--
----------
>From: "Thomas Lunde" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: "Douglas P. Wilson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Re: Co-stupidity (and the flaws that cause it, or context that
nourishes it)
>Date: Thu, Aug 5, 1999, 8:56 PM
>
>
> I would like to mention WesBurt at the start of this post. I have just read
> his lengthy post and though I cannot follow all his economic arguments I can
> agree with his thesis. Society has totally neglected the investment in it's
> children by not providing additional income for those years of parenthood.
> The capitalistic idea of paying a single man the same as a married man with
> children is obscene and only penalizes the parent and society as a whole.
> WesBurt's analysis is correct as far as it goes in my opinion, but it
> neglects the ideas I present below through Pearce's quote - and he is not
> the only author making these statements - they just don't get good book
> reviews.
>
> Now, it turns out that our Prime Minister may actually bring in a National
> Day Care system and guess what, it amounts to $5000 per child per year up to
> the age of six. I would say that WesBurts math is pretty good. In light of
> what Pearce says though, that $5000 per child would be better spent allowing
> the mother to mother her children rather than send them to day care. If
> mother's mothered, we would not only get healthier psychological adults but
> their removal from the workforce into this highly specialized and natural
> employment would also lower the unemployment rate bringing some of our
> economy back into balance.
>
> Now to my answer to Douglas's points:
>
>
> ----------
>
> Thomas wrote:
>
>>> You know, people are the problem. Why? My answer is because most of us are
>>> terribly dysfunctional. Why?
>
> Douglas wrote:
>>
>> Actually I don't think we are all that dysfunction by nature. How
>> well or poorly people function depends on their social context or
>> social environment -- the people they live, work, and make love with.
>
> Thomas:
>
> Ah, that I had a scanner or ten hours to type in a proper response to this
> statement. Given that I don't and I don't really want to paraphrase the
> power of the words in the following lengthy quote, let me say they come from
> the book Evolutions End by Joesph Chilton Pearce who has just spent two
> excruciating chapters talking about the childbirth practices in the United
> States and most of the Western World and how they have destroyed Natures
> birthing cycle which has created a lack of bonding, the first and most
> essential step in healthy child development. At the risk of boring everyone
> on the list senseless, I am going to pick up his thread on Page 125.
>
> Quote:
>
> No good comes from discussing any of this. An enormous literature has
> appeared over the years to no avail. These obscene practices have become
> not just acceptable but the model for childbirth. Our current generations
> are the unbonded victims shaped by the system, terrified of the thought of
> birth outside the medical umbrella, willing to pay any price to avoid
> personal responsibility for what is considered a dreadful experience. As my
> New Zealand physician friend, Stephen Taylor, put it, this is really a basic
> war of man against woman. In the male intellect's long battle with the
> intelligence of the heart, the real trump card was found in catching the
> woman when she is most vulnerable and stripping her of her power. Now, it
> seems we have her --- and are surely had. Beneath it all grows great anger:
> children angry at their parents; men angry at women because they didn't get
> what they needed from women at life's most critical point and still fail to
> get it; women angry at men for robbing them of their power and, identifying
> with their oppressors, rejecting motherhood and men in the process. This
> has caused a rising tide of incompetence and inability to nurture and care
> for offspring. The genetically encoded intuitions for nurturning have been
> shattered, and the results are cloaked by ever-so-practical
> rationalizations. The largest growing work force of the 1980's were the
> mothers of children under age three. Day care, an unknown phenomenon until
> recent years, is a major growth industry. Seventy percent of all children
> under age four were in day care by 1985, and major concerns of the nation
> are how to get them all into day care --- and who will pay for it.
>
> Our species has survived throughout its history by women caring for women in
> childbirth, yet midwifery in the United States has been virtually illegal
> for the last half century. Male surgeons are in charge and many of the
> female obstretricians follow their system andd are little better. Home
> birth under any circumstances is safer and more successful than hospital
> birth, by a six-to-one ratio. That is, the death rate is six times higher
> in hospitals than at home, regardless of conditions.. Male doctors'
> intellect has interfered with women's intelligence and in effect, destroyed
> a major segment of their lives. Medical childbirth is one of the most
> destructive forces to issue from the mind of man and a most destructive
> force on earth today. And, as so often in history's ironies, we bow down
> and worship that which is destroying us. We "honor our doctor as our god"
> (as one medical man's sign admonished), and offer up in propitiation our
> mothers.
>
> In 1979 the government of California funded the first scientific study ever
> made of the root causes of crime and violence. Their first report three
> years later stated that the first and foremost cause of the epidemic
> increase of violence in America was the violence done to infants and mothers
> at birth. It is the primary cause of our explosive rise of suicide, drug
> abuse, family collapse, abandonment and abuse of infants and children,
> deterioration of schooling, and social disintergration in general. Only
> television, to be discussed later, comes close in distructive force.
>
> One final observation has to do with the black community in America.
