antiparenting

Surviving Steven Pinker – Abuse with an Excuse and the Blank Slate

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Surviving Steven Pinker – Abuse with an Excuse and the Blank Slate

I’ve said many times that some folks could do with a better version of atheism, that the species of atheism I so often encounter online is weak and it’s the one the Church is happy to contend with. Having said that, even so, even though I thought I was already there waiting for folks to catch up, I must confess: the Blank Slate, Steven Pinker’s thorough dissection of residual spirituality in intellectual and scientific thinking, has busted me, uncovered some leftover magical thinking in me too. Specifically, I’m having to face that I was still subscribing to some version of the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that while our bodies have been shown to be physical things, subject to biology and evolution, we still imagine a soul, a spirit, or a “mind” as a magical, non-physical thing). I still wasn’t quite seeing thought and feeling, our complex inner life as resulting from the processes of the machine. I think I was denying the ghost, but I hadn’t yet re-assigned its functions to the machine – and maybe that’s the main failing Steven was addressing, maybe a lot of us go that far and no farther along that line of reasoning.

Maybe we all want to cling to that idea, spirituality. After all, life as a machine, or as a component in the Big Machine, doesn’t seem to us to fulfill all the needs our complex inner life has. It’s understandable, especially because the idea of the ghost may actually be an evolved thought, the built-in way we understand the difference between living and non-living things, between dead and only sleeping people. At some point in our evolution, that idea was probably a revolution, a new level of understanding. But all that was in a different world, the world where our development took place is not the world most of us inhabit today.

This is a strange sort of plagiarism, I’m mostly just sharing Pinker’s book with you here, getting the idea out there. I must say, though, while Pinker made a solid case, my efforts at supporting his case in the preceding paragraph are my own. He didn’t say anything about the effect of or the cause of our first inklings of the idea of the invisible spirit that we naturally think is behind the appearances of life. He simply made a case that we do tend to think in those terms, and for natural reasons. He’s making a case for genes and evolution in this book, and for the cultural effects of false, primitive ideas – but not so much the effects of them in the deep past, more just through the latest century or two.

I don’t purport to have explained The Blank Slate here, proved it or anything; for that, I strongly recommend the book. It’s probably the best non-fiction thing I ever read, I actually stayed thrilled all the way through. Learning can be fun and Nature/Nurture questions are very close to my heart – so buy your own. My copy will be kept for reference.

Moving on.

I once wrote a post or two, “Hearing What You Don’t Want to Hear,” in which I bragged that at this advanced age, almost 55, I was still willing to risk hearing opposing points of view, that I was still trying to escape the trap of Confirmation Bias.

https://neighsayersotherstuff.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/hearing-what-you-dont-want-to-hear/

https://neighsayersotherstuff.wordpress.com/2014/08/12/tearing-skeptic-magazine-a-new-one/

(not crucial to this post, the point’s been made . . . )

At that time it was about a Skeptic article regarding the objective reality of the existence (or not) of Jesus, which honestly, is only a tangential pursuit of mine.

The Blank Slate appeared to threaten my main cause – a damning critique of the use of punishment in child-rearing and elsewhere – I was pretty terrified to read it. Before I even began it, I already knew how my intellect, education, and access to intellectuals stacked up against Pinker’s. If Steven invalidated me, then invalid, incorrect and irrelevant I would indeed be, in my own estimation as well as in everyone else’s. Nevertheless, fearlessly, or rather with a strong faith in my ability to rationalize anything, I read it anyway. Let the chips fall where they may; if my cause didn’t survive, then it didn’t deserve to.

Still, tough to say after being on this train of thought for some thirty years. Worryable, to use a word coined by Jagger regarding Richards’ arrest and trial in Canada. Scary.

But I read it, and while my fears weren’t calmed through most of it, the joy of learning, and learning from as bright a light as Pinker, and about my favourite subject, made it a pleasure. As it turned out, “Children” was the second last chapter, so, non-fiction it may be, but he kept me in suspense almost until the very end. With that end, I shouldn’t probably have worried. First, he let me and anyone else who worries about abuse off the hook by exempting abuse from the discussion. As regards child-rearing, the disciplines of the study of Human Nature concern themselves with personalities, with traits – not with damage.

Spoiler Alert!

It was scary, though. He spent a lot of time refuting that a child’s personality is in any way under its parents’ control. Again, it was in terms of personality, and relative intelligence, but he basically pointed out that, other than providing a safe environment or not, parents have zero influence on their kids after conception. This, from some good theoretical science and a whole lot of adoption/sibling/twin studies and analyses:

First of all, intelligence and testable traits are somewhere between 40% and 50% heritable, genetic;

Individual, random stimulus (individual, personal experience, perhaps the meme that it’s not our problems but our reaction to them that make people what they are, really, still unknown factors) accounts for 50% of traits;

Common environment –shared households and parents – show almost no effect whatsoever! Pinker suggests that he’s being generous when he allows it to claim a large part of the remaining 10% of the pie.

A big part of the explanation of the parental inability to influence children is that kids learn their values and strategies from their peers, other kids. It’s certainly fair to say that the phenomenon Pinker is debunking is epitomized by the idea of increasing your kids’ intelligence by playing Mozart to her in vitro. It must be, because he said it.

I think what he’s said is that there is no way to make your child smarter than his genes, and no way to direct our children’s interest or capacity for what we hope they’ll do.

This seems to be the upshot of combining what I thought before and what The Blank Slate makes clear: the negative power of parenting (the destructive power of abuse) has no positive correlate. There isn’t a way to ‘enhance’ our children, only a myriad of ways to damage them. And the next thought that follows is this: if we have no power to improve the next generation of people, and only the power to hurt, then maybe that kills any sort of ‘greater good’ talk used to justify punishment of children, at all. Perhaps, with no up-side to punishing, no possible improvement, what I’ve always held to be true really is: only the down-side, only the damage matters. Maybe if our only function for our kids is safety and protection, then we need to practice it against ourselves a little more.

Perhaps, just like Steven says in the book, an honest look at the facts, free of magical thinking, will actually provide real life reasons why our morality is important, and why our moral sphere tends to expand, to be more inclusive. If our myths leave our kids out of the circle, maybe science and honesty will bring them back in.

For that bit of hope, Dr. Pinker, I thank you. Seriously.

In my personal life I recently witnessed an ongoing unfolding tragedy that would seem to bear out the idea, that positive influences have only a tiny fraction of the power of negative ones – possibly due to the simple fact that positive influences can’t be beaten into us, that backing positive influences up with force turns them into negative ones. We all enjoy hearing stories where a positive influence saves a kid, of course, but those stories are that good because of their relative rarity. If that was what we all saw most days, those stories wouldn’t be quite so satisfying.

That is a sad, sad state of affairs, isn’t it?

Again, my function, what passes for my talent, is only to help see the problems, the problems as they really are, in the hopes that eventually a solution might be found. Apologies, I know this was a real quickie. The conclusions here definitely want to be expanded, looked into a lot more closely.

Of course, I hope to do that. Sometime. Of course, I’m nobody, a tradesman. If anybody smart would like to pick this up, well . . . that’d be great . . .

😉

Jeff

August 31st., 2015

Oh yeah – Five Stars, for sure!

Somebody mind telling me who beat it out for the Pulitzer?

Life is Hard

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Life is Hard

I’ll prove it to you. I mean, logically, rhetorically; I don’t aspire to be the agent of any more pain or difficulty for you. If I have been in the past, maybe move on, this one won’t be better for that, probably.

It’s just this, that some of the things that are our options in life are very hard things indeed. Still, options they are and they do get their share of hits, which is the proof I’m offering. If some of these things are possibly as good or better than our circumstances when the choice is required, then our situation is hard all around, and it means that quality of life before these hard choices – life at home for kids and teens, life without prospects for adults, etc. –  wasn’t so different.

On a personal level, I was shocked when I saw some kids in my extended family running away from home and prostituting, and it was a part of the puzzle of my cause when I realized that homelessness and sexual slavery seemed to be a viable option to these kids over staying at home fighting with their parents and staying in school. Sure, teenagers are too stupid to be afraid, but the numbers are there. That isn’t our countries’ smallest industry by any means. List all the reasons you like, street life and prostitution is a real option in the minds of millions of North American teens. If they’re all just that stupid, then sure, teenagers are dumb –

–        But of course it’s not all of them, is it? Of course it happens to smart kids and wealthy kids too. I’m not saying all these teens are making an informed choice. I’m just saying that the hand of the free market has judged that in some percentage of teens, an attitude of ‘anything is better than this’ prevails. Teens are voting with their feet. They may be stupid and wrong, but we raised these idiots.

