Problems don’t imply their own solutions
The Andrew Brown discussion, or wrangle, raises an interesting issue – interesting and pervasive yet obscure. Much of the wrangle has been about whether Dawkins actually said or meant or both that parents who impose harmful beliefs on their children (what is meant by ‘harmful’ is of course part of the wrangle, I’ll get to that, be patient) should be forcibly removed by the state. Brown didn’t even bother to wrangle, he simply said that Dawkins had simply said that, which was and is not the case. Commenters have been wrangling about whether he meant it and if so how strongly (and about what beliefs are ‘harmful’). A strong claim that several people have made is that it’s mere evasion to claim that Dawkins did not say that and did not necessarily mean it either; that he presented a problem but did not say what the solution is. The strong claim is that to state the problem is to say what the solution is – that if the problem is as bad as Dawkins says it is then active intervention is required.
My claim is that that’s wrong. I think what’s going on here is that Dawkins is pointing out a very serious, even terrible, problem, but one that of its nature is very difficult if not impossible to solve without an unacceptable amount and kind of intrusion on people’s lives.
I put it this way in a comment over there: I think it’s fair to say that the really bad stuff is not universal and that it may well not be very common. But I think what Dawkins is saying in that chapter is that the really bad stuff is indeed that bad – and I think he’s right. One child (or adult) in agony because she believes a loved friend is in hell is very bad. It does not follow that the police should be called to arrest the child’s parents, nor does it follow that I’m claiming that. But that kind of agony is very bad – and I think Dawkins is absolutely right that people should worry about it as opposed to ignoring it or brushing it off as unimportant.
Since saying that I’ve looked for some stats, and I’m not so sure it is fair to say that belief in hell (which I consider the really bad stuff) may well not be very common. Unfortunately it is very common. This survey reports that 74.6% in the US believe in hell, and 58.3% in the UK. Maybe they all think that only other people go to hell, and maybe they’re cheerful or indifferent to that thought – but that is no help, is it, because that is still very bad stuff.
And that’s before we even get to other religious indoctrination, such as telling girls that they’re inferior, telling boys that girls are inferior, telling children that homosexuality is a ‘sin,’ telling children that they are ‘sinners,’ telling children that ‘sinners’ go to hell, and the like. That’s what I mean by ‘harmful’ – beliefs that poison children’s minds and make them afraid or cruel or both.
And, obviously enough, there is no quick and easy solution to this, because pretty much no one wants to run around listening in on what all parents tell their children, and no one would be able to even if lots of people did want to. It’s not the case that we think belief in hell is harmful and therefore the police should be called. I for one, and I imagine lots of other people too, think that belief in hell is harmful and there is very little that can be done about that.
The one thing that can be done is education – and that’s what Dawkins was doing on page 326. ‘Consciousness raising,’ he called it; same thing. That can be done without violating anyone’s rights, without installing bugs in every living room, without filling the prisons with naughty parents. It can’t always be done without a lot of argument and brawling, as in the Kitzmiller case, but it can be done without sending out the Gestapo.
World: Religiosity (III) – Belief in Heaven and Hell (2007)
“On the other hand, when asked do they believe in hell, 79.7% Irish say yes,…
micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/05/27/world-religiosity-iii-belief-in-heaven-and-hell/
First off, this post discusses the issues about the dangers of religious indoctrination and abuse clearly and well. It also captures, I believe, something of Dawkins’ approach to the question.
Second, though, I don’t think this is an entirely impossible problem to solve (at least not impossible in every case). Not that we want to criminalise certain regrettable behaviours, but we do, I suggest, want to diminish them. This can be done by the sort of consciousness-raising that both Dawkins and Humphrey are engaged in. But it can also be done by keeping one’s eyes and ears open. It can also be done by making sure that anything that passes for religious instruction in schools (and even, perhaps, in limited ways, for home schooling) is not coercive and destructive. And even home schooled children should be able to be assessed along some of the parameters of concern here. Stephen Law’s book The War for Children’s Minds is a good stab at expressing some of these concerns clearly.
But to dismiss the concern because issues of religious or spiritual abuse are not easily quantifiable is a red herring. It’s fairly difficult to quantify other types of abuse too, as well as to define where they begin. Physical or psychological abuse are examples of this. We know that there is physical abuse, but it is not clear exactly what constitutes it. And psychological abuse occurs, but what does it mean exactly? Children who are constantly criticised, diminished, marginalised or ignored, fall, at some point on the continuum of criticsm and marginalisation into the number of those who are rightly taken to be psychologically abused. We want to make sure that this doesn’t happen, if we can, though doubtless many children fall through the cracks and suffer abuse.
But there are means of intervening in cases of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. There is no reason this should not happen with religious or spiritual abuse as well, nor is there any reason to suppose that those who suffer this kind of abuse do not really suffer.
I didn’t quite say the problem was impossible to solve – I said it is very difficult if not impossible to solve (without unacceptable intrusion) – a nicely evasive way of putting it I think!
