In which I agree with Will Wilkinson
(posted by Angelica)
This does not happen often:
Political freedom loses much of its point in the absence of psychological freedom. Rationality and the capacity for moral agency develop. That’s why we do not think children have the same rights and responsibilities as adults: they haven’t developed the requisite capacities. But this development can be retarded, creating adults with little more than a child’s capacities, reinforcing childlike dependency. If you don’t worry about this, then I wonder in what sense you care about human freedom.
It is tyrannical for parents to attempt to reproduce their ideologies and prejudices in their children, especially when this requires social isolation and emotional coercion. Liberals who worry about religious home schooling are not wrong to worry. I defend home schooling not because parents have a moral right to indoctrinate their children. Indeed, parents have a moral obligation not to. They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds. Many parents, though they intend the opposite, are in fact guilty of wrongful disregard for the development of their children’s psychological freedom. They deserve condemnation and ostracism, not interference from the state. I defend their political right to potentially behave immorally — to harm their children’s capacity for the full exercise of their rightful freedom — in part because I appreciate how accommodating pluralism reduces social conflict. But, perhaps more importantly, because I think that full-fledged competitive diversity in education will help erode superstitious thick identities, that it will help fosters a sense of contingency in inherited identities that make it easier to slough them off, or at least easier to wear lightly. But, even then, the scope of liberal pluralism has its limits, and it is neither right nor desirable to avoid the conflict inherent in debating and enforcing those limits.
I think what he says echos the points I made in a comment on Mona’s post on the FLDS. We’ve already hashed that discussion out, so I won’t revisit it here. I linked to Will because he made the case for my point of view rather more elegantly than I did.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:42 am
Honestly, I think psychological freedom is probably the only kind of freedom. There is no doubt in my mind that psychological persecutions, oppressions, and brainwashing occur on a daily basis in our society. Hell, we do it to ourselves half the time!
I don’t think that psychological oppression comes only from cults and families. It comes from teachers. It comes from salesmen. It comes from bureaucrats. It comes from bosses and commercials. It comes from our peers. It comes from the media and from nature. It comes from a million consensuses and traditions and unexamined errors. It’s coming at us from all directions. Please don’t try to tell me liberal pluralism is content to have me be whatever I want: it has a reasonably well-defined template I can easily adopt out of whole cloth.
And there’s no escaping this oppression. In fact, life is largely defined by dealing with adverse external conditions. One of the best ways to cope is to adapt yourself; to change who you are to better deal with environment. But that comes at a terrible cost sometimes.
In a way, that’s precisely what society is: a mental cage we put ourselves in to give ourselves the experience of co-existing with others. There’s a theory based on research done on children that consciousness is something you can only experience in a group; without that, you have no individual identity because there’s no distinction between group and individual. So the question to me is how we form identities that are of our own making, rather than being manipulated into them.
I think it ultimately starts with self-exploration and self-discovery. Liberalism can create an environment for that, but it’s not really gung ho about it - in fact, very few traditions or ideologies are. They usually focus on physical violence, an incredibly effective conditioner. I advocate pursuing parallel paths within and without to realize the individual’s identity as maximally self-determined. To me, anarchism is primarily spiritual.
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:50 am
“I defend home schooling not because parents have a moral right to indoctrinate their children. Indeed, parents have a moral obligation not to. They just have a political right to not be stopped, within bounds.”
And there’s another side to the coin. Any attempt by the state to regulate such enculturation by families, for the ostensible purpose of protecting children from “indoctrination,” will almost surely result in the inculation of a different orthodoxy–that of the state–in its place. It doesn’t require any sinister purpose. It’s simply unavoidable that whoever educates the kids will pass on their implicit (and perhaps largely unconscious) assumptions about “objective reality.”
I think this has a bearing on our earlier discussion of decentralism. The present centralized corporate system was created by massive, top-down structural changes, that were never subject to genuine political debate when they were in the making. And the system’s apparatus for cultural transmission and reproduction–the schools, the media, etc–presents the present system to people from their earliest years as natural and inevitable, and defines the “moderate” political center around the structural bases of the present system. By definition, “moderate” change involves the kinds of marginal tinkering around the edges of the present system, that not only leave the fundamental structures intact, but can be implemented by those presently running the system. Anything that involves fundamental changes to the structural underpinnings of the present system, or that would displace the elites running it rather than being implemented by them, is “radical and extreme” and never even appears in mainstream political debate because it’s never articulated by either one of the “both sides.” “Both sides” just want to put themselves in charge of the system, and engage in the above-mentioned marginal tinkering.
The system’s achilles heel, IMO, is that it’s unsustainable. Among other things, the economic effects of Peak Oil that you mentioned in an earlier post are likely to destroy corporate capitalism, or alter it beyond recognition. And Peak Oil is just one example. By definition, state subsidies to transportation infrastructure, and other inputs to the corporate economy, generate demand for those inputs faster than they can be filled. That’s what subsidies DO, basic Micro-econ 101. Eventually the system reaches a systemic crisis at which the state no longer has the resources to increase input subsidies any further. The only question is whether the decentralization will be catastrophic, or can be managed over a “long emergency” of two or three decades.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
TGGP really kept Will and pals on their toes in that discussion.
Basically, echoing what Kevin said about the inevitability of doctrine, neither TGGP nor myself or other skeptics of “false consciousness” are at all comfortable with the claim that by removing these children from homes they didn’t claim they wanted to leave to begin with (uh, rather important IMHO), they will somehow be “liberated” by “worthy” ideologies that have proven themselves via perfectly disembodied reason and good intentions. Yea, right.
Will claimed that false consciousness theory is defendable, TGGP says it is not falsifiable. Will retorts that the Marxist version, for example, is falsifiable, and it is false, but that psychology has given us insights into normative cognitive functioning. I then think, uh oh, the way ones mind ought to work? Will confirms my suspicion. Creeping Orwell…
One commentator over there mentions that terrible things are laying in waiting for the kids of these compounds in their future years, such as alcoholism and depression. Well, I somewhat doubt the former, and in any case referred him to a study of Texas foster care kids and their dismal prospects.