Oops. Preaching aside, the point is, when that is an option, life must be hard.

Other examples come to mind:

  • Battle, war, nuclear war. It’s a hard life that makes war such a regular option and where nuclear war can be seriously considered and planned for. Plus, like Churchill said, I’ll paraphrase, ‘of course there are worse things than war. Dishonour is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war.’ It’s a real option, which means peace is not, apparently, because if it were it would be no contest. Life is tough when peace is not even an option. On an individual level, soldiering is a hard, dangerous choice, and for many, it’s their last option among others that include homelessness, crime and or incarceration. For some, I imagine it’s the same as the teen choice above, it’s a way out of the nuclear home.
  • Suicide. Again, say what you want about their reasons and choices, the numbers are there. It becomes an option for far too many when their lives become intolerable, and it has a nasty way of working to become their only option. Of course, this was an easy one, every suicide has the aspect of an indictment. But still, when that is among your best options, and again, far too many . . .
  • Cheating. Lying. Stealing. Along with divorce, along with death by addictions, situations no-one wants from their youth. When you can live with a bad reputation, when being mistrusted is as good as it gets, that signifies a depressing choice at some point, the lesser of two particularly smelly evils.

I guess I’ve said it. Really, for me, of course it’s about the runaway teens, about kids, and you probably know I see it as a fractal thing, that if big life, the life of nations sucks so hard that mutually assured destruction is an actual option, then that possibility derives from individual lives sucking so hard that military service is an option. When kids run away, to the streets or the army, they’re voting with their feet, against their parents and caregivers and maybe their judgment comes from their pre-verbal times, as it seems to in teens, but still.

So I’m just trying to give that a voice, just saying, this is what ‘Life is Hard’ means to me. I don’t think it’s a rule, that life is hard, but it certainly is the present state of affairs.

Jeff

August 21, 2015

Authority is the Problem, Part #2

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Authority is the Problem, Part #2

 

       Here’s Part #1:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2015/01/08/authority-is-the-problem/

although it’s not really related . . .

Really this Sandra Bland thing, feels like the final straw, I’m sure these last few weeks’ body count of people who die in police custody will be for many people, the very last possible straw.

Don’t let it be, folks.

I know it’s horrible, and depressing, but if it’s what it looks like? If it’s as bad as it looks? Because what it looks like is that individual policemen all over America are making examples of black people, driving it home for blacks and everyone else watching exactly who kills who in this society. Just when a sane person might imagine some shame, Hell even chagrin, on the part of America’s police, no, same answer as always, the club, the gun, the authority. They just keep doubling down and they never seem to run out of chips. That’s what it looks like: gang style intimidation. It’s like the American jihadists shooting soldiers for “the self-proclaimed Islamic State,” individual nut case cops acting as representatives for policemen generally, all on their own. Maybe we can’t show affiliation, but their interests are all leaning in the same direction.

If it’s that? If it’s that, and it is, then our fear and obedience may be the first goal of these examples, but don’t let it get you down either, because our sadness, depression and apathy serves their goals too. Be happy when you can, and maybe be angry if you feel the apathy creeping in. Certainly don’t let the apparent hopelessness keep you out of the voting booth. Somebody needs to vote against these Law and Order sister-sleepers. These swine are selling that employment-killing criminal records and prison sentences – which only create poverty and crime – are supposed to somehow be something we all want. Of course they sell that, because that really is good business, selling social improvement while destroying families and communities, creating the need and expanding their market with every poisonous thing out of their mouths.

Looking at you, Stephen Harper.

Authority is the original, world-warping scam.

Seriously. It’s sold to us like the American Dream. ‘Sure you’re not enjoying it now, while you’re bottoming for the authority,’ they say. ‘But you’ll get some too. Some day you can top!’ Nobody likes it when they’re being pushed around by authority, but give somebody some authority of their own – let them reproduce, for example, let them become parents – and now, they’re invested, now they’ve bought in, and they’ll tell you: ‘we need authority. Without it, there would be chaos.’

It’s a scam, and we’re all getting a piece of the action or we’d hate it. The thing is, though, just because everybody’s in on it, that doesn’t make it right. It only makes it a universal wrong.

Why Ending “Corporal Punishment” Won’t Fix It

Jeff/neighsayer4 Comments

I had this idea of doing a YouTube sort of video, but for various reasons, I’m giving it up.

I spent some time writing it though, so here’s the rough script, just ’cause I can’t bear to write and not publish . . .

YouTube – Abuse with an Excuse

 

Me talking – scene? In the yard, birds and flowers?

PART ONE – INTRODUCTION:

 

Hey Folks, thanks for the click, of course.

This will be a talk about a sort of technical, psychological aspect of how we raise our children, and it’s not going to be exciting for most internet users.

If it were an 18th, Century manuscript, I guess it would be titled ‘A Critique of the Prohibition of Corporal Punishment’ –  maybe it will be, too, old-timey as it sounds, that is what it’s supposed to be.

I want to show that outlawing “corporal punishment” is not working and is not ever going to work to end spanking and violent child discipline and I plan to demonstrate that it is due to faulty assessment, that there is far more to this problem than what is happening in the very narrow definition of “corporal punishment.”

More, I hope to show that any policy built around the idea of stopping “corporal punishment” is in fact misguided, built upon a bad idea.

My belief, to avoid any surprises, is that punishment generally is a leading cause of our social problems and not a cure for them at all.

I think the world will become a better place with every act of punishment that we don’t engage in – but that is not the subject of today’s talk.

Today will be just one small part of that larger conversation.

So, Folks, if that interests you, if you’re a policy maker in the government or some Social Services agency, or a person engaged in the attempt to understand their own childhood and themselves, welcome!

Maybe you’re a teacher in an Early Childhood Education program, teaching our future daycare staffers and teachers, or simply a person who wants to delve deeply into parenting before, during, or after the experience of it, and if so, or for whatever reason this catches your eye, welcome!

I may bore you to tears or I may make you angry – parenting is very personal – the only thing I will promise is that unless you know me online or in real life already, you have probably never heard the views in here before.

If you make it through to the end, I’ll I commend your attention span, and welcome your input.

Again, on behalf of all humanity, because we all start out as children, I thank you for your interest.

OK then. I think we’re probably alone now.

Ha.

Scene change?

Hi there, welcome to Abuse with an Excuse, the movement with a poor name and an even poorer chance of success, because, well, because we can’t have nice things, can we?

Scene change? – sad things, kids, people? A headline reading ‘Canadian Majority Government falls to No Confidence vote, nation gives Same Guys Super Majority?’

After all, if we could change only one thing to make the world a vastly better place, surely that would be too easy! Plus we wouldn’t deserve it, would we, sinners that we are?

Scene change? – images of Christian self-abasement, Whitey from ‘the DaVinci Code?

 

It sure seems like that sometimes, but I guess in truth, I’ll have to say no and no.

Of course we deserve nice things.

Plus, it’s a fact is that making this one change in the world will be anything but easy.

But that’s only because it’s unthinkable.

Scene change? – Galileo in the Tower of Pisa?

 

If we can get past that, it might not be so hard – so that’s the goal.

That’s my challenge to the world. Can we think the unthinkable? Can we get outside of the box?

We’ll be going after one of the PC Brigade’s favourites, I’ll warn you now. No shame in walking away.

Scene change? – Protest scenes, placards – Simpsons? South Park . . .

 

Ha.

Don’t get too excited, I know we’d all like to think we get outside of the box sometimes – but we probably won’t like the outside of this one.

Most don’t.

We probably think that what’s outside of this particular box is something along the lines of a sharknado – no wait – Biebernado.

Scene change? – Can I do that? Sharknado scene, and the same with JB?

 

Ha.

Don’t worry; I’ll get back to that.

Ha.

