It is unethical to exploit an advantage
A bit more on indoctrination. What is wrong with indoctrination?
Guardian readers were upset, David Shariatmadari says, by ‘the idea that a religious group should set about “indoctrinating” children who were intellectually defenceless.’ But just how damaging is this, he asks.
There are a few arguments I can think of, but I’m not completely convinced by them (as always, I’m open to persuasion). The main one is that children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of religious ideas.
No not quite – that puts it too mildly. Children do not yet have the capacity to evaluate the worth of any ideas, and that’s why adults should be very economical about imposing ideas on them. Children believe what they are told, especially when parents or authority figures are the ones doing the telling. That’s just a brute fact, as brute as the fact that children are shorter and lighter than adults. Adults should be economical in their use of superior size and strength on children, and they should be economical in their use of superior cognitive abilities on children. Adults shouldn’t exploit either advantage unless there’s a very good reason which is at least compatible with the child’s well-being.
Religious parents of course think religious ideas are crucial for the child’s well-being, so that’s a complicated issue. But churches and other religious institutions – they have other motivations for imposing their pet ideas on children, motivations which include their own continued employment and status. They are interested parties, and that means they should be very cautious indeed about ‘indoctrinating’ children who are intellectually defenseless. It’s only fair.
Thanks for recognizing that the issue of parents rights and responsibilities over their children is complicated.
However, we have some data points on the spectrum of behaviors that can illustrate what is acceptable and what is not.
It is expected that parents will educate their child to a certain minimum level. We allow parents to do it themselves, if they wish, but the must report on plans and progress to the state. They cannot simply do nothing.
It is expected that parents will provide basic health care, not kill or maim them (yes, certain religious maimings are permitted).
The state requires these things in order to have a future supply of citizens, preferably productive ones.
Critical thinking is clearly a tool that helps a future citizen be more productive in business, politics, science or any other trade. (It even helps in the religious trade, though you have to do the equivalent of disabling the safety equipment in order to use it)
So, teaching critical thinking is not indoctrination. It does not come with a membership in the Young Democrats. Courses in critical thinking do not insist that you reject gods in order to pass. It is teaching a skill just like carpentry and baking and long division.
This is a very difficult issue to think through – or at least I find it so. I’ve been wrestling with it for some years now, and I still have not been able to resolve it to the extent of being able to write something worth publishing. I’m puzzled by people who give answers to such questions with confidence.
I’m able to do no more than put down a somewhat tangential thought as a place marker.
Still, I think it’s an important thought, and maybe worth some discussion. It goes like this:
The state (along with all of as individuals) has an interest in the general education of children, including their education in fundamental scientific and other knowledge that may tend to contradict the religious beliefs of the childrens’ parents. That interest is based on such values as the flourishing of the children themselves, the future flourishing of the society, etc. This does raise questions about why a life lived with something like a comprehensive delusion is less flourishing than one with an incomplete but essentially true understanding of the world – but that’s the value most readers of this site would affirm (I among them).
The state also has an interest in permitting parents to attempt to indoctrinate children in their (the parents’) religious beliefs. That interest lies in the fact that (a) many parents believe such indoctrination is essential to their childrens’ spiritual salvation (which can amount to rescue from an eternity of horrible torture), (b) their childrens’ (alleged) spiritual salvation is understandably of such overwhelming importance to these parents as to override all the parents’ other loyalties, including loyalty to the social contract itself, so (c) the state must, as a practical matter yield on this point, in the interests of social peace. Note that this is a totally different set of values from those in the previous paragraph, but not a set of values that can be ignored by law-makers. Even if they disapprove of religious indoctrination of children by parents, they need to leave at least some scope for it.
The two sets of values described above cannot be reconciled. The best we can do is understand why they cannot be reconciled.
All that is possible, therefore, is a series of historical compromises. None of the compromises are especially compelling or stable, and we should assume that conflict over these issues will continue until such a time as either the institution of the family is radically transformed or plainly irrational forms of religion (those which are in pretty obvious conflict with well-established secular knowledge) largely die out.