Just my little joke. In reality I suppose I think it’s very difficult in some places and impossible in others – but I also think that it’s impossible to know which or where in advance, so it’s always worth making the effort, etc. I also also think that time is fluid so even if it is impossible now, who knows what will be true 100 years from now, assuming most of the earth is not under water by then.
The thing about physical abuse is that it is at least quantifiable, in a way that mental abuse isn’t.
But I absolutely think that those who suffer mental abuse really suffer and that Dawkins is dead right to make a stink about that. I think it’s appalling that it mostly just gets shrugged off or ignored.
When someone dithers between difficult if not impossible, I always go for the the extreme, because that’s really a way of trying to play the odds without playing! (That’s my little joke!)
But I don’t think it’s impossible at all, and it should be even more possible in connexion with things like ‘faith schools’ (which is an oxymoron). People who supervise children for one reason or another can spot behavioual signals of personal problems quite easily – well, relatively easily – and if people began to think (as they should) about extreme religious indoctrination as a problem, this would probably be detectable (and quantifiable) too.
(As an aside, I remember a youth weekend at another parish, during my time as a priest, where a couple of fairly level headed kids from our parish went. In the middle of a Saturday evening we had to call the whole thing to a close, because of reports from the kids, one of whom phoned her parents. One of the children was almost rendered catatonic with fear. It turned out that he had also been sexually abused at one point by a trusted neighbour. And this was in a situation in a staid Anglican context (I thought), where people could be trusted. These experiences are not uncommon, and not without effect.)
We’re at a very early stage of this sort of thing, as responses to Humphrey and Dawkins make clear. But, with a bit of consciousness raising, there’s no reason this sort of abuse should not eventually be included in the schedule of reportable offences.
I think, for example, of the ‘hell houses’ that Dawkins explored in his badly named The Root of All Evil (a relatively gentle version of which is recorded in my aside above). There is no reason why people should not be very concerned about the welfare of children who are subjected to that sort of thing, and it would surprise me if, amongst a significant minority of those so subjected, there were not some who showed various kinds of personal dysfunction. The fact that hell is taken for granted in Christianity and Islam is perhaps why this kind of thing is not more widely looked for or reported.
Participants in this discussion who have not read ‘Why the Gods are not Winning’ at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html may find it interesting.
Neither hell nor high water (yes, OB, the latter may be on its way) seems to be able to stop the steady decline of all religions.
A minor tangent
OB: “…assuming most of the earth is not under water by then.”
Most of the Earth is under water *right now*.
(I’m not doing this to be picky, I only noticed it myself while trying to work out if there was enough water for that to be possible.)
Otherwise, carry on ;)
Over at CiF, someone has linked a site in which a mother speaks of the sinfulness of her 4 year old daughter. It’s very disturbing.
Loving the Lord Jesus Christ and hating sin
Ophelia: What is the source of the poll? I have been unable to track it down, and as far as the UK is concerned it is greatly discrepant with a December 2004 Yougov poll:
http://tinyurl.com/7n639w
http://www.yougov.com/uk/archives/pdf/STI040101003_2.pdf
It also seems to be of synch with this ICM poll from two years ago:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/dec/23/religion.topstories3
http://tinyurl.com/a83ole
P.S. I’ve found the source of the poll, but am unable to find the poll itself:
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/
You can find data for 1997/8 here:
World Values Survey Data
According to these figures (see page 7) belief in hell in the UK is 28%, in the US it is 71%, Canada = 42%, Denmark = 8%, Sweden = 8% (just a brief sampling).
The Yougov (2004) poll tends to agree, with 22% Conservative, 23% Labour, and 26% Lib Dem believing in hell (which actually seems to be unintuitive). That puts Ophelia’s 58.3% way off. Does anyone have the Bristish Social Survey data, or do they ask this question?
Thanks, Eric!
It’s not important, but just to be pernickety, I think you’ll find the figures you quote are for 1993. (The table based on the 1997 World Values Survey does not include the UK, etc.)
“Extract of data available in the book Human Values and Beliefs: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook. Political, Religious, Sexual, and Economic Norms in 43 Societies: Findings from the 1990-93 World Values Survey; by Ronald Inglehart, Miguel Basañez & Alejandro Moreno (The University of Michigan Press, 1998)”
http://www.religionstatistics.net/gendaten.htn
Allen, you’re quite right. Just took a cursory glance at dates. It’s remarkable how stable belief in hell was, then, over a ten year period in the UK, if the Yougov survey 2004 is anything to go by.
May have got my commas and words in the wrong order. I do not mean to sugest that any percent of British people think that hell is in the UK!
underverse CiF (03 Jan 09, 9:12pm) (4)
“Indoctrination is part of the bargain of civilization, and we all begin with it.”
Is it indeed? So this means in essence that ‘we sinners’ either have to put up or shut up, as it is part of the bargain that ‘we sinners’ were signed up to by our parent/s when we were thus born and soon thereafter baptised.
“This is not to say that by late childhood we do not, if all goes well, acquire a rational faculty.”
Oh, right, so after a whole childhood of indoctrination, if all goes well, of course, we should then see the light of day.
We do not live on the same planet, that is for sure.
Wow, you sound (to me) like someone who comes from a extraordinary sheltered religious background.
