Given a rational choice, which he cannot have and will not have for many years, no baby would choose to writhe in his own waste. But this does not make changing his diaper any less an act of physical force – expressed with a forearm gently pressed to the baby’s chest if necessary.Photo by: Sellers Patton
I clicked through your link and read your post “We will not rid the world of cannibals by eating them…” and I found your thoughts very interesting. I found absolutely nothing to object to among these assertions:
You do not have the right to hurt people.
You do not have the right to effect retribution.
You do not have the right to exact revenge.
You do not have the right to demand recompense for injuries that might have occurred but didn’t.
You do not have the right to make an example of Joe so that Jerry will be deterred.
You do not have the right to teach anyone a lesson.
Other people’s lives are not yours to dispose of. Not ever.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Not ever.
I am curious about a few things in light of this extraordinarily clear explication of principles. Do you punish your son? Does your son go to school because he chooses to or because you require him to? Do you require your son to attend church with you?
I have no idea if these are “gotcha” questions or not. I have enough and too much experience with that kind of pretend philosophy, where, if you can make believe you have tricked me into saying something inane, now, on the fly, you don’t have to trouble yourself to think about what I’ve said and consider whether it might be true – despite its unfamiliarity or your having memorized a few “gotcha” tricks. I don’t know if this is the case here, and I am inclined to give my correspondent the benefit of the doubt, and, in fact, I don’t actually care. The fact is that I think about questions similar to hers all the time, and I think they are very important ideas to explore, and I am not hugely satisfied with my own conclusions. I think about everything, and I don’t settle for easy or received answers.
So, again, the fast way, literal answers:
Do you punish your son?
Yes, sometimes. We don’t strike him, but we do take away his privileges.
Does your son go to school because he chooses to or because you require him to?
We encourage him to choose to, which is effective about half of the time right now. The other half the time he follows through to hang onto his privileges.
Do you require your son to attend church with you?
Same answer, essentially. My son is a believing Catholic, where I am not. Sometimes he goes to Mass despite himself, and sometimes he goes without me, walking to church.
That’s facile, though, from my point of view, because it doesn’t deal with the underlying issue, the coercion of human beings, with the emphasis being critical.
Yet again, the more interesting way:
Do you punish your son?
Do you house-train your dogs?
Does your son go to school because he chooses to or because you require him to?
Do your dogs pee in the yard because they want to or because you make them?
Do you require your son to attend church with you?
Do you compel you dogs to walk on a lead?
Now the “gotcha” answer to all these questions is, “I don’t have dogs,” and I have zero respect for that kind of evasion. But the more interesting question would be, “Greg Swann, why are you equating your son with dogs?”
The answer is simple: Because a post-natal genetic Homo sapiens is not a human being. A human being is a man-made thing, an artifact, created by the human parenting of a normal post-natal genetic Homo sapiens. Absent human parenting, a normal post-natal genetic Homo sapiens will never become human. It will flail around as a hideous parody of an animal, never developing the rationality that is present in potential, but which must be cultivated to be realized.
The question I think my correspondent is not quite asking is this one: “Greg Swann, how can you reconcile your claim that you never have the right to coerce another human being with the obvious fact that you coerce your son every day?”Father’s DayMore Married. More Husband. More Father. More Man.Available at Amazon.com
I never stop thinking about this – and not just with respect to my son. It bothers me that I imprison and compel and physically punish my dogs. Every one of our animals is neutered, and it plagues me no end – particularly the males, with whom I can more easily identify. I wrote about the domination of horses in Meet the Third Thing, and I will tell you that I have never resolved this question to my own satisfaction. Certainly from the point of view of the horse or dog, exclusive internal motivation is right and just, considered not as concepts but as attributes of behavior. From our own point of view, we would argue that Big-Mother-knows-best, but it is easy enough for me to take the animal’s side in that debate.
But the point is this: What I am coercing in my son is not the nascent rational human being, but the vestigial irrational animal.
But that’s not going far enough, because it is important to understand this:
All parenting is coercive.
Not just human parenting, mind, but animal parenting is a much less rigorous, less time-consuming pursuit. But when a human parent cajoles a normal post-natal genetic Homo sapiens to smile or to make raspberries or to say, “Baba,” that parent is coercing that child, willfully diverting it from the mental path of its own choosing and redirecting it to the path of the parent’s choosing. It is no less an act of loving coercion than picking up the puppy and hustling him outdoors to pee, praising him to the skies all the while. Given a rational choice, which he cannot have and will not have for many years, no baby would choose to writhe in his own waste. But this does not make changing his diaper any less an act of physical force – expressed with a forearm gently pressed to the baby’s chest if necessary.
So, again: “Greg Swann, why are you equating your son with dogs?” Because my son, when he was born, was more like a dog than he was like a human being. The fact is, he bore nothing in common with human beings except appearance, where his activity in the immediate post-natal period was extremely dog-like. But a dog at four weeks is an amazingly capable creature compared to a genetic Homo sapiens at the same age. And I can have a puppy house trained at eight weeks – ecstatically so – where my son took a good deal longer than that to learn to use the toilet.
And yet again, the not-quite-asked question: “Greg Swann, how can you reconcile your claim that you never have the right to coerce another human being with the obvious fact that you coerce your son every day?” Because it’s baked in the cake. The choice to become a parent, for human beings, is the choice to lead, plead, persuade, cajole, reward, punish – to coerce – a very poorly-adapted mammal into becoming a supremely well-adapted human being.
We believe in the ‘Catch your kid doing something right’ idea, incentives versus disincentives. Ultimately, to become a fully human human being, my son must learn to choose to do the right thing for the right reasons. But we are very much aware of his animal motivations, and we most definitely deploy them to his advantage. We want him to play the violin well because the purpose of mastery is mastery. If he chooses to play the violin well in order to out-do his fellow young violinists, we smile behind our hands, recognizing that animal motives are often venal motives, but they are not always harmful motives. But in the same way, when he chooses to laze around like one of the dogs, we are all over him, leading, pleading, persuading, cajoling, rewarding, punishing – coercing – him to live up to his identity.
