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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 5 Womb, Birth, Infancy, Childhood by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR January 29, 2007 Like characters in a gloomy sci-fi novel, many found work in the secret police, where their lack of loyalty and ability to make "friends" were saleable traits. ~
David Tenenbaum, “Drastic
Deprivation”, on adults who had been raised in Romanian
orphanages with massive deprivation of contact and affection To
have good manners means to think of others, no—to feel for others. One
must be group-conscious, have the gift of putting oneself in the other
man's shoes. Manners prohibit the wounding of anyone. To be mannerly is to
have genuine good taste. Manners cannot be taught, for they belong to the
unconscious.
Etiquette, on the other hand, can be taught, for it belongs to the
conscious. It is the veneer of manners. .
. . Bad manners always spring from a
disordered psyche. Slander and scandal and gossip and backbiting are all
subjective faults; they show hatred of self. They prove that the
scandal-monger is unhappy. If we can take children into a world where they
will be happy, we shall automatically rid them of all desire to hate. In
other words, these children will have good manners in the deepest sense;
that is, they will show forth loving-kindness. ~
A.S. Neill, Summerhill:
A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960), page 192 What
kind of world do we want? More
than ever, this is an important question. Our answers, and how we go about
trying to implement them, will determine whether our grandchildren live in
freedom or in tyranny, and perhaps whether they live at all. Never before
has mankind held so much technological power, and this power is growing
exponentially. How it is used will make all the difference—and
healthy human beings make better, healthier choices than do neurotics or
sociopaths. That
last sentence is another way of saying that the character of the human
world is created by our treatment of the young. Early experience is in
fact crucial to what we become: happy or miserable; healthy or sick;
loving or hateful; trusting or cynical; compassionate or cruel. Early
events set the tone for later character, philosophy, and behavior. We see
and feel the world through the lens of early experience, usually without
noticing that the lens is there. The
wider importance of early experience should be obvious. A world of loving,
compassionate adults would not be a world of war, or crime, or secret mass
graves filled on the order of madmen. It would not be a world where armies
of emotionally-damaged soldiers would be available
to madmen, or where centralized power over others generally would be seen
as acceptable. Nor would such a world need the drugs, legal and otherwise,
now used by the trainload to calm the nerves and cover the pain of damaged
children who have grown into uneasy adulthood. A
healthy world would not be a place where technology, or anything else,
would be used maliciously or recklessly. The
only question that really matters today is this one: Can we move
things in the right direction in time? That
is not hyperbole. Many scientists, including Stephen
Hawking, Bill
Joy, and Martin
Reese, are worried that we will not make it through the present
century. Their concerns appear well founded. ———— Some
find it hard to believe that early experience, and especially preverbal experience, can have any effect on later life at all. How
can events during infancy, during birth, or even in the womb make any
difference in our experience or actions as adults? Such
attitudes are telling because it is actually common knowledge that even
experience in utero has a huge
effect on later life; Thalidomide is among the most dramatic examples but smoking,
drinking,
or other
drug use by a pregnant mother are also widely known to have strong and
often lasting effects on the baby in terms of brain structure, behavior,
and inner experience. Brain development can be interrupted in various ways
not only in the womb but by a traumatic
birth or in infancy, leading to a host of ill effects. For example,
the book Ghosts
from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence “. . . presents data to document what we have long observed: that
experiences in infancy which result in the child’s inability to regulate
strong emotions are too often the overlooked source of violence in
children and adults. Story after story points to the importance of
intrauterine conditions and early experiences which can lead to future
violent behavior.” (p. xiii) If
you have trouble believing in the power of preverbal experience, consider
the occasional intensity of
lower-level, nonverbal experience in your own adult life: sex, pain,
hunger or thirst are all essentially lower-level, non-verbal experiences
despite our ability to add words to them. We do
remember these non-verbal experiences and our behavior can clearly be
modified by them; you don’t put your hand back on a hot stove after
doing it the first time. For that matter, dogs, fish,
and other animals (even tiny flatworms)
learn
from experience and modify their behavior accordingly. The
power of even prenatal experience is enormous. One example, from
"Prenatal Stress May Cause Disorder" by Rogers Worthington, Chicago
Tribune (as reprinted in the San
Diego Union-Tribune), They
are products of a first-of-its-kind project examining the effects of
prenatal stress on the brain development of young rhesus monkeys, animals
that are said to share 95 percent of human genes. The
story goes on to say that it took remarkably little stress—in one set of
subjects, exposing the pregnant monkeys to "(t)hree noise bursts . .