“This is not to say that by late childhood we do not, if all goes well, acquire a rational faculty.”
“A 14-year-old who was trained to kill by radicals in the tribal regions of Pakistan” rational faculties unfortunately did not go according to – ‘if all goes well’ – plan. “They told him that once he blew himself up he wouldn’t die because God would save him for being a true Muslim.”
‘Rational faculty’ indeed – how are you at all?
So I guess I’ll have to do some more poll-hunting. I’m tempted to contract it out!
“More Americans Believe in the Devil, Hell and Angels than in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution”
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=982
Marie-Therese,
I didn’t say that religious indoctrination was the price we pay for civilization; I wrote indoctrination generally. You surely wouldn’t argue that even in “raised consciousness” households children get to choose whether or not to be potty trained, or sublimate their sexual and aggressive urges?
My point is just let’s not indulge in a naive fantasy where a child is able to make decisions for itself in its own interests from day one. Human enculturation is pre-rational, and it is not optional.
“children get to choose whether or not to be potty trained,”
I am taking the above words (out of context, of course) as they raise, from my perspective, anyway, a serious consciousness of diabolical proportions, insofar that I commit to memory plenty of children who never got to choose whether or not to be potty trained.
Because, because because…
The babies/toddlers, in question, as part of their daily hygiene indoctrination in general were forcibly strapped on them each and every day for so long that their entrails all hung out. They were fed on these potties, they were strapped on these potties and they slept their live-long days on these potties. They were never given any choice as to whether they wanted to be strapped on these potties by their religious cares. They just were.
You surely wouldn’t argue that even in “raised consciousness” households children get to choose whether or not to be potty trained.
No, I surely would not argue with you about your “raised consciousness” households, as I am albeit too much suctioned (like the wee babies/toddlers were, as well) on the indoctrinated, religious, emotional and psychological potty to even dwell on what they think.
“not every child will grow up stunted, frightened, or hopelessly disempowered.
But some of them will.”
And as I’ve been arguing in reply to Chris S at Comment is Cheap, even if none of them do, it’s still horrifying if they are frightened and grief-stricken just for a brief time during childhood. I’ve always remembered what you told me about that experience, Claire, and it’s always made me…well, livid, but more to the point, appalled, because it must be such a common experience. (And for the children who are taught that but are not appalled, the experience seems to be one of a terrible callousness and indifference, which is even less endurable or beneficial.)
Not every child grew up disembowled – as older children came to their rescue and shoved their insides, that were hanging out of them, right back were they belonged!
Marie-Therese,
I’m having trouble understanding the point of your satire. It sounds like you are saying that toilet training is more benign than religious instruction because it is an intermittent experience, or something like that. If you could extricate your argument a little from your indignation and outrage about–whatever it is–I might be better able to respond intelligently. If that’s something you would like. Perhaps you prefer to keep me cast as a beastly, monstrous, hater of children.
Ophelia, you said, rightly, “it’s still horrifying if [children] are frightened and grief-stricken just for a brief time during childhood.”
I was just reading a short article by Emmanuel Levinas about Heidegger, and about the fact that Heidegger, though he had ample opportunity to do so, never spoke out against the horrible genocide practiced by the Nazis, and, indeed, on one occasion equated factory farming with the industrial death camps. And he wonders what it was in Sein und Zeit that could engender this depth of hatred and evil, though, he suggests, it must be there for those who can read.
I think the influences of religious indoctrination do cause fright and grief as you suggest, but I think there is a more serious dimension to this. This indoctrination, while, on the surface of the lives of children causes fear and suffering, goes much deeper, and infects almost everything that they do.
I speak from experience here, not a quantifiable survey type of experience, but one that, I can say, dominated my life until very recently. It warps and distorts practically every attitude, practically every thought, and makes it nearly impossible to think outside of certain lines. It’s like a prison in one’s mind, from which one can break free only at great personal cost. My freedom, I sometimes think, is still pending.
I would scarcely compare myself with Primo Levy, but I recognised in my upbringing, not the degradation of the camps, but aspects of the dehumanisation that took place there, in my own upbringing in a religious school – not a Roman Catholic one, by the way, but protestant. My first headmaster was an Anglican canon, as I became. I did not know him well, but the influence of that school suffused every pore, and, I swear, every synapse in the brain.
So, I am not thinking only of the sorrows of childhood. I am thinking of its long term effects, and the harm that it is capable of doing to others over all those years.
And to Chris… Perhaps indoctrination of a sort is an aspect of civlisation that we sign up for. But I suggest that most indoctrination is unnecessary, coerced and unhealthy. Culture is absorbed just by living with people. You have to go out of your way to indoctrinate. The transition from ‘indoctrination’ (and even then that is not the correct word, if it is a transition) to education should be seamless and gentle. It is precisely this kind of thing that, it seems to me, in his criticisms of Dawkins and Humphrey, Andrew Brown is at pains to avoid, supposing that (a la John Gray) there is a kind of inevitability about religious conditioning. I suspect, to hark back to what I just wrote, that this is what is at the back of Heidegger’s silence. It is a silence that we ignore at our peril.
