What Our Childhoods Say About Culture
How we remember our childhood days can say a lot about who we are and how much we have grown as human-beings. Did you know that your childhood contains valuable information about your culture and history as well? But of course! That is a part of what we call memoir. However, your childhood contains special nuggets of information your current adult-self may have forgotten, unless you know how to interpret those memories.
We should start by addressing free-will…. You have none, or to put it another way, very little of your conscious-self is in control of your environment, and none of it controls the body or its development. Gene expression or epigenetics, environmental stimuli, various hormonal glands, and organs control most of your biological and psychological destiny. We also do not choose our family. We do not choose our childhood.
Dump any Freudian notions you have about human behavior. As a child, you were not directly responsible for any trauma or weird thoughts you may have had. Children respond reflexively to their environment. They are the ones which get acted upon by people who are already conditioned and self-aware. They are constantly absorbing what they see, hear, and touch in their environment like sponges. Their immediate environment becomes their whole world. The people and media in this environment become the template children mold their internal selves after.
It has been said by psychologists that children become self-aware around 4 to 5 years of age, but it starts at around 2 or 3. One way to tell is the mirror experiment or photography. Self-aware children are typically cautious about how they look, especially to public eyes. There is a paper which goes into depth on the five different levels of self-awareness.
Erich Fromm, a famous German psychologist, talks at length about self-awareness of the individual and individualist spirit in his book, The Fear of Freedom or Escape from Freedom.
“A child is born when it is no longer one with its mother and becomes a biological entity separate from her. Yet, while this biological separation is the beginning of individual human existence, the child remains functionally one with its mother for a considerable period.” ~ Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Ch. 2 The Emergence of the Individual and the Ambiguity of Freedom, pg. 12
Fromm says as children we learn about different entities and objects. In time, we gain mastery over those objects available to us. Through our mastery over objects and the environment, we come to the realization the universe is separate from ourselves. Pain, hostility, and frustration are all a part of the learning process. It makes us aware that the world is often hostile and indifferent to our suffering and desires. This is an important lesson on our road to create a strong, independent self capable of meeting not only our own needs but the needs of others in society.
Let me start with the drawing above. The year is around 1994. Before homeroom begins, I would use my free time to draw all sorts of things, mostly boyish stuff. The Cold War had not ended yet. There were plenty of shows, such as The Terminator, which depicted nuclear holocaust in all its terrifying glory. Godzilla was popular as well.
The Cold War and nuclear horror explain some of what we are looking at, but what else can we glean from this image? Explosions often mean anger, stress, and tempestuousness, right? Well, as a child in middle school, adolescence frequently conjures images of angry children and teen angst. My family life was not all that great. I had trouble with authority and a sneaking suspicion that the adults in my life might have been just as clueless as I was. What did Einstein say about his school life, again?
“School failed me, and I failed school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn’t worth anything…. I felt my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by the teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system? From the age of twelve I began to suspect authority and distrust teachers.” ~ Einstein, Albert, 1879 — 1955.
Unlike our lovable “mad scientist,” I did do quite well in school. I just did not do well in elementary or middle school, probably due to being teased mercilessly by other children and sometimes the adults, too. Actually, that was not unlike Einstein after all. Regardless, the drawing does illicit strong emotions and the feeling life was somehow going terribly wrong. I suspected the adults around me were intentionally trying to kill all the creativity and curiosity out of me and spoil my love for adventure. They wanted to kill the child inside. So, they can mold what was left into an adult who will earn, consume, toil, marry, raise children and repeat the process, except for Mr. Simons, my 6th grade substitute teacher. He was cool. He gave me the keys to adventure, a map book of the entire Virginia Beach area, of which I put to very good use. How I miss him.
There was also this overbearing authoritarianism I had to deal with. But it was not just me. Everyone I knew in school dealt with it, some begrudgingly. Some classmates treated it as a joke. For quite some time, I had no idea the administrators at differing school districts consistently put me in classes for problem children with no prospect of ever graduating or getting into college. I “beat the system,” and it took caring people at a public high school in Texas to do it. This was before Bush’s No Child Left Behind program ruined school for millions of kids forever with endless testing, competing school districts, and funding cuts. I went on after high school to college, eventually earning a Bachelors in Computer Science at San Diego State graduating at the top of my class. I will always feel grateful for the friends I made in middle and high school and college, as well as for the help they provided.
School, Prison… Was there a difference?
There is a documentary elucidating the plight many children and parents confront within the US public school system with its ever encroaching authoritarianism. It is called the War on Kids. There is a certain kind of folly when people, for the sake of security, take an open institution meant to enrich the lives of society and its children and turn it into an exact reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A simple problem is always made intractably complex whenever a hierarchy of care is introduced, and societal violence is already a complex problem to start, often rooted in another miserable hierarchy ruled by incompetents. Some recent incidents of workplace violence alighted that it takes a single consultant to take a well-managed institution and turn it into a brutal, ignominious bureaucratic nightmare but also a model of efficiency. The phrase, “going postal,” may never have been invented if someone somewhere did not think it was a good idea to take a perfectly running postal service and tweak it into some sort of efficiency sweatshop. My hope is people come to their senses before these toxic environments lead to another tragedy.
