children – Becoming Human

Zwarte Piet

As always around this time of year, some people are getting upset about the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition of “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete). Although it is pretty clear that the origins of this character have nothing to do with racism (some say it goes back to two black ravens who accompanied Wotan in Germanic mythology), and it is even more obvious that it also has nothing to do with racism today, it seems that some people nevertheless take offense at it, thereby playing into the hands of the Dutch political far right and their hate-filled discourse of an immigrant threat to Dutch culture.

Not, I think, very smart, particularly as Black Pete lost his role of tormentor of bad children a while ago, at least in “official” traditions. This hardly seems like the worst social ill one could imagine to protest against, and its elimination would do nothing to promote non-racist attitudes on the part of those stupid enough to have such attitudes in the first place. I venture to suggest that the only reason the Zwarte Piet tradition attracts criticism is because it is an easy but irrelevant target for a complex problem. In other words, this is the availability heuristic at work. During the decades it might take to shame the tradition into submission, actual important issues around say education, policing and discrimination will receive less attention than they could and should. It is easier to blame Zwarte Piet. In fact, the word in everyday Dutch has become a byword for a symbolic figure made to carry the weight of society’s ills: a scapegoat.

The myth does bear deconstruction, however. Although it is said that the contemporary figure no longer has this association, older Zwarte Piet songs make clear that his role, at a certain moment in history in any case, was to punish children who misbehaved and therefore did not merit the rewards that Saint Nicholas was set to bring. It seems that this role separated out from an earlier ambiguity in the person of St Nicholas himself, who, as a saint, was felt to be too good to inflict punishment, a role that therefore needed to be delegated to another character, even if one whose scope of operations was closely linked to that of St Nicholas himself and bore no signs of autonomy. That such a menacing figure is portrayed as being black might constitute or at least contribute to racial stereotyping, but I venture to suggest this is not really the point. The point is that he exists at all. In other words, that we fail to criticize the way in which we fabricate myths in order to control the behavior of children, and then don’t even take responsibility for it by delegating the dirty jobs to someone else.

Zwarte Piet is just one incarnation of this universal bogeyman who happens, unlike the German “Schwarzer Mann“, to be literally, and entirely incidentally, black. His scarcely critized social purpose is to allow adults to manipulate children through the threat of unspoken evil consequences vectored by the agency of omnipotent spirits which inexplicably have not, however, vented their disapproval on the adults in questions rather than their kids.

The Bogeyman has a lot in common with the devil or the demiurge, figures who crystallized out of the ambiguity of traditional representations of God as both loving and savage. He also lives on in adult imaginations, infusing the sinister powers of any public institution that is there to enforce supposedly moral order, and frequently also other more nebulous spirits.

That can lead to real psychic damage, and it’s a game we should stop playing, whatever the color of the skin of the personality we delegate it to. If a compliance-figure has any role, he or she should take moral responsibility for all of his or her decisions, favorable and unfavorable. Better yet, we should not delegate the enforcement of necessary social norms to any fantasy personality at all, whose actions are beyond reasoning and debate. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but God and Father Christmas have crystallized out of the same dissociation that subsequently produced the devil and Zwarte Piet as mere second-order emanations of our inability to reconcile what we think we need to do with how we want to feel about it and how we want our children to view us. We would do better simply to reunite moral authority and enforcement in the same flesh and blood person, quite able to reconcile these diverse roles, ourselves.

Monogamy and personal growth

As I have noted before, mankind has an amazing and innate skill for manipulation through shame, which implements an effective evolutionary strategy designed to ensure group coherence and the passing on from one generation to the next of epigenetic knowledge about the world. Emotional manipulation is particularly easy for persons in positions of authority.

This skill, or Achilles’ heel if you will, has been exploited by agrarian societies in order to solidify the social relations of economic production. They have done so in two main ways, one of which Aquarian society is well aware of and in the process of abandoning, but the other of which remains largely normative and unquestioned.