Yep, quite right, Ophelia. Still horrifying to be a frightened and grief-stricken child even briefly. And since children are not good thinkers, especially about abstractions, and they ARE good story-inventors, even a brief terror has inner mind repercussions we’ll never know the entire details of.
Chris, what Marie-Therese wrote is, unfortunately, no satire. She was imprisoned throughout her childhood in an Irish industrial school; the above is just an account of potty training at Goldenbridge.
You can read two articles by her on the subject here, in the articles section (on the subject of Goldenbridge, not specifically toilet training there).
Satire? Intermittent experience? Toilet training? Religious instruction? beastly monstrous hater of children? Indignation?.
Wow, I am momentarily howling with laughter at the web moon-god as I rewrite your words.
Eric – that’s chilling.
By the way – do you know Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son? If not I think it would interest you.
Claire – yeah, and that’s part of Dawkins’s overall argument: children are, for good survival-based reasons, highly credulous, which of course makes it all the more horrible when they are told dreadful untrue things.
Anyway – to back closer to the beginning –
“My point is just let’s not indulge in a naive fantasy where a child is able to make decisions for itself in its own interests from day one. Human enculturation is pre-rational, and it is not optional.”
But like several of the points you made at CiF yesterday, that point is entirely irrelevant. No one is indulging in any such fantasy, so your point is simply diversionary.
I’m afraid this seems to be a pattern with you. You seem to avoid answering actual points and instead you answer claims that were never made. That’s just a waste of time and effort, frankly. It’s also somewhat impolite, because it’s not arguing in good faith.
Yes, I do know Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, and it did interest me. I think I still have it somewhere, though I do downsize my library from time to time to make space for more. My experience cannot match Marie-Therese’s for its brutality and out and out cruelty, but I’m willing to match her on its dire personal effects. I was alread innured to physical abuse at home. It was the more subtle injustices (and some not so subtle) of boarding school life that confirmed my basic distrust of the world.
I do not write satire either, and find it hard to detect. I wonder if that is just a personal quirk or a result of scripture being drummed into my head? I remember reading Swift’s Modest Proposal for the first time! To someone raised on the literal word of scripture, it took me awhile to adjust my world.
Ophelia,
I take the charge of bad faith seriously, and having been on the other side of (what seemed to me) bad faith arguments, I know how frustrating it can be to have your time wasted, so let’s see what I can say to make my argument clearer. What points am I ignoring, by your lights?
I think it’s strongly arguable that Nicholas Humphrey, from whom this entire debate originates, is indulging in the fantasy that children can choose what’s best for themselves. I don’t deny of course, that they can partially do so, and increasingly as they grow older. But there seems to be a resistance here to the uncomfortable fact that a certain amount of indoctrination is biologically necessary in the development of a child. It’s in this context a good, not an evil, and it can get tricky to sort out which parts are which.
If it’s more flattering for some of you to believe in yourselves as rationalist heroes who have overcome all of your childhood conditioning so that you are at liberty to engage the world objectively and freely without regard to norms or taboos, go right ahead. To me that seems just as nutty as belief in a “sky daddy,” and just as resistant to any thoughtful consideration.
Chris,
I think it’s extremely unlikely that Nicholas Humphrey is either ignorant enough or silly enough to be ‘indulging in the fantasy that children can choose what’s best for themselves’ – and I think you must be reading an enormous amount into that passage to think he is saying that.
I really can’t imagine why you think there is any resistance at all here to the fact that children need some indoctrination. But the fact that children need some indoctrination does not mean that they need to be told that some people are tortured in hell forever.
Your last para is just silly and irrelevant – as well as rude. Again – no one said anything like your absurd caricature.
Nope. I checked again. No one said anything like that. Everyone here has been (very clearly) talking about certain kinds of indoctrination, not any and all indoctrination. The meaning is unmistakable, so this wanton misreading is just that.
Again – that’s just a waste of time and effort. It’s just like the problem with Andrew Brown – he raises an imaginary demon to fight with, which is utterly pointless, since it doesn’t address any real issues. It’s as if the police all arrested department store dummies instead of actual perps. You fighting with things that no one has said is utterly pointless.
How odd it all is.
Ophelia,
I wrote at CiF that indoctrination (generally, not specifically religious) was a fact of life. Marie-Therese took exception to that here at B&W, above. So did Eric, who wrote that enculturation happens by osmosis, and any particular repression on the part of parents is needless. So there’s at least two conversations focused on general, not religious, indoctrination. Even though Eric’s and Marie-Therese’s reactions were not very well argued, they were certainly not imaginary.
At any rate it seems that you and I are in agreement that a certain measure of indoctrination is an important component of child rearing. So we don’t need to quarrel about it. As for Nick H., my reading was based on these passages, among others:
(This is, of course a tautology; anyone who does not choose science can easily be declared, by definition, an unreasonable person.)
(This is very tidy, since we have already decided a priori that children would always choose scientific beliefs. Unless they were unreasonable, of course).
