05 Jun What does it mean to help my child become a good child? (JORDAN B. PETERSON) | Part B’
If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It’s a one-sided, deeply ideological theory.
Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from this presumption of
social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by
cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to
deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people
who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based.
This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social
revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous. We have learned to live
together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches
of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing
works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological
shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good,
given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.
Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in
the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the
hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so. Horror and
terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at
our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where
unimaginable monsters lurk.
I see today’s parents as terrified by their children, not least because they have been
deemed the proximal agents of this hypothetical social tyranny, and simultaneously
denied credit for their role as benevolent and necessary agents of discipline, order and
conventionality. They dwell uncomfortably and self-consciously in the shadow of the alltoo-powerful shadow of the adolescent ethos of the 1960s, a decade whose excesses led to
a general denigration of adulthood, an unthinking disbelief in the existence of competent
power, and the inability to distinguish between the chaos of immaturity and responsible
freedom. This has increased parental sensitivity to the short-term emotional suffering of
their children, while heightening their fear of damaging their children to a painful and
counterproductive degree. Better this than the reverse, you might argue—but there are
catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum.
The Ignoble Savage
It has been said that every individual is the conscious or unconscious follower of some
influential philosopher. The belief that children have an intrinsically unsullied spirit,
damaged only by culture and society, is derived in no small part from the eighteenthcentury Genevan French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau was a ferventbeliever in the corrupting influence of human society and private ownership alike. He claimed that nothing was so gentle and wonderful as man in his pre-civilized state. At
precisely the same time, noting his inability as a father, he abandoned five of his children
to the tender and fatal mercies of the orphanages of the time.
The noble savage Rousseau described, however, was an ideal—an abstraction,
archetypal and religious—and not the flesh-and-blood reality he supposed. The
mythologically perfect Divine Child permanently inhabits our imagination. He’s the
potential of youth, the newborn hero, the wronged innocent, and the long-lost son of the
rightful king. He’s the intimations of immortality that accompany our earliest
experiences. He’s Adam, the perfect man, walking without sin with God in the Garden
before the Fall. But human beings are evil, as well as good, and the darkness that dwells
forever in our souls is also there in no small part in our younger selves. In general, people
improve with age, rather than worsening, becoming kinder, more conscientious, and more
emotionally stable as they mature.Bullying at the sheer and often terrible intensity of the schoolyard
rarely manifests itself in grown-up society
This means
that it is not just wrong to attribute all the violent tendencies of human beings to the
pathologies of social structure. It’s wrong enough to be virtually backward. The vital
process of socialization prevents much harm and fosters much good. Children must be
shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive. This fact is reflected starkly in their behavior:
kids are utterly desperate for attention from both peers and adults because such attention,
which renders them effective and sophisticated communal players, is vitally necessary.
Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by
abuse, mental or physical. This is damage by omission, rather than commission, but it is
no less severe and long-lasting. Children are damaged when their “mercifully” inattentive
parents fail to make them sharp and observant and awake and leave them, instead, in an
unconscious and undifferentiated state. Children are damaged when those charged with
their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them
without guidance. I can recognize such children on the street. They are doughy and
unfocused and vague. They are leaden and dull instead of golden and bright. They are
uncarved blocks, trapped in a perpetual state of waiting-to-be
Part A’: https://www.lecturesbureau.gr/1/2595/?lang=en