It’s a tragic situation that we have to live with as best we can.
I have to question whether many adults do actually have superior cognitive abilities to children.
More experience with the bullshit detector creates a more effective set of heuristic rules. Lets see… American accent, preaching, on TV. What does experience tell me?
Buford – in the US parents often can get away with doing nothing when it comes to education. Enforcement of standards is very lax and some parents say they’re ‘homeschooling’ when really they’re just keeping their children out of school. I have no idea why this is.
Russell, yes – I’ve been wrestling with it for years too. I don’t expect to get anywhere; I think it’s just a case of competing goods.
It’s true about more experience with the bullshit detector. Just habit is helpful – which is one reason I think bullshit detection can be taught.
Of course habit can also lead one astray. The ‘American accent’ part isn’t really a very reliable marker. I know it shouts ‘stupid’ to most of the world, but even so.
No, it’s not just a matter of competing goods. It seems to me that what is being forgotten here is that children themselves ought to be seen as having rights. States have interests, and parents have interests, but children have interests as well, and they can’t simply be subject to the competing interests of states and parents. I’m not sure how all these interests and rights get balanced, but the children, as developing persons, both in terms of their present welfare and future prospects, must be thought to have interests and rights as well, and this cannot be dealt with by trying to balance public interests vs the interests of parents.
Eric, I agree, of course, that children have interests, e.g. interests in flourishing, whatever exactly that consists in. The latter is, unfortunately, an incredibly controversial and deeply-contested matter. From an evangelical Christian viewpoint, for example, their most important interest is in spiritual salvation, and an unsaved life cannot be a flourishing life.
The state has an interest in furthering some of the interests of children (or so most of us probably think). Spiritual salvation is not one of those interests, since the state is agnostic about the reality of spiritual salvation. But nor can the state assume that parents’ concerns about the spiritual salvation of their children are just bunkum. They may well be, and indeed I think they are, but the state is a rather clumsy and limited set of institutions and mechanisms. It is not well-suited to make those sorts of judgments one way or the other, and it has little prospect of attaining its primary goal – social peace – if it attempts to do so.
Hence, the various concepts of freedom of religion have always involved some freedom for parents to indoctrinate children. Freedom of religion is fundamentally grounded in the need for social peace. Even if the state does not recognise spiritual salvation as a value that grounds rights – and it shouldn’t – it has to recognise social peace as such a value, and it can’t achieve social peace if it goes beyond a certain yet-to-settled point in hindering parents from taking strong action to try to save their childrens’ souls.
None of which, of course, answers the original question of what is so bad about living a life with false religious beliefs. I think that there are various things that are bad about it, but there are also things that are bad about having other kinds of false beliefs. What’s uniquely bad about false religious beliefs?
What worries me most about them is that they are so all-pervasive in a person’s life: they can distort the person’s entire life and character. Most other false beliefs, not so much. They are then incredibly difficult and painful to cast aside (as I well know from experience).
I agree, Russell, that the question of children’s rights is fraught with all sorts of difficulties, but it seems to me that we could establish some limits on the indoctrination of children, and what is and is not considered to be satisfactory limits of passing on traditional beliefs and customs.
It us quite well known that, in certain contexts (like Northern Ireland and Palestine/Israel), the damage to children’s attitudes towards the hated other is established by very early ages, around 6 or 7. By those ages the hatred is very deep rooted, and we know, from experiences of ‘deprogramming’ fundamentalists, that moving outside of the fundamentalist frame is a painful and not always successful transition.
The point that I am making is that we can do some fairly substantial work on the effect of early conditioning, and it should be possible to establish parameters within which families are allowed to operate, and outside of which the question of child abuse can be raised. I note, for example, that the Quebec department of education has made the study of religions mandatory for all children, even those whose parents would like to confine them to indoctrination in the religion of the parents’ choice.