I think these passages establish fairly well the notion that “children can choose what’s best for themselves.” And yet this itself is an ethical value; a hallmark of our culture but not one universally treasured by our species. In other words, liberal values must be transmitted before there can be any talk of living up to them. It is not merely a matter of keeping the bad stuff out, but also of putting the good stuff in; that is, indoctrination.
My deeper point is that at any age in early childhood there will be times when what the child chooses is not what even the most enlightened secular parent would choose. Bodily urges are the best example. But most types of “pleasure principle” activity falls into this category. To presume, as Humphrey does, that all parents need do is provide the basics of life–nutrition, shelter, and freedom to move around a little–and the child will basically self-develop into a functioning member of a rational, secular democracy is staggeringly naive.
Chris, for Christ’s sake, try to get something straight for once! Here is what I said, word for word:
“Perhaps indoctrination of a sort is an aspect of civlisation that we sign up for. But I suggest that most indoctrination is unnecessary, coerced and unhealthy. Culture is absorbed just by living with people. You have to go out of your way to indoctrinate.”
I did not say that enculturation happens by osmosis, but a lot of it does. It doesn’t take a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate, which in case you need reminding, is to teach someone to accept a view uncritically. Look at a little bit of child developmental psychology and you will see how soon children are able to handle things critically and with intelligence. Even very young children can deal intelligently with moral questions. (Look at Kohlberg, for example.) The idea that a large measure of indoctrination is necessary for the ‘enculturation’ of children – a completely different process – is so ridiculous as almost to need no response.
Are children able to choose always what is best for themselves? Of course not. They need a period when they are under the control and direction of responsible adults, but a lot of the responsibility of adults should be directed towards enabling children to deal with questions in an intelligent and critical way, not to accept things uncritically. That’s why you explain things to a child at the same time that you forbid them to do something or other. They learn that way. They do not just absorb the points of view of the adults who have responsibility for them. Let me stress that word: responsibility. It is a key part of child care. It is not tyranny. It is a process of bringing a child to maturity, so that they can deal with things in a critical, intelligent way, that is responsive to conditions in the world, and not just to programming in the brain.
If you really want to contribute to the discussion, contribute to the discussion, instead of being so doctrinaire.
Chris, your style of sideswiping people got the better of me. The second sentence of my third paragraph immediately above should read: “It does take a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate, which in case you need reminding, is to teach someone to accept a view uncritically.”
Eric,
I never said that children can’t handle things critically at an early age. Critical thought and indoctrination need not be mutually exclusive. (In fact part of my argument is that some indoctrination in the value of critical thought is important to fostering it).
But if you feel so strongly that the role of indoctrination underdetermines morality compared to critical thought, perhaps you can share with me some of your reasoning process from when you decided not to go to bathroom whenever or wherever you felt like it, to attempt to mate with anyone who attracted you, or to attack anyone that angered you, to use the most prominent examples.
We sometimes explain confusing or dificult things to our children, like punishments, based on their ability and need to understand them. But this doesn’t mean that these things are negotiable. To an important extent, parenting *is* tyranny. A tyrant may explain why he is instituting some draconinan policy to the people; he may even be sincere about it. But this doesn’t mean he is opening up a debate about it.
This doesn’t mean I think parents should alienate their children, or engage in cruelty. It just means that parenting is an act of authority, which is the specific form that the responsibility of parenthood must take before children are old enough to take responsibility for themselves (at which point the authority ends). Certain rules and limits are fixed and absolute for the good of the child. Miraculously, perhaps, while all this is going on, we can encourage children to be curious, skeptical and inquisitive. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a very strong foundation of authority underneath it.
ps, blaming your typos on me is very classy.
I’m sorry Chris, I will not read further than this sentence: “Critical thought and indoctrination need not be mutually exclusive.” Look it up.
This is a waste of time, effort, bandwidth, money. Chris, it now appears that your argument is with Nick Humphrey in general – but that’s not the subject of this post, so a long analysis of some things Humphrey said somewhere is – yet again – entirely beside the point.
I take ‘indoctrination’ to mean things like ‘don’t cross the street without looking’ and I agree that children need some of those for their own safety. Now please let’s drop this whole line because it has nothing to do with what I was talking about.
I’m sorry, Chris, but you do have a way of getting under the skin.
The word ‘indoctrination’, though in what the Penguin dictionary calls an archaic form, means ‘to instruct’, or, as the OED says, ‘to teach’, today is generally taken to mean, as the Penguin dictionary says, ‘to teach (a person or group) to accept a view, ideology, uncritically, esp. by systematic repetition.’ That is how I understand the word.
I would not, therefore, include warning children to look both ways before crossing the street (first to the left in NA and Europe, and to the right in Britain, India, Australia and Japan), an example of indoctrination. That kind of authority is taken for granted with children. However, even in such cases, children may ask why, and it behoves the responsible adult to explain the reasons clearly, so that the habit of asking for and giving reasons for beliefs and actions is developed.
Of course, reasons, as Wittgenstein observed, come to an end, and then it may be necessary to say, ‘Because I said so.’ But only as a last resort. Parenting is not an act, but it is a matter of responsible authority, and children’s responsibility for many aspects of their own thinking develops early, and should be encouraged. There is not a point at which a child is able to take responsibility for itself. This is a process. Some never seem to get the knack. Some take responsibility very early, and act responsibly too.
