I don’t think they do. I think punishing is the human difference, the human genius – as well as the human madness.

I think animals teach their children by example.

People have told me that animals punish, that that’s what they’re doing when for example, a lion or lioness snarls and yells and swats a cub, or maybe bites a cub when the cub tries to eat the food the adult is eating.

Now if the adult cat here is trying to teach the cub to wait its turn, or just not to try to take the adult’s food, maybe, but I doubt it. I think this is a case of teaching by example. I think the adult is teaching the cub, by example, to protect its share of the food. This is an important, real life lesson for a lion. The lion that doesn’t do that will be starved out.

If this is an example of punishing, I have a few comments:

1. Is this the only thing lions do that looks like punishment?

– yes, I think it is. I don’t think they punish their kids for other things cubs do wrong, like wandering away into trouble, bothering the alpha male, not learning how to hunt, or just lazily not hunting. I think for wandering, mom might bring them back, but that’s all. I think they let the alpha male look after his own peace of mind, or the cub gets eaten, and I think a lion that won’t hunt or can’t learn may eventually be exiled and starved, but I haven’t ever seen on TV that a cub is beaten for refusing to learn.

(If anyone has seen that, if there are animal behaviourists in the house, please, let me know.)

2.  Teaching by punishing is a human thing. As another example, how does a prey animal, a deer or a rabbit “teach” its young to run and hide from the predators? By example – because, let’s turn that upside-down: does anyone think a deer or a rabbit hangs around to punish a child who doesn’t run while the wolves approach?

No, doing the wrong thing while simply telling your child to do the right thing and punishing him when he doesn’t – say, abusing your child about smoking and/or drinking when those are things you do – is a luxury animals can’t afford. The deer, the rabbit, they teach by example, and hope to stay alive to do it again tomorrow.

This won’t stand on its own. It’s a continuation of this one:

About Hating the Sin and Loving the Sinner – and Hating the Punishment and Loving the Punisher

 – in which I talked about homosexuality-haters and myself as a punishment-hater and made comparisons. I talked about whether these behaviours were natural and built in, but I ran out of space to postulate whether they weren’t.

What if they are choices?

Personally, I don’t like the question of “born gay” or not, because I think people should be allowed to choose their sexuality. Why not?

But punishing as a choice?

Punishing parents will say it is, that’s what prompted these posts, some said just that to me, if in different words. For me – spoiler alert! – the idea that hitting children enjoys the protection of being a “personal choice” is, uh, counter-intuitive, let’s say. Personal choice in the matter of consensual sex, sure.

But there is nothing consensual about punishment, is there?

So here we are again, this is our society: sex must be consensual, but violence?

Well as long as one of you is OK with it . . . 

Punishment is abuse, something I say a lot.

I know I’m ruffling some feathers with it, and I know why.

Unfortunately, me condemning the practice of punishing will feel like I’m condemning the people who practice it (or the ones who have practiced it in the past), if they feel like the practice is part of them.

It’s the same as my argument about why Gays feel hated by Christians, even if the Christian haters (not all Christians, I know) say they “hate the sin, not the sinner.” When gays feel the “sin” is PART OF THEM, then hating the sin IS hating the sinner, to the “sinner.”

That is a chestnut. The Christian gay-bashers will continue, because, although the gays feel gayness is part of them, the Christian gay-bashers don’t think so . . .

so in the case of punishing, I’m the hater. A punisher may feel that punishing is part of them, but I don’t think so . . .

so the punishers, or the former punishers, feel hated my me. I guess I’m starting to see how anti-gay religious people feel. These are rather parallel things, for sure.

Of course, there are differences. I don’t think the punishers of world are concerned that their punishing is part of them, for them it’s built into, PART OF the punished, not the punisher. For them it’s about Original Sin – that we are born evil – or its Naturalist version – that we are evolved from beasts and are born with beastly instincts that need to be suppressed. Still, though, anyone who has raised a bunch of kids in the usual way identifies very strongly with punishment, with the “need” to punish. Still close to parallel.

And now for my defense.

1. It is going to matter whether these identifications are real or not, whether they’re true.

– is homosexuality built into people?

Many say yes, and there are many good arguments for the truth of it. I believe it’s built in, PART OF people. Maybe not every gay person, as not every person living a hetero life is really wired hetero, perhaps some people live gay ‘against their natures.’ Homosexuality seems to be an integral part of many people, despite that it is often a fringe life-style, a life lived against the current, and fraught with difficulty and often danger.

– is punishing built into people?

This question hasn’t really come up for many people, I don’t think. Again, it’s more the other way, as in “Is needing to be punished built into people?” But when it’s posed to punishers now, maybe for the first time, I think –

Many will say yes. After all, it’s nearly universal. Dishing out punishments can appear automatic and natural. But, unlike homosexuality, punishing doesn’t exist stubbornly, against the current, it doesn’t exist despite being marginal, despite being threatened. Punishing is unchallenged, unless it is seen in an extreme form, and very much supported. It is in this support that we see the difficulty:

How do we know if something that we teach constantly, use constantly, and recommend continually is natural? How do we determine whether it would occur naturally? Where has punishing ever been allowed to occur naturally, when have ever seen people raised in the absence of the society that seems to be a cult of punishment? Everyone in our society wears clothes. Is that built into us? How do we separate these things?

