Children

I recently had the pleasure of attending the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference in Bochum, Germany . The highlight for me was attending a talk by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig on pre-linguistic communication. Getting home, I ordered a copy of Tomasello’s Why We Cooperate in which he argues, on the basis of detailed empirical work with young children and other primates, that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds. Many of the details of Tomasello’s work are controversial (the book is essentially his Tanner Lectures and contains replies by Silk, Dweck, Skyrms and Spelke) and I lack the competence to begin to adjudicate some of the disputes. But this much is, I think, clear: that work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t – quelle surprise! – support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy.
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Haven’t seen the new one yet (it will be the four year old’s first movie in the theatre, so we are trying to figure out a family expedition, so that everyone can enjoy him enjoying it), but its arrival reminds me that I’ve been meaning for ages to post on how Toy Story 2 maps out the major themes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. They both are driven by the same basic idea – of highly intelligent, potentially autonomous creatures who define their happiness entirely in terms of the happiness of others. In Never Let Me Go, this makes the (liberal) reader quite queasy. In Toy Story 2, this is treated as an entirely happy and natural state of affairs. Perhaps it shouldn’t be – and that so many people take the social relations in Toy Story 2 for granted, suggests that NLMG’s clones’ acceptance of (and even joy in) their status is less socially unrealistic than some of its critics think.

There’s an article to be written on this (perhaps taking Gene Wolfe’s chilly little short story, The War Beneath the Tree in along the way. In the meantime, from this perspective, Stinky Pete is perhaps the only character in Toy Story 2 who is genuinely free, even if he is stuck in a box for most of the movie.

Update: Tom Houseman# has similar thoughts.

The Lib Dems (for it was their policy and not the Tories’) have axed the Child Trust Fund, which, as Stuart White points out over at Next Left, was one of those rare policies directly inspired by the egalitarian liberal theorizing of the past forty years. (h/t Virtual Stoa). (To discuss, head over to Next Left).

Feminist Philosophers reports on some egregious behavior under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities:

a good friend of mine (a tenured philosophy professor in the states) was just accepted to an NEH summer seminar in [European city]. She’s a single mom and, obviously, wants to bring her son along. But, she says, she “has just been given 12 hours to “demonstrate” that she has full-time childcare arrangements for her son for the month of July that “are to the [completely unspecified] satisfaction” of the Institute directors; if she fails to meet this requirement, she has been told her accceptance in the program will be withdrawn. She was notified of said acceptance on Monday.”

The mind boggles. Then again, I’ve always thought it a very fortunate accident of nature that men are never in a position where they are responsible for offspring genetically related to themselves. (Is there even a word for that?). If they were, it would really be impossible to have a proper career.

Update: Edited to clarify the role of the NEH (as funder, not organizer). And just to be clear, I don’t have any inside knowledge on this incident beyond the post quoted above. As I say in comments below, perhaps some further details will emerge that make the whole thing an unfortunate misunderstanding or otherwise resolve things. We’ll see, I guess.

7854 posts in CT’s history, and virtually none written on autism. I think we are missing an opportunity here, to talk about something most people have no clue about, while chances are real that they have non-diagnosed people with autism in their families, neighbourhoods or professional circles. April 2nd was International Autism Awareness day, but since I was leaving that day for a family holiday, the post that I wanted to write arrives only now.
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Sad and upsetting times in Ireland. Cardinal Brady, it turns out, was instrumentally involved in the closed investigation of the monstrous Fr. Smyth, and himself swore to secrecy two children raped by Smyth. The incident simply resulted in Smyth getting some form of censure from the Church and going on to rape and abuse many, many more children. Whose parents were in turn stonewalled by the Church. How does anyone get over this? Should they?

Meanwhile, Pope Ratzinger is wriggling off the hook – at least this hook, this time – for his own involvement in a cover up. It’s odd to me that people are searching so intently for Ratzinger’s smoking gun, when as head of the Congregation for the Indoctrination of the Faith, he wrote to bishops telling them that breaking the seal of secrecy on church investigations of sex abuse was punishable by excommunication. That’s the smoking gun that destroyed not just the childhoods and perhaps lives of one or two children in Ratzinger’s direct responsibility, but thousands of children around the world who deserved better from the one, true Church.

The Irish adult voices of raped children are joined by American ones; people now grown up who were raped and abused by Fr. Smith when he was sent away from these shores and off to where he wasn’t known and could start again. A Connecticut woman poignantly asks why she was repeatedly raped by a priest who had been sent to America instead of to the police. An Irish woman asks why no one went to the police. If they had, she might have been saved. Many might have been saved. [click to continue…]

Following up our earlier reflections on genteel naming conventions, explored and expressed in the medium of webcomics: we note that this may be the greatest American Elf ever. However, there remains a question as to the absolute propriety of James Kochalka hereby ruining his older son’s chance ever to be President. (Then again, it’s a crap job.)