Eric, yes – I was rushing a bit there, I should have said that that’s what I take Chris to be using indoctrination to mean – that he’s using it as a shorthand for teaching children some rules that have to be obeyed (but as you say, there are in fact reasons, which can be explained when the danger is not roaring down the street).
However now that I’ve seen Chris’s latest comment on Brown’s post I guess that’s not what he meant. He argues that teaching children about hell is not so terrible…
I just read through that entire comments section…
???
Wow.
All I can say is that some people appear to have an awful lot of time on their hands…and are desperately touchy about their “faith”… :-)
One small assertion by Chris/”underverse” leapt out –
“It serves no useful purpose to you or me, not believing in hell”
Well, that’s patently nonsense, since at the very least it means there’s one less thing to stress about in life.
Why willingly choose to feel a bit worried every time one of the assorted crowd of “holy personages” opens their mouth and exhorts us to do as they would see fit…?
Hopefully that’s the insomnia beaten into submission for tonight…cheers!
That should flatten anyone’s insomnia, Andy!
What’s the Norwegian for ‘sleep well’?
:- )
Ophelia,
I took great pains to explain myself after you wrote that I had been making a “wanton misreading.” You said “no one had written” about indoctrination generally, so I cited the people that did. You said that Humphrey was not indulging in the fantasy of children as rational actors, so I quoted him showing why I *did* think he was.
After having done so, you inform me that it’s “diversionary” and besides the point, though I was referring directly to your comments here accusing me of attacking straw men and arguing in bad faith! I’m beginning to understand why the conversation is so one-sided here, if this is the way you respond to healthy debate.
“What’s the Norwegian for ‘sleep well’?
Treningsredskap.
Chris S,
Well, okay, I can see where you might think that. I was talking about what Humphrey said in the passage on p 326 rather than in his works in general – but if you think his works in general cast light on that passage, then that probably is relevant. It’s more detail and more deep background than I really want to get into on this one thread – but it’s not off topic, so I take that back. Sorry!
I don’t buy that Chris. Where did you quote Humphrey? You said this about him:
But this is not a quote. Can you show me where Humphrey presumes this? I think the one-sidedness in this discussion rests fairly squarely on your vagueness. If you want to quote chapter and verse and have a discussion about something, fine, but don’t come over vague and then accuse someone of onesidedness and characterise your own contributions as healthy debate.
Here, for example, Chris, is an quote from early in Humphrey’s Amnesty lecture at Oxford, 21st February 1997:
It’s a long time since I read the lecture, but this is the sort of think I would have expected him to say; but it is very different, I would have you notice, from the silly ideas your attribute to him. Can you give me some reason for believing any of those silly ideas about Humphrey’s view of child-rearing to be true?
Eric,
I quoted the passages I was responding to, also from the Amnesty lecture, above. (Timestamp: 2009-01-04 – 22:51:42 )
Truth and rational analysis are marvelous and important things, but they are not primary needs of a young child. What need protecting against, foremost, are not “false ideas,” but neglect and manipulation. Then we can start talking about rational inquiry.
MTO’L –
interesting…
I’d have hazarded something literal & simplistic like:
“sove frisk”, or perhaps “sove bra”??
Is yours a cunning colloquialism?
it comes out as (according to my dictionary, anyway!):
“the training utensil” or thereabouts..?
:-))
Hee hee.
Anyway, sove frisk, Andy. (Oooooh, sounds naughty.)
No, no Chris. That’s not my point. My question is: Where did you find something in Humphrey which amounts to this:
Those are not Humphrey’s words. They’re yours. Where does Humphrey presume this?
Oh lordy lordy lordy, Chris – you are a pain to argue with, frankly. Of course children need first of all not to be ngelected; duh; but nobody said otherwise. Nobody said ‘children have a right to be succoured by the truth and all their other needs can go hang.’ It’s completely beside the point to inform us sagely that they have more basic needs! I’ve never seen the like of you for making irrelevant points and for answering claims that no one made.
Oh, gawd – now I have to spend time tracking down whether Chris ever did actually answer the question I asked (as he claims he did) or whether he simply answered different ones – when I could be doing something more useful.
Your contributions really aren’t worth all this effort, Chris.
Okay. Major non sequitur.
Chris quotes Humphrey saying:
“The habit of questioning, the ability to tell good answers from bad, an appetite for seeing how and why deep explanations work—such is what I would want for my daughter (now two years old) because I think it is what she, given the chance, would one day want for herself.”
and comments “I think these passages establish fairly well the notion that “children can choose what’s best for themselves.””
That passage – the one you quote – establishes the exact opposite: Humphrey says that is what he would want for his daughter now because he thinks it is what she would want for herself later.
I was too exasperated with the overkill to read it carefully yesterday, but I have now, and I’m gobsmacked that you managed to interpret Humphrey as saying the opposite of what he did say.
Maybe they’re right over at Comment is Cheap: I’ve seen people asking if you’re Andrew Brown, and maybe you are.
