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Wednesday
December 8, 2004

When I First Became a Criminal by Adam Reed

A young woman whom I recognized from the NBI lecture was in the bookstore, leafing through W. Ross Ashby's "Introduction to Cybernetics," which I had read two years earlier. We started talking about the book, then about other things. By the time we came out of the bookstore, we were talking about the differences between Ayn Rand's and Aristotle's conceptions of rationality; and I was, for the first time in my life, in love. (Read more...)
Discuss this Article (133 messages)

Post 120

Friday, December 17, 2004 - 6:51pm

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If a parent were teaching his child to repress his sexual desires because they are evil, that would be wrong. However, if a parent teaches the same because even though sex is good, a child is not ready for that pleasure, that would be fine - for the simple reason that it is true.

Out of curiosity, what conditions do you believe are necessary for a person to be “ready”? I hear a lot of people talk about “emotional maturity” or the like, but it's rare that I hear anyone try to define the term.

Now, I do think emotional maturity is probably a valid consideration, but I still think it's not a good idea for parents to just tell their kids “you aren't ready” as their justification for forbidding such activity. Leaving aside the kids who dive into things just for the thrill of the forbidden, what I worry about are those who might take words like this too much to heart.

How is a young person to know when he is “ready”? Probably he has been given no explicit means to judge his “readiness,” except the approval of his parents or other authority figures. What is he to do, besides spend the rest of his youth with a deep-seated doubt in whether he is “ready” yet or not. In the extreme case, I would even hypothesize that he might conclude (in response to the morality of the culture around him) that he isn't really “ready” until he can stop thinking about sex in the adolescent fantasy terms of selfish pleasure and accept it as a mature duty to be performed for his wife.

Despite the good intentions of the parents in making the “not ready” justification, through that kind of thought process it can lead as surely to the acceptance of the mind/body dichotomy and the resultant suffering as does the “sex is evil” premise^*. Of course, I know nothing about adolescent sexual psychology, so this may not correspond at all to the reality of such persons, but it seems like a possible logical consequence of the “not ready” premise to me.

^*How many parents actually teach their kids explicitly that “sex is evil”? Isn't it probably far more common for those who hold that belief to veil it in terms like “sex is evil if you do it before you're ready”?

Post 121

Friday, December 17, 2004 - 7:42pm

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*How many parents actually teach their kids explicitly that “sex is evil”? Isn't it probably far more common for those who hold that belief to veil it in terms like “sex is evil if you do it before you're ready”?

I know many parents who teach, “Sex is evil, so don’t do it until your’re married, whereupon it transforms into unavoidable evil.”

Post 122

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 6:18am

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Nature says: Out of curiosity, what conditions do you believe are necessary for a person to be “ready”? I hear a lot of people talk about “emotional maturity” or the like, but it's rare that I hear anyone try to define the term.

Nature, I think this is an important question. I'm glad you brought up and I hope others will contribute to the answer. As the mother of 5 daughters (4 of them teenagers), I've always gone with an "I know it when I see it" kind of standard. You are correct that I should be more empirical. I have avoided saying, "Because I said so" in conversation with my girls--mainly because that one never held any water with me when I was growing up. I do think it's important that my daughters have a strong sense of who they are before becoming involved in a sexual relationship with someone else. One of the emotional dangers of sexual relationships is beginning to live through the other person. Jeanine mentioned kids who commit or attempt suicide because they can't have sex. I'd say that's a very strong sign of someone who isn't emotionally ready. I mean REALLY, it's just sex, it's not worth dying over. If someone is going to make it that important, they have bigger problems than not getting to have sex.

Also, the participants need to be confident enough to clarify what they can expect from the encounter. For example, is this really a more intimate physical expression of our love? are we just trying this out because it feels good (roughly on the emotional level of an ice cream sundae)? or what? There are many possible emotional ramifications from sex.

The physical consequences have already been discussed, I won't go into them other than to say the individual must be ready to deal with those as well.

I'm sure someone has a more concise answer to your question, and again, I hope it gets explored because this is an important consideration--maybe even the key to this topic.

I don't think it's been made clear here that my reasons (and I think most parents' reasons) for wanting our children to be ready before they have sex are not primarily economic. When I stop my toddler from running into the street, I'm not doing it to avoid the possible medical bills. I'm doing it because I love her and don't want her to be hurt. It is the same situation with my older daughters and sex.

