Morality and the freedom of the human spirit
We spend a lot of time worrying about the content to which we expose the young generation both individually and collectively. However, I am exceedingly coming to the conclusion that it makes absolutely no difference (at least as far as morality and lawfulness is concerned). Well sure, we know things like that children of Christians are likely to be Christians as adults and adults who are abusive are likely to have been brought up in abusive environments. But this is about as illuminating as saying that children growing up in German homes are likely to speak German as adults.
We are limited by our upbringing in as much as it imposes constraints on certain parameters of our behavior in language and culture. However, when the “what of our children’s ethics” moral outrage debates are held strictly within these parameters, the predictability of both individual and collective impact of content to which children (and adults) are exposed, seems to me, is pretty minimal.
First, it is amazing that, given all the bullshit supposedly great thinkers have put forth about the state of the youth of their day, we haven’t learned that such statements are just never right. They weren’t right about pulp fiction, comic books, and they are not even right about violent video games whose rise in the US coincided with halving the crime rate. There is simply no reliable or predictable connection between what people read or watch and what they do.
Sure we can always point at some whacko who did something horrible because he read it in a book or saw it on TV but there is no way to predict who will be influenced by what when and how ahead of time. The Bible contains all sorts of violence and depravity (and not just in a way that says don’t do it) and yet we don’t see a lot more violence in devout Christians. But neither do we see less. In fact, if we look at the range of behaviors the Bible, or any other religious text for that matter, inspired over the millennia, the only thing we can say about them is that they are typical of human beings. They happened in parallel not as a consequence of the text.
By the same token, we can no more expect virtue coming out of exposure to virtuous content than we can expect depravity coming out of depraved content. A good example is Karl May who popped up on a comment thread on the Language Log recently. Entire generations of Central European boys (and more recently girls) grew up reading May’s voluminous output detailing the exploits of the sagacious explorer Old Shatterhand aka Kara ben Nemsi. Old Shatterhand, a pacifist with a gun and a fist – both used only as last resort and in self-defense, embodies very much a New Testament kind of ethics. His focus is on love, equality and turning the other cheek. But also on health, vigour and the German indomitable spirit.
It is inconceivable that anyone reading these books by the dozen (as I did in my youth) could ever think less of another race or do anything bad to man or beast. Yet, as we know, Central Europe was anything but calm in the last century which saw sales of May’s books in the tens of millions. I wonder how many death camp guards or Wermacht soldiers did not read Karl May as boys. And as one of the Language Log commenters points out, Hitler himself was a May fan and supposedly tried to write Mein Kampf in the same style as his favorite author. How is this possible? Should we ban May’s books lest such horrors happen again?
Of course not. People seem to have a remarkable ability to read around the bits that don’t concern their interests. We can background or foreground pretty much anything. It is possible to read Kipling’s Maugli as a cute children’s story or as a justification for colonialism. When I first read it, I saw it as a manifesto of environmentalism and ecosystem preservation (I was about 8 so I did nor perhaps formulate it that way). But it can just as easily be read as an apology for man’s mastery over nature.
Karl May wasn’t quite banned in my native Czechoslovakia but his books weren’t always easy to come by due, I was told, to a strong Christian bias. I could never understand that until I reread Winnetou recently and discovered long philosophical expositions on sin and violence that were just out there. No coy hints, straight up quotations from the Bible! When I was reading these books, I simply did not see that. Equally incomprehensibly, there are people who’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia and did not notice that Aslan was Jesus. It’s an adventure story for them and that’s pretty much it.
When I look at my own political morality, I can see clear foundations laid by May and my reading of Kipling, Defoe (in a Czech reworking without the racism) and others – including a watered down New Testament. But I also see people around me who clearly grew up on the same literature and are rabid Old Testament tooth-for-toothers. Such is the freedom of the human spirit that it can overcome the influence of any content – good or bad. (Again within the parameters of our linguistic and social environments.)
UPDATE: Here’s an interesting summary of how Karl May’s impact cut both ways (Hitler and Einstein) via the Wikipedia entry on May. Jeff Bowersox also has a lot of relevant things to say to explain this seeming paradox of children both appropriating ‘moral’ messages for their own play and being shaped by them through the prism of their socio-discursive embeddedness.