Run along now, okay? I’m sorry but this is really futile and I don’t have the time. Stick to CiF: there are lots more commenters there anyway.
Ophelia, I don’t get you. I was responding to a question of Eric’s. You responded 3 times, and closed by scolding me for wasting your time?
I won’t respond at length to you because you seem to want me out of your hair. But if I did, it would be to defend my interpretation of Humphrey’s remark about his daughter. “What she would want for herself later” does not–cannot–exist in a vacuum. It is directed, in part, by the values her parents lay before her; in this case, liberal values. My reply to Eric, below, expands on this.
Eric,
You did notice that I quoted N.H. in the (earlier) comment, no? Let me paste the one that I think best distills what I’m getting at:
This, to my mind, takes for granted all the socialization that precedes the first attempts at rational ideology (potty training, curbing of sex and aggression, etc.), all of which are most certainly “imposed.”
Moving on to more abstract beliefs–cosmology, ethics, etc.–we can see that Humphrey wants to assert here that some beliefs are (or will be, over time) self-evidently superior to other beliefs, if only the parents do not block the child’s recognition of that superiority. But he runs into a contradiction, because if the child was going to choose these beliefs “anyway, no matter what” there would be no need to impose them in the first place.
Still too vague? I’m not arguing against the cultural values Humphries supports (curiosity, debate, inquiry, choice, etc.) But they *are* cultural values, and it is, I believe, disingenuous for Humphrey to write as though they require no enculturation of their own. (Except where he slips, and does say this).
Remember where Humphrey is going with all this: an argument for the usurpation of a parent’s authority to raise her own child:
Except for the belief that it’s valuable to “exercise her powers of understanding to arrive at her own beliefs,” which is implicit, not reasoned out. Don’t you see the reductio here? (Or perhaps you think humans are natural born utilitarians, in which case: why didn’t Bentham and Mill show up ten or twenty thousand years earlier?)
He continues, answering his own rhetorical question:
But that’s not quite the same question he started with. A liberal values parent ending up with a liberal values kid is win-win. But the original question was “how would you like it if I tried to impose my personal ideology on your little girl.” Humphrey shows no sign of contemplating what that might be like for a parent, and only glimmers of what the real trade offs might be for the child.
Because the stakes are so high, I think the criticism that liberal values are to a large extend pre-selected for the children raised under them is an important one. It’s easy to suggest, but very difficult to establish, what any child would do differently, when so much of the identity of the child (hypothetically now grown up) second guessing that decision is the product of the life it has already lived. The alternate, “anyway, no matter what” child does not exist except as an abstraction.
Still too vague? I’ve already gone on far too long, but you seemed to desire some more specific analysis. It would take a proper article to really make my point, not a comment on a blog, but I hope I fleshed out my argument to something more than a quizzical non-sequitur. If not, well, que sera.
First, Chris, Ophelia was quite right to respond as she did. This is an open forum. Anyone may speak, and Ophelia spoke to some purpose. And besides, she’s the moderator!!
Next, I quote this from you:
No, I don’t see the reductio here. What reductio? The object of education or the raising of children is that they should be able, at the end of the process, to exercise their own powers of understanding and arrive at their own beliefs. Of course this is implicit in what he says. And this is not only a cultural value. It is the only reasonable goal one could have in teaching children. You think that this has to be justified, or else we are indoctrinating children. How would we justify it without using and teaching the very means which it presupposes?
I will say this for your last post. It makes clear what you are going on about. I’m not sure that it achieves the end that you were seeking. You have, essentially, two choices here. You can induct a child into a particular culture of beliefs, that is, impose them on the child as, in some sense, already established (though on what basis?), or you can help the child to understand how to make reasonable choices and come to their own conclusions as to what beliefs to hold.
That is, enculturation can be a rote process of learning what the parents value, or it can be a more open process in which the beliefs of the parents are themselves open to question. Humphrey prefers the second way, and so do I.
If you want to say that there is no basis for choice between the two options – which is what I hear you saying – and that they are both cultural choices, that’s fine; but I don’t think that’s true, because we are, after all, having a discussion here (argument, debate?), and trying to find reasons for doing one or the other, which seems to me to show that probably teaching children to do the same kind of thing is best. But if it comes to a choice, that’s what I would choose, and what Humphrey does, and I’m inclined to agree with him that this is a matter of respecting the child as a person.
And that is the point that Ophelia just made about your mistaken interpretation of Humphrey. He is not saying that children know (now) how to choose what is best for themselves, but that, if we educate them, instead of indoctrinate them, in the end we will find that that is precisely what they would have wanted, that is, for the simple reason that they will have learned what it means to choose for themselves.
But you say:
What are the stakes here? Whether the child will be taught to think for herself or not? Or whether liberal values which say that this is what we should do are the right ones or not? What’s at stake? I think the choice is obvious, because I like to be able to make up my own mind. Are you saying (and arguing) that you wonder whether that is best? Or are you saying that it is reasonable for you to choose for your child whether to raise her to think for herself or not – as you, note, already do?