The institution of whose corruptness we are well aware is religion. Organized religion cynically latches on to mankind’s inherent sense of awe and numinosity, and channels it into a vehicle which commands subservient obedience. True religion is a demand-side, or better collective experience, but the supply side has used threats, misrepresentation and coercion in order to dominate it.

We have been fighting this and pushing it back for centuries. In the Enlightenment we coined the idea of separation of church and state, choosing, no doubt opportunistically, to ignore that this is a complete nonsense: church and state have always been simply two aspects of each other. Whenever a religious movement has really challenged the basis of the agrarian state, it has either been short-lived and brutally repressed, or rapidly co-opted, and thereby denatured, by the powers that be. As Marx stated, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.”

We have been much less willing to dethrone the second pillar of social subservience: the family. Should we be in any way surprised to learn that this institution is one of those dearest to a religion whose founder stated “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life — he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)? We should not be surprised: the intentions of the religion and of its founder are diametrically opposed to each other.

I am not, however, going to get into a lame exegesis of statements I am not concerned to defend. The point I wish to make is that human nature displays a tribe-building instinct which social authority has deemed is allowed expression only through the institution of the family.

That institution and its rules have of course varied from place to place and changed significantly over time. For most of human history it has not implied complete restriction on the sexual freedom of men, but it has ensured that women occupy a subservient place in society, essentially reducing them to one more item of property in the estate of their husband.

The social allocation of women – what we may term the bridal economy – has, of course, reduced men’s sexual freedom indirectly, by making many women sexually unavailable, but there has always remained the institution of the brothel, and enough “shared” women with no choice other than to populate it due to unfortunate circumstances in their lives. However, this is no more than a valve to let off what would otherwise be an unbearable build-up of pressure due to the power of male sexual drives. A brief liaison with a prostitute in a brothel, even when relatively free from shame, hardly allows for satisfaction of the complete sexual instinct, which requires relationship and connection. Indeed, the sexual drive itself is only the basest component and the easiest to gratify. Thus it remains the case that within all systems where women are treated as property, the sexual instinct of both sexes, in its full sense, is almost completely repressed.

Repressed, of course, is not the same as forgotten, as many utopian attempts at reconstituting polyadic communities over the centuries attest. Free love has often been subversive and remains so today. Friedrich Engels wrote that “It is a peculiar fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes to the
foreground“. As Reich can testify, the idea of sexual pleasure as an organizing principle of society has hardly been universally welcomed.

Monogamy and its historical variants have served the goal of social control not only by repressing sexuality and the empowering vitality which it engenders. Families are perfect units to tax, both for money and for soldiers. They are associated with transgenerational property rights, the defence of which necessitates compliance and docility. They are also far less robust than tribes to the losses of individual members, meaning that those members must be risk-averse. Lastly, the family unit is naturally self-propagating. Children are conditioned into it and their economic incentives are aligned with it.

Even today, there is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention into the affairs of state, but families are very largely self-governing, not as a result of any liberal conviction but rather because they are so constitutive of the greater whole which is the state. But if monogamy were intrinsic to our species, why would we need so many institutions to enforce it?

We sleep around, but we feel guilty, just as we used to feel guilty for not going to church. This is a sure sign of having been manipulated into believing that the behavior in question is inconducive to the welfare of the group. If we believe the exact contrary to be the case, then it behooves us to be courageous. We need to reject the traditional institution of marriage with the same joyful iconoclasm as many of us reject the institutions of the church.

Certainly, we will need to find other ways to structure our lives remaining compatible with the need for community, companionship, allowing each person independence, and rearing emotionally healthy children. This is a vast project with no map to guide the way, and it is easy to fall back on what is tried and tested, even if the result of testing conventional monogamy in its modern form has been to show that it is an enormous failure. Whatever institutions we may invent going forward, however – and I use as always the word ‘institution’ to mean not only form but also content – such institutions will need to be compatible with human nature and aspirations, or they are not worth having.

