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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 16, 2009
Fun & games
I am notoriously uncharitable to psychologists, fairly generally, and beyond them to those who use psychologizing arguments to explain anyone's behaviour or beliefs, including their own. (Example: "I'm depraved because I was deprived," or, "You believe in God because you need an authority figure.") Indeed, this is part of my general "conservatism" -- and the reader may attribute it to an intense dislike of moral evasion, with no known psychological cause.So I am not usually well-disposed to such books as Alison Gopnik's latest -- The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life -- just published and possibly headed to the top of the "serious" bestsellers. It purports to show how "the child is father to the man," in light of findings by developmental psychologists over the last few years. More broadly, it is a book written by a mother who raised four children; and by a woman whose mind, though educated to some modest degree in philosophy as well as psychology, remains almost recklessly playful. This is what makes her worth reading: for here is psychology that goes beyond psychologizing, into something more like journalism. Gopnik's may not be the best for the purpose, but is nevertheless among the most accessible books that show how recent empirical research into the behaviour of the littlest human folk has utterly demolished the assumptions and "theories" of such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. Both of those old shysters, and all the hag armies in their train (feminists, behaviourists, etc.), have held that the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, reality from imagination, moral good from bad, is for all practical purposes socially imposed. Only in adolescence, they suppose, are the pegs driven home to support the tent of civilization -- and then, to be quite obtusely Freudian, only under the pressure of a budding sexuality. Perhaps I am understating. Let me go a bit farther and aver that this is at the root of Stalinism, and all other species of leftism; of psychologizing in every form and kind. What these all have in common is the belief that humans are a "social construct," that they can be changed through social engineering, that reality itself can be "reformed." There is nothing, for instance, in Barack Obama's comprehensive proposals for audacity, and change, that does not presuppose this false account of human nature. (And therefore nothing in it that can possibly work.) At the very least, Gopnik shows that human apprehension of an objective moral order -- founded on the Golden Rule: to do as you would be done by -- is innate. This sense of justice is present long before adults have had a decent chance to tamper with it, or to impose ideological blinders. From a very young age, even before continuous memory has set, the babe is playing with hypotheticals and counterfactuals in a remarkably knowing way, and is in little doubt about the goodness or badness of his behaviour. That even a babe is capable of evil -- of doing the bad in defiance of the good, in the absence of sufficient self-control -- is made wonderfully apparent in Gopnik's book, and many other empirical studies. The importance of play, in the development of children, is seldom so well stressed as by Gopnik. The child's empathy is also innate, and first appears, as if spontaneously, in the loving return of the gaze of his mother. It is developed through his imagination, in which he posits imaginary creatures, from invisible playmates to magical dragons. Indeed, the lack of empathy observed in autistic children correlates well with a failure to play such games. Yet it does not follow that the normal child (and note the absence of quotes) is any less able to distinguish the products of his imagination from the creatures of the external world. The normal child is not credulous; he knows that he is playing. The normal adult likewise plays, and knows the difference between the imaginary and the actual; he entertains hypotheticals as a prelude to action. All humane learning, and Prudence itself (the queen of the non-theological virtues), depend on such a play of the mind. The normal adult is still capable of a rather childish joy, in his empathetic and imaginative entry into other lives, and parallel situations. As Gopnik would have it, normal adulthood is too often abridged by the avoidance of play. She goes too far in casting typically feminist aspersions against some of the greatest Dead White Males on this account; but only because she does not understand them. Plato himself knew that we must learn from children, and that genuine philosophical education is founded in the play of art. But she is right in the main: that we enforce upon ourselves a zero-tolerance autism when we discard wit, humour, conscious acting and play, in the cause of what I'll call "political correction." And let me conclude with some gratuitous psychologizing of my own, by suggesting that a monstrous humourlessness may be the key to the left's narrow and tyrannical vision. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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