Post 123

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 8:06am

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On emotional maturity and being "ready".

In an earlier post, I suggested that it is the responsibility of parents to protect their children, and was, partly, a reason to enforce a code of ethics in the home.

Suicide attempts because someone can't have sex? That is more indicative of a need for help than parental repression.

What do I tell my own daughter? Some of what I tell her is this: You are gold. Your time, your energy, your mind, your body, are all precious. Value yourself. Learn what you value, learn what you desire. Tolerate very little. Learn your boundaries. Practice setting them. Be selfish. YOU choose who, what and when. Never let another choose for you. Saying NO can be a powerful thing. When you say YES, it is your values, your choice, your responsibility.

Part of my responsibility to protect, is because of her age. Also, because the motivations of teenage boys and teenage girls when it comes to intimacy and sex ARE different. So I am scared for her, as any father would be.

I will know when she is ready when she is able to choose with full knowledge, and selfishly.

John

Post 124

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 11:04am

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1) Just for the record, my reaction in horror, via Adam's original post, was not to parential control over sex (which I also oppose), but parential orders to a child to cease involvement with someone they love. Parential discouragement to sex in itself is an evil, but parential orders to cease or bar romantic love constitutes an absolute, unforgivable evil, in fact as far as I am concerned perhaps evil's basic metaphor.

2) Despite the requests, themselves rational, that I defend some points made on this thread, I have decided not to do so. My reason is that I simply share so little in terms of spirituality and sense of life with most here that I fell no base of comment assent to discuss from, and no joy or interest in discussion for its own sake. I will sketch below my essential values wherein I disagree with Objectivism, but I will not further discuss; I just cannot find any desire to.

3) For the record, the essential issues I disagree on are:

i) the scala naturae view of human dignity
ii) the nature of emotions
iii) the value of emotional authenticity
iv) the nature of sex
v) the nature of 'maturity' and 'responsibility'
vi) the consequences of repression
vii) the wisdom of youth vs. adulthood

Ultimately, these reduce to the question of whether human value is essentially a transcendence of nature, or a further expression of immanent nature. Objectivism sees emotions as essentially animal, sub-rational, and need of schooling by reason; I see the emotional and rational complexity of human existence as inextricably intertwined and that both must be affirmed involved without bending or reservation for a worthwhile human life, which I do not see in terms of contradistinction with animality but rather a special case of animality (and life and nature in general). This constitutes a fundamental distinction with Objectivism, whose Prometheanism is not just a revolt against authority but an authority defined by all things imminent and organic in human life, with revolt defined by all things instrumental and directive.

Objectivism inculcates believes that reason is "higher" than emotion, and its basic fear is a loss of control via sliding back to the emotional level. This is Aristotelian, this is conservative, this is functionally little different from bourgeois Christianity.

For those of us who believes that humans differ from other animals in the degree of their complexity is both reason and emotion intwined, and who view reason as fully functional in direct and unmediated contact with passion, and emotion as essential rational and in need of respect and fulfillment, the Objectivist program to bring emotions in subservience to reason is ethically a methodical program of murder of the human spirit. An Objectivist society would train children to repress their emotions until they want the teleologically 'right things', it would organize society and cultural institutions to quarantine the disease of unrepressed emotions by the use of property and other values identified with reason to exclude emotional persons from the benefits of civilization; it will organize institutions along heirarchical, disciplined lines, and will use maintain a (romanticized) bourgeois ethic that considers the essential nature of happiness to be the regular pursuit of instrumental values and the suppression of passion not congruent with that end.

Granting my view of the nature of happiness, Objectivism would create a nightmare of repression worse than the existing society and rife with unhappiness, but filled with people of armored, proud egos who have invested their passions in their refusal to the temptations of emotionalism and who will never feel their joyless existences.

Objectivism is a patriarchy- Objectivism defends the essence of pride as self-control over emotions, the essence of ordered liberty as a society civilized by the discipline of reason over emotions, and its revolt is the revolt of those superior in their capacity for control over those who 'give in' to their emotions. It believes in ordering society not to make full expression of human faculties, rational and emotional, possible, but in organizing society under the authority of the principle of production and of curbing human faculties of joy which don't produce to that end. It models all human virtue and human affairs on the specific conditions of survival and hence mistakes the means of life for the end. Objectivism is right to demand respect for manufacture and commerce, but in the end its specific philosophy gives all human affairs the taste of iron and sterility.