Scene change? – Graphic of a box, and us flying into it, inside some image of people, humanity, then a “spanking scene,” then one of a parent administering a task-based penalty

PART TWO – INSIDE THE BOX:

Today’s box has two things in it, besides all of mankind: the first is “corporal punishment.”

The second, well, I’m looking for a better name, but generically perhaps we can call it simply “non-corporal punishment” for now.

The terms are problematic, and we’ll see why soon.

You get the idea, though, two sorts of punishment, corporal as opposed to otherwise, which means ‘pain, discomfort or endurance-based punishments’ as opposed to punishments that are intended to be non-violent?

Common examples of the latter kind are referred to as restrictions on ‘screen time’ for our modern, wealthy kids, the removal of a desired thing, a toy, the ‘timeout,’ ‘grounding’ (curfew), increased chores, etc.

Scene change? –graphic, outside of the box, someone closes box and labels it?

I’m sure I haven’t lost anyone; we all know that stuff, right?

That stuff, though, that is inside the box – and we are stepping out of it.

It is my hope that when we turn back to look at it, that we will see only the box, labelled “punishment.”

Scene change? – back to me talking – where?

So far so good? Super.

When we’re finished here, I’ll help you pack that box out to the curb. Hold on, we’d better back up.

PART THREE – “CORPORAL PUNISHMENT” – THE MYTH:

This is about childrearing, parenting.

Scene change? – somehow show a bunch of folks approving of the task-based scene and disapproving of the “spanking.”

There are a great many people living in the box for whom the contents are distinct, very different things, and this conversation is intended for the ones who identify as anti-corporal punishment, people who do not hold with hitting children and “spanking.”

Scene change? – somehow show a bunch of folks approving of the “spanking” scene

All those who are pro-corporal punishment, you’re not going to care about what I have to say here.

Stay if you’re curious, but really, this conversation is for most of the folks you are in opposition to already.

Scene change? – somehow show the ‘pro’ folks disapproving of ‘anti’ folks  and vice versa

I don’t think you are necessarily any more harmful than the non-corporal punishment people on the whole, and I don’t think you’re not worth talking to – I just think this is internal, anti-spanking movement stuff.

Scene change? – meeting of the People’s Front for Judea? Palin guaranteeing Idle’s Right to have babies and Cleese’s response?

The errors I’m pointing to here are ours, not yours.

You’re next on my list to attack, don’t worry, I’m not forgetting you.

If you’re still being like that after I straighten these namby-pamby types out, we’ll talk.

Scene change? – me talking?

Ha.

Where was I? Oh yes.

Don’t get me wrong –I’m anti-corporal punishment. Pain for pain’s sake? Kind of a no-brainer to my way of thinking.

In fact, I’m anti-punishment.

“Anti-punishment.” Let’s let that sit there for a second.

Scene change? – deer in headlights shot? Leela – “Yes. Wait – what?”

Has everybody heard that particular combination of syllables before?

Is it something we hear in the box?

Anti-punishment. Surely it’s been said, I just can’t be sure when or by whom.

The thing is, I want to be anti-corporal punishment, so I’m anti-punishment, period.

That’s how it works, sorry to tell you, but all punishment is physical, and it’s all based in violence.

It’s not all “corporal,” I’m not saying that, because “corporal” means the pain is the penalty.

What I am saying is all punishments require physical means to make them happen, enforcement.

Imagine forcing somebody to take a punishment over the phone, if you had no physical presence.

Scene change? – cartoon, Slyvester getting clobbered through the phone . . .

 

Me talking again

It’s possible, don’t get me wrong, some caregivers have that sort of power, but they got it through plain old-fashioned physical superiority, either in the past, the kid’s experience – or because of a present or future threat.

Or both, obviously.

(A word about pronouns. Sometimes when I’m talking about hypothetical kids, I’ll say, he or she, him or her, but if I lose track and I’m always talking about boys, it’s only an example, I don’t mean to leave the girls out.

I’m a man, and if the hypothetical has a correlation for me, I may say ‘he’ just through identifying with it.

I’m not intentionally just using male terms as global identifiers.

Mostly, I’m always writing this exact sort of stuff, and to type ‘he or she’ twenty times a day is tiresome to do, and tiring to read as well.)

When we can control our kids with a word, when we can impose a punishment and simply watch while the kid hands over the toy or walks himself to the naughty chair, whatever he has to do to pay for his crime, that kid knows something that we maybe don’t.

He knows that it isn’t optional, that if he says no to this penalty and opts for what comes next, that things only get worse for him.

Children that appear to take their punishments willingly know from experience what happens when they get their backs up and refuse.

This is what I’m saying about “non-corporal” punishment: it is always only the child’s first, best option.

It does in no way replace the rough kind of punishing, the physical kind is always there, because “non-corporal” punishment cannot exist without it.

Hmmm . . . wait a second . . .

Trauma doesn’t have to be consistent to be damaging, I mean your life doesn’t have to be all trauma to damage you.

Even one-timers can destroy people, worst case scenario.

That means that a child whose life includes mostly non-physical penalties is still vulnerable to trauma and damage if the discipline only turns violent occasionally – and it always does, at least occasionally.

So.

The physical kind of punishing is always there, because “non-corporal” punishment cannot exist without it, that statement needs a little support, to say the least, right?

Well, this isn’t hard science, but I have a few things.

One,

is everyone aware that much of the older child-rearing advice was proudly corporal?

Do we know that they advised smacking babies specifically because they lack language skills and therefore cannot be reasoned with?

Scene change? – baby shots, maybe an old birth scene with the ritual First Spank?

Actually, fair enough almost, they do lack speech and can’t be reasoned with, but I’m not actually feeling the need to weigh in here on corporal punishment of babies as such – I’m anti-ALL punishment, I’ll remind you.

But what the previous generations’ childrearing literature means is what I’m telling you about kids and non-physical punishments: we often learn our physical lessons before we even get our legs.

When a toddler or a child has learned to stand still and take his medicine, it’s likely because he has been trained by force, because, third time, you can’t talk babies into anything.

This I offer as proof that if we control our babies, if a great many of life’s conflicts with our babies are settled in our favour, there is only one way we can have accomplished it.

Two,

 

Scene change? – shots of Darwin, Goodall, a frowning, hairy Jemaine Clements . . .

 

when it really isn’t actual force – and I may have to know you well to believe you if you say so – maybe there’s a human nature aspect to it, that perhaps humans have retained some instincts. Maybe kids just know to toe the line when the parent is only showing warning signs.

That is something like genetic proof, if we have that instinct, because it means those of us without it flourished less, and that heeding the warnings is a survival trait– and it reminds us that a first non-violent attempt to control a child isn’t something we just invented.

If there are two varieties of punishment, they have always existed together, side by side.

Scene change? – Walmart scenes with kids? Corporal punishment in public?

 

Scene change? – back to me talking

Evidence that they can be separated is still pending; I’m not holding my breath, because the vast majority of households in Canada and America self-report still “spanking.”

That tells us this “no corporal punishment” narrative isn’t changing anything.

Three,

we have a long, long childhood and most of us never make it all the way through without calling the parents’ bluff at least once.

Somebody tell me that we never learned this when we pushed our grownups to the limit– our caregivers weren’t bluffing, were they, because what is punishment if the parent won’t back it up?

And in what way, while I’m asking questions and being rhetorical, in what way has this generation changed that fundamental fact about punishing? That you can’t bluff?

Rhetorical, of course, we haven’t. That’s the secret.

You know you have to follow through, right?

That statement right there, there’s another sort of proof.

If you have to follow through, then your non-physical punishment was always going to be physical if it had to be to work.

(That is a whole other discussion, what we mean when we say something “works.”

Perhaps that will be the next entry.)

Scene change? – scenes to show the following two scenarios . . .

Four,

and I’m sorry, it’s the same as number one, really, just another angle – how physical do you have to be sometimes to follow through?

Grounding and curfew aren’t corporal punishments – but the fight that will ensue when your teenager says ‘fuck you’ and heads for the front door is sure to trespass into the physical, isn’t it?

Same with a toddler who doesn’t want his timeout; timeouts certainly aren’t corporal punishments, but bringing him to where timeouts happen and keeping him there is something that happens in the physical world, isn’t it?

Where else?

Scene change? – me talking

So, that’s three or four points, arguments to show that “corporal” punishments aren’t the only rough kind, because all punishments have force, violence, and disregard as their basic, necessary ingredients.