The confinement of sexual expression, and indeed frequently of all expression of adult intimacy, to one single other person, together with the societal assumption that this will, always and everywhere, be the case, is a pillar of oppression which we need to pull down if we purport to be on a spiritual path. This alone, however, is insufficient because it considers only the sexual dimension and ignores the aspiration – often passed over by some of the more austere thinkers I have quoted – to live in deep community and to raise children together in love. Given our biological nature, this is frequently hard to realize other than within institutions which have the form of dyadic relationships with dependent children, and I am not arguing that everyone is obliged to follow a more utopian path whatever the practical difficulties. Within that structure, it must, however, be absolutely clear that commitment does not translate into exclusive focus and that other loves, on the part of persons equally conscious and enlightened, are considered an enrichment, and welcome.

Monogamish

I don’t agree with Dan Savage on everything: occasionally listening to his podcast drives me nuts. But most of the time it is a real breath of fresh air. In this video, he very eloquently gets across the message on why responsible non-monogamy is a deeply humanistic, respectful and appropriate ethic which salvages, rather than threatens, the mess we have made of the social institution of marriage when, around the 1950’s and with the rise of feminism, popular culture fundamentally redefined it by, as he puts it, “instead of extending to women the same license and latitude that men had always enjoyed, … impos[ing] on men the same limitations and restrictions that women had always endured“.

The new paradigm was not of course drawn from nowhere: the church had been preaching it for centuries. The point, however, is that we had always allowed ourselves double standards and endured the feelings of guilt and shame that went with them. Those double standards kept some lid on the extent of extramarital sex and the social consequences to which it could lead, but they did not, and could not, eliminate it.

The asymmetry in society’s standards which had slumbered beneath the surface for hundreds of years (ever since the counter-reformationist Council of Trent outlawed divorce in 1563), was clearly articulated in the first version of Napoleon’s seminal civil code, considered (for other reasons rightly) by him as his lifetime’s greatest achievement. The provisions on divorce are worth citing: article 229 states that “the husband may demand a divorce on the ground of his wife’s adultery,” article 230 by contrast that “the wife may demand divorce on the ground of adultery in her husband, when he shall have brought his concubine into their common residence.”

Such discriminatory provisions, of course, could not stand the test of time. Though divorce was again outlawed in restorationist France in 1816, when it was reinstated by the law of 1884, the clause on common residence (itself inspired by canon law, which seems to have been more ambivalent about extramarital relations as such) was struck out, thereby consecrating, for the first time in a legal text, the religious condemnation of adultery (whatever is the correct understanding of that term), paradoxically enough together with a facilitation of divorce on such grounds, which the Council of Trent explicitly excluded.

Dan is right when he says that the myth according to which extramarital desire is proof of lack of love and commitment is not only evident nonsense, but also pernicious to the very institution it seeks to associate itself with. If we go round pounding such notions, which are so obviously at odds with our biological nature, into everyone’s heads then it is no wonder relationships and families are a mess and it is no wonder that affective trauma gets passed from one generation to another. It is not easy to reconcile social monogamy with sexual non-exclusivity, but only because it requires a great deal of deconditioning and the demasking of a great deal of inherited suffering. Attempts to do so, under the likely conditions of asymmetric incentive between the partners, may often end in failure and acrimony or worse. Nevertheless, the idea that there is anything natural in the association between these two ideas has been comprehensively disproved by the accumulated experience of vast numbers of couples for whom it is, by now, a complete non-issue, indeed for whom open sexual boundaries have meant much greater, not less, intimacy.

Dan’s is no self-interested male agenda, of which, being gay, he anyway cannot be suspected; it is a plea for relationships based on real respect, commitment and love between adult and equal human beings. The kind of relationship in which children prosper emotionally, and each partner feels more empowered in going about their life due to the love and stability they enjoy. It is surely high time for society to cast off the vestiges of shame around sexuality which objectively stand in the way of making the institutions work which they purport to defend.

Jealousy

Today I took my little boy to the childminding service at the school which is organized before classes start.