2. One is sex, one is violence. (If you think punishing can be other than violence, ask me in comments, or read my blogs.)

– this is our society, where sex is immoral and violence is not. I mean that as a critique, just to be clear. I think for the religious, that arrangement seems to be correct, but not for me, not for the liberal, not for the modern, secular person.

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So, parallel as it seems, these are the differences:

3. Homosexuality IS part of people, and it exists despite persecution, despite everything, because it IS built into some people, it IS natural.

4. Punishing is taught, promoted, supported by scripture and old science, and nearly universal, and if it is natural, we would never know it. Punishing is literally forced upon us all.

5. If we want to know if punishing could exist in nature, we’ll have to do an experiment: we’ll have to stop teaching it, promoting it, supporting it with bronze age stories, we’ll have to stop forcing it on everyone.

Then we’ll see if it exists without all of our efforts to make sure it does. Let’s take it off life support and see if it lives.

Then we’ll know.

When you have something important to say, some important lesson to impart – say it nicely.

When you’re giving a lesson, give it nicely.

I mean, if you want someone to listen to you, if you want your pearls of wisdom to be accepted, then you want to be someone to listen to, you want your students, your children, to respect you, and the more subtle, complex, counter-intuitive or difficult the lesson may be, the more you need to be a loved and respected teacher.

This itself may sound either mind-numbingly obvious or counter-intuitive, depending on a number of things, but things can sometimes be made infinitely clearer by turning them over, so lets look at this upside down and backwards:

The more subtle, complex, counter-intuitive or difficult the lesson is, the easier it becomes for your student, or especially your kids, to find a way out of getting it. Threaten them, hurt or belittle them, and they have a reason not to believe you. We should tread lightly; any abuse of our power is all the excuse a person needs to reject what we say, no matter how true, necessary and wise the lesson may have been.

A few kitchen sink sort of examples:

1. I for one, as a child, had heard so much stupid and contradictory crap from the adults in my life that they were no longer credible sources if they said the sky was blue or water wet. I didn’t believe the adults when they told me I would need to complete my school, get some skills, and that I would have to work to support myself. In hindsight, of course this is obvious, and should have been to anyone, even a person as dreamily clueless as me, but at that point – I was 15 – if they said it, it could only be wrong. Of course, in adulthood we learn that there is more to life than the structures of our nuclear family – even I got that, eventually – but that I didn’t see that then, and this blame belongs with the adults in my life. It is they who establish the rules, and the game itself. It was they who made the power structure of the family all that mattered. That was their game, and at 15, that was still the world to me.

So I didn’t get the skills, and I dropped out of school and out of life, because that would teach them.

It was quite a few years later when I picked up where I had left off, and made a very late start on living my adult life.

2. My wife doesn’t always agree with everything I say. I don’t know why, I must have lost a lottery or something. But when I am trying to make a point of some sort with her, sometimes I will try once, twice, three times, and if I’m not getting any traction, and if I deem the point an important one (child-rearing things are the worst of these memories), I may try making my point by talking louder, some times I may shout. I’m human, I’m a man . . . I’m sorry. Most of these incidents are in the past, when the kids were young and life was busy and stressful . . . 

but the point here is, if I got angry, or sometimes if I got loud, even if I was consciously trying to turn up the volume without being angry, if my wife heard anger – then my point would be lost forever. The last thing she would ever do is agree with an angry man, no matter if I may have been correct. I have learned that getting mad only makes it worse, and now I have a formula to follow: what is more important to me here – that I vent my frustration (and that is frustrating, believe me. Just when something is wrong enough to anger me, that is when nothing I say or do will be heard or acted upon. Unimportant stuff, something I don’r care about is fine – but something I’m passionate about – that I can just swallow and hold down forever) or that I retain some small hope of winning my point?

It’s a point of pride for me that I more often choose the second option, but even when I choose to vent, that doesn’t feel as bad as it did in the past, because now I know what’s happening. Being conscious always feels better. Looking back on something and knowing I was unconscious, running on some sort of programmed script, that is what has always felt the worst.

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Now, these examples were subtle, nuanced versions of what I’m really after.

If I’ve made any case there about people taking a moral stance as an excuse or a reason not to hear you, imagine the more blatant scenario of punishing. Do we take life coaching from someone who thinks it’s OK to hurt us when we are children? Do we take a whooping, or a grounding, or the confiscation of a loved object from someone and then open our minds to them? Do we remotely want to share in the wisdom of those who are punishing us?

Not me.

Probably not your kids either.