On shame. I have watched the rise in pro-shame propaganda in the US
with great concern. A serious problem here is that the word "shame" has
two meanings. John Bradshaw, popularizing the folk psychology of the
recovery movement, articulates the distinction well: healthy shame is
one's ordinary conscience and boundaries and the desire to keep private
matters private; toxic shame is what a child internalizes through abuse,
having concluded that s/he must be a bad person who deserved to be
abused in that fashion. The frequent conflation of these two meanings
is an important ideological support for oppression. Assertions that bad
behavior reflects a lack of shame are very confused, and "shaming" is the
deliberate abuse of a person whose effect (and, basically, whose purpose)
is the creation of toxic shame. As Alice Miller (a very problematic but
brilliant and justly influential writer on abusive disciplinary practices)
points out, this practice is generally justified as being "for your own
good". Abusive religions (including several that claim to speak in the
name of Jesus) often naturalize the inner sense of badness (toxic shame)
and then act to reproduce it through their advocacy of shaming practices
such as corporal punishment and the injunction to "quit whining". So,
although ideas about shame *are* culturally specific, this fact does not
follow from the observation that mothers in Latin America favor shame and
mothers in Connecticut do not: they may have different meanings of the
word in mind.
On lightly equipped minds. I can see how Hutchins' theory of mind might
raise moral problems, inasmuch as he portrays us all as less smart than,
say, Descartes thought we are. As some have pointed out, Hutchins is
simply following in the anthropological worldview that we are largely
products of culture, and that our cultures do much of our thinking for
us. It is not surprising that a gulf has historically divided such
views from liberal views about the autonomy of the individual; one name
for this gulf is counter-Enlightenment (that's us) versus Enlightenment.
When I was involved in artificial intelligence, though, I had another way
of thinking about it that I still find useful. The question, in my view,
is not whether people are smart or dumb. From what I can tell, in terms
of innate capacities (as opposed to learned beliefs and practices), people
are just about as smart as they could possibly be. AI is mostly pretty
confused as a field, but it *does* have useful ways of talking about this
"possibly". It's not a matter of IQ (Descartes thinks we're geniuses;
Hutchins thinks we're morons) but of computational practicality and
physical realizability. On this view, Hutchins is not saying "we could
have been smart but in fact we're dumb"; instead he is saying "we are as
smart as we could possibly be, but that only goes so far, and so together
we have evolved a traditional system of beliefs and practices that lets us
fit into something larger". This notion of "fit" is returning to AI, and
AI has some good things to say about it. In some ways Hutchins' views are
similar to those of Simon in "Administrative Behavior" (ca 1944), in which
he spoke of organizations as providing complex cognitive environments that
are well-fitted to (what he would later call) the "limited rationality"
of individual organization members. This idea -- a picture of individuals
not as perfect self-contained spheres but as jagged puzzle-pieces who
fit snugly into equally jagged niches in a larger institutional puzzle --
disappeared from AI in the early days (Simon claims not to know why). It
has returned lately, and is on display in a special double volume of the
_Artificial Intelligence_ journal that MIT Press will republish later this
year as "Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency". This is not
to say that the moral problems are resolved, but perhaps it's a piece of
the puzzle.
On control. To avoid clogging the mailing list, I won't reply to Jay's
note in too much detail. Just a few points:
(1) It seems to me that his argument is slightly unfair, in that sometimes
he claims only to be talking about gross physical violence (to which we
are all, of course, opposed), but often it seems he's trying to shift the
moral force of that simple point into the more difficult middle ground of
smaller and more subtle coercions.
(2) I also found his statements about fathers downright ugly. That
fathers are often wounded and abusive does not imply that children do not
need fathers. Children need *healthy* fathers; whether they're better off
with a bad father or none will vary case-by-case. My own experience comes
from deep conversations with a great many men (that being the focus of my
own work) whose fathers were physically or emotionally absent; it hurts
all the way down. But my point in my message was more abstract, about
the structuring and ordering and containing functions that tend to be
symbolically associated with fathering, whether that symbolic association
is fair or not.
(3) Jay scoffs at my mention of "negotiation" in school settings, given
the power asymmetry. I used to think this way too. But it's a false folk
model, and a grossly disempowering one at that, to think that negotiation
requires parity in power. Negotiation is whatever determines what happens
when power is at stake. It is a skill, and if you believe that you are
powerless then you will labor under the fixed belief that the authorities
will do whatever the hell they want, no matter what. But it doesn't work
that way. First of all, children do have many kinds of power, including
the power to disrupt and refuse and invent nasty nicknames and sabotage
things behind the grown-ups' backs. Secondly, most real adults are open
to suggestion, and negotiation is mostly about devising suggestions that
reconcile the parties' interests to the greatest possible extent. If
children grow up (as I did) believing that the powerful will always act
in a completely arbitrary manner that is both unpredictable and fixed in
advance then they will be greatly handicapped.
(4) Those and other small matters aside, I think that Jay's fundamental
claim is that children are going to grow into different worlds from those
that grown-ups already inhabit, and that this undermines the argument for
articulating an explicit set of values and creating structures aimed at
passing those values on. My world is different from the world my father
inhabited when he was 35: the Civil Rights Act had just been passed, the
worst phase of the Cold War was a fresh memory, the economy was expanding
and people like him could buy houses, and so on. But much is the same as
well, and it's meaningless to ask if my world is more like or unlike his.
My point is more specific. Children don't know how to pay bills, or get
a job, or drive, or open a bank account, or a thousand other skills that
one acquires during socialization into an adult identity. Those skills do
not change rapidly, and even though they change, today's adults know much
more about what they will be like in ten years than today's children do.
Here is my fundamental reason for writing. I believe that American white
middle-class liberal culture is being destroyed from within by a sort
of auto-immune disease: the impossibly contradictory subject-position of
white people in a world of identity politics. Having convinced itself
that its every fiber has been corrupted by bad habits inherited from the
oppressive past, it engages in a weird dance of embracing a potpourri
of basically decent values while denying that it has the right to impose
those values on its children. This is the real source of the strange
educational double-binds that I complained about in my previous message;
constructivism is just a theoretical rationalization for them. I think
that this approach to education -- and to life generally -- has proven
itself self-destructive and lousy politics. It provides all kinds of raw
material for reactionary propaganda and affords few coherent organizing
strategies in response. Much better, in my opinion, to articulate and
proudly embrace a set of positive democratic values, and to go right
ahead and pass them along to children. Part of the construction of such
values is an open acknowledgement of power: teaching children what power
is, how negotiation works, how to organize for what's right and against
what's wrong, how to respect difference without tolerating antidemocratic
behavior, the symptoms of internalized powerlessness, the nature of
addiction and its consequences for the earth, the difference between
healthy and toxic shame, the distinction between taking responsibility
for your actions and having responsibility thrust on you for things
that aren't your fault, the importance of boundaries and the skills of
asserting them, the indispensibility of hard work, and all of the other
things that most decent people believe. None of this requires brutality
of the sort that Jay denounces, but it does require that grown-ups act like
grown-ups, making use of their irreducible power and using it responsibly.
Phil Agre, UCSD