By way of background, I am probably the most obsessed person in the known universe on the subject of the attitudes of adults towards my children (and in fact all children). I am infinitely sensitive to the frequent occasions when those adults project their own neuroses and unresolved emotions onto the kids. When I see or feel it, there is no room for compromise. I am also in love with my little boy. I rely on him for most of the spiritual enlightenment I am ever likely to obtain. He is amazingly charming, almost always happy and playful and he has a really tender side also. He’s three (nearly).

Despite being impossible to please, I am pretty happy with the school. It’s not perfect of course, but it could be a lot worse. We feel comfortable sending him there.

The lady in charge of the childminding service seems to love him particularly. Whenever he arrives, he is greeted with open arms and a warm heart. As I love him and care for his wellbeing, what more could I want?

So, where I stand on this is pretty clear.

To my surprise, though, this morning, how I feel about it apparently is not. Continue reading “Jealousy”

A spiritual manifesto

When I married my partner, almost to the day five years ago, we, like many couples who are dissatisfied with traditional concepts of marriage, were faced with the challenge of how to formulate our marriage vows and our marriage contract to reflect what it was we at that time really believed was the meaning and content of the commitments we were entering into. We didn’t find a lot of resources out there to help us do that, because every alternative we found – be it polyamorous, Wiccan, or other new age notions – seemed to be envisaged, by its adherents, as a new orthodoxy. That is, it was characterized by a bunch of behavioral prescriptions and once-for-all negotiated space but it did not go to the heart of the sacredness of human relation and of the human person, nor did it reflect truly, for us, the deep spiritual urges underlying the wish to enter into a relationship and to bring up children. So we did our best to find words.

Five years later, and I see the problem in a different light and from a number of new angles. I want therefore to try to propose a solution to it, and I hope I can count on the support of some of the very wise people I have met over the intervening years who have a similar clarity of vision as to what it is that is actually going on in the space of human relationships and its meaning within the context of humankind’s spiritual evolution.

I believe it should be possible to distill, out of the various experiences and movements that have brought us an immense new global consciousness of our human potential, some principles which are perfectly universal and to which any person who has seen beyond her or his conditioning and glimpsed their true nature will find it natural to adhere. Indeed there is no effort of adherence required, merely an effort of formulation. This article is trying only to introduce the concept and some basic ideas; on the basis hereof I hope together with others to arrive at a text which can really find a natural consensus, because it seems to me that on all essential points of it all authentic persons and teachers would agree.

What are the key elements of such a declaration?

Firstly, it seems to me that it must be in the first person. The ancient Hebrews (basing themselves on the even more ancient Sumerians) formulated their code of laws in the second person and credited it with divine sanction. We have been living with it and all its inadequacies for over three thousand years. Its manipulative and paternalistic character as well as its primitive nature are plain to see.

Our new set of principles will not be imposed on us from outside, it will simply emanate from our soul; and it will not serve a purpose of organizing society around a set of ethical precepts, which is a worthy but separate purpose. It will rather serve to communicate and reach out, and its effects will be only in the private sphere.

The new set of principles must be based on a complete renunciation of any claim on the life of another person. We have recognized the evil of slavery and of many social injustices; with the same passion we must recognize the evil of traditional prescriptive family institutions, chief among them marriage. It is a Faustian bargain which 21st century man can no longer tolerate. It predates on mankind’s desperate desire to achieve some measure of spiritual advancement and consolation, and should in its traditional form be simply outlawed: the law should recognize, at it does in so many other areas, that a contract written under such oppressive conditions cannot be binding. This is the principle which has underpinned humanity’s progressive emancipation ever since liberal thinkers began challenging the moral precepts of the church and the inherited social order.

Marriage is not a divine institution, but a contract between two individuals subject to a high degree of social incentive and coercion; marriage as a contract is, however, in almost all cases based on a collective misrepresentation, a social psychosis; even if such misrepresentation is innocent, it seems to me that (whilst I recognize that children enter into the institution without contracting or being able to contract to do so, which is the only remaining justification for a legal marriage regime I can see) all marriage contracts should be voidable by the automatic application of contract law. There is doubtless a need to reformulate the institution of marriage in order to protect the interests of children, rather than abolish it entirely; with this I do not take issue. However, such an altruistic concern is hardly the foundation of marriage law today.