I think it is important that this be done, and that more work be done, quite deliberately and publicly, to test such limits. At the moment children are completely at mercy of their dotty parents, and while Larkin may not be quite right about the harm done to children deepening like a coastal shelf, there are surely measureable effects which should be actively being explored, so that limits to the harm being done to children can be established.
Of course, I don’t make light of the difficulty of doing such things, and establishing such limits. But doing something like this is especially urgent in the contemporary context, where monolithic religious traditions are beginning to share the same contexts in ways never envisaged before, certainly not by Western demoractic polities.
I don’t know if the state has to recognise social peace as a significant value. A kingdom might aspire to war with another country, and view the extermination of another country as the primary goal. Granted, the liberal state might need to recognise social peace in at least some contexts, but the state needn’t.
Even when it comes to the liberal state, things are not rosy. The protection of liberty requires an enormous amount of intrusiveness by the government into everyday life. And we call government intrusions “instruments of social peace” instead of “instruments of occupation” if and only if we think the law is legitimate. (By legitimate I mean politically tolerable.)
So if we’re interested in approaching the issue from the standpoint of social peace in a liberal society, we have to ask: why is the teaching of religious delusion tolerable? Russell, you say the state is clumsy, implying that it’s impractical to intervene. But while the state may have been clumsy once, its powers have grown enormously over the past century, and will continue to grow, unless we have a principled reason to tell it to back off. Do we?
OB: “They are interested parties, and that means they should be very cautious indeed about ‘indoctrinating’ children who are intellectually defenseless.”
But, of course, the religious believe that they are correct; therefore, they are involved in education and not indoctrination.
Also, I do not think that children are truly “intellectually defenseless”. If this were the case, all children would believe everything they were told by adults, especially those adults in positions of special authority (parents and teachers), and this is simply not the case. And children brought up in a religion would not be able to reject it, until they were older and more experienced (I gave up on religion at about age 11).
I actually think that coercion of adults to remain in a religion, or pretend that they do, is the more serious problem. If the social (and more serious) pressures on adults and young adults were removed, then I think people would leave religions in droves and the issue of indoctrination of children would (largely) disappear.
(But I could be wrong.)
I think it both undesirable and impossible for the state to tell parents what they can and can’t teach their children. But it can refuse to fund religious schooling, and even better, it could disallow private schooling of any sort. I think all schooling should be run by the state, to work toward equal opportunity, and to mitigate the often impenetrable divisions caused by religion and class.
Keith, yes, some of the religious believe they are correct, but that’s one reason it’s a good idea for atheists to be less bashful and more overt: so that the more dogmatic among the religious can at least be exposed to the suggestion that they have no real grounds for that belief.
Children who are 11 are older and more experienced – than children who are younger than that. Obviously the process is cumulative. Children of 5 are far more credulous than children of 8. I’m not saying that all children of whatever age are absolutely credulous and intellectually defenseless, Í’m saying they are relatively, including relatively to each other.
Emily, I wouldn’t say it’s simply or flatly undesirable for the state to tell parents what they can and can’t teach their children. That’s too sweeping. And then of course if the state runs all schooling it is indirectly doing exactly that.
Some of my children’s friends seem to have horrifying views about religion – eg one child told my son that anyone who believes in evolution will go to Hell. He has also put pressure on my son to convert to Christianity. He is a far more militant atheist than me so won’t be swayed – but he does find it very awkward. It might be argued that atheists also indoctrinate – but I’ve never told my children God doesn’t exist – I’ve only told them that *I* don’t believe in God and that they can believe what they like.
As a product of a Catholic education, I remember that at a very early age none of the things they were telling me added up. Of course, I thought there was something wrong with me. I tried so hard to believe and even went so far as to attend a seminary preparatory school in order to convince myself. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Many years later I was talking to my mother about this and she said the same thing. We were afraid to speak out for fear that others would think there was something wrong with us.
We were a working-class family and didn’t know anyone who went to a university where agnosticism or atheism might be more acceptable. It makes one suspect this happens far more than is generally acknowledged. Perpetuating fear and passing it down generation after generation.
