This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.
Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.
Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.
My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.
The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)
Aella did have a weird and indeed abusive childhood, but mixed in with it there's bits where the parents were not being unreasonable. A kid that is so sensitive they burst into tears because "people will be looking at me" does need to learn how to handle being in public. When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell. So for "burning with shame and tears streaming down my cheeks" Aella, the parents were not in fact being cruel to insist "you have to do this or else".
Also for someone smart, she acted kinda dumb. "Oh no, if I do this thing, I'll be punished" but she can't figure out - e.g. with the spankings - "okay, grit my teeth, suffer this one, and then I'm free". Instead it took eleven beatings until she worked out "do it and get it over with". I'm sorry for her, but she definitely was not the sharpest tool in the box when figuring out how to deal with the situation. Probably because she was so over-sensitive and over-emotional, hence the karate lessons were the kind of outside distraction she did need to learn how to toughen up.
I know that sounds unsympathetic, but there really are parts of her story where I can't help but go "okay, this thing here? this was in fact good for you". Like this little anecdote:
Yeeeeah. Someone who stops washing because somebody else said they didn't wash their hair (probably meaning they didn't wash it every day, or didn't use commercial shampoos rather than their own homemade blend of eggs and beer) is someone way too easily influenced and without any sense of "is this going too far?" I probably would have forced baby Aella to go to karate classes, too.
Not being yet conditioned to instantly come over for more beating right after being beaten does not sound like a failure of intelligence to me.
I wouldn't say that's intelligence, per se, but evolutionary instincts doing what they're supposed to.
Avoiding pain on a basic level sounds like what evolutionary instincts are supposed to do. They developed way before sadistic will-breaking cultures did.
Yeah, it is instinct. But instinct can be harmful, and the outcome there is that being unable to over-ride instinct resulted in her getting eleven beatings instead of two.
It's horrible and the father should have been punched in the face, but it's what having the ability to reason also tells us. "I don't want to go to the dentist, because my jaw hurts afterwards. But if I don't go, then this problem will get worse, and I will end up in much worse pain later than the smaller pain now". She describes it as eventually her brain broke and over-rode instinct and that stopped the beating, but if she had been able to break voluntarily earlier, she would have been out of pain sooner.
I'm not saying it was right! I'm saying she doesn't seem to realise what she's describing, because she is still in that mindset.
I'd wager it's easier to go to the dentist than to subject yourself to beatings precisely because of the ability to reason that pain at the dentist is an unfortunate consequence of getting healthier teeth, not the entire point.
I have lost track of what you're trying to prove, but if it's "being able to voluntarily and without hesitation go get beaten for no good reason other than 'you'll get beaten more' is a reasonable standard for a child", it's going to be a tough sell. I doubt many here would meet that standard as adults, if a bunch of armed men broke into their house right now.
The purpose of the beatings is to get the child to behave well, for the parents' values of what constitutes well behaved, without having to constantly fight and renegotiate. In GKGW that's defined by instant, unthinking obedience without negative repercussions rebounding on the trainer. The program is to only do one beating if they get the proper level of deference, so the winning strategy is to go with that (and it sounds like Aella did most of the time, and also relates that to her unusual tastes in drugs).
Inconveniently, that doesn't work all that well on people, or at least the children of the sort of people who defy social norms to homeschool their kids in a weird cult in a time and place where that isn't really done. Also it's bad. There may be people it does work on, though one of the several misjudgments of the program is that unthinking obedience, once achieved, isn't actually valued all that highly in the civilization these kids belong to, anyway. It doesn't even seem to be all that highly valued by the Biblical God (c.f. Jacob wrestling with the angel/God, Abraham bargaining with the angels/God, Jesus sweating blood in the garden, etc), so even from a traditional strict Christian perspective, they're very fringe in not just their methods, but also their aims.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link