After reading Jared Diamonds book 'the world until yesterday' I am baffled by some of his terse remarks on child-rearing. To be fair, they aren't "diamonds views"; as an anthropologist, he is presumably taking an "objective" perspective on how pre-state societies conceive child rearing. I am still nevertheless miffed by his frequent mention of his "american friends" and their views on the need to hit children.
I found myself arguing with myself - as is my style - in an imagined conversation with Diamond. I wanted to point out how intergenerational cycles of trauma and violence are created - nay, seeded - when an adult decides to abuse a child. But how could i do that? What I've written earlier about the relationship between shame, dissociation, pride and idealization, fits into this puzzle as the organizing program our brain uses to discard negative self-experience and highlight a positive alternative. I feel a big problem with science is what can be called the fetishization of science as the only way of knowing; unless a study has been conducted showing something, there is a stubborn and naive resistance to realities that can be discerned by examining your own phenomenology.
I take shared-intentionality (Tomasello 2014) as the organizing schema of human functionality. The term refers to a "view from nowhere", which includes within it 'self' and 'other'. Every individual human being experiences itself not merely as an individual, but always and ineluctably "in relation". The concept of a 'view from nowhere' corresponds to some imaginal 3rd person perspective which takes the individual actor and the "culture" he has been exposed to as working AT THE SAME TIME whenever we experience ourselves in action.
This shared-intentionality hypothesis of Tomasellos is operationalized along a shame-pride continuum. The whole study of emotions in man and animals has bizarrely skewed the picture of human emotions. While it is a good thing that neuroscience is now exploring emotions (after a half century of a singular cognitive focus) it is incredibly strange indeed that shame and pride are considered "ancillary" or secondary, apparently because they are more relevant to humans than they are to older species.
The reality is, between homo erectus and homo sapiens lies 600 cc's of brain evolution. An even more important reality - one recognized by psychoanalysis but fervently ignored by the rest of psychology - is that human minds are FUNDAMENTALLY organized around shame dynamics, as the 600 cc's of brain evolution during the lifetimes of Homo Ergaster and Homo Heidelbergensis evidently was the time period where human beings became 'inter-connected' within this larger web Tomsello terms 'shared-intentionality'; that is, it was only via the organizing principles of shame and pride that shared intentionality (a mirroring of intentional states) could even occur to begin with.
But how does this become organized? What mechanisms does the brain use? When you hit a child, are you merely causing the child to become scared? Or is there also a shame aspect - in the sense that the one being flogged experiences him or herself as weak, vulnerable, and to borrow a term from psychoanalysis, as being "a bad object"? Indeed. Experiencing oneself as weak IS related to an experience of shame. But there is at the same time an experience of fear.
The mechanisms of dissociation and idealization are probably not the same at all developmental periods. Early on, the effort to "idealize", is surely not as strong as it would be for a teenager. Nevertheless, experiences of weakness, fear, shame and anxiety, are dissociated; the contents are driven away from consciousness so that organism wont have to experience itself in such a worthless way. At some time period, as the self begins to solidify, and as pride begins to become a consciously preferred state (even if only intuitively known), experiences of shame, weakness and vulnerability are reflexively inhibited by a manic turn to a pride state. The turn is a 'self-corrective' that is made rather unconsciously. It is impulsive; it is what is referred by modern day relational theorists as an 'enactment' - something done to defend the self against the pangs of shame, anxiety and other negative affects.
This way of thinking is important because of the way people frequently conduct themselves in conversation with one another. Enactments often occur impulsively; which means they emerge out of a 'high intensity' affect states. During a conversation, for instance, I may find myself resisting an interpretation because I do not like that I am being challenged. Whatever subject-matter is at hand seems to be 'collapsed' into the very basic, organizing reality of 'shame-pride', or said differently, "low-status-high status". My mind ardently resists being represented as 'wrong', and thus, in the logic of the brain, of being "of low status". The extremely stereotypic and chliched manner of our everyday interactions is what allows us to act in a world that puts short-term gains ahead of long term consequences: this is the essential logic of enactment and low-road impulsivity: we want to feel good NOW, regardless of whether what were saying is true or not; or what relation is it has to promoting a false view in a wider circle; or, as we see most clearly in climate change, how our individual delusions of 'needing to be right', feed into larger system processes like the climate system. In this example, not paying attention to the system dynamics of your own consciousness (the relation between shame and pride) promotes and corroborates certain noxious dynamics at the social level (climate change denial) which, with inactivity, feeds into the probable consequences of not responding to climate change in time (environmental disaster; collapse of civilization).
Besides the moral necessity of paying attention to the reasons for your own reactions (which requires some sort of attentiveness to your embodied phenomenology) with regard to propositions about truth and reality, these behaviors actually DO have very serious and extreme consequences when aggregated at the global level.
Is it impossible to conceive a future where we encourage children to feel a sense of relatedness to one another without fearing being victimized? Sure it is. Can we also imagine a time where we can conventionalize knowledge of our own human nature - our tendencies to dissociate and idealize, as defenses against cognitive dissonance and negative affects? Ultimately, questions like this are political, and however we think about this, we should always keep in mind the brains inherent plasticity.
In an environment where self-knowledge, mindfulness, and right action are deemed important, human beings will experience such cultural values as desirable. Even more importantly, as knowledge of the brain continues to grow, people will be able to experience a greater tolerance for the difficulties infants, children, and teenagers have with self-regulation, as self regulation ultimately depends on well developed dorsolateral functions which don't attain full-maturity until the late 20's.
Ultimately, it needs to be understood how counter-productive the punishing attitude is. Diamond likes to emphasize that the difference between parenting practices in hunter gatherer, farming and herding societies pertain to differences in valuable property. Even if this is true (which it probably is), it still must be understood how inefficacious it is, in terms of long-term social stability, to respond to others with a punishing attitude - as myriad contextual factors intervene between the motive to act a certain way (being exposed to relational stimuli) and acting in that way. It is here, in the facts of brain, society and our inter-locked dynamics, that we can recognize how much more intelligent it is to demonstrate for others what we understand about them, and what we want from them, as how one is seen, affects how one comes to see others.
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