And I am last glad to finally understand this, for it resolves much within me personally. There are places where I feel that Objectivism alone among today's philosophies exults what I love in life. But there are other places where the tenets of Objectivism are iron teeth against everything I have found my calling and made my spiritual vocation to exult, exalt in, and defend in this, my life, on Earth.

If I had wings, no one would ask me, should I fly
The bird sings, no one asks her why
I can, see in myself, wings as I feel them...
If you see something else
Keep your thoughts to yourself
I'll fly free then

Yesterday's eyes sees their colours fading away
They see their suns turning to grey
You can't share a dream, you don't believe in
If you say that you see, and pretend to be me,
You won't be, then
(Peter, Paul and Mary)

Jeanine Ring,
Aster Manque

Post 125

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 1:50pm

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Reed,

I was, of course, using "repress" as rhetorical device to emphasize the primacy of reason in the happy life. I think parents are negligent if they do not teach their children how to repress - by which I mean control - their appetites, feelings, and passions. I assume from your statement that you are not denouncing this commonsense but something else altogether nasty and anti-life. If so, I agree with your hatred of "repressive parenting".

Leseul,

I hesitate to say there's a bright line test for determining emotional maturity. Some youngsters are old souls before leaving home. Others need another decade or two leading the life of a dissolute adult before they mature. But I'm not sure emotional maturity is a necessary question for parents to address in making their rules of the house. If the kid is under their roof, the parents rule. If the kid is out on his own fending for himself, then his life is his own to mess up.

Tenya,

Amen! In the end sex is just not important enough to let a child ruin his life over. Your daughters are fortunate to have such a wise mother. I hope I can be just as sensible when mine are teenagers.

Jeanine,

What concerns me most about your posts on this subject is that it appears you view children as small adults. I'm not saying you advocate this, but I think one of the rottenest things parents can do to a child is rob him of his childhood. Childhood is the one and only time a person can embrace the world in innocence and completely free of the burdens of living. He should not have to worry about finances, politics, sex, and all the things an adult must cope with to succeed in life. As a child approaches the age of majority, parents must prepare him for these things and the most important preparation is teaching him how to gain experience in the adult world without harming himself. This, of course, means counseling against plunging into sexual relationships. In other words, go slow, and this is advice for a newly minted young adult. So, to loose a child into the emotional tumult of sex, romance, and love with no experience of these things is simply cruel, irresponsible, and calculated for disaster. I suppose I should be amazed that this is not obvious. But little in today's degraded culture surprises me anymore.

R. Pukszta

Post 126

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 2:32pm

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Newnham,

I expect your little girl to do fine with a father who teaches her to value herself. This is the epitome of Objectivit morality.

After all, who are we kidding here? How many teenaged girls are bedded for anything more than a boy's (or worse, a man's) need to gratify his lust? Girls must be taught to not let themselves become vessels for another person's desires. As you say, a girl must learn to value herself and have the self-esteem that immunizes her from the debasement of pleasing others with her body.

Pukszta

Post 127

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 3:00pm

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I do essentially view children as small adults, and adults as large children. I think the carefree state of subservience idealized in childhood is the same myth of childlike dependency of Victorian females, the cloudworld of Christian Heaven and the pastoralist longing for a lost Arcadia. Similarly, I think the glorification of the gloomy, repressed state of sacrifice, repression, duty, 'responsibility' expected of adulthood is a horror only partially alleviated by formal freedom.

The glamorization of helpless dependence and the valorization of repressed liberty are the flip sides of the same coin. True happiness involves encourages the young girl, adult woman, and old lady to enjoy life for its own sake, by conscious awareness and clear application of reason. Dependency should be encouraged in none; and the annihilation of choice a crime to all. The answer to 'lost childhood' is to live its value as an adult- with an adult's freedom, knowledge, and power. I do so, and proudly. That is the true grandeur of life.

I have no desire to turn one's back in resentment upon the garden of Eden, repress my longing, and romanticize and pretend to love a life of blood, sweat and tears- and call that happiness and freedom for man.

If this is conflicts with Objectivism, so be it. Objectivism draws in me on an increasingly depleted bank account.