I repeat: what is any punishment if we don’t follow through?

Punishing means following through.

Unfortunately, following through means just what it sounds like it means.

PART FOUR – OUTSIDE THE BOX:

“Corporal” is not the point, if the other kind is also nasty, is what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is corporal punishment VS non-corporal punishment is not really it, it’s not a meaningful distinction.

The distinction should be physical or not, violent or not, if that’s what we’re trying to say, ‘don’t hit.’

Does it really matter if we hit them because we planned to, because that’s the sort of penalty we like and really not matter if we hit them to make them stay in timeout, stay in house arrest, or complete their extra chores?

Scene change? – a scene to show this? The old one of Dad marching a kid to the neighbor’s with the broken window, ball gear . . .

If we hit them to force them to do the restorative part, pay for the broken thing, apologize to someone?

Scene change? – – a cartoon for the following?

This entire conversation, could be put another way, I could say that we don’t endorse “corporal punishment” for original crimes, the thing the child did to warrant punishing, but we do indeed recommend it if the little bugger won’t take the first offering.

Scene change? – me talking

Ha. Sort of.

I’m not asking this directly, ‘is hitting in those situations bad;’ I’m asking is it qualitatively different than simply skipping the restriction or the chore and just hitting them straight off?

What difference do we think it makes if we fail at what we hoped for and wind up using force and violence anyway?

None of course – well, not enough, I should say.

If a thing is rough, it’s rough.

We don’t get to pick and choose which violence is good, because it serves our purposes and which is bad, because it doesn’t; a bad thing is a bad thing, so let’s double check, ask again.

Is hitting children bad?

Apologies – it’s just a rhetorical reminder.

If that’s the distinction – whether we hit them right away or not, whether we hoped we wouldn’t have to or not – then I’m really sorry, but all of our punishments are on the wrong side of the line and the wrong side of history.

This violence isn’t from corporal punishment, from hurting kids as a penalty, this violence is from stubbornly following through and getting physical in an attempt to punish “non-physically.”

Ironic violence I suppose, but it counts!

Scene change? – Monty Python fish slap? Back to me talking

Corporal punishment is physical by definition and non-corporal punishment still depends on our willingness to back it up with force, so there really isn’t a sort of punishment that doesn’t.

That means everything that is wrong with “corporal punishment” – which we say as though it means “violent punishment,” as if there were another kind – is really what’s wrong with punishment, all of it.

There is no “other kind,” this is what I’m trying to show, because again, as we know, what is discipline if we don’t back it up, don’t follow through?

Oh, Hell, this is the way I write, isn’t it? Nobody talks like this.

Actually, nobody writes like this either, let’s all just be thankful for that and move on.

Ahem.

Just say it, right?

We can’t “not hit” young children and still have control. I’m not condoning “corporal punishment;” that was intended to demonize control.

Control is the problem, and deciding “not to hit” alone won’t help.

When our control of our kids is non-negotiable, they will make us hit them, which is the trap, the rookie mistake we all make.

Do we think our parents were never starry-eyed youngsters who were never going to do that to their kids?

OK, maybe not all of them, but certainly some were!

The trap got them and us along with it, and it’s going to get us again because of this . . . misunderstanding, this misconception that hitting is merely a choice, when we’re not really changing any of the other choices that our parents made.

The trap has us if we think that.

Again, if our control of our kids is non-negotiable, they will make us hit them.

Didn’t many of us do exactly that in our youth?

Call the bluff, make them hit us?

Scene change? – Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting, “Nope. Bottle.” Williams, “Why?” Damon: “”Cause fuck him, that’s why!” Back to me, talking

I know my brother did, regularly.

(My ‘back story’ is that I watched my three older siblings and the fighting that went on in the house, and watched my hyperactive brother attract all the attention, more bad than good – so I was good, scared straight.

Actually, though, I did act out and earned a spanking and a grounding once, I guess, an all-day skip out of grade four or five and shoplifting spree, and it was from that sort of need too, for sure, testing for limits.

It was my one and only formal punishment as I recall, in childhood, before the teen dropout/rebellion.

The teen thing was too late for spankings and by then there really wasn’t anyone around with the will or the attention to administrate the groundings.

It’s at about that age that for good or ill, our parenting is often already done and over.)

Thing is, until we have kids, we may not know that we are quite so committed to being in charge, many of these attitudes are, uh, unexamined.

Scene change? – family voting scene from ‘Signs?’

Back to me, talking

For many of us, the idea of some democracy in the family is a new and dangerous idea, no-one suggests it; and if no-one questions parents’ rights, then no-one has to answer for them.

You know what?

It was sort of possible taking the first three quarters of this thing at least a little ways down the road towards fun – irony is fun for adults, right? –but at some point things are serious, or we wouldn’t be here, would we?

Punishment, over-punishment and abuse are very real.

I’ll try, but I’m afraid I can’t see many jokes from here to the conclusion . . . I’ll just try to make our time on the Dark Side as brief as possible and just remind us all that the truth can be painful, but it will set you free.

I think getting outside of this particular box hurts – so to try to take the sting out of it, let’s just watch my hummingbird feeders while we push on, OK?

Humour can only take us so far.

I think maybe some peace and quiet might serve us better.

Scene change? – Hummingbird video . . .

PART FIVE – DAMAGE GETTING PAST:

We’ve all watched parenting or caregiving from the day we were born, and it’s like the air, always there, we’ve never known life without it, and we can’t imagine having to ask ourselves what it is, or how it should be approached, right?

Scene change? – early scene from ‘Look Who’s Talking?’

Hummingbird video . . .

Of course, I‘m sorry if it’s obvious, but humans have built some deep fields of knowledge on the subject of air, despite that the air has always been there, that we’ve watched it from the day we were born . . . pick anything and look closely, and there’s a world of study in it.

For me it’s this question, one better than ‘corporal punishment or not’ this one – ‘punishment or not?’

For me, this opens up a new understanding of the world, such as the bit I’m trying to share with you today, which is “corporal punishment” is too specific, that too much violence, too much damage to children and damage to family relationships is still getting past.

Which it is.

Consider the growing prison industry and the proliferation of psychiatric drugs for kids and teens.

These poor fixes show that something isn’t working, that the hurt and the damage are still happening, despite our idea that we have stopped supporting violent punishing practices, because really we haven’t; not yet.

As children, we’ve all felt unfairly punished and known that those times had the opposite of our parents’ intended effect, that they made us sad, angry, less wanting to be responsible, upstanding citizens, if that was they wanted.

Remember?

As parents, haven’t we all had some heartbreak or remorse, feeling terrible after having done the ‘tough, responsible thing,’ perhaps sensing that the effect wouldn’t be what we wanted?

Both of these multi-generational hurts happen because of this trap, because we imagine that simply choosing not to hit is going to be the answer to it, while really, that wasn’t the trap itself but only the bait.

It happens, our hearts broken at both ends of the transaction.

As kids and again as parents, we fall prey to this misconception that we can have it all our way with the kids, total control without hurting them in the process, because we think only “corporal punishment” is the bad kind, we think only “corporal punishment” will hurt and damage them.

When really, there is no other variety than the bad one.

Really, it’s all bad – if by “bad” you’ll allow that I mean forceful, callous, often violent . . .

“Corporal punishment” is the central element of a myth that allows the violence to continue that none of us wants or we wouldn’t buy into it in the first place.

Irony always in this conversation.

CONCLUSIONS:

I hope I’ve been able to get us to see this myth, this “corporal punishment” with fresh eyes and some logic, and to see how that idea misses the point and subverts our efforts to lessen the violence and callousness inherent in our childrearing.

It’s a test for truth, that when we buy into a narrative and the promised change isn’t forthcoming, that the truth is lacking.

Let’s stop wasting each other’s’ time with this one, OK?

Let’s look at it a little closer, and we’ll see: the emperor has no clothes, the myth has no truth.

Banning “corporal punishment” will not stop the violence in our childrearing, and hoping so, just as so many of our parents did, won’t change it either.

We need to kill this well-intended zombie lie, and you know how to kill a zombie.

You have to go for the head, the brain.

Now, finally, again, don’t get me wrong, end corporal punishment now, sure – but it’s not the real problem.

