Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh look, I’m back. That is to say, the database is fixed, thanks to its owner, who fixed it, but prefers to remain anonymous, which makes thanking rather abstract, but you get the idea.

Apologies for the dry spell. Never mind. What with folding up the turkey to re-use next year and making wrapping paper hash, you’ve been too busy to read B&W anyway.

But those days are over – it’s shoulders to the wheel now, and no slacking. New Year’s Eve nothing – that kind of thing is for shallow worldly frivolous flower-sniffers, and I don’t hold with it. I expect a ten-page report on my desk by the end of the day.

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.

Still pretty clear and bright today, so I did the next item on the ‘don’t waste the ideal weather’ list and walked the golf course at Pebble Beach. It must be a closely-guarded secret that one can do this, because walkers are there in the single digits rather than the thousands. (But then there weren’t all that many people at Point Lobos, either. Carmel is always packed to the rafters while Point Lobos is blissfully underpopulated. Funny.) I encountered a guy on my dawn walk this morning, who stopped to greet the dog who was with me; the guy asked if where we were was the Pebble Beach course and I said no, it’s at the far end of 17 Mile Drive. We chatted dog for a bit and then parted, and as an afterthought I called after him, ‘You should walk the Pebble Beach course if you have time, it’s spectacular.’ He was all astonishment. ‘They let you do that?’ he said. They do. They don’t put out big signs saying YOU CAN WALK HERE but they definitely let you. ‘If I had my dog could I take him there?’ he asked. Yes. It’s funny, you’d think it would be all exclusive and get offy, but it isn’t. It costs the earth to play the course, but nothing to walk it. I’d much rather walk it!

So I did, and spectacular it was. It’s laid out on bluffs that overlook the ocean and Carmel Bay and the hills behind it. It’s an excellent walk on a very clear day in December.