But you know what really makes me really proud? Not that I can write posts like this one, oh no. Rather, the Kochalka child in question has just invented a character named Mean Guy, who really does look quite mean. But my kid totally invented Mean Girl two years ago. Same look. And she has a rich, satisfying mythos to go with. Thus do I achieve through my children. (But I have a suspicion Eli Kochalka is better at video games than my daughter. She cannot steer a MarioKart to save her life, ye gods.)

The criticism of philosophers in the discussion of Michele’s post, specifically from our own Daniel that not much of the discussion was about how philosophers might listen to people from other disciplines, reminded me that I have been meaning to say something about one of my favourite books that I didn’t read in graduate school, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. Like another of my favourite books I would notice it in piles of textbooks for other departments in the university bookstore while I was in grad school, and spurned it mainly for its title. About 6 years ago, my wife read it for a class on children’s literature, and her rendering of the thesis that childhood was socially constructed made it sound so preposterous that I was compelled to read the book.

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According to Wikipedia, yesterday was the 100th International Women’s Day (I started writing this post yesterday, but spent most of that day at a feminist meeting and having a women’s night out. Sorry. But here it is – better late than never). Last year, here at CT, we discovered that in some countries this is not celebrated as a social or political event (as it is in Europe) but rather as a day to give your wife or girlfriend chocolates or flowers. So I felt it’d be good to post an old-fashioned political poster, stolen from the very same wikipedia site. Isn’t it awesome? [click to continue…]

(readers who don’t have children of a certain age shouldn’t worry if they don’t understand this post).

We’ve been discussing here at CT many, many times issues related to justice, care and the family, so I thought some of you may want to know that I’m organising a conference on that theme with some truly world-class scholars in this area. Information below the fold. There is a strictly limited number of seats, so if you’re interested, then immediate registration is highly recommended.
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I tried to run away from home once, when I was 7. I was not at all unhappy, I had just spent a lot of time reading Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit books, in which one character wandered around with all his belongings wrapped in a hanky on the end of a stick that he carried over his shoulder. I wanted to be like that. My mother, remarkably, helped me wrap up the belongings. It now occurs to me that she was probably reasonably confident that, in the middle of a massive thunderstorm, I wouldn’t get very far. I spend a very cheerful hour eating whatever she’d packed while sitting in a stream of water under a rather large table in the playground of the school, the schoolhouse of which we inhabited at the time. Then I returned home, defeated, cold, sodden, but full and happy.

But I never thought of eloping.

Among some groups of ‘Western’ feminists, perhaps especially within academia, there is a reluctance to draw attention to extreme instances of human rights violations in ‘non-western’ countries, especially in (predominantly) Muslim countries. The argument behind this position is that by highlighting the oppressions of women by some Muslim leaders or groups, one is playing into the card of Islamophobia, and contributing to the polarising rhetoric of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Some also argue that Western feminists should focus on unjust global economic and political structures for which Western governments bear responsibilities, rather than on local sources of oppression in non-western societies.

I think such concerns are in many instances justified. Nevertheless from time to time I am struck by the intensity of the violence against women and girls by some groups or leaders in the world (and clearly this is by no means just a Muslim issue). Moreover, it would be hard to deny that it is of a different order than the disadvantages or hampering social structures experienced by mainstream groups of women in Europe or North America.

Take the latest one from the Taliban: they have warned that in North-West Pakistan they will kill all girls who still go to school on January 15th, and that they will blow up schools who will enrol female students after that date. Now one would hope they wouldn’t have the capacity to execute such a threat, yet surely they will be able to kill some girls, just as they’ve killed so many other targets. It is just very sad that these things continue to happen when we are entering 2009. It reached the newspapers and the 8 o’clock news here in the Netherlands – but then, what else is going to happen now? As far as I can tell nothing much – except what must be a terrible decision to be made by these girls and their parents.

Ari, over at Edge of the American West, comes across a site saying that the Wild Things were Jewish.

The original concept for the book featured horses instead of monsters. Sendak said he switched when he discovered that he could not draw horses. The Wild Things (except “Goat Boy”, of course) were named after (and are presumably caricatures of) Maurice’s aunts and uncles: Aaron, Bernard, Emil, Moishe and Tzippy.

Maybe this is common knowledge to lots of folks; I did know the story about the horses. But it reminds me that when I was reading Where the Wild Things Are to my son two nights ago, I spotted that the moon in Max’s bedroom is three quarters full in the early illustrations, changes to a full moon when he begins his travels, and remains full when he returns to his bedroom, and (presumably) normality, linear time, and all that good stuff. Suggestions about what this is supposed to mean (and other WTWTA trivia) welcome in comments.