"cooperation is older than sex"
Kathryn Paige Harden, a behavior geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin
"plumb that well" was the Freudian slip she used as a psychology Ph.D.... interesting.
https://kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/being-a-child-is-not-a-sin
In For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, the psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes the “poisonous pedagogy” espoused by Christian pastors and physicians in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before Hitler came to power, when the Nazis were still children, what were their parents reading? Content that sounds like it could have been written by James Dobson.
For instance, one Dr. Schreber, whose books went through forty printings in Germany, wrote:
“The little ones’ displays of temper as indicated by screaming or crying without cause should be regarded as the first test of your spiritual and pedagogical principles . . . Once you have established that nothing is really wrong, that the child is not ill, distressed, or in pain, then you can rest assured that the screaming is nothing more than an outburst of temper, a whim, the first appearance of willfulness. Now you should no longer simply wait for it to pass as you did in the beginning but should proceed in a somewhat more positive way: by quickly diverting its attention, by stern words, threatening gestures, rapping on the bed . . . or if none of this helps, by appropriately mild corporal admonitions repeated persistently at brief intervals until the child quiets down or falls asleep . . .
This procedure will be necessary only once or at most twice, and then you will be master of the child forever.”
Corporal admonitions … repeated persistently … until the child … falls asleep?
What happens when a child is hit, and then instructed to quiet down and fall asleep—or maybe, as Dobson instructed, to smile and hug the person who hit them? Miller argued that, “If there is absolutely no possibility of reacting appropriately to hurt, humiliation, and coercion, then these experiences cannot be integrated into the personality; the feelings they evoke are repressed, and the need to articulate them remains unsatisfied, without any hope of being fulfilled.”
In other words: If someone hurts me (“I am making you hit your brother until you weep”), while telling me I am not being hurt (“I love you and this is good for you”), and if allowing myself to know that I am being hurt is too dangerous, I must come up with some way to make that knowing go away.
To the young child, the parent is necessarily a sort of god. The parent’s caprices must be rationalized as just and good, because what is the alternative? That they are dependent for their very survival on a fallible being, capable of cruelty? Such a conclusion is intolerable for a child. It’s intolerable for many adults, even: Avoiding coming to such a conclusion about the Christian God is exactly what motivated the doctrine of inherited, inherent sin in the first place. I must be bad, so my parent can be good, and my parent must be good, if I have any hope of survival.
Original Sin (2026).
https://kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/what-makes-a-child-go-bad-nature
I’ve published papers on genetic influences on ADHD symptoms and conduct problems, on early sex and marital conflict, on drunk driving and problematic alcohol use and illicit drug use, on psychopathic personality traits, on rule-breaking and aggression and violence. (To be clear, I’m not saying that all of these should be considered bad behaviors; I’m saying that schools, parents, religious communities, and the state do consider these behaviors to be violations of their rules. Thou ought not.)
Given the volume of research that I and others have conducted on the genetics of these “externalizing” behaviors,...........
am no longer an Evangelical Christian, but I do believe we inherit predispositions toward sin. Sometimes I am outraged, and convinced that someone deserves punishment, only to find my convictions shimmering, fading, as I inspect them more closely. I have spent much of my adult life studying how our genes, and our early environments, cause us to behave in ways that are punished. What does this work mean for how we should treat one another?
Next month, my book addressing this question will finally be released into the world. It’s called Original Sin: On The Genetics of Vice, The Problem of Blame, and The Future of Forgiveness.
...............
I'm guessing the phrase "biological annihilation" is not in her book. The problem with "evolutionary psychology" is it is too anthropocentric....
She points out that cooperation can be harnessed for evil. This is an ironic take on the Duke University research couple's book - how being friendly was advantageous for humans.
Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanityis a book by Duke University professor Brian Hare and researcher Vanessa Woods. It argues that, rather than "survival of the fittest," human evolution was driven by friendliness, cooperation, and social tolerance, similar to the domestication of dogs.
So in this sense - being friendly has humans has led to biological annihilation accelerating on earth...
Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and acts as co-director of the Texas Twin Project
No comments:
Post a Comment