I think this is a non-issue. The stakes are indeed high, because some people think we should simply force children to wear someone else’s beliefs – usually the parents, but just as often the authorities of some religion or ideology with pre-formed beliefs. But what gives them the right to choose to do that, and to deny the same kind of choosing to their children? Because this was chosen for them (the parents, the religious authorities)? I don’t understand your point. Just saying that we must criticise liberal values is already to give a preference to liberal values, because criticism is at the heart of them.
Eric,
What’s at stake is who gets to decide what moral and intellectual beliefs get transmitted to a child. The parents? The state? Humphrey? You? Me?
Humphrey offers a certain standard beyond which parents should be at least partially relieved of their authority–namely “other people’s bad ideas.” Obviously he gets a little more granular than that, arguing for the superiority of 21st century liberal values, specifically, over religious ones. Nevertheless, it demarcates a rather fuzzy line between indoctrination and the marketplace of ideas. This makes it very hard to determine what the threshold is that indicates intervention is necessary.
Let me illustrate with an example from an entirely secular context. There is a school of thought (thankfully less popular than it used to be) that parents should share with their children all the information they are intellectually capable of understanding. Bettleheim cites the example of well meaning parents, wishing to alleviate a child’s guilt for his bad behavior, explaining to him the pragmatic, mechanistic process which led to his bad behavior (they used emotions as the explanatory cause, but we could replace this cause with instincts, genes, or any number of things with the same effect.)
The child’s reaction was one of terror: “You mean there’s a machine in me that ticks away all the time and at any moment may explode me?” We might say this child’s terror is not as profound as the terror that he may suffer eternally in hell, but neither is it something we can write off as insignificant. The boy expresses real anxiety. Does this indict the parents’ value system that a child should be brought up to understand the best scientific knowledge available? Conversely, what of the parents that tell their child that Jesus is real, and loves him or her. Is the very fact that the child might not otherwise believe this, left to her own devices, reason enough to call the belief “crippling?”
I have never argued against fostering rational thought and inquisitiveness in children. What I argue is that there is a moral dilemma inherent in “forcibly breaking the vicious cycle” (Humphrey’s words) of religious instruction. There are innumerable problems perpetuated by bad or mediocre parenting that do not rise to the level of “addling” or “crippling.” As the Robin Hitchcock song says, there are so many ways to screw up a child. Some result in neuroses of various severity. Some in more dire personality disorders. We have a standard for intervention in cases of critical abuse and neglect. Are we to extend this standard to the groups that Humphrey singles out as most egregious providers of “intellectual dungeons”: Amish, Hasidic, Jehovah’s Witness, “radical” New Age, orthodox Muslim, just based on the commonality of their doctrine?
Ironically, under this standard, Humphrey would have intervened in the case of the very person he sets forth to make his case for the inquisitive life, Adelard of Bath. Adelard was born in 12th Century England, and grew up Christian in what are supposed to have been the dark ages, but this did not dim his ardor for truth and investigation (he stayed religious, but leaned more toward the Deist or Platonic Demiurge model as an adult). Just an anecdote, of course, but it suggests that Humphrey should define his terms a little more precisely, and work to develop a testable hypothesis of just which religious doctrines cripple young minds, and how. To advocate for state intervention without first developing these ideas seems highly irresponsible to me, but that may be why he’s moved on to other subjects since 1997.
Again, Chris, you are misreading your sources. Humphrey does not say that we should forcibly break this kind of vicious circle. This is not what he says at all. He asks this question:
And then he goes on to give an example of when this happened in the case of the Amish, and he says that this raises a moral question, whether, if children would choose something, if they were undeterred by the authorities governing them, we have any right to impose that something upon them by way of indoctrination?
The answer he gives is that it should give us some moral pause. But he nowhere makes any proposals as to how this kind of intervention should take place. All he is doing is raising a question, but he does go on to talk about FGM, and surely, in a case like this, it is absolutely wrong that this should be imposed on a child, when we know very well that, if left to herself when she is older, she will not choose to have such mutilation done. And then he goes on to suggest that, if this is true about bodies, why is not considered to be true about minds?
And then he comes to the main point, which is this: “I want to propose a general test for deciding when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible.” And then he points out that the criterion imposed here is probably utopian, but that “its moral implications remain pretty obvious.” He even says, just before that, that “in practice … such a totally free-choice is never going to be available.’
But the moral implications are still pretty obvious. Why should you think differently? You’re doing exactly the same thing that Brown is doing. You forge ahead with the consequences of doing something that Humphrey raises in a purely consciousness raising way, and make it seem as though he’s going to send the Old Bill after parental defaulters. And I think your interpretation of Humphrey is as wrong and as objectionable as Brown’s interpretation of Dawkins. So, no wonder you were defending him so forcefully, and without evident effect, on the CiF page.
I think, don’t you?, that this is about as far as we can go with this. But if you are going to argue like this in future, you need to have the actual quotes and context from which you take them in front of you, so that we know what you are saying, and how reliable it is. In this case, your interpretation turned out to be very inaccurate indeed. No wonder we have been led such a merry dance.
Yes, this is as far as we can go with this. Please, Chris, do run along now. Continue the argument at your own blog if you want to continue it, but enough here.