Sarah, have you told them only that you don’t believe in God, or have you told them why you don’t?
It’s a tricky issue, because telling why can seem like a kind of indoctrination, yet it seems a mistake to treat the matter as a mere arbitrary preference. That’s what accommodationists tend to do, which always sounds to me as if they’re saying there’s no reason to choose one or the other – and that’s not the case.
@OB – I had to think about that one! I believe I have probably discussed with my son (12), briefly, the reasons why a ‘belief’ in evolution is different from a belief in creation myths. But he is so actively atheist(whereas I just tend to ignore God even though I read this blog!)that I tend to end up taking up the ‘some theists aren’t too bad’ postion while he explains exactly why the God of his friends is ‘worse than Hitler’. I haven’t discussed this so much with my daughter (9) who says she is an agnostic. Apparently none of her school friends believe in God which is perhaps why she doesn’t dwell on the matter so much.
Sarah – ah well fortunately ‘some theists aren’t too bad’ is entirely consistent with ‘there’s no real reason to believe God exists.’ It’s even consistent with ‘that God is worse than Hitler.’
I mostly used to take the indifferentist approach but then religion wasn’t getting in my face all the time. Those days are over.
Speaking of bad theists – because whatever it is he claims to be, he’s decidedly a theist – Mark Vernon is bringing the stupid again at CiF. I won’t even link to his essay out of sheer revulsion, but I will direct anyone interested to this wonderful parody of it:
http://www.mirandacelestehale.net/?p=1041
As far as I am aware, no religious creed or statement of belief ends by saying “of course, all this may be wrong, so best regard it as provisional or as a working set of ideas, to be discarded if something better turns up.” Any religion which did include that was selected out a long time ago.
Yet paradoxically, that is how religion itself evolves, and sees itself as evolving. All religions to my knowledge explain their own origins somehow. Christianity and Judaism both set this out for their present followers in terms of an earlier period of floundering around in error, followed by an elect under divine guidance finding The One True Way.
The only problem is that all those One True Ways are mutually incompatible, and cannot all be right. But none of them wants to admit that the possibility of error applies also to itself.
So my advice to any young person is much like Sarah’s: Believe what you want to believe – because that’s what you will finish up doing anyway. But don’t believe what someone else wants you to believe just because they want you to believe it; however well intentioned they may be.
G, was that the article where Vernon says God is mysterious and mystery is God? I’ve been wrangling with that one for days, and probably still would be if comments weren’t closed.
And I would have linked to it here, too, but I can’t because I can’t use the database. B&W is silenced for now. Sorry.
B&W is silenced??? Poo. Big steaming piles of it.
Yes. Sorry. I hope it won’t be for long.
Ian, is that really your advice? Believe whatever you want to? If so I cannot agree with you!
Thanks for linking to my parody, G Felis :)
OB: As I have great respect for your learning, wit and intelligence, I assume you have misinterpreted what I wrote. So even at the risk of making matters worse, let me attempt a clarification.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but there are no criteria for belief in philosophy or science. Propositions are rated one against the other in terms of their probabilities of being right or wrong, and within the state of knowledge at the moment. (A special case are the propositions of logic and mathematics, which once the axioms have been accepted, become true by definition.)
However, all that is within a psychological framework. As we know, in the debate over AGW (anthropogenic global warming) there is a minority of scientists who, presumably after considering the same data, find AGW not proven, while the majority do. The difference I think is to be found in what the members of the two respective camps want to believe. One hopes that nobody is being consciously hypocritical.
At any given time we believe what we want to believe. Not what we wish was true, which is another matter entirely, but what we want to believe. For example, there have been three separate occasions in my own life when I have been confronted with news so appallingly bad and with such clearly devastating future outcomes that in each case I have found myself going into denial; that is searching desperately for grounds for hope, and not wanting to believe what (there was excellent reason to believe) was going to happen whether I liked it or not. Every time, I managed to find grounds for believing that what I had been told was true was not so, what would happen was not going to, and that there was still hope. Two of these matters concerned medical diagnoses (of other people) that just had to be wrong if life was to be still worth living.