The real thing, of which corporal punishment is only its lure, is punishment, all punishment.

I mean, we’ll phase it out; it won’t be all at once, I know what that’s like.

We don’t punish at our house, so when we get a punished kid to look after who’s in that never-ending grudge match with the adults, and he starts looking for a fight?

We can’t deal, we dial 911.

We just can’t play that game anymore.

So I get how if we simply punished and pissed everybody off forever and then suddenly removed all constraints – I get it, not bright, kind of terrifying.

Looking at you, Bieber.

There it is! Sorry, I had that one loaded up, I kind of had to.

Scene change? – scene of JB behaving badly

Hummingbird video . . .

Ha.

Slow change is OK – but “corporal punishment’s” end is NO change, because every sort of punishment requires the ‘follow through.’

In that sense, all we’ve done is taken a stand and condemned the mirage, but no actual, real thing is going to be examined or criticized.

Worst case scenario, we’ll act like we’ve found the problem, and we’ll grow old and die wondering what went wrong – the current state of affairs – the worst case means we just never figure it out.

(sigh)

Of course, the only possible real cause to point to is punishment itself, again, if we think hitting kids is bad and we shouldn’t do it.

It might change the world if we can see that, if we can see that it’s the very core of it, the essence of punishing we’re really at issue with and not something . . . peripheral.

If it’s violence, hurt and disregard we’re trying to stop, then we’ll have to start to see that’s all punishment that is, let’s say problematic.

That’s the first step, obviously.

The thing is, we don’t even try to solve a problem if we’ve confused it with a solution. That’s part of this problem.

Scene change? – A few seconds of peace and quiet, then back to me talking

Thank you for reaching the end!

I’ll have the text of this available at abusewithanexcuse.com, my WordPress blog and elsewhere, along with two hundred mostly shorter blogs from the last few years, and I’m happy to discuss any and all of it.

Tactics, or What Works

Jeff/neighsayer4 Comments

I’m gonna change my approach a little here, start making these things short and sweet.

So this second one of those will be on this idea here: if you don’t punish, what are your strategies? What works for you? So a couple of thoughts:

What does “works,” mean, first? I think the question usually means something specific, is that right, how do you feed them, how do you get them in the car, what to do if they’re covered in excrement and won’t get in the tub? Well, those are valid questions, and no waiting, you got me. I have no guaranteed way to get them dressed and off to daycare, at least none I would recommend and none everybody doesn’t already know.

Frankly, it drove us a little crazy too, my wife and I were raised in families where kids got whooped and our input wasn’t often requested. We invented it, this No Punishment of Any Sort thing, at least in our lives, but losing half the disputes with our toddlers and seeing what we “let our kids do and get away with,” surprise, that wasn’t easy for us, just as many folks might imagine it wouldn’t be.   OK, we saw it once, and we reverse-engineered it. Credit to you, Yvonne and Gord, but sorry – no royalties. Not greedy, and not a legal issue – there simply are no royalties! This stuff is free. J

I mean, we missed things, late for Christmas dinner at Grandma’s, we lost things, dishes, toy, electronics, things were damaged and destroyed, carpets – the younger girl teethed on the backs of our teak dining room chairs . . . they’re all just things, I know, furnishings, my mother in-law’s feelings. We were lucky, nothing important got hurt.  😉

If you can commit to no punishment of any sort – I write elsewhere and soon will again on the “any sort” part. Short version: nothing we might do to them because they won’t like it, which is a good definition for punishment – if you commit to that, then your only options are the loving ones, the patient ones, the ones that don’t always work. Specifically, we talked endlessly, we distracted, we may have even bribed – and we failed, and stuff got broken and we rarely kept to any schedule we had planned. We said “Yes” to the kids whenever possible and less yes to ourselves and the world of grownups generally. Some old-time sacrifice? Maybe, but only for the first five years, and sacrifice in the best sense, the kind with a long term payoff.

Admittedly, we tried harder and probably made more mistakes (meaning that once or twice we did something that worked) for things like work and doctors’ appointments than for other things, but even those things didn’t always go the way we or Grandma or our employers might have wanted. This because, sorry to say, what “works” in some examples, especially where safety is an issue, is OK, but something that “works” all the time, something guaranteed, well that requires punishment because if your decisions are hard-line, then soft-line methods will not achieve them. Still, even so, it’s only guaranteed in the short term.

Honestly, just as they say punishments and corporal punishments are short term solutions but increase long term social problems including misbehaviour, so equally and oppositely is not punishing not a short term solution, but a long term one.

Since my girls could talk and converse, maybe at five years of age, neither of them have given us a reason why even a good side of normal North American family might ever feel the need to punish them. Those first several years were high-energy times, however, and many things, carpets, etc., were damaged or destroyed, I want impress upon you that I’m not lying to you, not trying to sell you something that works in the short term, it sure didn’t. Sure did in the long term, though, at least all through the years from five to twenty.

Jeff

July 19, 2015

“It Teaches Them to Listen”

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

“It Teaches Them to Listen”

I’m gonna change my approach a little here, start making these things short and sweet.

So this first one of those will be on this idea here: that a pat on the bum reinforces what we’re asking or telling a kid to do, that a smack is supposed to improve a child’s hearing. So a couple of thoughts:

Will anyone who’s done it say that it worked, that their kid learned to listen after the first pat, maybe the second, or the tenth? (Consider that if we only did it a few times, we probably wouldn’t feel we have to justify it, because rationalizations are for ongoing situations more than one-off mistakes. If I patted my kid’s bum once or twice, I might be more willing to say it was a mistake, not have to justify it.)

It teaches the exact opposite. Put yourself in the child’s place. If Mom is going to go upside of your head or your backside when she really means it – then why would a kid ever listen? Clearly, words are meaningless, powerless things, when Mom or Dad are serious, they’ll use more than words. So that becomes the measure of when we have to listen to our caregivers: words are just noise. When we are actually supposed to listen, they’ll make us feel it.

Spankings teach that talk is cheap. If you want communication, don’t destroy it with violence, no matter how mild.

And when you meet someone who doesn’t hear you when you talk and won’t listen until you stand up and get physical? That’s not “life,” and it’s not “human nature.” That’s that pat on the bum.

Jeff

July 18, 2015

Shit Flows Downhill

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Shit Flows Downhill

. . . and payday’s Friday, the plumber’s knowledge base, as we boys mansplain it to each other. (Wow. Word had no comment for that word! Did Microsoft buy the Urban Dictionary?) Of course, I’m not here to discuss plumbing, which is a good thing: I suck at it. This for the metaphor.

You know, the king wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and dumps on the court, the cabinet all growl at their staff and slash the budgets of their least favourite departments and ultimately the people don’t get their bread.

Abuse flows downhill, is what I’m trying to say, along the lines of authority.

The family version is, Dad lords it over Mom, Mom gets a little more disciplinary with number one son, this firstborn noogies his younger sibling more than usual and the lastborn kid winds up taking it out on the dog, who then puts the run on the cat, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Plus of course, Dad is upset because of something his boss did or said, who is simply passing on directives from above . . . not ad infinitum, technically though. In theory, the buck stops at the king or ‘the shareholders.’ I don’t think in this conversation that we need to credit Dad’s or the king’s claim that he represents and works for God; I’m not weighing in on God’s existence or not here, just saying I have yet to meet the man or the king who might be on God’s mailing list. Our default position for such claims must of course be skeptical, even if we think it’s possible. Certainly most such claims are false.

Abuse follows lines of authority, it bears repeating. Just as hierarchical structures of authority make so many large cooperative efforts possible for humans, it’s this same structure makes punishment and abuse possible. Without authority, punishment is simply abuse – but without authority, abuse would simply be an unconnected bunch of fights. Winners win, losers lose, but that’s just violence. Abuse is an abuse of authority, and authority means something like ‘legitimate power,’ so abuse is violence in a more specific, organized context. Interestingly, disorganized violence we can view as natural and amoral, like what the bears do and we don’t judge harshly for it. Abuse is different.

Abuse is a crime within some sort of social order. Along with all the new things human resource pooling has brought into the world like agriculture, industry, and community care of the sick and elderly comes things like oppression, war, and abuse – new crimes for new situations.

Of course, shit flows downhill in a racial sense too.

