturation, something that doesn't happen to other species. Unfortunately, Western societies are increasingly segregating the different age groups: the young are confined to educational institutions, the adults to workplaces, the old to retirement homes; which deprives the old of their traditional role as transmitters of knowledge to the young.

Again, the evidence for his argument is grounded in his analyses of the philosophical and literary tradition. Along the way he drops quotes and ideas from poets such as Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Poe, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Yeats, Rilke, Auden, Pound, TS Eliot, Bonnefoy (his favorite French poet since Apollinaire), as well as from philosophers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, with interesting observations about their work (for example that Heidegger, more than anyone else, studied time but failed to discuss the concept of one's age, which should stand to time like place stands to space).

He notices that we can easily build software that emulates the human mind but we find it difficult to build robots that can match human mobility, and his explanation is simple: the mind is "young" (it has evolved recently) whereas bodies are old (it has evolved over millions of years).

Technically speaking, Harrison introduces two concepts/terems: neoteny (the persistence of juvenile features in adults), and heterochrony (the contemporary coexistence of different biological, psychological, historical, and cultural ages).

Harrison's view of the cycles of history is borrowed explicitly from Giambattista Vico. Vico argued that every civilization goes through three ages: the ages of gods, heroes, and men. The divine age is dominated by animistic religion, its fundamental social organization is the patriarchal clan/tribe, and its language is poetic and ceremonial. The heroic age is dominated by federations of patriarchs, i.e. aristocratic classes and its language is symbolic and figurative. The age of men is dominated by a struggle for egalitarian institutions and its language is discursive and analytical.

Harrison focuses on four "neotenic revolutions" in which genius and wisdom balanced each other in ideal ways, achieving "a synergy between the synthetic forces of wisdom and the insurgent forces of genius": Plato and the rise of philosophy; the rise of Christianity; the European Enlightenment; and the founding of the USA. This was the least interesting part of the book for me. The chapter about Hannah Arendt's "natality" contains his prescriptions for education (obviously, he advocated more room for the humanities), and an interesting prediction: that adulthood will be increasingly devoted to absorb the humanities that one didn't have time to study during one's youth.

The epilogue tries to explain why US culture has such a phenomenal appeal over the rest of the world, and Harrison focuses on its "youthfulness".

Summarizing, Harrison thinks that we have never been so young (so detached from past wisdowm) and so old (so influenced but thousands if not millions of years of history and prehistory).

I have two problems with the premises of this book. First, Harrison overrated progress of the last 80 years. As i have written in this chapter of my book, we wildly overestimate the changes happening in our age and wildly underestimate the changes that happened in other eras. My favorite age is the 40 years between 1880 and 1920. Quote from my book: "One century ago, within a relatively short period of time, the world adopted the car, the airplane, the telephone, the radio and the record, while at the same time the visual arts went through Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism. Science was revolutionized by Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. Office machines (cash registers, adding machines, typewriters) and electrical appliances (dishwasher, refrigerator, air conditioning) dramatically changed the way people worked and lived. Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Varese changed the concept of music. " And so on. So i don't think that the change we have witnessed in our era is so dramatic compared with previous eras. Incidentally, the Moon landing took place in 1969, more than half a century ago, and at best we'll soon match that achievement. The only supersonic passenger plane, the Concorde, was retired. I can find dozens of cases in which there has been regress, not progress.