(My conclusion BTW after all that has been that living in hope is about the most futile way I know to spend one’s time.)
There are plenty of people out there who want to believe in God, and quite a few who want to believe in the Tooth Fairy. My advice to them is simple: if after informed consideration (ie of a standard satisfactory to yourself) you still want to believe in them, then believe in them. I might in passing mention the case of the monks who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, lest they be confronted with facts that might upset their beliefs.
I don’t know anyone who believes what they don’t want to believe; which as I said is not the same as accepting that X is true but wishing it were not.
I hope all that makes sense to you. It makes perfectly good sense to me. ;-)
From the website of a local Melbourne evangelical church: http://enjoychurch.com.au/kidmania
The video is disturbingly hilarious. ” . . . so fun that it’s insania . . .”
Couldn’t have said it better myself (except maybe not the bit about fun). Poor kids.
Can’t resist contributing the following very fresh incident from lunch with my 38-month-old son, less than two hours ago.
Out of the blue, while munching in total silence, he suddenly says “God is a fictional character.” And goes right back to munching, while my (ex-Catholic) wife dissolves into helpless laughter. He knows the Garden of Eden story, but that’s about it and it was particularly jarring because we hadn’t been discussing it either at the time or at all in recent days. I’m also pretty sure he hasn’t been reading Dawkins (who would be within physical reach) because the only words I’m sure he can read so far are “Du” (German) and “taxi.”
Stewart, !!!!!
That’s amazing and hilarious. I especially like it since it’s a point I’m fond of making. I wasn’t clever enough to start making it at age 3 though!
Ian, I don’t agree that ‘we believe what we want to believe’ – at least not if you mean exclusively and necessarily. We believe lots of things without any wanting either way, and we also believe plenty of things we don’t want to believe.
Seriously, you don’t know anyone who believes what they don’t want to believe? So you don’t know anyone who believes she will die? You don’t know anyone who believes that everyone he loves and likes will die? You don’t know anyone who belives bad things happen to people?
Sorry, I must not see what you’re getting at.
I also don’t see why your advice to people who want to believe in the tooth fairy or god is to go ahead and believe. One, I don’t see why your advice to them is even an issue (do people ask your advice about what to believe a lot?). Two, I don’t see why it would be that. I’m not saying it should be ‘No don’t believe that’ – but I don’t see why it would be go ahead. There are after all good reasons not to believe whatever we want to believe – despite your stipulation about wishful thinking, which frankly doesn’t really make much sense to me.
You’re not just some woolly dafty, so I must be missing something!
Ian, I guess you mean something like “I don’t know anyone who believes what they don’t want to believe unless they’re forced to by the facts”? I can certainly understand that claim. (Though it makes me wonder how we can uniquely grasp the facts without standards of evidence, and hence criteria for belief).
One problem is that depressed and anxious people can certainly believe all kinds of terrible things that they don’t want to believe on the basis of insufficient evidence.
Another problem is that there are certain common-sense situations that are tricky to figure out. i.e., suppose a man were to say to you: “I don’t want to believe my girlfriend is cheating on me, but I see the way she looks at Mr. so-and-so, and I know that’s not enough to accuse her, but I just can’t help but believe she isn’t being faithful.” Does that mean he doesn’t really believe it?
But even that claim would claim too much. We believe lots of things where want or not want doesn’t even come into it.
OB: I think there has been a bit of a misunderstanding here and that we have been talking past one another. I have been using the word ‘want’ in the sense of ‘choose’, so perhaps a better formulation would be ‘we believe what we choose to believe’. That is, given a proposition and after applying a series of tests arranged in a hierarchy according to our own priorities (for me, logical consistency and scientific validity are top of the list, but others have their own) we choose to agree or not to agree.
