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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 6 Free Societies in the Real World by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR February 7, 2007 Civilization
is sick and unhappy, and I claim that the root of it all is the unfree
family. Children are deadened by all the forces of reaction and hate,
deadened from their cradle days. They are trained to say nay
to life because their young lives are one long nay. —
A.S. Neill, Summerhill:
A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960), page 102 Is
a free and compassionate world even possible? It is easy to get caught up
in feeling that such a world could never be. Tyranny, hatred, racism, and
other such horror have always been commonplace. War has been in the news
since before there was a news business, as have torture and unjust
imprisonment. Physical and emotional cruelty to children have ever been
the norm. A
healthy world can seem so distant, so far from what exists now, as to seem
unreal in some way; a mere and foolish fantasy. If you’ve been feeling that way lately, I have good news: free and healthy societies are not only possible and practical in the real world: they exist right now. Many of them, in fact. They are small, for the most part, but no less real or important for that. ———— I
saw one of these societies, or part of it, while at the grocery store
recently. A mother and four girls, maybe seven to twelve years old, were
in line ahead of me. Two of the girls were daughters of the woman in line,
the other two were, I think, friends, but the kids might have all been
sisters. What
was special about this small group? Nothing, and yet everything. It was
just a woman and some kids, standing in a check-out line at the market.
The girls were talking and sometimes giggling, and the mom was talking
with them occasionally, with obvious affection. The kids were lively and
vivacious, enjoying each other’s company in a natural and pleasing
fashion, and being respectful of others in the line without being servile
or sullen about it. Neither the mom nor the children seemed anxious,
defensive, manic, angry, needy, controlling, or otherwise visibly
neurotic. At one point the youngest stepped back while talking with her
sister and banged her head on a display case; the sister hugged the young
one’s head to her chest and patted the child’s hair, perfectly
naturally, nothing overblown but with unforced and instinctive concern.
The incident was over in a moment and the conversation went on as if
nothing had happened. No
big deal, right? And yet, this group seemed a slice of heaven to me. All
too often I see families and other groups or individuals who have had
healthy, appropriate, and natural behavior and demeanor crushed out of
them. I see children who have been disrespected so deeply that they have
no respect for themselves or for others; I see parents who were hurt so
badly in childhood that they cannot behave naturally or healthily with
their own children. I see much worse, from time to time, and I imagine you
do as well. What
I saw that day at the supermarket was nothing special, and yet it was the
most important thing in the world. What I saw was a small group of
emotionally healthy people enjoying each other’s company – exactly
what human beings were made for. ———— Real
needs, engraved within us at the deepest levels, all
have that same “big deal / no big deal” quality. Real needs are
profoundly natural and thus easily taken for granted as long as the need
is fulfilled – despite the pleasure we take in the fulfillment. But deprivation of what is truly needed creates crisis; if not resolved,
the crisis leads to harm to the organism or worse. Consider this partial
list of human needs: Air Food Love Freedom Even
a minute or two without air creates panic; death soon follows. Several
days without water will kill a person, and not pleasantly. Starvation
seems impossible to most in the developed world, yet millions die a slow
death from lack of food every year. Lack of love, affection and connection
with our parents and others early in life contributes – hugely,
as it happens – to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other deadly
ailments as well as to life-long misery and harmful behavior of almost
every type, including depression and suicide. For that matter, an infant
who is not loved at least enough
to be fed, protected, and otherwise cared for will literally die. Lack of
freedom (tyranny) killed hundreds
of millions in the Twentieth
Century, while ruining the lives of many times that with famine,
unjust imprisonment, torture, needless poverty, and in dozens of other
ways, including by simply breaking the hearts and spirits of millions. That
short list of needs is misleading, for the last two entries are really
one. Loving someone includes respecting their freedom; to coerce a person
(including a child) is to treat that person with un-love. Coercion
actually erodes and destroys
love; more of one always means less of the other. In similar fashion, love
is necessary to any free society; a nation where love is lacking
cannot long remain free, assuming it ever was. Even the market requires a
widespread sense of connection (love) among the participants if it is to
remain honest
and workable; laws alone cannot replace the natural respect for others
that comes from widespread emotional health – which is to say, from
love. As
I have written before: Love and
freedom are a single unit; a duality.
Love includes freedom; freedom (in the human sense) includes love. ———— The
real protection of life and property, always and everywhere, is the
general recognition of the brotherhood of man. —
My
motto for the home, in education as in life, is this: For heaven's sake, let people live their own lives. It is an
attitude that fits any situation.
—
A. S. Neill, Summerhill:
A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, p. 123 (emphasis in original) A
nuclear family, an extended family, a school, a village, a town: all can
be free and loving societies. So can the larger society of a nation or
even the world as a whole, and indeed nations and the world as a whole will
become free and loving – or at least much closer to that than they are
now – and soon, or mankind will join the countless other species that have
vanished into the mists of time. Any
group of human beings can be free and loving. I do not mean that people or
societies can become healthy by sheer willpower; I wish they could, but
that is not how people work, and even the largest societies are, for the
most part, only groups of people. Our
experiences early in life determine
the limits of our emotional health for the rest of our days; what we
each make of that is up to us. I believe healthy change is possible on a
personal level, but not widely or easily. Undoing neurosis is a worthy
personal goal but not a method to pin one’s hopes on for world-wide
social change. For
that, we need something else. We need more love and freedom to grace
the lives of the very young, and we need it as widely as possible. We need
dramatic, radical change on an epic scale, and we
need it yesterday. ———— It
would seem that given a good start in life, almost any kind of stress can
be withstood later on. — Arthur Janov, The Feeling Child, 1973, p. 144 .
