What is safe?

By pure chance I happened to catch the end of a news item on TV tonight. Parents were expressing concern over the content of stories being read to their preschool children, such as A tale of two daddies. One mother stated that she does not send her child to preschool to learn about homosexuality or sexuality. I must admit, I never have been able to understand this perspective. For that matter, I don’t even understand what it has to do with sex. What’s the difference between referring to “Daddy and Daddy” and referring to “Daddy and Mummy”? And how is the one somehow about sex while the other, presumably, is not? I don’t remember ever hearing of a book being challenged on the grounds that it mentions a child’s mother and father, thereby implying a sexual relationship. Why are two fathers lucky enough to be about sex while a mother and a father are labelled only as parents?

I seriously, seriously, just don’t get it. I never have, since I was a child, and my father first tried to explain the concept of homosexuality to me (it was a storyline in Cop Shop) and why it might be considered a problem (I wonder what he’d say to me now?!). I mean, who cares who the parents are? Whether they be mothers, fathers, gender-queer parents or whatever label; whether they be one, two, three or more? Personally I’d rather know that the child feels loved, safe, curious about life and able to learn, explore and develop with a sense that it is safe to be itself.

In order to understand why people feel so strongly about censorship, I am therefore trying to challenge myself by use of an extreme example: child pornography. I’ll admit that it has never occurred to me to feel indignant at the censorship of child pornography. Why? Because I accept the extraordinarily high likelihood of harm to children from engagement in adult-level sexual activity. I must therefore admit to an instinct to ban self expression if it is likely to result in / promote activities that are harmful to someone. The sobering extrapolation is, of course, that many people genuinely believe that certain ideas, and certain people, are harmful by their very nature. And that makes me feel very uncomfortable. Not to mention immensely sad. How shall we decide what is or is not okay? Is it even possible? And who will suffer the consequences of our choices?

Ways of knowing: Crago and Devereaux

Crago, H. (2012). "A tale of two hemispheres: Psychotherapy, psychology and the divided brain." Psychotherapy in Australia 18(4): pp. 58-65.

Devereaux, L. (2008). Between you and me: Reaching for understanding in anthropology and analysis. The uses of subjective experience: A weekend of conversations between ANZSJA analysts and academics who work with Jung's ideas. Melbourne, Australia, Australian & New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts: pp. 45-73.

When my counsellor gave me an article to read, I did not realise (and, presumably, neither did she), that she was handing me at last the answer to the powerful question of why I failed to complete my PhD. The article, by Hugh Crago, uses as its inspiration Ian McGilchrist’s The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. It argues for the importance of the left and right hemispheres of the brain working in conjunction with each other, and describes the dangers of one hemisphere dominating over the other. Crago’s subject is psychotherapy, but his depiction of the current dominance of left-brain thinking in our culture, and of the marginalisation of right-brain thinkers, speaks to a wider context.

With amused and guilty delight I read the following:

Because words are separate from, and only 'represent' the real-world things to which they refer, the left hemisphere can spin off easily into a self-referential universe, and delude itself that this 'world', created by itself, is the only 'reality'. p. 61

I started to read on, then stopped. Surely what I was reading was a perfect description of post modernism? I had been here. I had lived it for four years, through a Masters degree and the beginnings of a PhD. I recognised this beast! Sure enough, on the very next page:

[McGilchrist] points out repeatedly that, on its own, the left hemisphere veers off in a deeply worrying direction, building systems of thought (and practice) that claim universal validity, but are increasingly out of touch with the reality of human beings and the world in which they live. For McGilchrist, both Modernism and Postmodernism (with obvious exceptions, such as Picasso), are examples. p. 62

After my training in critical thinking, such a statement sounds blissfully like blasphemy. I was thrown back into a world I struggled to comprehend; a world full of wonder, insight and possibility, and yet strangely unsatisfying. It was like an abstract concept, lacking form and substance. It needed context. The more I studied, the more fascinated and yet empty I managed to feel, and the more frustrated. I began to read from other critical perspectives, looking for a more complete picture, and failing to find it. I would find it in individuals, such as David Rudd, but not in any particular discipline or school of thought. And I could not work out what made the difference, for me, between a David Rudd, and a brilliant post modern thinker.