Whilst marriage law is the easiest target because of the institutionalized nature of marriage, an adherent to the declaration will undertake, of course, to recognize patterns of manipulation in all of her or his human relations and both to admit them and to seek to go beyond them, vis a vis children, colleagues, friends and lovers.

The declaration must also be objectively multilateral and subjectively unilateral. There are no parties to the agreement, not even those others who happen to subscribe to the same text. The benefits I accord to you are the same benefits I accord to every human being, not only to those other human beings who are as “enlightened” as myself and still less to one single human being. (Philosophically speaking they may, indeed, not stop at the species boundary either; but for our purposes I think there is no need to develop this).

The text will need to take a form in order to underpin community but it cannot be rigidly formulated or breed hermeneutical bureaucracies. No one need ever tell another what it means or does not mean. No one will certify whether or not my behavior conforms to it in practice.

It should be and can be, I believe, perfectly ecumenical and even scientific. The basis for it is our understanding of how the self is formed, developed in psychoanalysis, and how it acts, developed in psychology more generally. To complete the picture, a simple extrapolation of liberal and humanistic principles on which there is wide agreement is enough.

And what are the advantages?

My hope is that the manifesto will constitute common ground on which spiritual people can build their relationships and communities. Communication can take place around it. Some may consciously decide to derogate from it, and they may have their own reasons for doing so. However, relations between spiritual people may hereby come to take place on a basis which is explicit, not in the shadows of hoped-for shared values and unelucidated conflicts of interest. Simply put, if you adhere joyfully and willingly to the principles set out, a lot is possible between us; if you do not, I am forewarned of the difficulties ahead.

The manifesto will be only a basis, a kind of framework law or constitution. Much will come on top, much that is specific to individuals, couples and groups. However, as a basis for communication and a source of shared understanding from the outset of human interactions, it is an invaluable shortcut which will slash the opportunity costs of building community. I envisage its use across the web as an invitation to authenticity and real dialogue: in social media whether, like Facebook, general in scope or devoted specifically to meeting new people.

I would also like to add that I am not “against” manipulation and even its past institutionalization, I perfectly well understand the circumstances under which it has arisen and the role that it has played and continues to play in human society. It can be argued that the institutions in question, although I qualify them as evil, are in fact a bulwark against greater evil and as such a least-bad social choice. This is not a debate I am entering into. I speak here to persons wishing to leave behind the childhood of the human race and become autonomous, empowered, enlightened individuals. For such people, these legacy institutions are inimical to spiritual growth, and this is the real point. Compromises with civil authorities doubtless need to be found. However, at the heart of what our human relationships are really about, we can all choose. I invite to this choice.

And so finally, what could this manifesto look like? It would be nice to have something memorable, a sort of Aquarian decalogue. It needs to start with my attitude to myself. As I imagine it may be difficult to sum up what needs to be said in ten short headlines, there may need to be a paragraph accompanying each to clarify the meaning, not perhaps for those of us to whom these spiritual principles are intuitive but certainly for those for whom they are not.

I don’t want to write it here as I first want to gather ideas. But let me try, to make it concrete, to give something of the possible flavor:

I understand the origin of my emotionality in my childhood experience
I take responsibility for my own experience of the world
I acknowledge my conditioning and do not seek to defend it
I distinguish between my inner feelings and what is going on in the outer world
I communicate my feelings without blame or criticism
I communicate my needs and wishes without making demands
In managing our common interests and those of those who depend on us, I will treat you with fairness and respect and honor the differences between us
I honor your need for touch and your sexuality
I honor your vulnerability
I speak my truth and listen to yours
I do not instrumentalize or objectivize you
It is my honor to delight you and to serve you

…..

Your thoughts and views are very welcome!

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination 🙂 But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress 😉 ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

Virtue in education, ou comment faire de bons Belges…

I was at a party organized at my daughter´s school today, and I had another epiphany.