As for debasement, I consider a culture that can only experience things as signs of 'achievement', or 'moral worth', never for their own beauty, pleasure, debased. Our traditional culture knows nothing of the immediate joy of life, which defies reason as a war on emotions, happiness as the deferral of pleasure, civilization as the refusal of spontenaity, production as the control of recreation, and sets all relations to heirarchies of achievement, ladder and pillars to be climbed without end, rules to be followed, loves to be lost, rigidities to be learned and internalized- so that some day, after years of struggle, one can venture to a comfortable life of duty, wife, and children and then die a small death after a small life. That is what I call degradation, and may that culture well perish as it deserves!

Post 128

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 3:27pm

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I'll just note that Rand once claimed that the answer to irrational emotions wasn't to learn to repress emotions but to understand one's emotions, change one's values, and hence change one's emotion- and emotion itslef should never be repressed. And Rand's early writing suggested the perusal of a life where one's emotions can have opportunities for expression and that life becomes continuous, joyous exaltation.

I find it at once shocking and laughable that the only way repressionists can think of getting through life rationally is to repress emotion- perhaps they should learn how to actually use the emotions- not be mastery and control, but by existing fluidly within them to learn continuous joy in complex process. Of course, this doesn't work with today's managerial workplace, but it's perfectly consistent with productive and intelligent life.

Rand portrayed such lives in her fiction and the unabashed exaltation of life in her first stories. Its such a shame that when she turned to philosophy, she picked up terms with Christian-Platonist definitions and constructed an ethic for an inspirited golem instead of a human being. And its too bad that most of her followers, who as creatures of patriarchal dualism have no experience or respect for anything but inspirited golemhood, have lost nearly everything of Rand's passionate envision and made her magnificent fire a furnace to power a machine of repressive devastation whose frame of philosophy and insignia of egoism give it a destructive potential in Christianity unmatched.

Post 129

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 4:59pm

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Rooster,

Please keep in mind that reason is NOT a "thing" that can be set in opposition to the rest of the Self. Reason is an attribute of the person; it is absurd to assert that reason should have "primacy" over other attributes, such as happiness, passion, and especially integrity. An integrated soul develops from moral autonomy, and that requires practice. What I call a repressive parent is the parent who does not respect the moral autonomy of the adolescent. Respect for the adolescent's moral autonomy means, that the parents may not condition their support of the adolescent on a demand that the adolescent surrender her moral autonomy to the parents until she leaves home.

Lack of respect for the moral autonomy of the adolescent is often part of the "intellectual baggage" that former Moslems, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians etc. bring with them into their new life as Objectivists. Of course those of us who grew up taking for granted our parents' respect for our moral autonomy, have a hard time understanding how hard it may be to give up one's control for the sake of letting the adolescent grow up into an independent and virtuous individual. But to expect that the adolescent will learn responsibility by obedience, is like expecting that a greyhound will learn to run if you just keep taking him for a fast drive now and then, in his cage on the back seat of your roadster.

Back when I lived in New Jersey, I got into a conflict with the local Sopranos, was framed for a crime, and spent several days in jail before I could prove my innocence. Not having anything to read, I asked the jail chaplain for a copy of the Jewish Scriptures. He had a pack of them, but it took him eight days to find it, because no one had ever asked him for a copy before. In a county where Jews make up some 10% of the population, I was the first Jew in jail - which held thousands of prisoners at any one time - for over a decade. I think that there is a lesson for former Christians in there somewhere.

Post 130

Saturday, December 18, 2004 - 11:48pm

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Msr. Reed-

(and glad to have some personal affairs straightened so as I can again so address you)

Let me second what you have said, both in gratitude for keeping a sunray open to my vision of the Objectivist world, and because my own experience (in a strange way) greatly confirms your own.

You received an upbringing so moral it fell light as a feather. I received an upbringing so immoral is fell like an anvil- and by the time I straightened out the damage it did and set myself in my own direction, I was marked in many ways but my parents' moral authority had cancelled itself. Thus, I ended up to a degree greater than most people constructing my own sense of emotions- something which changing sex and joining the Life helped with, by making most of my past irrelevant and giving me a clean slate.

Msr. Puke talks about constantly repressing irrational urges, and takes the disaster of heeding those emotions as evidence of repressions- as base 'animal' instincts which humanity and dignity consist in overcoming. But the point is that I, and I suspect you, don't feel generally these emotions as given and basic- that these 'natural' base desires are in fact natural only to immoral emotion that is the flip side of moralized reason. The use of repression, not authentic sight, to shape the soul in a rational direction inevitable creates a sewer of repressed desire.