Now I suspect I have my answer. What I could intuit, but not describe, was that the wonderful work I was reading was, for me, lacking context - lacking body. And ironically, I discover, my former analyst, Leslie Devereaux, has also written on the same topic, but only now do I make the connection:

what a relief it was to find a philosophical attitude to knowing that grounded itself in experience, and investigated its conditions! - that took advantage of Kant's realisation that however wondrous human conscious is, and it is, it is nonetheless housed in bodies and sense organs and an embodied mind that gives it access to the world. No body: no mind. No embodied mind: no knowing. How humiliating is that to the project of limitless rationality hoping to become God?. p. 46

She writes of the strange disconnect between the lived experience and the ways in which we try to apprehend that experience:

Anthropology, as well as analysis, knows that people do not actually live in the conceptual, but in the daily, the totally contingent. But we think, we assess and we evaluate ourselves against the conceptual. p. 47

and

Literacy is a process whereby the thinker becomes aware of his own thoughts as an entity, as an abstraction. Writing fixes the idea, transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, semi-permanent world of space. It allows analysis to free itself from context and to develop generalising and universalising tendencies. And print, far more than mere writing, completes the separation of the knower from the known. Printed text creates finality and closure, and presents thought as a commodity in the manufacture and discursive shaping of the text, and in conventions of form. Thus the lifeworld has lost its place in the academy to analytical abstraction.  p. 57

Here at last I have my answer. Post modern thinking gave me tools with which to open and explore the universe. It then left me there, with no instruction, indeed no permission, to do anything with what I found. What I instinctively felt the need of, was to complete the circle, as described by Crago:

Key to McGilchrist's concept is that while the right hemisphere can take in new information direct from the surrounding world, and then pass it on to the left hemisphere, the left can only process what it already knows. p. 62

"The case of Peter Pan"

Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan, or, The impossibility of children's ficton / Jacqueline Rose, Macmillan.

I was introduced to Jacqueline Rose during the theory unit of my Masters degree. I quickly discovered that she is the person to quote for anything to do with children’s literature and her work is the aspirational standard. At least, apparently. In actual fact, I notice that while everybody references her, I have yet to see any in-depth analysis or comment on her work (though that may be because I haven’t read much). For my own part, I wouldn’t dare analyse her work - I am too far from understanding it. I have now read the book twice, and was pleasantly surprised on the second reading to discover that a few more grains of wisdom passed through to me. If I read the book about ten more times over the next twenty years, I might passably be able to claim that I have a nodding acquaintance with her ideas (at least enough of an understanding that only the elite might call me out).

The interesting thing about reading Rose is that, because she is the person to quote, there is a distinct sense of pressure to do so. Academia provides its own standards and norms for acceptability, subject to the theoretical perspectives espoused. And then, within children’s literature, you stand or fall by your ability to come to grips with Rose. I wonder how it feels to be in a position like that of Rose? Since I am not attempting in any way, shape or form to compete on academic terms, I have a temptation to rebel against received wisdom. The trouble is, Rose makes sense. I don’t understand her work, but I find it both compelling and exciting. My imagination fails as I try to ponder what it would be like to have a mind as capable of complex thinking as hers. And so, of course, I have to include her.

Unsurprisingly, Rose explores the use of children’s literature as an attempt to shape child development. She provides examples from the English Board of Education, demonstrating the change in stance towards children’s education across the twentieth century. She documents the ways in which the board explicitly set out to dictate the type of language that would be taught to children, with education style divided according to class lines. In the early part of the century, the privately taught, middle class child was encouraged to learn the abstract language of literature, while this form of thinking, speaking and writing was actively discouraged for the working class. The children of this (less / more fortunate ?) class were to be taught to think and describe concrete objects and ideas only, with written language being subordinate to the spoken. Amusingly, this strategy ultimately proved to be maladaptive as the century progressed, as a requirement emerged for a workforce with more complex language skills. But Rose makes clear the deliberate use of language by the government to differentiate and shape its people according to its perceived needs. Books were also carefully chosen and used as prizes, “with the book as a reward for a correctness which it is intended to encourage” (p. 105).

However, Rose does not stop at the level of describing the educational and economic manipulations of language and literature. She points to the desire of the adult for the child in some complex fashion (although, while the concept of “the child” is extensively analysed, I did not see much to define what “the adult” might be):

It will not be an issue here of what the child wants, but of what the adult desires - desires in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech (p. 2)

For Rose, the adult has an investment in what the child represents; the child is seen as a gateway, making the child disturbingly valuable, not for and of itself, but for what it can offer to the adult. She describes a mythic concept of “the child” and its connection to “nature”, as described by Rousseau and others:

Children’s fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy which sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state (p. 8)

Despite Freud’s work on the problematic and inherently deceptive nature of language, emphasis is, according to Rose, placed on the innocence and primitive nature of the child, setting it up as the gateway back to an apparently pure point of origin, not only moral, but linguistic. Rose suggests a desire for a perfect and unproblematic mode of communication and of being, in which words can have simple, absolute and non-deceptive meanings, with the child (conveniently universalised across all classes) being used as the representational aspiration to:

a primitive or lost state to which the child has special access. The child is, if you like, something of a pioneer who restores these worlds to us, and gives them back to us with a facility or directness which ensures that our own relationship to them is, finally, safe (p. 9)

Dawkins and Jensen both discuss the ways in which society may attempt to shape its future generations. Rose goes further, by attempting to examine why this might be so. More than merely a desire for the material success of a society, Rose suggests that her undefined “adult” needs the concept of “the child” as a bridge to something which it believes it has lost, but which, in fact, never existed in the first place.