. randomly sounded over a 10-minute period" was enough—to cause
severe effects in the offspring of the stressed mothers. The research
project, developed over five years at the University of Wisconsin's Harlow
Primate Laboratory, showed that the offspring of stressed mothers were
also slower to learn, more shy, clumsier, had less effective immune
systems, and weighed less than the offspring of animals that were not
stressed.* *
Harlow and his research lab are most famous for the “wire
mother/cloth mother” experiments with infant monkeys, which showed,
among other things, that social deprivation during infancy and childhood
has severe and lasting effects on monkeys – something also true of
humans, as the article at link above shows (link is also used for quote at
top of this column). Another
example, this time about experience during
birth, from "Born addicts", New
Scientist magazine, The
more painkillers a woman gets during labour, the more likely her child is
to abuse drugs later in life. Karin
Nyberg of the One
more example, primarily about the effects of experience in childhood: a
study published in the Journal of
the American Medical Association—Psychiatrists
Explore Legacy of Traumatic Stress in Early Life, August 1,
2001—found that “More than 50
studies show that repeated physical or sexual abuse has numerous sequelae
in adulthood, including sexual dysfunction, anxiety, depression, and
suicidality.” Post-traumatic
stress syndrome (PTSD) in such children is common and often follows them
into adulthood. “Early experiences set the level of responsiveness of the hypothalamic
pituitary adrenal axis and autonomic nervous system, Yehuda noted,
allowing these systems to overreact or underreact to subsequent stress.
Childhood trauma leaves a person extremely vulnerable to the effects of
stress, she said, and specifically to the development of PTSD.” ———— Because
most studies are couched in negative terms, it is easy to forget that the
studies are telling us the good as well as the bad. Negative early
experience has negative effects on later life, but this also means that preventing
negative early experience has positive
effects (in both cases, relative to the statistical norm). If the
combination of a birth complication and rejection by the mother makes a
male infant three times more likely to exhibit violent behavior later in
life (as one 30-year study[2]
found), then the study means that male children will have a lower
statistical risk of showing later violent behavior if
the infants have good births and loving mothers. Society-wide,
reducing such risk factors would have major benefits: the study’s
authors estimate as much as 18 percent of all
violent crime is related to these two specific factors, for example. ———— For
the world to become more free and compassionate, we need increasing
numbers of children to grow up in healthy environments. Children need
freedom just as adults do; adults who spent their entire childhood being coerced
by teachers and parents will not likely understand freedom or support it
for others. Adults who grew up getting little compassion from cold or
angry parents, or who grew up in war zones or with violence from other
sources, may be less able to feel and to express compassion for others.
And how can the duality of love and freedom not
be damaged in a society where hatred, prejudice, or blind obedience to
Authority is systematically instilled in the young? These
problems cannot be successfully addressed via coercive government because coercion
itself is a major part of the problem. Even well-meant and initially
well-run government approaches eventually become disasters; they
hurt rather than help. Ultimately, the foundations for all coercive government can only be cruelty and violence: submit
or die. Need it be said that a free and compassionate world will not
come about via such methods? Love
and freedom begin with family, with small groups, and with voluntary
association and action. “Live
and let live” and “Do
unto others as you would have them do unto you”
are the foundations of any free and healthy society. This approach
to life is diametrically opposed to the “Do
as we say, or else” attitude
central to coercive government. ———— If
Reese, Hawking, and others are
right, we may have little time left to begin increasing the levels of love
and freedom in this world. Moving things in the right direction starts
with compassionate and non-coercive treatment of the young. Next
week: Free Societies in the Real
World. ———— There
is an ocean of material about early experience and its results. Below, a
very short list of sources from a variety of perspectives: Birth
Without Violence by
Frederick Leboyer Ghosts
from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence by Robin Karr-Morse,
Meredith S. Wiley, and Dr. T. Berry Brazelton The
Biology of Love by Dr. Arthur Janov Motherless
Daughters: the Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman Whatever
Happened to Daddy’s Little Girl? The Impact of Fatherlessness on Black
Women by Jonetta Rose Barras Touching:
The Human Significance of the Skin by Ashley Montagu A
General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and
Richard Lannon, M.D. Summerhill:
A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by A.S. Neill Report
by H. M. Inspectors on the Summerhill School, 1949 (An excellent look
at what the school was like 28 years after its founding. Compare this to
what you know about today’s schools. Link is to an HTML file of the
report). Free
at Last: The Sudbury Valley School by Daniel Greenberg (link is to a
page at the school site with excerpts) A
collection of news items and other material on this topic is available at http://www.paradise-paradigm.net/science.htm
Finally,
last
week’s column features material from the 17,000+ participant ACE
Study as described in Dr. Vincent J. Felitti’s astonishing The
Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning
Gold into Lead [PDF]. ———— 1.
The study discussed was published as “Perinatal Medication as a
Potential Risk Factor for Adult Drug Abuse in a North American Cohort”
in Epidemiology,
11(6):715-716, November 2000, Nyberg, Karin; Buka, Stephen L.; Lipsitt,
Lewis P. 2. Raine A, Brennan P, Mednick SA: Birth complications combined with early maternal rejection at age 1 year predispose to violent crime at age 18 years. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1994; 51:984-988. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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