If, God forbid, Barkley was right as well as honest when he told us that whooping their kids is what black people do (paraphrase), meaning if there is any racial difference in America as to the use or amount of use of corporal punishment, then maybe this is why, because that’s how the stuff of plumbers’ efforts flows. Because life is a pyramid and bad stuff falls down from above like a champagne fountain where people are the glasses; the ones at the upper levels hold what they can and all the rest falls to the ones below, all the bad stuff winding up at the bottom. Do I have to say who is at the bottom of our society? The poor, obviously, among which group black and brown people are over-represented here in North America.

So maybe Charles was right, maybe the stereotype, the cliché has some truth, maybe the under-classes really are rougher on their kids. I am not a racist, no “buts.” If that stereotype has any truth, and if it is in any way due to the fact that gravity operates on our waste, then that is on us, the folks at the top.

I love all things in and around social issues, I love socially-directed comedy, and I really enjoy black comics preaching about racism (Chris Rock: a black man has to fly to get to where a white man can walk!). I do worry about my own racism, because that pleasure is very specific, almost fetishist if you consider that I live in the most black-deficient place in North America. But Chris Rock, Pryor, I love those guys. Know who I can’t stand? George Lopez. I don’t suppose it’s his whole act, but unfortunately for me and George, the only few times I’ve seen him, he was going on about how his parents whooped him, how it was good for him, and how if we don’t whoop our kids they’re all going to turn out badly. All I can see in it is a brown guy, a member of an oppressed group, talking about how the answer for people is more oppression, more roughness.

I pity a person for that, knowing that their pain is too great to face – but these comics, Lopez is not the only one, many comics do that material, Eddie Murphy did – these comics are marketing their denial, and marketing corporal punishment. That is not helpful – plus it is easy to see it as a form of collaboration with the folks at the top.

Shit flows downhill, but that sort of comedy is like installing a pump in the line too, really un-called for.

Now for some really wild conjecture – in a discussion of racism! What could possibly go wrong? – regarding race, class, and corporal punishment: life is tough for the under-classes, and if the poorest folks really are rougher on their kids it isn’t from any sort of bad intention. We all think discipline is a good thing. Poorer kids are at higher risk levels for everything except being spoiled and feeling entitled, so maybe poor parents make a logical choice to be stricter, to do more of what they hope will keep their kids on the straight and narrow.

As for why it’s not working, if that’s what’s happening, I will refer you to the rest of my blogs, but suffice it to say it isn’t champagne that is flowing down on the poor from above and it isn’t champagne that poor folks have too much of and have to pass down to their children.

Jeff

July 12, 2015

Forget Forgiveness

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

for bd, AI, TTMO, pamela . . . i’m forgetting people, I know – oh, for thewalrusofsheol, wraith and noahbody . . . anyone who needs a break from platitudes . . .

with love from the dark side of parenting

Forget Forgiveness

Wait, wait, hear me out a bit. Believe me, I know the generally accepted narrative: you can’t hold anger in your heart, you have to let it go, all of that. I even accept that our worst tormentors probably never had a chance not to be the way they were, but still. Forgiveness is overrated.

First of all, for it to be what it should be, for the thing to live up to the advertising, forgiveness would have to be optional. As things stand today, in the view of this cultural Christian, that really isn’t the case. We all know that forgiveness is the endgame, and that it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves somehow omniscient enough to forgive – almost without exception, even in some of the most horrible cases of abuse. The pressure to forgive starts the day our victimization comes to light.

That pressure leads many folks to a premature declaration of forgiveness, at a time when probably neither the abuser nor the victim have really learned their lessons. That sort of forgiveness is easily rescinded as soon as the abuser does what they do, and for that, rightly so – but the pressure simply restarts and it can become another dysfunctional cycle in our lives. Worse to my mind, is simply that in this Original Sin based Christian society, victims may suffer endlessly but abusers can too often sit and wait to be forgiven, that it’s automatic, that they are entitled to forgiveness from any decent Christian victim. That’s the Christian ideal, right, ‘Father, forgive them?’ Well, you know what?

The legend we have for the moral behaviour and teachings ascribed to that fellow, Jesus, are a rather impossible paradigm. We need to see that as a sort of bait and switch game, which is probably no more fair or positive for us than comparing our bodies to the impossible Hollywood beauties carved out of surgery and starvation. So with that in mind, and believing that there are more things to be in the world than saints or Hell-deserving sinners, I say f@#$ ‘em, our torturers. Let someone else forgive them, some moral savant or someone with less of a personal stake in it, someone who can afford to forgive them, because mostly, we can’t.

In this Christian culture, we know about Original Sin, we know we are all sinners and subject to the Christian message, that we will all sin, and we need Jesus’ forgiveness to avoid eternal pain and suffering. The human being cannot help but to reason and analyse, and when something goes wrong the human being wants to know why. We may need this information again, and so we find the agency responsible, we assign blame. In this particular culture, where we are prone to blame ourselves already, sinners that we are –

          if we forgive the obvious culprit, who will be left, who takes responsibility? For us, the default is us.

That is what I mean, that we can’t usually afford to forgive our attackers, because blame deflected from them too often comes back to us. That is some serious unfairness that the victimizer is freed from the accusation and victim suffers both, the abuse and the guilt. Forgiveness for the abuser is far too often a continuation of the violence against ourselves.

Second, real forgiveness is a process of maturing, a process of acquiring a longer perspective, and in most cases it takes time, real time, like the time between generations, like the time between the spring and autumn phases of our lives. Of course there’s part of the social pressure to forgive in that: we want to look like we’ve matured, and in a healthy way. It would be more ironic if it weren’t the normal situation: we are expected to go far too swiftly from so hurt as to cause a rift to a state where we have healed, matured and are now in the power position, bestowing forgiveness. That is not the sort of thing that the majority of sightings of it are ever going to be the real deal. That transformation is never easy and not often quick. Truth to tell? Several decades and the demise of our abusers probably go a long way towards bringing that achievement – and it is one – into the realm of possibility. Some of us don’t even want to heal as long as our parents are alive to see it; we need to be the open wound, the accusation; we can’t imagine goals for ourselves until they’re gone.

So my idea is this: we need to keep ourselves of two minds about it. Forgive in theory, know as you go about your life that ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I,’ and think that all of us could be that bad and hope that we can all be forgiven, sure – but let’s keep that in perspective, let’s keep that cerebral – cold, even. Let’s don’t invest our own feelings in it, give that idea our head maybe, but not our hearts. Our hearts need to be protected.

What I’m saying is, let’s stop treating abuse and forgiveness as personal, one-off situations, matters of the heart – after all the Big Data is coming in: we are not alone in our troubles. Not with 7,000,000,000 plus people running around – and start using our heads. Let’s consider that the prevalence of abuse and all manner of unpleasantness short of it and the near universal need for forgiveness likely indicates a social problem, and put our collective heads to it instead.

I just mentioned this rant to a wise woman I know and she told me a story about forgiveness. She was upset about a failed marriage, and she was always on a self-discovery journey anyways. She spent some serious time – three or four years – doing a lot of inner work, stuff involving her father, etc., and at a point, it became clear all the ways in which she had married her father – hardly all the fault of the man chosen for the part. She wasn’t looking for a way to forgive her husband, I think she was mostly still mad about it – but her own work towards self-knowledge took her to where she had to forgive herself, and forgiving him was just, uh, collateral repair.

That, I think, is how it works, and I know that’s what we’re advocating when we recommend forgiveness, but a few things need to be said.

One, that was a very intense, directed bunch of work that lady did, we don’t all do it, and even so, years.

Two, that was an adult situation. I’ll check, but if my wise friend has forgiven everyone, her own parents, etc., I think I can safely say it took her a bigger chunk of her journey than that focused three or four years of father-work. This person is on the lifelong plan. And that’s the sort of approach that produces real forgiveness, always as a by-product. For our caregivers, our parents, our abusers, the situation is very different, most obviously because we don’t choose our parents (at least those of us who aren’t reincarnationists don’t think so).

