On Initiating Youth into the Democracy of Touch

Some youths playing football as imagined by D. H. Lawrence 

in a water colour entitled Spring (1929)

 

 

When D. H. Lawrence writes of the inspiration of touch, he is clearly thinking of how desire invests the lives of adult men and women, involving as it does, amongst other things, "the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love" [1].

 

Nevertheless, this former school teacher was vitally interested in the education of the young and would doubtless have wanted to see children and adolescents initiated (or groomed) into his phallic-utopian new order, so that from an early age they too might learn to substantiate the mystery of touch and form a direct relationship with all things. 

 

The fact that children and adolescents are often denied intimacy with one another is something that also concerned the French author Michel Tournier. Like Lawrence, he argued that youngsters should be allowed (and, indeed, encouraged to experience) physical contact with the bodies of others and that our primary human need is for touch. 

 

Before eyebrows could be raised, however, and accusations begin to fly, Tournier quickly added:

 

"When I speak of physical contact, I mean of course something far more vast and more primitive than erotic games and sexual relations, which are merely a special case." [2]

 

Tournier was also keen to counter those who think that by giving children toys or pet animals to play with we can conveniently sublimate their desire for the forming of close physical and emotional bonds:

 

"Everyone likes to say that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my word for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, living body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Version 2 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Albert Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17. 

 

 

They're in the Trees! (In Praise of Risky Play)

Two Blonde Beasts in a Tree 

 (SA/2019)

It's conker season - a time of the year that brings back fond memories of childhood, throwing bricks and sticks at the horse chestnut trees lining Chatteris Avenue and, if feeling particularly brave, attempting to clamber up them in order to better access their treasures.    

Today, children don't bother collecting conkers; nor do they seem to climb trees, or even go outdoors very much. We live in an increasingly risk-averse culture of health and safety in which unsupervised activity - or what used to simply be called play - is socially unacceptable.

And that, surely, can't be good ...?

In fact, the eradication of genuine play - understood as an inherently joyous but sometimes risky form of freedom - has had a profoundly crippling and depressing effect on children.

Modern parents, teachers, and other childminders may not like it, but children like to climb trees, swing on ropes, ride bikes, handle knives, jump in water, play with fire, throw stones, wrestle, explore abandoned buildings, and generally get up to mischief. And they like to do so without wearing crash helmets and other protective forms of clothing - for even cuts and bruises and grazed knees are an important part of having fun and growing up.          

In other words, forms of risky play have developmental and evolutionary value and can therefore be observed in other young mammals, not just human youngsters. Sometimes, rarely, it can result in serious injury and - very rarely - even have tragic consequences. But the benefits of allowing children to play outdoors and unsupervised far outweigh the dangers; as experiments with rats have clearly demonstrated.     

Children - like rodents - that are deprived of play during a critical phase of their development tend to grow up overly fearful and less adaptive when placed in an unfamiliar environment. Their ability to interact socially with strangers is also not what it might be; they can, for example, be sullen and withdrawn, or quick to anger (i.e., they have trouble regulating their emotions).

Again, that's not good - and surely it's not what anyone wants. Perhaps if children still played conkers and climbed trees, there wouldn't be so many teens stabbing one another, dealing drugs, committing suicide, etc. Such neurotic and psychopathological behaviour surely isn't unconnected to the dramatic decline in childhood play (and the equally dramatic rise of social media).   

The irony of the situation today isn't lost on one researcher in this area:

"We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns. Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways. In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. And, we deprive them of fun."*

* See: Peter Gray, 'Risky Play: Why Children Love It and Need It', Psychology Today (April 07 2014): click here.

On Why the Language That Speaks Us as Children Matters

A young child revealed by nature

I.

The language that we dwell within is of crucial importance. 

For ultimately, such language speaks us, as Heidegger famously noted.* In other words, language mediates the existential unfolding or disclosedness of Dasein. 

Further, in as much as our actions are determined via linguistic categories, language is also in a very real sense world-creating. It certainly does more than merely represent the world, or communicate ideas. Language makes things possible; including the magical space/time of childhood.

II.

One of the most alarming chapters in Isabella Tree's recent book relates not to the destruction of the British countryside and the wildlife thereof over the last fifty years, but to what she refers to as the extinction of childhood experience in terms of the natural world.

Echoing the concerns of Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion, she reminds us of how the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have set about replacing words including acorn, buttercup, and conker with terms such as attachment, blog and chat room.** Whilst this obviously reflects a "shift in children's perceptions and activities over the past few decades", it might also help explain why so many young people seem so fucked-up today.   

For according to the author, much that is troublesome in their behaviour is rooted in a lack of empathy with (and knowledge of) nature. Not only are they unable to name trees, flowers, birds and insects, but they themselves are no longer spoken by the language of the natural world. Instead, they are enframed by technology and spoken by the language of social media and the digital workplace.

Thus, whilst they have profiles on Facebook and Instagram, they have a void where their souls used to be. And the more they intervene technology between themselves and the Outside, the more they numb and atrophy their own senses, denying themselves the opportunity to enter into a more natural revealing and to experience, as Heidegger would say, "the call of a more primal truth".    