"Lesbian epiphanies"

Jensen, K. L. (1999). Lesbian epiphanies : women coming out in later life / Karol L. Jensen, Harrington Park Press.

As with Dawkins, I did not pick up Jensen with any thought of incorporating her into my research question. But this is one book I am glad I picked up. In the back of my mind, vaguely, I could see the importance of considering child development theory in my work. It is a research area so far largely unexplored by me. Now, having read about the power of societal values and attitudes to profoundly impact upon basic self knowledge and identity, I realise that the question of the power of words is encompassed within a much broader and more complex picture than I had envisaged, one in which I cannot ignore the contributions of areas such as sociology and cultural studies.

Lesbian epiphanies of course relates to the development of sexual identity, and there is an interesting correlation with Dawkins. Dawkins describes the power of adults to shape the belief system of future generations, including for example, the doctrinal belief that women are the property of their husbands. Jensen’s work would suggest that such a belief is not as old fashioned as it may sound. She describes a complex paradox in which sexuality is perceived to be central to relationships, whilst at the same time taboo. The woman is “admonished to dress and paint for him, but is accused of inviting his attention when it comes” (p. 206). According to Jensen, the woman is encouraged to believe that sexuality relates specifically to the male, and her role is to fulfil him, rather than to seek fulfilment of her own, wherever that may lie.

I struggle sometimes to see exactly how she supports her critical analysis, but the picture presented is an alarming one, seeking to account for the fact that a surprising number of women do not even discover their sexual identity until after marriage. She uses the word “script” to describe the overall experience of cultural values which may influence the ability to develop self knowledge, creating an image of values as language: “The power of the social force to marry creates a script for women’s lives that is so powerful that their own internal messages can be, and sometimes, are, overwhelmed” (p. 206).

This quote represents a potential departure from Dawkins in that it explicitly sets up a tension between that which is innate to an individual, and that which forms part of the external “script” that the individual reads in an attempt to negotiate life and social interaction. More than merely imprinting the unfinished child, for Jenkins, social values can have the effect of actually overwriting innate traits or potentialities. This, presumably, is in fact the hope of many morally didactic lessons. And yet, without a great deal changing in the external world, events, relationships and ideas, both large and small, accumulate until for some at least, the “authentic” individual finally emerges from the social construct.

In my reading from years ago, one of my confusions related to the surprising amount of power apparently accorded to subversive literature: a complete religious upbringing and regular exposure to the Bible, could, according to many texts I read, be overturned in an instant by the mere act of reading Harry Potter or His dark materials. Jensen’s work would appear to suggest a solution to this puzzle. If the child’s innate nature is not simply created through moral and social education but overwritten, there is the possibility that the overwrite may not be complete. Fear of words then becomes fear of the fire that is damped but never fully quenched. The text of identity may appear to be successfully overwritten, but life is a hacker, and the never-fully-erased original text is forever in danger of being exposed, to the discomfiture of those who would wish it otherwise.

"The God delusion"

Dawkins, R. (2007). The God delusion / Richard Dawkins, Transworld publishers.

One of the surprising things about this study so far has been the number of times that I am given pause to reflect by works that I never thought of as being in any way related to my research questions. I start to feel a little like Francis Spufford as I discover that so much of my reading appears to connect to what is apparently a central question for me. And everything so far, including the original research ideas with which I naively set out on this journey, has so far not been the central question. I am nibbling at its outer edges and drawing myself, book by book, experience by experience, towards an unknown centre. Do we ever really choose a research question with objectivity? Or do we selfishly ask questions of ourselves and embark on a surprising and unexpected journey?

Dawkins, unsurprisingly, believes that the most important thing is to teach children how, not what to think. He states that “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” It therefore appears that for Dawkins, the child is not only an unfinished creature, but one that can be imprinted. Learning and identity do not necessarily continue to evolve, unfettered by the ideas encountered along the way, with each new thought assimilated and new directions and shapes emerging. Instead, the child is “vulnerable” to that with which adults choose to imprint it. Thus:

‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' The adage is true as long as you don't really believe the words. But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than deeds.

Power, then, belongs to that which is most reinforced, or that which converts word into belief. And that is the interesting question: how does this process occur? What combination of factors must be in play for the word to become the [perceived] reality? Saxby discusses stages of reader development, suggesting that guidance is required to bring the reader to a mature level of detachment and critical appraisal. Perhaps for Dawkins, who is a firm advocate for the preservation of the Bible as literature, the power lies, not so much in the words themselves, but in the development, or lack thereof, of critical thinking skills. The difficulty, of course, for both authors, is the implication that the “adult” is highly influential in the extent to which these skills can and are developed. And is it ever entirely possible to separate the “how” from the “what” of thinking?

Faith as danger

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Richard Dawkins

Thought made visible

I wanted to write on myself so that I couldn't hide from how I feel about myself. I wanted to show I am not always strong, but strong enough to beat the darker thoughts in my head.

Michael Williams (re. self portrait)