A friend has been talking about child abuse and sexual abuse going on in the Orthodox Jewish community in Miami. Another person is talking about the abuse in the Catholic Church. Then there's abuse in Islam, Hinduism, Baptists. There is abuse in the music industry, Hollywood, the military, politics, left-wing social movements, alt-right groups, Fox News, CBS News, the theatre community, prisons, college. Where ever there are humans, you will find abuse. It's not the religion or the industry that fosters it, but the silence. What allows abuse to continue systemically is a lack of open questioning and -usually- an us vs. the world mentality. If you can get your flock to fear the world outside more than what's going on inside the herd, then people will stick around and deal with the known devil in their own family, rather than facing the peril of the unknown boogeymen outside. Rather than spending time attacking one institution after another, why not deal with the mentality most people have going into most schools, religions, workplaces? Why don't we address the way we train our kids? Why don't we talk about the American cult of obedience that is killing us, making us stupid, allowing greed to divide us, allowing predators to run wild? We put obedience over-inquisitiveness, and compassion for our own kind over empathy for others. As long as these things continue, there will be systemic abuse in every institution...because it's the people that are rotten, not the system.
As a child, I was always mystified when I was kicked out of Sunday Bible school. I would ask a question. The teacher would get peeved. I would ask them why they were angry? They would deny it, saying that I was a child of God. I would say 'great b/c I have another question.' I would get the boot and my usual parting shot was 'don't you want us to be curious? Don't you want us to know?' They were trying to train me into a being a submissive adult. I knew that back then. I knew that the teacher's heart was in the right place, but they were just doing what had been done to them.
Time and time again, the biggest conflicts I've had in my life has not been when I was lazy or stupid. God, no. The world almost seems to relax and appreciate a lazy artist or a stupid man willing to stand with the herd. What has irritated, enraged, baffled people is asking questions, refusing to accept something in the herd, questioning a lawyer in court (which got me excused from jury duty for several years), questioning the purpose of an 'anti-hate' march at Northwestern b/c it represented the kind of vague white liberal blanket of nothingness that suppresses thought and encourages people to walk around at night with a candle and think they're doing something against a generic unspecified hate.
The cult of obedience leads to abuse, genocide, environmental devastation, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, #metoo, and all the systemic horrors. Why don't we re-train our kids and adults to question things, to demand accountability and righteousness?
As a child, I was always mystified when I was kicked out of Sunday Bible school. I would ask a question. The teacher would get peeved. I would ask them why they were angry? They would deny it, saying that I was a child of God. I would say 'great b/c I have another question.' I would get the boot and my usual parting shot was 'don't you want us to be curious? Don't you want us to know?' They were trying to train me into a being a submissive adult. I knew that back then. I knew that the teacher's heart was in the right place, but they were just doing what had been done to them.
Time and time again, the biggest conflicts I've had in my life has not been when I was lazy or stupid. God, no. The world almost seems to relax and appreciate a lazy artist or a stupid man willing to stand with the herd. What has irritated, enraged, baffled people is asking questions, refusing to accept something in the herd, questioning a lawyer in court (which got me excused from jury duty for several years), questioning the purpose of an 'anti-hate' march at Northwestern b/c it represented the kind of vague white liberal blanket of nothingness that suppresses thought and encourages people to walk around at night with a candle and think they're doing something against a generic unspecified hate.
The cult of obedience leads to abuse, genocide, environmental devastation, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, #metoo, and all the systemic horrors. Why don't we re-train our kids and adults to question things, to demand accountability and righteousness?
1 comment:
While I could not agree more that we are raising generations of vulnerable sheep that are getting so fat and flabby that an increasing number of 18-year-olds cannot even meet minimum health standards to enter the Army. However, I think that the solution is not necessarily to “re-train our kids and adults to question things, to demand accountability and righteousness?”
First, it is difficult to undo culture and reject cultural norms. Machine-gunning an instructor with questions is not inquiry but grandstanding. Such behavior does not advance the exchange or information or insights. It often does lead to social isolation.
Second, well-intentioned educators have indeed gone overboard in trying to create a school climate that does not discourage inquiry. In doing so, they robbed kids of the experience of “F” for failure, and seem to have turned several generations of kids into spoiled adults who cannot cope with stress and learn from failure. By creating stress avoiders, kids are reticent to ask a question, suffer embarrassment if it turns out to reflect their own ignorance, and thus just memorize the answer for the test. Yes it stifles inquiry and derails learning how to logic, but it gets you that diploma into adulthood.
Third, and most challenging, is the fact that our current pedagogy reinforces binary thinking in which all life experience is egocentrically binned into good-bad, friend-enemy, libtard-Nazi. Once this takes hold, it is nearly impossible to reverse. Soon binary thinkers suffer permanent nuance blindness. Every time an event is binned and labeled, it reinforces the righteousness of the label and the labeling process. That cognitive deficit makes keeping an open mind impossible because one’s bins define truth. To challenge binary thinker truth is to make them aware of their vulnerability and that life is neither fair nor easy. When binary thinkers feel vulnerable, they gravitate to fascism – to bind with other like-minded peers. We know historically how that always turns out.
Alas, binary thinking is how parents teach because they assign a value to everything as a way to protect their offspring from the dangers of life. High School was the institution created to transform children into adults by exposing them to nuance and teaching them how to reason, to apply logic, form and organize ideas, to use debate as a way of building on the experience and knowledge of others. In other words, to learn. The smarter kids still seem to graduate with such competencies, although many of my colleagues who teach introductory courses lament that those competencies are less often displayed than in past decades.
Since parents start the process of binary thinking, and society no longer can be relied upon to teach nuanced thinking, then the onus rests with parents. The only alternative solution seems to be yet another great economic depression and/or global war. Historically both squelch all social norms and expectations and force open-mindedness in order to survive.
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