When we chose the school (I’m happy to say she’ll change next year – whether that will be an improvement is of course not preordained), we noticed that there was a very big emphasis on codes of behavior. It was kind of a bit too much, but nothing objectionable that one could put one’s finger on. On the contrary, who could disagree that it was a good thing to learn to listen to others, to take their feelings into account, to be on time in the classroom, and many other laudable aims and intentions?

Plenty of parents hope that school will instil in their youngsters a sense of discipline and standard of behavior which they, as parents, feel they have failed to do at home. This takes on occasion extreme forms in response to desperate parenting failures. We rather hope that school is a place where our children would have fun and learn self-expression; in the right environment, we would expect the rest to follow without any need for compulsion. But of course we also know that not everyone brings up their children like we do, giving the teacher a more difficult job, and we wouldn’t want our daughter to be terrorized by children that are out of control, so I guess we thought we could live with the school’s approach.

As expatriates, and given that she would only spend one year in the school, we haven’t been very closely involved in the life of the school. The only thing that I have found constantly disturbing in this school is the lack of tenderness and joy on the part of the teaching staff. They don’t smile much, and treat children brusquely to say the least. But otherwise – a normal school. Nothing really to complain about.

The event was themed around tolerance of diversity, with plenty of other laudable themes thrown in for good measure – like environmental stewardship and so on. Pretty much as I would imagine American high schools – full of public displays of allegiance to the school’s moral code. Except we’re talking here kindergarten and primary.

I have lived in Brussels for 20 years, so I pretty much know the place. It has been my experience that many members of the educated population present a sycophantic public persona, which is apparently polite and very conflict-averse, but behind which the rage is barely masked – utterly unprovoked verbal aggression is not difficult to solicit from the most innocent of comments or questions. So one might wonder whether this school is typical or counter-cultural.

A casual glance at the faces of the parents present at today’s event, at their body language, or casually eavesdropping on their conversations convinces me that as far as the parent population is concerned, it is typical. And of course I cannot fast-forward 20 years, but both self-selection and the conservatism of social institutions make it highly likely that the children as adults will not be so very different from their parents.

So is the moral education not working?

Of course it is not working. Moral education does not work. We have been amply warned by Nietzsche of the social role and the effects of Morality, and we should have listened better. What is Good flows directly from Lebendigkeit, vitality. The extinction of resistance to the behavioral code you wish to impose can only beget outcomes that are, at the very best, socially convenient; the anger locked inside expresses itself exactly as I have already alluded to.

The insidiousness of this is that it is so hard to argue with and stand up against. Almost no-one will understand you. Don’t we want our children to grow up to be good citizens? To prosper through their connections to their peers?

And so the groupthink marches on, and the Gleichschaltung is assured of success.

There is one word for this: manipulation, and it is a power game whose true nature yields rapidly to analysis. Exactly as many manipulative mothers, my own included, constantly remind(ed) their children of how much their behavior disappoints them, hurts them, how “good boys and girls” don’t do things like that.

Well fuck you. Children owe no duty to their parents in a world where parents have no regard for their children. Children are easy to exploit and emotionally manipulate, but Macht macht kein Recht, power is not morality.

Just before going to that party, I was reading another article from the school promoting the doctrine of non-violence, I believe in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition. I of course agree that when our spontaneous reaction to something is a violent one, we should try to come to an understanding of why that is and maintain our emotional states in consciousness – which is not quite the same as rejecting violence, but it comes close enough in practice. Everything that is said in that article sounds right – about understanding the different perspective of the other, how one’s own psychic wounds predispose one to certain emotional reactions and so on. The problem is that this discourse will inevitably be instrumentalized, implemented in such a way as to impose anyway the will of the more powerful individual by manipulation.