. . we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of
experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes
that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only
incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. —
John Taylor Gatto, “Against School”,
September
2003 Harpers Magazine Among
the most optimistic facts about human nature, given our current situation,
is that small, simple changes early in life can provide enormous benefits
that last a lifetime. A
healthy pregnancy without drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, and with a healthy
diet supplemented by folic
acid and other
nutrients and with as little interpersonal
and other stress as possible; a gentle
birth; an affectionate
infancy with the baby never banished to solitude; and a loving,
non-violent, non-coercive relationship with the child at any age – such
a start to life can overcome almost anything, and most
of this can be provided by any parent.** Partners and extended family
members can help; friends and neighbors and churches and charities and
businesses can help. None of this involves rocket science or impossible
actions. None of it requires coercive government, although as long as we
are using government to penalize assault against adults, the same
protection should certainly be extended to children. Speaking
of assault and coercion, America’s long, cruel experiment with Prussian-inspired
coercive “public education” is clearly as much a failure
at educating children as it is a success
at turning them into stunted
little corporate drones and compliant,
mind-addled subjects for the ruling elite to manipulate as it pleases.
What
other group do we routinely force into twelve or more years of servitude,
enforced by (in this case) truant officers? What other group is treated
with the coercion, disrespect, and disdain that school children so
often get from teachers and other school staff? It
doesn’t have to be that way, and it shouldn’t
be that way. Treating children with respect – without violence or other
coercion, and without neglect or emotional cruelty – is actually easier
to do, because it makes for happy children who are pleasant to be with. It
teaches children self-respect in a way no later workshop or pop-psychology
book ever can. Treating children with respect (which includes insisting
that they treat others with respect; as A. S. Neill pointed out, “freedom is not
license”) gives children a natural sense of responsibility and a
comfortable understanding of how to deal with people in a healthy fashion. Among
the best short proofs of that (and what does it say about us that we would
need proof that treating children well is a good thing?) is the British
Government’s own report on Summerhill School from 1949, which
headmaster A. S. Neill included in his 1960 book on the school. The link
will take you to the complete report, but for now I excerpt the report
below, and as you read the material, keep in mind that it was written not
by the headmaster or anyone else employed by the school but by British
government employees. (Neill himself pointed out that “We were indeed
lucky to have two broad-minded inspectors sent to us.” That wasn’t
always to be the case later on; the British government tried
to shut Summerhill down a few years ago; only a public outcry
prevented it.) Here
is what the school and its children were like in that June of 1949,
according to the British report (my emphasis below): "The
main principle upon which the School is run is freedom . . . . the
degree of freedom allowed to the children is very much greater than the
inspectors had seen in any other school and the freedom is real. No child,
for instance, is obliged to attend any lessons. As will be revealed later,
the majority do attend for the most part regularly, but one pupil was
actually at this School for 13 years without once attending a lesson and
is now an expert toolmaker and precision instrument maker. This extreme
case is mentioned to show that the freedom given to children is genuine
and is not withdrawn as soon as its results become awkward." ".
. . the children are full of life
and zest. Of boredom and apathy there was no sign. An atmosphere of
contentment and tolerance pervades the School." ".
. . the children's manners are
delightful. They may lack, here and there, some of the conventions of
manners, but their friendliness, ease and naturalness, and their total
lack of shyness and self-consciousness made them very easy, pleasant
people to get on with." ".
. . initiative, responsibility and
integrity are all encouraged by the system and that so far as such
things can be judged, they are in fact being developed." "Summerhill
education is not necessarily hostile to worldly success." The
report backs up that last point with a list of degrees held and careers
followed by former pupils. The obvious question here is: would you rather
live in a world where people had been raised with love and freedom
(whether at Summerhill or wherever), or the world as it is today? Summerhill
is a boarding school in England, but day schools run on similar principles
exist in America and in several other nations as Sudbury schools, modeled
after the original Sudbury Valley School
in Framingham, Massachusetts (here’s a
list from the Sudbury Education Resource Network). Another alternative
deserves mention here: home schooling. ———— Freedom
and compassion are life itself; their lack is the road to death. That will
become increasingly true in a literal, global sense as we move deeper into
the 21st Century. The staggering, exponential increase in scientific
knowledge and technology, which is only just beginning, has created a
stark and urgent choice for mankind: A free and healthy world, soon,
or a technologically empowered global
tyranny – or perhaps even an
extinction event for the human race. Free
and compassionate societies exist in the real world right now, as indeed
they always have. The time has come to expand their size and number until
they merge throughout entire nations and, eventually, the world as a
whole. Now
or never. ———— Next
week: How the Baby Boomers Almost
Saved the World . . . and why they failed. *
Lane discusses three large-scale attempts at genuinely free societies: the
Jews of Abraham; Mohammed and the Saracens who followed him; and the
Americans who fought off British colonialism. While largely ignoring the
flaws of each attempt, she does a spectacular and eye-opening job of
presenting the case that each of these societies was, for at least a time
(in the first two examples for quite a long time) free in a manner that has seldom been seen before or since. ** Not every parent, no, and not in every particular. 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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