Underwater World: Mixed-up Morality

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a stark example of how mindless we have become. Instead of being mindful and doing things in good and appropriate ways to begin with, we spend most of the time trying to fix the problems we caused due to mindlessness. It makes for messed up societies with mixed up morality.

For example:

Child rearing

When I was on a train in Europe last summer I heard a young baby crying and crying in the next car. When I got off I still heard the cry and saw a couple casually chatting and pushing a pram with the highly distressed infant. (I intervened, to no avail.) Somehow we have the idea that children don't really need that much care, or that their bodily needs must be put up with at first, and that they must be trained to be independent or they will forever be whiny dependents (but the opposite is true). So we mistreat children by causing them lots of distress (isolating them, letting babies cry) leading to aggressive personalities, depression, anxiety disorders and all sorts of health problems (check out this symposium).

As James Prescott so wisely pointed out, Western civilization has turned evolution on its head by promoting imposition of pain on children. Our species evolved for pleasure in relationships, which used to be part of early life experience among our ancestors (still apparent among hunter-gatherers today). Instead, we isolate and punish children during the critical period when their brain/minds are forming. No other mammal does this. I would call this child torture.It leads to a disordered society and our inability to pay attention to our bodies or each other.

Our bodies

Somehow we think that we are not our bodies, that our bodies are machines that we can toggle with this or that pill and go on, basically ignoring them. Symptoms of bodily distress (e.g., indigestion, headache) are treated as if they are nuisances to be drugged away instead of signals that our behavior needs to change. After we have run down our soma to grotesque illness from lack of sensibility about what it/we need, Western medicine will have some gerrymandering it can do to keep us going. These are moral issues for all sorts of reasons. For one, if you don't understand or attend to your own embodied self, how can you fully attend to someone else? Ignorance and poor intuitions about what humans need leads us to mistreat children in schooling.

Schooling

Somehow we think that children are like machines that you put some quarters in and should get a coke out. When they don't give us what we want (obedience and performance) we kick the machine--blame and punish the children. For example, when children can't sit still through boring classroom tasks (when their bodies want and need to be running around playing), then we diagnose them with ADHD (see the definition in DSM-IV) and forcibly drug them for their restlessness (see the film, the War on Kids). A misunderstanding of children, of development, of bodies, of learning, also leads to....

....Poor Parenting and Poor Parenting Support

Somehow we think that parenting comes naturally. But the evidence shows that first time parents are terrible parents (see Sarah Hrdy's Mothers and Others). And when you have been raised by a neglectful parent, your parenting is even worse, and so it goes on through the generations. Maybe that is one reason why parenting shown on television in the 1950s is so different from parenting shown today.

Somehow we have the notion that moms (or mom and dad) should take care of the children on their own. This emphasis on the nuclear family is less than 100 years old (the bloodiest 100 years of human history, I might add). The rest of the time humanity has been around, the extended family cared for children. It's too much for one parent or two to care for a child. You need the grandparents and other family members to give the child the support it needs throughout life.

Because we think kids are born good or bad, that their raising is largely "babysitting," our society doesn't give parents much support. We expect parents to be able to hold a couple of jobs and still raise decent kids. Stressed parents lead to distressed children who end up with all sorts of difficulties.

In recent weeks we can see the results of mindless moral formation. We have forgotten how to build moral citizens. So it should be no surprise that the adults in charge of oil companies, or oil rig inspections cheat and pass the blame, and the watchdogs go to the dogs. Mindlessness all the way down.