The words don’t matter; only the motivation and consciousness matter, and these will not be changed by words. The realization of this was what underpinned the great post-colonial emancipation movement; and when violence is provoked, it is also legitimate and understandable, even if it is not always wise or enlightened. Even if the original provocation was very well disguised in seemingly philanthropic dress (behind closed doors, be assured the violence is as real). Then, as Sartre put it in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, “this irrepressible violence [in response to colonial exploitation] is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself”.

These days I am shaken by rediscovered violence from my childhood. I love it, I feel alive, each time I abreact it (of course I don’t hurt anyone; or myself) I come into a new space of greater consciousness and joie de vivre. As for aggression, it is positively sacred in my eyes.

My children don’t need to be brainwashed into subscribing to pretty ideologies and to the relationships of power which vehicle them and are profoundly opposed to their own sense of self.

Social incidence of sexual abuse

@phdinparenting on Twitter, the author of the simply great parenting blog www.phdinparenting.com (obligatory reading for all readers of my blog who have small children) reasonably enough asked me to back up my statement there – in response to her question on the subject – that approximately 100% of people had suffered from sexual abuse as children.

The answer doesn’t need a lot of space, but more than 140 characters for sure, so I am posting it here!

I have basically three reasons for making this statement (although I admit a certain residual hyperbole):

1. My experience in numerous personal development workshops, in which people who never suspected they had been the victims of sexual abuse, have realized through the therapeutic work, that in fact they had. This implies that any self-reported survey must underestimate the real incidence of the problem. (In any case, we also know that even people who ARE aware they have been the victims of sexual abuse, often do not talk about it, even anonymously).

2. Retrojection from people’s current behavior and attitudes to sex, based on my understanding of the psychoanalytic basis of such attitudes. Sexual neuroses are very widespread and must have their origin in pregenital sexual experience, even if (see the next point) no actual physical abuse has occurred. (Freud famously concluded from what he thought was overreporting of pregenital sexual abuse in therapeutic contexts that childhood sexual fantasies, and specifically the Oedipus complex, played a major role in the development of neurosis. I am not so sure that Freud was not simply unwilling or unable to accept the extent of actual abuse in society.)

We do have data on sexual dysfunctioning – we know (lower bounds for) the incidence of, for males, premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction, though we have less idea, because we have less basis to measure it, of the incidence of penile insensitivity; and for females, of partial or complete anorgasmia and of less common conditions (in the female) like what has been colloquially called “sex addiction”.

3. Most importantly, I probably have a wider definition of sexual abuse than is commonplace, but I would like to defend this definition; it is real sexual abuse because it leads to sexual neuroses (I have a correspondingly wide definition of sexuality itself).

Thus, whilst I am quite confident that the incidence of physical sexual abuse is high enough (ie too high, and at least 20% on a conservative consensus estimate), I would also view as sexual abuse all of the following:

Genital mutilation in both sexes
An attitude towards the child’s sexuality which is based on adult perverted sexual scripts, regardless of whether or not these have actually been acted upon (but in some measure, I am sure they almost always have)
Bizarre, unnatural and perverted attitudes to sexuality generally (I’m very tolerant and these are not morally loaded terms for me, but the lack of a healthy model can only have the effect of at least blunting the child’s natural sexual development)
Poor or inexistent sexual education, especially timely information about periods and ejaculation
Parenting behavior which degrades or humiliates the child, even if not explicitly in its sexual identity

And that’s a short list – I could go on.

We should also remember that the sole force capable of corrupting the child’s sexuality is not the parents – unfortunately, if at least you believe you can get parenting right. Parents are not all-powerful. Other adults in the child’s environment may abuse it sexually and many of the indirect forms of abuse are, I believe, totally endemic in the school system, at least it is my experience (or let’s say it is my deep fear, because I don’t get to sit in my toddler’s classroom).

So, in short, societal violence and attitudes to sexuality basically corrupt us all. Actual sexual acts between adults and children are themselves endemic, but if you escape them, their direct ripple effects to society anyway result in everyone being caught up, if not directly, then at very close quarters.

I haven’t the slightest doubt that if we could simply respect the sexual identity of children, we would transform society beyond anything we can even imagine today.