Whether we believe that all our damage from our earliest days can be healed or not, surely we can agree that the chance that it can’t be must be considered in any calculations we’re making. A full understanding of what even happens during our earliest days, while some people have remembered and dealt with some things, would remain impossible to guarantee considering that limited understanding we had during the experience. I think, given the inevitable unknowns, that true forgiveness could only result from our achieving a state where we could forgive literally anything.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, it happens all the time. I’m just saying it takes time, and if its schedule is even in the same ballpark as the abuser’s idea of a proper schedule, then it’s probably not the real thing. (Forgiveness is something taught to us as children by the very people – parents, preachers, teachers, in short, adults – that we might end up having to forgive. That is a conflict of interest at the very least, and an outright, cynical scam in the worst cases.) There is tremendous social pressure to forgive, to look healed and mature, to show the forbearance and mercy of a good Christian martyr – and unfortunately, the form of forgiveness usually satisfies the social pressure even if the substance is lacking and the true healing delayed. I worry that if forgiveness can become an entitlement, then there is no mechanism to change our behaviour, that if we must forgive our cruelest caregivers then perhaps we can make lax choices and do our own kids wrong, knowing that we’ll be forgiven in the end.

These are my concerns about forgiveness as a given. That if we forgive too soon that we’re blaming ourselves instead. That if we find a way to forgive our tormentors, that we may be less aversive to making the same sort of mistakes with our own kids. That forgiveness is only a treatment for a problem and not a solution, that we need to spend more energy on stopping the abuse and harm in the real world rather than accidentally trying to minimize or legitimize it by declaring all sins to be not only forgivable, but that they all must be.

Finally, let’s compare our usual attitude about forgiveness for a moment with our attitude about punishment as a parenting tool: that a cultural Christian or possibly a person from any bible culture is expected to aspire to forgiveness as a moral obligation, and along with the same culture’s injunction to ‘honour thy parents’ means that erring parents are to be forgiven if at all possible and to be pretend-forgiven if not. Contrast that with the parenting situation where the dealing out of penalties for misbehaving children must never be shirked. Discipline must be consistent for it to work. That has the potential to give us a glimpse of the measure of the gulf between our experiences of child- and parenthood:

Parents, abusers, even if they get no penalty other than their child or victim’s ill feelings, can wait for their socially entitled forgiveness while the child can be secure that his or her penalties will be swift, rarely waived, and even more rarely apologized for.

The social pressure to forgive is always there, irrespective of detail. I’ll just let you imagine how society’s will gets expressed when someone stands with the children and tells parents that the apologies and forgiveness are all traveling in exactly the wrong direction.

Jeff

July 6, 2015

Punishment is a Crime

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       Punishment is a Crime

It’s Sunday morning, the wife and I, over fifty, don’t sleep in past seven o’clock anymore so we’re up, each of us at our computers. On Twitter, I see, a Dr. Roger D. Jones has added one of my blog posts to his online psychiatry newspaper – that’s a great start to my day, but not for long. My wife is fascinated by all manner of tragedy, the bigger the better, and she’s reading about the Residential School scandal, the dark, most recent chapter in the story of Canada’s genocide of its Aboriginals. She tells me about a kid who, for the crime of speaking in his own language – a high crime for the genocidal – was beaten and thrown into a root cellar for two days and when they went in for him, they found he had died of his injuries.

An horrific story all around, and not at all rare and extreme as these Residential School tales go. The violence, sexual and otherwise of those schools seems to have been the fucking point of them. Perhaps that is where the church knowingly placed its most sadistic and evil staff, and the urban church scandals were perpetrated by priests who never made the cut for the big game against the still extant native North Americans.

Flatly disgusting. Personally, I would give Canada’s First Peoples half of Canada’s land, and not just the Barrens, either, the good stuff, the coasts, the farmland. When we are two strong nations – then maybe we can think about integrating, when it’s a merger of equals. Otherwise, with no balance of power, there can be no integration, only assimilation – the larger part of which is genocide – when you’re dealing with the aggressive, world-domination driven, white Christians of Europe. Yes, I know you don’t want to hear it, but that’s what we are.

This is not my field of expertise, however, those are opinions, and the revelation the story of that murdered kid gives is the point here. Apologies, but I have to scream it:

Don’t even tell me what the victim of abusive punishing did to earn it. If you beat a kid to death, I have no interest in HIS crime, we are talking about WHAT YOU DID, we are talking about YOUR crime.

Of course, I don’t deal in one-off situations, I don’t concern myself with random phenomena that require specific individual explanations; I like to think I deal in principles. Anyone who for whatever reason seeks to understand me had better know this, that on the very same principle,

Don’t even tell me what the object of punishment did to earn it. If you are treading on another person’s rights, if you are bringing pain and or deprivation to people intentionally, THEIR crimes are not subtracted from yours. We will deal with them and their crimes, meaning that we will work to solve poverty and ignorance and teach our children how to live – but we will also deal with you and your crimes. That means ‘correction’ will no longer be a moral defense for your crimes of punishing.

I know, I’m going after a basic tenet of our societies, the legal/moral point that criminals forfeit their human rights. First of all, not so much. Despite the baffling and inexplicable fact that no-one is listening to me, that is already improving everywhere. Of course, in the former First World, prisoners have a reduced suite of human rights, it’s not that they have none at all, at least in theory if not in practice. The state has to work very hard in America for instance, to strip you of your right to life. Still, it’s a weird definition for ‘rights.’ Certainly it makes our rights very alienable, whatever that means. Apparently, we reserve the right to suspend your rights if you misbehave – clearly a breach of our inherent human rights, which is a logical fallacy no-one would ever allow if it weren’t beaten into us.

I tell you now, this is not a logical conundrum humanity cannot escape, we can. We have to want to, of course, which means we need to understand it first. I think we have no idea of what we’re missing, I think a world where every crime doesn’t automatically replicate itself and become two crimes instead could be a much better place to live.

Lost Causes – Picking Punishment Apart

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

What a long, weird trip it’s been.

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to express this properly, the strangeness around my effort to change the world, but I’ll try.

I’d like to find some common ground and some connection for myself as a Person with a Cause and somehow talk about that independently from the perceived merit or not of the cause itself . . .  of course that will mean talking about my crusade, laying it all out, but I’m not trying to sell it in this one. I have a hundred and fifty to two hundred posts online and one really bad book collecting dust under my desk where that’s what I’m trying to do. Today, it’s not about me and My Cause, but rather about my cause and what it has meant to Me.

You should know, I don’t really like challenges. My self-image has a low white cell count and I really don’t need to get into any fights I’m likely to lose. In the real world, I’m a bit of a spaz and a moron to tell you the truth; my latest theory or excuse for it is in a recent post, that I am for some reason permanently stressed out, living life flooded with cortisol, which is an emergency mode of functioning that is intended to preserve life and has for much of our time as animals on this Earth. It’s a good adaptation, but it’s not supposed to be chronic. We are supposed to have some measure of peace between existential threats; breeding, raising kids, requires some calm, some respite from the battle for survival. Like I say, that’s my present rationalization for my poor connection with the world, my stupidity. Of course, like all things, if I had uncovered the correct reason for the problem, the problem should be solved. That not so much being the reality, I’ll keep the case open – but for now suffice it to say that I am not really a person on the rise, building success upon success and ready to take on  big, public challenges.

I really didn’t need this shit, is what I’m saying. This cause, for whatever reason, chose me. It has been suggested that all I am is a contrarian, that I have selected my viewpoint for the express purpose of picking fights with everyone and so that I can feel original, but I assure you that I worry about that, that I am not unaware of that danger, and try to stay vigilant about it. That is the sort of thing that can never be settled or proved, however, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll take a different tack: is that charge not a version of the fallacy of authority? An unknown or disreputable source is not proof of the failure of an idea. Honestly, I do have personal good feelings about what I believe, I even derive an occasional ego kick from writing and feeling original. All true, but besides not being damning to my theories, it should be obvious if we look at it: Having the epiphany experience and carrying around a fixated idea that no-one else appreciates – it’s not all fun and compliments.

It can be something of a burden, truth to tell. Does anyone remember Sean Connery in ‘Medicine Man?’ – “How do you think you would feel if you found the cure for cancer and then lost it?” I’m sure every crackpot like me knows the feeling – how do you think it would feel if you found what seems to be the answer for everything and no-one wanted to hear it?