This, too, came from the sixth grade. Yes, I knew a whale shark was not actually a whale or a mammal of any kind.
Some of my earlier drawings were of jungle animals and underwater scenes. Ah, the life of a lonely child. That was a happy time. I loved the peace drawing gave me. It was indeed meditative. But times change and so did the subject matter of my drawings.
There was a definite transition where most of the things I drew were of animals, skeletons, skulls, atoms, DNA, stuff that interested me. As I grew older, I drew buildings, machines, and war zones. The US always prided itself as being on the forefront of scientific discoveries and technology, especially military technology and might. This part of US culture left an indelible impression on my young mind. Space exploration intrigued me, as well as engineering. There were plenty of shows on television glorifying the US and its military. It only seemed natural that we were on the right side of every issue, and military strength was the appropriate answer to most problems facing the world. As I grew older, I realized the world and its problems were not that simple.
Love & Marriage: Does not go together like a Horse and Carriage
Marriage held no interest for me. I took a cue from my own family’s troubles and decided it was not for me. From a child’s perspective, people did not get married because they wanted to.
People got married after “falling in love.” Falling in love was icky. Falling in love, as popular Disney and other cartoons tells it, is not something which happens by choice. It is something thrust upon you, even coerced.
I watched this movie with mom and my step-father while I was still little, way to young to be watching something like this. There was one scene where Merlin magically helped Uther rape the wife of his rival. This was how Arthur was born. This movie might have been the start of my preconceptions about marriage and children.
I continuously displayed little to no interest in getting hitched or even an interest, sexually, in either sex, much to the goading from impish family members saying, “You’ll understand… You will someday change your mind.” The family members’ snickering and goading when it came to these matters, coupled with what I saw on television and in movies, led me to believe I was correct, and someday, I would be forced to get married and have children. Of course, I never was, not physically at least. But, there was plenty of societal pressure, including pressure from family, to marry and have children. It got so bad that I seriously considered the idea of family and children, as if these things were something I had actually wanted! I did experiment, but it seemed like a constant echo from voices long since past guiding me into believing it was what I really wanted. In the end, the experience left me feeling guilt-ridden and painfully hollow. I had to wait until I was in my early-twenties before I finally found someone to help fill the void.
Society Taught Me To Fear Society
There was also plenty of fear being described here. Yes indeed, I felt a copious amount of fear as a child: fear of loneliness, fear of alienation, fear of abandonment, fear of failure, fear of the unseen enemy, fear of others, fear of myself, fear that I was never going to be good enough for anyone, fear of adulthood, fear of the past, fear of the present, fear of the future, and fear of poverty. Being a resident of the US, was one marked by fear. The expression I commonly used was “a prison without walls,” which was very much the same as Erich Fromm’s use of “moral aloneness.” This fear bred plenty of resentment and guilt, as well. There was this intense desire to throw freedom away and dissolve into some angry conservative group.
The stress from all this fear and guilt created a terrible nightmare which nearly killed me in my sleep. I woke up one night clenching my chest, fell to the floor, and for a brief minute was paralyzed from the waist down. It was a horrible experience which changed my life. Hopefully, you never had to go through something like this during your formative years.
In Retrospect
Notice how children come from a “Me, me, meeee…” perspective? This is how the world is framed in the mind of a child. It is a rather solipsistic interpretation of the world. Young adults experience this too, though hopefully they have become a bit more mature. It is different for adults to think this way than it is for children.
Remember our dear friend Dr. Fromm? In the beginning, our childhood selves still remain quite attached to our immediate family, and we depend on our parents and lean on authority. These relationships create our primary ties. Our growth as individuals is marked by our quest for greater freedom and individuation and the cutting of primary ties.
It is difficult to know when children reach a certain level of individuality and self-awareness. Fortunately for us, Fromm provides us a resource as to how and what this looks like by quoting for us R. Hughes account of a ten-year-old child’s awareness of its own individuality in “A High Wind in Jamaica”:
“And then an event did occur, to Emily, of considerable importance. She suddenly realized who she was. There is little reason that one can see why it should have come that particular afternoon. She had been playing House in a nook right in the bows, behind the windlass (on which she had hung a devil’s-claw as a doorknocker); and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she. She stopped dead, and began looking over all of her person which came within the range of her eyes. She could not see much, except a fore-shortened view of the front of her frock, and her hands when she lifted them for inspection; but it was enough for her to form a rough idea of the little body she suddenly realized to be hers.
She began to laugh, rather mockingly. “Well!” she thought, in effect: “Fancy you, of all people, going and getting caught like this! — You can’t get out of it now, not for a very long time: you’ll have to go through with being a child, and growing up, and getting old, before you’ll be quit of this mad prank!”