A young child enframed by technology

Notes

*Heidegger first formulated the idea that language speaks [Die sprache spricht] in his 1950 lecture 'Language', trans. into English by Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper and Row, 1971). See also: 'The Question Concerning Technology' and 'The Way to Language', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994).

**Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion were among a group of 28 authors so concerned about the removal of words associated with the natural world from the OJD that they wrote to the publishers, calling for the decision to be reversed. Whilst recognising the need to introduce new words, they found it worrying that 'in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today'. I share this concern and don't believe this is simply a romantic (or nostalgic) desire to project memories of my own childhood onto today's youngsters. I also agree with Motion, the former poet laureate, who argues that by discarding so many landscape words and animal names, the editors of the OJD 'deny children a store of words that is marvellous for its own sake' and that their defence - that lots of children now have zero experience of the natural world - is absurd; for dictionaries 'exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know'.  

For further details, see Alison Flood, 'Oxford Junior Dictionary's replacement of 'natural' words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry', The Guardian (13 Jan 2015): click here to read online.

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), p. 294. 

For a sister post to this one - on biophilia and nature-deficit disorder - please click here.  

On the Romantic Conception of Childhood

Suffer little children and forbid them not - 

for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven

I.

If there's one child in modern philosophy and literature who should have been aborted, it's Jean-Jacques Rousseau's fictional offspring Émile (1762). For this immaculate conception fatally shapes the ideal of childhood not just in the Romantic and Victorian period, but well into the twentieth century.

Indeed, in some quarters, there is still an ideal insistence on the essential moral superiority of an individual child over the collective corruption of adulthood. To grow up - I was recently informed - is to fall into complacent mediocrity, accepting of your own limitations and all the evils of the world (i.e. to grow up, is to give up).

Those who believe this - whether they know it or not - are giving credence to the opening li(n)e of Rousseau's book which asserts that each and every child is perfect at the point of their divine creation - Rousseau rejects the notion of Original Sin - but quickly degenerates within a social system designed to erode their natural goodness.   

According to Voltaire, when not fantasising about the noble savage, Rousseau likes to imagine himself as part-educator, part wet nurse to an infantalised humanity. 


II.

Thanks, then, to Rousseau and his novelistic treatise Émile, from around the middle of the 18th century many cultivated and otherwise perfectly intelligent people began to view childhood in a more sentimental light; i.e., as an authentic state of innocence and freedom.

The traditional idea - that children were born sinful and therefore required moral instruction and setting on the path to righteousness with discipline and punishment - was thrown out with the bath water. Perhaps, it was argued, what children really needed was love and affection. And perhaps they should be encouraged to express themselves and develop their healthy instincts and natural creativity.

If Rousseau was right, then, it was hoped, his method of education would preserve the special attributes of childhood and this would result in well-adjusted adults and model citizens.     


III.

Rousseau's ideas rapidly crossed the Channel - Émile was first published in English in 1763 - and disseminated by Romantic poets, including Blake and Wordsworth, who fully bought into the idea of childhood as something blessed. After all, hadn't Jesus told his disciples that in order to enter God's Kingdom they too had to become as children [Matthew 18: 1-5].

This new idealised version of childhood became (and remained) an immensely powerful myth; in all kinds of literature and art, the innocence and purity - and, yes, even the supposed wisdom - of the pre-pubescent was promoted as something that adults should cherish and learn from. Children, it was now thought, were not only our future, they were our salvation too - And a little child shall lead them!

But, of course, these weren't actual children - snot-nosed brats who like to pull the wings off flies - they were, rather, imaginative representations. Even artworks that appeared realistic were underpinned by cultural understandings of childhood and reflected the values and desires of the artist; usually male, usually upper-middle class, and with little knowledge of children living outside the nursery and no direct experience of what day-to-day childcare involved - Nanny takes care of all that.

IV.

By the mid-19th century, the so-called Cult of Childhood arguably reached its nauseating and slightly pervy peak. Lewis Carroll, for example, wasn't simply content to celebrate the childhood of Alice Liddell and her sisters in his writing (and nude photography), but liked to confess his longing to return to a state of infancy himself. A poem entitled 'Solitude' closes with the following lines:

I’d give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life’s decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

Now, it's one thing to gaze upon the world with childlike wonder - and perhaps the struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. But it's another thing for a man to actually want to be a child and give an obscene literal rendering to Christ's words. This, says Lawrence, is an extreme form of decadence; a sheer relaxation and letting go of all adult pride and responsibility. 


V.

When not dreaming of regression like Lewis Carroll, there were other men, with darker fantasies, conceiving of ways in which adolescence could be deferred and children kept in a state of eternal childhood. Thus it is that in some of the best-read and most-loved Victorian fantasies we discover a sinister tendency for child characters to die and thus, in this way, remain forever young.

So it is we arrive at a fatal conclusion: idealism ends in murder - for each man kills the thing he loves most. This is why child worship is a form of cruelty and abuse. Place a child on a pedestal, fetishise their virgin purity, and you'll soon find you've built a sacrificial altar ...

See: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (Basic Books, 1979).