> (Thomas: And I might add the aboriginal communities in both Canada and the
> US). In the pre-World War II South, from where I originated, the black
> community delivered its children through its own network of midwives. The
> major characteristic of these black communities was their solidarity. They
> took care of their own and were in effect, one extended family ---which is
> the key ingredient of any true society. They took care of each other not
> just out of the grim necessities for survival but spontaneously out of the
> bonding function their home birth assured. I have watched the destruction
> of the poorer black communitiy's "extended family" power, which was its
> strength through centuries of oppression, through the simple act of shifting
> its birthing from midwifery to hospital charity wards, where new mothers
> receive atrocious treatment. And now many of these mothers are unwed
> teenagers with virtually no family, no support system, no education, no
> knowledge of birthing or mothering, to say nothing of the influence of
> drugs, alcohol, and AIDS. The situation worsens at an alarming rate.
>
> Several hundred infants a year, of every race, are murdered outright by
> their parents in New York City alone. Our national average of infant murder
> is in the thousands, the average age of the victims from two weks to two
> years. One million children a year, from every race, creed, and financial
> level, are hopitalized as a result of parental abuse. A disproportionate
> share of the damage is done to black infants.
>
> In america, systematic destruction of the bonds between mothers and infants
> has created a black community at war with itself. Reports of brain damage,
> estimated as high as 40 percent, from these hospital practices have been
> ignored, and in most cases not even published. The clear and detailed
> medical studies of autopsies of SIDS victims, 80 percent of whom are black,
> showing damage due to the violence done to the infant at birth, were
> ignored. So far the growing vilence in our black communities has been
> largely contained within that community. Black teenagers kill each other
> with abandon, but there is just as much violence exhibited by black men
> toward black women, and the anger and fear of women toward their men is all
> too often taken out on the children. This was not the case when I was
> young. We blame it all on drugs, of course, or poverty, neither of which is
> the case. Our black communities in the pre-World War II South knew a
> poverty far more extreme, harsh, and unrelenting than today---yet their
> solidarity and extended family held them together. The breakdown we witness
> today is a result of the violence done both mother and infant at birth --- a
> psychic shock acted out from that point on. Rather than a cause, the drug
> taking we see is in itself but one of the many fall-out effects of this
> basic genetic damage.
>
> During World War II the precentage of children born in hospitals in America
> rose from around 30 to 97 percent; home births were stamped out, midwifery
> was virtually outlawed, and childbirth became the source of very serious
> money. Breast-feeding was discouraged even before this, but after World War
> II it was considered a cultural embarrassment; and home birth, the common
> practice before World War II, even more of an embarassment. Thus the
> nation's psyche was split. Television followed within ten years, then day
> care came, and shortly after, drugs.
>
> Today we witness the macabre drama of a horde of lawyers swarming in to feed
> on the vulture-like obstetrical body that feeds on the dying social body.
> Have you sued your OB recently? This malpractice madness has exacerbated
> every outrage, increased every invasive technology, and obliterated all
> remaining common sense. Dark clouds gather for us and for all those
> "backward" nations to whom we send out our "life-saving" childbirth
> interventions. Japan threw out its ancient midwife system some twenty-five
> years ago in its major industrial cities, imported all our machinery, and
> then technologically outdid us; within ten years the violence in schools and
> homes was epidemic, while the "stress level" and rate of alcoholism
> skyrocketed in the Japanese work force. In a two-week lecture tour there, I
> was asked most often by older people how young mothers could say they didn't
> know what to do with their children. "How can a mother not know how to
> mother?" these elders asked in bewilderment. The answer lies in the
> arrogance of the male intellect in undermining Nature's wisdom, casting on
> water a bread returned tenfold.
>
> I think of our Senate passing a bill that hospitals must teach new mothers
> how to mother and breast-feed. Can you imagine teaching a mother cat how to
> nurse her kittens and care for them? The tide is possibly turning, though,
> after all these years. Jessica Mitford has targeted birth in America, and
> midwives are beginning to catch on to the devious machinations of the
> obstetrical intellect and are finding out how to maneuver on legal grounds.
> Women who resent the loss of their personal power to the obstetrical world
> can take a decisive and effective step simply by supporting Midwive's
> Alliance of North America. Our civilization , as well as our species
> survival is at stake here.
>
> Douglas said:
>>
>> Most of use are connected to the wrong people, incompatible people,
>> and so we seem to be dysfunctional, but I am utterly certain that in
>> the right social context almost all of us would be smarter, more
>> productive, more creative (not the same thing!) and happier.
>
> Thomas said:
>>
>>> ... We have made bad guesses about human psychology, child birthing,
>>> child development phases and we are working against nature, the result has
>>> been dysfunctional people. A leap of logic here, when you have
>>> dysfunctional people, you have dysfunctional society's, dysfunctional
>>> economic systems and dysfunctional relationships.
>
> PS: A bumper sticker wisdom statement: Mean people make mean people!
