Survival or development? The infant policymaker

Babies haven’t changed much for millennia.

Give or take a few enzymes this perfectly designed little bundle of desires and interests has not needed to evolve.

He’ll be fine provided there are some people there to care for him.

If not, evolution has taken care of that too.

You live in a cruel world and treat him roughly: he will develop into a compulsively self-reliant and ruthless individual with little concern for others.

Mean societies produce mean people ...

Family & Parenting Institute 

... dire warnings from environmentalists – backed up by dire facts like this – have become a kind of political tinnitus: always there, always upsetting, always ignored.

Yesterday, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released a report showing how Tony Blair’s environmental policies are “becoming daily less discernable from that of George W Bush”.

Already, it has been added to the tottering pile of similar warnings, waiting patiently to be recycled ...

What we choose to do about these scientific warnings will answer a fundamental question about human beings.

Are we a rational species, capable of understanding the damage we are doing and acting in our own self-defence - or are we addled hedonists, too high on our fumes to see the truth?

Johann Hari, The Independent, 13 November 2005

In which Steven Pinker quotes Marxist optimism: "We have the ability to construct our own futures ..." in which 'we' are a species unlimited by genes or evolution.

"The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for change and their hostility to 'bourgeois' democracy. If the 'we' is truly unfettered by biology, then once 'we' see the light we can carry out the vision of a radical change which we deem correct.

But if the 'we' is an imperfect product of evolution - limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority - then 'we' had better think twice before constructing all that history ...

constitutional democracy is a based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which 'we' are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The  checks and balances  of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect humans."

The Blank Slate page 128

Does youth have to be a time of rebellion and turmoil? This was the question asked by anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1925 when she left for an experiment that would shake current psychology to its foundations and create a book that would become a classic. The current theory of the time was that the biological changes of adolescence could not happen without a great deal of social and emotional stress - the stereotypical alienated and rebellious teen so caricatured in our society. Margaret Mead doubted this assumption, and set out to test this theory on the isolated Polynesian Island of Samoa.

There the anthropologist found a near-paradise of youth freedom. In Samoan culture young people were considered full members of society from birth with equal rights and dignity to adults. Instead of being sent to school they learned from life experiences, and once able were free to take jobs and occupations of their choice. Youth as young as 14 were able to sit on the government council. Young people were able to engage in romantic and sexual relationships without puritanical condemnation and scrutiny. It was an environment of permissiveness and freedom. Yet Margaret Mead could find no trace of the angst, stress, and alienation that so characterizes teens in our society.

At the end of her anthropological study, Mead found that youth does not have to be a time of stress and strain but cultural conditions make it so. Rebelliousness and anger is not the fault of the youth but of the society that represses them. Mead described her nine-month sojourn on Samoa and outlines her finding in this book, which became a bestseller amidst great controversy. Contemporary critics objected to its frank discussions of sexuality and unrestrained youth. The story of this radical finding jolted the social s science of young people out of old doctrines into the twentieth century and has since caused Mead to be called the "founding mother" of modern anthropology.

Unfortunately, today some parts the Samoan islands have changed from places of freedom to ones of confinement, as told in the article Gulag Schools in this issue. Margaret Mead passed away in 1978, but her book still shows that adolescent angst is not some inherent curse but the result of a repressive society, that disappears when youth are made free.

Free Youth

J.B. Watson (1878-1958) was the founder of 'Behaviourism' who argued, on the basis of experimenting with rats in cages, that there is no such thing as 'heredity' and that in our behaviour we are all merely a bunch of highy complex sets of conditioned reflexes which we learned in our early childhood.

He, and his sidekick B.F.Skinner (1904-1990), went on to assert that,  just as we had learned these responses in childhood, so we could unlearn then, given the right 'conditioning'. Hence human behaviour was infinitely modifiable.

This they called 'learning theory' - a notion that became widely accepted in psychology and sociology, and hence in government.

The term "noble savage" expresses a concept of humanity as unencumbered by civilization; the normal essence of an unfettered human.

Since the concept embodies the idea that without the bounds of civilization, humans are essentially good, the basis for the idea of the "noble savage" lies in the doctrine of the goodness of humans, expounded in the first decade of the century by Shaftesbury, who urged a would-be author “to search for that simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has been often known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce” (Advice to an Author, Part III.iii).

His counter to the doctrine of original sin, born amid the optimistic atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, was taken up by his contemporary, the essayist Richard Steele, who attributed the corruption of contemporary manners to false education.

The concept of the noble savage has particular associations with romanticism and with Rousseau's romantic philosophy in particular. The opening sentence of Rousseau's Emile (1762), which has as its subtitle "de l'Éducation ("or, Concerning Education") is

“Everything is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of Things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

Wikipedia

Marx is not responsible for a 'doctrine' of any kind, neither a teaching about what the world ought to be, nor an explanation of the way the world works. He conceives of humanity as socially self-creating, and this clashes with anything which purports to be any 'doctrine' or 'theory'. For 'doctrine' means separating the 'teacher' from the ordinary person being taught, a separation which is itself a symptom of the sick, fragmented way of life of modernity. Today, entities like money, capital and the state are crazily accepted as subjects; at the same time, we treat each other and ourselves, not as free, self-creating subjects, but as if we were things. So we are necessarily cut off from understanding ourselves.

While human freedom means that humans - all of us - consciously create their own lives under mutually-agreed relations, socialism sought the re-arrangement of a given collection of humans by a self-appointed set of re-arrangers. Marx is after something quite different: 'the alteration of men [Menschen = humans] on a mass scale'. What might this mean? Clearly, he is not talking about individuals changing themselves, one at a time, for he shows that the essence of humanity is 'the ensemble of social relations': history is the process in which we all make each other. Marx's aim is nothing less than a collective struggle by all of us to remake our world, our social relations and ourselves: self-creation. This is what he means by freedom. The notion that some people, the socialists, will remake the world, has nothing to do with Marx. Humanity, all of us, must consciously make ourselves.

libcom.org 27 October 2005

Karl Marx: The Self-Realisation of All

"For men and women to have their world, their sensuous bodies, their life-activity and their being-in-common restored to them is what Marx means by Communism. Communism is just the kind of political set-up which would allow us to re-appropriate our confiscated being, those powers alienated from us under class society. If the means of production were commonly owned and democratically controlled, then world we create together would belong belong to us in common, and self-production of each could become part of the self-realization of all."

"In place of the old bourgeoisie society, with its classes and class antogonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Liberal thinkers still see the unchecked power of the state as the chief danger to human freedom. Hobbes knew better: freedom’s worst enemy is anarchy ...

Believers in progress ... think of ethics and politics as being like science, with each step forward enabling further advances in future.

Improvement in society is cumulative, they believe, so that the elimination of one evil can be followed by the removal of others in an open ended process.

But human affairs show no sign of being additive in this way ... Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result.

They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts. ...

Black Mass pages 186-188

US Army Apologizes for Horrific Photos from Afghanistan