  1. I think we’ve all seen enough of that side of yours truly for the moment! Ahem. Moving on.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, my best friend and the girlfriends we had all agreed – I hate everything. I was always making observations about everything in life and the people I saw and I wasn’t impressed. For example, although I’m not sure this one occurred to me that young, I would try the wrong one of a double door to a store or something, find it locked and bark something like:

“I hate that! The place is open but one door is looked, just to make half of us feel like fools! Are you open or aren’t you?”

I did that stuff pretty constantly, and I still do, I can’t stop. So I’ve decided that complaining is a good thing, positive, and if you’re not complaining then you’ve simply given up. It’s the complainers of the world that are pointing out the problems, hoping for change. But I get that it would drive folks nuts. Rick, Diane, Darlene, Maureen, Gavin, Jim – I’m sorry. Like I say, I can’t stop – but I’m sorry. I ruined every round of golf for decades for my latest best friend with my anger and my frustration that is all part of the same attitude, and Phil, I’m sorry. I know there is no way to make up for it, all those years.

Having said all that, there is still a place for the social critic, even if he’s simply a private, individual curmudgeon and it’s not so much a job as just a catastrophic combination of personal traits. The door example – I can imagine reasons: a quicker lock up in case of some sort of trouble, or just that it’s sometimes a low-level employee in charge of opening and maybe he’s not sensitive to the slight, negative message of one locked door that a conscientious owner might be – it’s real, right? Somebody at some point made a decision that impacted me in a very slightly negative way – and maybe on my worst day it could be the straw that broke the camel’s back, the difference between a good day and a bad one, or me seeing the universe and mankind as basically good or not. If you’ve got two doors and you’re open, opening both doors would be more thoughtful, is all I’m saying. If there is a better reason for you not to, fine, but it doesn’t change my experience.

So I’m grumpy, always looking for something wrong in the world, hypersensitive to the tiniest of offenses.

There are other ways to look at it, of course, but I’m going to go with this right now: it is this talent of mine, which was always present and developed and nurtured over time which has made me the perfect victim of this cause. It’s a nasty irony that while I am so open to the appreciation of this problem, that I’m not much of a vehicle for solving it. (Man, this is just dripping with Christianity and self-abuse, it sounds like Joan of Arc or something, ‘your humble and unworthy servant!’ I’m actually an atheist, a cultural Christian – and this is the power of culture. If it disqualifies anything I say in support of my cause, I hope any critic will commit to demonstrating exactly how and working through it with me. Everyone has baggage!)

OK, so much for the preamble. Sometimes, all I have is preamble; I think that when I die, someone should take everything I wrote, bundle it all up and make it the introduction to the book I wanted to write. My secret dream is that before that happens that I might ever get to the fucking point. But oh, well.

My long-game cause is the end of the practice of punishment in nearly all of its forms. A mid-range goal would be to end the punishment of children in all its forms. The nearest goal would be that we just start to think about it at all.

Seriously.

It’s punishment that I’m focussing on, and it brings its own problems. Anywhere we see a list of topics or subjects, school curricula, websites, the big board on ‘Jeopardy,’ even, anywhere that categories are delineated, there is one word, one concept, one real-world thing that is never there, and that one thing is punishment, or the practice of punishing. My epiphany, my Grand Unification Theory of Life, punishment – is not even a subject, not a topic, period.

Somebody, please, I beg you – does that sound strange?

I’ll brainstorm a little myself before I continue here. What else, what else that is so common in life, is not a topic? We have all manner of science built around the air, and water, and all of humanity has some level of expertise with food and our bodily functions, all of these ubiquitous, taken-for-granted things have deserved study and nomenclature, all of these things have many people dedicating their lives to them, and they are vast fields of knowledge, ever expanding . . .

As is the study of punishment, it too can be a door to a huge area of study, but, so far, that is apparent only to me and a few others. I suspect it is in the particular nature of this particular thing, punishment, that it by necessity and design escapes our eye, our human inquisitiveness. Like a living parasite, punishment can somehow make sure that we don’t look directly at it: it’s controlling us that way. Oops – talking for the cause, not about it. Redirecting . . .

As a cause, at this point in history, the eradication of punishment is utterly hopeless – not even an available topic for discussion, as I’ve been told. This cause has made a pariah of me; I spend my time telling pretty much all parents that they’re Bad Parents, and it doesn’t matter that I’m speaking to all of humanity, or that I often include waivers to that effect when I write, ‘nothing personal,’ ‘not you, it’s the system,’ I say, doesn’t matter. Parenting is personal, period. There may be more people in the world that would side with me on it, but so far I suppose I could count more of my fingers than I could those people. It’s not even a subject. The index for the Book of Life has references to punishment on nearly every page, but it’s not in the Glossary section and there is no Further Reading on it – that is, there wasn’t until a few folks like me came along. Sadly, because punishing hasn’t really been optional anyway, and few folks ever really think about it in a critical way, there doesn’t seem to be established arguments about it yet. There are no Keyneses and Hayeks for us to line up behind.

Unless there’s a smarter and better situated person to do it, I would be willing to play the part of the ‘Keynes of Punishment,’ making the arguments and taking the flack, but who will be my Hayek?

The rare few of us who have looked at punishing behaviour for decades and tried to analyze it have no trouble finding opponents to dismiss and ridicule us, but I haven’t yet found anyone who suffers my equal but opposite obsession with the subject, anyone who has built a logical structure in defense of punishment – I’m sorry, but I mean a logical structure that deserves to be called one, one with more than a few dozen words, a serious breakdown of what logic may support it. Again, I’m sorry, and I’m not asking for that from busy parents, either. Surely there is some authority, some institution that will speak for Standards and Practices? – kidding of course. Punishment is not a subject, not a field, and there aren’t any experts to consult. Just in case you’ve been thinking it – psychologists and educators, are they not our experts?

First, for the educator, punishment is simply a tool in their kit, in the past often the most used one. From what I can see, however, the school systems appear to be ahead of the curve in terms of at least corporal punishing, plus they’re not the parents and they’re not prison guards or police, so really, they’re not doing most of the damage. Not at work, anyway.

For the psychologists and all the other iterations of head doctor, it seems all stimuli and effects are just data, bits of a puzzle (other than Alice Miller and her followers, I suppose) and frankly, punishing and over-punishing is giving those fields job security. The main thing is, though, these issues are personal. Psych people and educators, they are like all of us, first and foremost, persons. All the personal, psychological things that exist around child-rearing and punishment are there for the educator and the psychologist as well; blind spots are blind spots, it doesn’t necessarily matter that many psychologists, psychiatrists etc., have spectacularly good vision, we are all born and bred in the system. The parasite does not allow itself to be seen.

A question, for any psych folks out there – was punishment a subject in your educations, a topic? Did the concept get the time a single event we punish and traumatize for gets, like toilet training, or that tired old saw about catching your parents doing it?

Really, really what I’m asking for is for the universe to spontaneously create the zealot who will see his mission to create a philosophical basis for punishing in the world, for my nemesis to appear, the Unbreakable one to defend the world as it is, to my Mr. Glass (a movie, “Unbreakable,” M. Night Shyamalan, I think). Either that, or people have to confess to me that there is no rationale for punishing beyond the senseless sound bites we all know, and start to think about it. As always, the best time was ten years ago, but now is good too.

Actually, never mind all that crap about the universe making me a strawman to flog, let’s just go with that last bit.

I need to realize that there is no such equal and opposite argument, even less so than there is for global warming. Feel free to correct me, but really, this is something we should be applying that impressive human brain to, we should step one pace back from ‘do we like punishment?’ which most folks could answer, to ‘what is punishment, exactly?’, start from there. I’m not saying most people couldn’t answer that one, I’m only suggesting that no-one has ever asked them that before, and perhaps it will get us thinking. I do think that many folks have things in their definition that really aren’t punishing at all, so the definition can use a little refresher in our minds anyway.

I am deeply sorry, Dear reader-if-there-is-one, I cannot seem to keep this thing on track, it’s become more of a ramble, I’m afraid, a catch-all. Honestly, I’m trying to build myself a strategy going forward, how I’ll write, maybe try to change my tone to something recognizable as writing in this century, as well as how I’ll blog and promote and even how I’ll talk to people. Not sure yet, but I think this will help: sorry to use you for a sounding board like this (it’s what a lot of blogging is, I guess), I hope my circular rambling was at least mildly entertaining. I promise more substance and less navel-gazing next time.

Jeff