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> Well, that's a theory. Quite the opposite of my own, I see, since it
>> blames dysfunctional relationships on dysfunctional people.
>
> Thomas:
>>
>>> Joesph's answer is to start trying to raise more people from pre-natal to
>>> adulthood who are not dysfunctional.
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> I don't think we really know how to do that. From my own theory I'd
>> suggest surrounding each child with compatible others, with compatible
>> adults to supervise them, and so on, but it doesn't make sense to test
>> one theory using techniques from one that's precisely the opposite.
>
> Thomas:
With no disrespect, the way to do that is to examine the
> allegations Pearce has made. To examine native societies that existed
> before the white man came. To examine primitive cultures - the few that are
> left in terms of psycholgical wellness instead of the statistics of child
> mortality, which often have to do with cleanliness.
>
> As to the compatible adults - Pearce states there aren't many left,
> certainly not enough to go around for all the children that exist. In my
> opinion, you have fallen into the trap of trying to correct a psychological
> problem of epidemic proportions by curing each sick individual rather than
> examing what has made them sick. An out of control medical establishment, a
> ruthless capitalistic system that destroys communities and individuals, an
> academic community that has ignored many of these causes because they are
> degree granting institutions who are selling a product and they can't
> destroy their own product.
>
> Thomas:
>>
>>> ... These people, not being dysfunctional will then
>>> be able - from their more normal perspective, will be able to devise
>>> new systems that make people more of what they could be. Well, that's
>>> a pretty utopian plan but it has a logic in it that is difficult to deny.
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> Denial is a speciality of mine, but I'll try to resist. To be scrupulously
>> fair (for a change) I should point out that both theories have some
>> merit, and both could be true. Human society is full of such viscious
>> circles. Bad people make bad relationships, but bad relationships
>> make bad people. Break the loop anywhere and we may have a chance.
>
> Thomas:
>
> I don't think your break the loop theory is valid. Today in the Ottawa
> Citizen was a whole page article about how medical science has found a way
> to predetermine how sperm can make a male child - I didn't read it because
> it sickened me. On the West Coast, it has become common for those of
> Oriental descent to go to Washington State to get CAT Scans to determine the
> sex of their babies in time to abort the female because of a cultural desire
> to have male children.
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> I still think the world is filled with basically good people, with good
>> intentions, who are warped by their social context.
>
> Thomas:
>
> It ain't the social context that warps people - it is the inability tof
> science to recognize that Nature has spent a long time finding out ways to
> make our species survive and develop and we are interfering - not only in
> childbirth, but environmentally, food wise, medically, etc etc.
>
> Douglas:
>
> I think we can
>> change that context, finding good jobs, good friends, and all the
>> other social necessities for people. Surely people who are happy and
>> productive at work and equally so at home would also be more
>> perceptive of the world around them and inclined to make it better.
>>
>> Most of the people who support the peace, distributive justice, and
>> environmental movements are not oppressed conscripts in poor
>> countries with no trees, but rather comfortable westerners who have
>> the time and money to spare. That's not a criticism of these people,
>> just the opposite, I commend them for seeing beyond their own
>> relative happiness to the misery of others. Let there be more
>> such people.
>
> Thomas:
>>
>>> ... You can't make something better when your raw materials are flawed ...
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> Fine craftsmen the world around know how to make the best out of less than
>> ideal materials, patching and filling and all the other tricks of the trade.
>
> Thomas:
>
> Fine craftsmen are in rare supply.
>>
>>> ... You can't make a better people society when the flaws in the
>>> people that created the dysfunctional society are the very onestrying
>>> to design a new society. ...
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> I don't know why you say these things. They scare me.
>
> Thomas:
>
> And I intend too. Read the last sentence again of Pearce's quote that I
> typed in - I believe it is that serious.
>
> Douglas:
>
> The first step
>> is labelling people as "flawed", the next step is making the most
>> flawed wear some distinctive marking, say a yellow star-of-David, and
>> the next step is eliminating the flaws with poison gas.
>
> Thomas:
>
> In fact, we should mark those who are not flawed, they are the rarity.
>
> Douglas:
>>
>> I prefer to say that people are basically good, are an excellent raw
>> material, and that we can make an excellent society with them. All we
>> need to do is help people find the social necessities -- good jobs,
>> good friends, love, a mentor to learn from, someone to teach, good
>> co-workers, good neighbours, and so on. In such a context these
>> people's underlying nature will bloom instead of being repressed or
>> warped, and they will then be able to cleanup this planet and keep
>> it that way.
>
> Thomas:
>
> Optimism is fine - but read the daily newspaper for reality. Sorry if I
> seem overly negative but I think the situation calls for a strident denial
> of the status quo.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Thomas Lunde
>
>
>>
>> dpw
>>
>> Douglas P. Wilson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> http://www.island.net/~dpwilson/index.html
>> http://www.SocialTechnology.org/index.html
>>
>>
>>