Do I believe I will one day die? Yes, I choose to accept that, because the alternative however superficially attractive is untenable. But as it happens, I have a relative for whom the death of certain others has been such a threat that she refused to countenance it, and who responded to a suggestion by me that it would happen sooner or later by telling me: “don’t say that.” In practical terms her own needs demanded belief that both they and she were/are immortal. That’s what she chose, in the light of her own needs as she perceived them, to believe.
Now she may be an extreme case, but she has cobbled together an operating system that worked well enough on a day-to-day basis and only came apart (big time) when those people important to her finally died, each in their turn. But I am sure that her own eventual death is still so far out of her own mind as to render her immortal still.
I think we each have a mental operating system, and religious people take one supplied as a bundle and install it in their heads to suit themselves. However logically inconsistent and cherry-picked for contents, it gets them through life. Needless to add, a good part of your own writing here is devoted to pointing out religious humbug and hypocrisy, though hypocrisy has never been much of a problem to the hypocrite, who is usually well-practised at rationalising his or her way around any obstacle or operating-system problem.
Benjamin: In the case I mention above, ‘the facts’ were a problem. But the first death of an ‘important other’ did not prevent death being ruled out as a consideration in the case of the other ‘important others.’
In my own life I have attempted to keep irrationality and hypocrisy to a minimum. (Don’t we all? Well, perhaps.) In my religious phase I had a battle reconciling what I chose to believe with my own priority for rational consistency, and finished up junking the religion. But I see plenty of others who are in the business of rationalising their way past difficulties like those presented by facts and logic.
I was also not clever enough to make such comments at age 3 (I didn’t have his vocabulary at that age, either; I was taking him up the street on my shoulders the other day and he said to me “Do you see that man and woman ahead of us?” I said I did. “They are oblivious to us.”). I don’t fool myself that he understands the full implications of his statement.
Your comment did make me recall my own earliest decisive sorting-it-out moment. I had never believed, but had from early on been required to pay fairly extensive lip service to those who did. I was probably already in school when I found myself at the point when the “does he or doesn’t he” (exist, that is) question needed to be dealt with. What I remember is thinking something along the lines of “alright, if you exist, give me some kind of sign,” followed by a brief glance heavenwards. After a few seconds had elapsed and nothing whatsoever had happened, I figured there was no god (certainly none with an interest in whether or not I believed in him) and tried to get on with more serious questions, some of which I had already accepted might be unanswerable.
The older and more experienced I become, the less I tend to see how I dealt with the issue as immature. An absence of evidence does not require the respect of a long attention span (and he’s had several more decades since then to provide something and he’s still come up worse than empty).
‘Oblivious’ – from a 3. How cool. He sounds pretty dang conversable!
Come to think of it he also sounds like Stewie, only nicer. You probably don’t know Stewie…
Ian, sorry, I still don’t get it. I don’t “choose” to believe I will die, I just do. I just don’t think we do choose most of our beliefs. We don’t think about most of them actively enough to do anything like choosing.
And now for something completely different –
while I can’t update B&W, which I don’t know how long that’s going to be, I set up a thing called a ‘blog’ by way of a placeholder. It is here. Just a couple of News items so far, but I’m working on it. Please visit.
Yes, that’s what I mean. Many of our more visible beliefs are chosen, but we have lots of implicit beliefs that aren’t.
FYI, Ophelia – you’ve got comments set to moderation at your wordpress page, in case you didn’t know.
Thanks, Benjamin. I’ll relay the message, but the prospects aren’t that good, considering he’s neither American nor American-born, nor does he live in the U.S.
Thanks Josh, I didn’t (until I got the message telling me to moderate yours!).
Stewart, no problem, he can be World President instead. Whatever works.
Head of the UN Human Rights Council – he’s needed there.
Right, well as soon as he starts respecting his parents’ human rights, I’ll get onto it (there is a little more to all this than just having a big vocabulary and thinking god is a fictional character, you know).
Glad to see we’re back in business for other threads to develop. Happy New Year, all.
You mean you’ve been misleading us?!
:- )
Happy New Year.