I look at this description of the passions- and a mindless horde of desires to be ugly, gross, and senseless- and flinch in horror- such are not my desires, and I see no need to repress emotions because my emotions are, in the main and in principle, parallel to my convictions (for good or for evil). Msr. Puke assumes everyone basically feels these vicious passions and assumes that everyone just has to be pushed to control, control, control before all Hell breaks loose- and people have to be protected from other's desires, which are also vicious- safe company is controlled company.

This is to me the essence of everything that is wrong with the world; it amounts to a basic fear and distrust of the human soul. This is, whatever it is presented as, Platonism, or Christianity, or from a sociological point of view the ethics of patriarchy. It is precisely looking at the world at a struggle to suppress dark emotions- continually represented as children, women, foreign devils or some kind of 'other', that has given us endless slaughters of selves, loves, and persons. The model is the same whether it is picturing government as controlling criminals who are "of course" tempted to predation, sexuality "of course" tempted to obscenity, children "of course" tempted to random unreason, or foreigners "of course' tempted to unreason and hatred. Control the self, control others, control the populace, control nature, control the body, control the passions. It is never thought that all that is complex and ingenious in the world might be the perfection and realization of much maligned basic want or desire, and that the more free one allows desire,t he better people will learn to become. Well, such is the ruin of misery before us.

I think most people have forgotten that as young people, they desired to know- they only later forgot that joy under the force of schooling; that as young people they enjoyed activity, and had to be told not to constantly do things- they forgot it when commanded to work; that while young they loved the experience of life and not cynicism and pain- they forgot it when told what is 'right' to enjoy and not enjoy. Msr. Puke talks about the wonder of childhood, but to the degree that wonder is real, what is real about it is the fearless facing of existence that Rand spoke of in her presentation of the children of the gulch in Atlas Shrugged- not the silly ethereal childhood our society drips sentiment about... in parallel with a senselessly repressive adulthood.

Ultimately, the question is whether the emotions pursue their dark purposes which reason must control, or whether the emotions are a translation of one's conclusions which if one is free to think, will be rational, and thus will be the emotions. If the latter is true, the attempt to control the emotions by violating the judgement of the young can only produce exactly the repressed, rationality-hating, evasion-loving psychology that Msr. Puke takes as natural and inevitable.

my regards,

Jeanine Ring )(*)(

Post 131

Monday, December 20, 2004 - 10:17am

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Glenn,

I just read your post and I thank you for the response. I am not familiar with the distinction between "moral rights" and "legal rights". To my knowledge, it is not in the Objectivist corpus, so any argument in that direction is probably new ground. If I interpret your concept of "moral rights" correctly, it sounds like you are saying a child is under no obligation to give his parents his moral sanction if he does not agree with how his parents choose to raise him. If that is the case, then I agree with that. It also works the other way too. Of course, I am sure we both understand that what you choose or choose not to give moral sanction to has little to no weight outside of your own mind, much less a court of law.

My problem with calling "moral rights" rights is that it confuses the issue. Per Objectivism, rights can only be infringed by the initiation of force. To qualify some "rights" by referring to them as "moral rights" opens up a can of worms, namely defining rights as the Democrats understand it (e.g. rights as entitlements to specific goods and services such as "health care" or "education"). I am sure no libertarian wants to go there. There are many choices that do not involve the initiation of force that I do not give my moral sanction to (e.g. I am against abusing narcotics) yet I advocate the legality of (I am for legalizing all drugs).

Now, you brought up a good point when you asked to what extent a parent can punish their child for disobeying their demands. There has yet to be an extensive Objectivist treatise on this important issue (a point I brought up earlier) but I'll take a stab in the dark. I think that a parent should unconditionally provide for a child's food, clothing, and shelter (their biological and safety needs, to use Maslow). Until the child is an independent adult (by some reasonable and objective standard), that should be an obligation that is legally binding. Anything beyond that depends on the relationship between the parent and child. For example, if a child does not do his chores because he's too busy reading "Atlas Shrugged", that could affect a parent's decision as to how much allowance to give next week.

Post 132

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 - 6:20am

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Thank you for that, sir.