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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26002 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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We're always just one Benjamin Spock away from revolutionizing childcare and killing a bunch of children in the process.

You used to be able to look towards a healthy society and base your judgement on that. Mixing and matching the old and new, good and bad, like a good conservative. But it seems 'good conservatism' doesn't necessarily lead to healthy children or 'healthy societies'. As we've managed to revolutionize those as well under their watchful eye and careful guidance.

I would like to blame people like Freud, Spock and other culture critique warriors who judged what a healthy society was based on other metrics than the societies ability to rear 'healthy' children. But at the same time much of the blame falls on the societies themselves for failing to defend themselves against bad memes.

Instead of firm guidelines, education and a social fabric built around babies, we get a cyclical revolution driven by anecdotes, hobbyists and professional weirdos constantly trying to keep up with an ever-degenerating society.

19th/early 20th century child-raising approaches in the developed world created several generations of people who killed something like 70 million of each other in the span of about 30 years and built multiple viciously authoritarian governments.

For someone living in 1950 and spending his time investigating child-raising, I'm not sure there was really any large-scale model of success to point to.

Victorian era America and Britain were just as big on the whole ‘kids belong in a coal mine, not in front a screen’ thing as Austria-Hungary, the Russian empire, and China. They also notably didn’t produce brutal dictators who killed millions.

Estimates for deaths that are more or less directly downstream from British colonialism also range in the tens to hundreds of millions, and it's not hard to draw direct connections between how British society at the time envisioned the relationship between adults and children, and how it envisioned the relationship between colonial master and colonial subject. On the US side, the Civil War was about in the middle of the Victorian era...

Modern parents do such a wonderful job of teaching their children not to start world wars or become communist dictators. If only little Adolf and Joey had some gentle parenting, all that nastiness could have been avoided.

I think you're being sarcastic, but to be honest I think yeah, if little Adolf and Joey had gotten more loving parenting there's a very good chance they wouldn't have ended up becoming dictators.

That said, I'm sure that there have been many dictators who had loving parents so having loving parents is probably not a sufficient condition for not becoming a dictator.

On this website we do not besmirch the name of Klara Hitler!

But seriously, I've never heard anything to suggest that she was a bad mother. And I read about Stalin's mother and she didn't seem bad either.

To be fair, I don’t think coming home from work every night in an alcoholic frenzy and viciously beating your 8 year old son would exactly be considered “Good Parenting” even by the standards of 19th century Georgia.

From what I know about 19th century Georgia I don't think it would be that exceptional.

19th/early 20th century child-raising approaches in the developed world created several generations of people who killed something like 70 million of each other in the span of about 30 years and built multiple viciously authoritarian governments.

I don't believe this applies to American 19th/early 20th century child-raising approaches.

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