Determined to avoid any interruption of this highly important occasion, she began to climb the ratlines, on her way to her favourite perch at the masthead. Each time she moved an arm or a leg in this simple action, however, it struck her with fresh amazement to find them obeying her so readily. Memory told her, of course, that they had always done so before: but before, she had never realized how surprising this was. Once settled on her perch, she began examining the skin of her hands with the utmost care; for it was hers. She slipped a shoulder out of the top of her frock; and having peeped in to make sure she really was continuous under her clothes, she shrugged it up to touch her cheek. The contact of her face and the warm bare hollow of her shoulder gave her a comfortable thrill, as if it was the caress of some kind of friend. But whether her feeling came to her through her cheek or her shoulder, which was the caresser and which the caressed, that no analysis could tell her.
Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was now Emily Bass-Thornton (why she inserted the “now” she did not know, for she certainly imagined no transmigrational nonsense of having been anyone else before), she began seriously to reckon its implications.” ~ R. Hughes, “A High Wind in Jamaica, Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Ch. 2 The Emergence of the Individual and the Ambiguity of Freedom, pg. 13
Children treat the world and the people in it as extensions of themselves. It takes a while for them to develop empathy and think of others as individuals with their own concerns, problems and needs. Think of the teachers. Did they really want to kill the child inside me? Well, I can think of one that did in elementary school, but the rest tried really hard at serving their community’s interests.
I remembered giving one home room teacher a hard time, because I found her attractive. I did not understand the feelings I had and seriously thought she was trying control me. Oh, how very silly I was… What about my family? Were they seriously trying to entrap me with marriage? Maybe, but it was not for the reasons I believed.
Going back to Fromm, we can understand these feelings from a child’s perspective by treating people as objects, objects of the self or foreign objects of potential benevolence. When people behave in ways which are counter-current to the child’s whims, those people are treated as potentially hostile objects or entities. If this continues consistently over an indeterminate time span, the child will draw negative associations towards these hostile entities, deeming them worthless, possibly dangerous (Think teen rebellion).
Teenagers often feel stressed and anxious about coming of age. As teens are encouraged to cut their primary ties and exert a greater sense of independence, they encounter that the weight of this new freedom comes from ever more responsibility and loneliness, responsibility to the self and to others, separateness from family and community. Teens come of age in a world now inimical to them remembering it was once a world which seemed warm, safe, and secure. Hostility toward this new world and the people in it is not far behind. (This hostility is a necessary step towards achieving greater independence; however, the child may in adulthood retreat from freedom if its sense of “moral aloneness” is not quelled.)
Socioeconomics
Politics was always in the back of my mind; however, it was not absent. I had a very energetic imagination. Entire worlds were created to explore various abstract ideas or deal with the pain of existing in a nonsensical culture. Another reason was merely to help with concentration. Even to this day, if I am not actively controlling my thoughts, they will wander and play funny tunes or repeat arguments like an iPod with only one or two songs on repeat. With such potent thoughts, I reached meditative states which allowed me to lucidly dream while awake.
Being a child still, I dreamed of a world ruled by children. I thought, “What would they use as currency? I know! Clay! It’s useful. You can make anything from it, and there are rare, natural colors which could give it more value.” The most valuable commodity in this fantasy-world was knowledge left behind by an ancient people, ancient in child years. This knowledge could be about anything of value from agriculture to building flying machines. I had a rather interesting take on economics. To my childhood self, I interpreted “money” as substances or artifacts with intrinsic value that could be accurately measured (Clay is a building material. Scrolls and books from ancient times contained valuable knowledge and wisdom). That was not what “real world” money was. The money we used was inherently worthless as anything else except as a form of accounting. Yet, people erroneously chased after it believing it was valuable and lavished with attention people whose claim to fame was hoarding copious amounts of the stuff.
The main governing body in this world was an empire ruled by an imperial senate composed of democratically elected dictators. One of the senate members was a female ruler/warrior from a desert kingdom. There was only one person who held more power than the entire senate who was not a member, but she only advised certain key members of the senate discretely. Convoluted, I know. I kept this story ongoing with various story arcs in my mind and on paper up until early college. Sometimes, I still refer to the drawings and notes left behind from the past. Perhaps, I will pick it up again.
A question must be currently forming in your mind. Why would I come up with such a system of government? Why an empire?
Above is a game I loved playing on DOS. This is the intro on the 3DO version. You play as a young servant boy, Kirk Cameron, who recently received a knighthood by the king. How nice for him. It was Cameron’s best role yet. “I have no home sire… I was raised by a kind herd of wild cows!”
During the 80s and 90s, there were plenty of medieval, fantasy movies and games about kings, queens, prophesy, monsters and magic. Americans loved them all, and the masculine mystique entranced the psyche of many an adolescent. Such movies like Conan the Barbarian and Braveheart encapsulates this new type of masculinity so completely. Just read this proud movie goer’s romantic review of this fictitious reenactment of William Wallace’s quest for revenge:
Ah, Braveheart… I remember leaving the movie theater that evening in 1995. I was seventeen, clueless and inspired. Something stirred inside and I could tell my friends had been impacted as well. Yep, we loved it and for many years to come, when asked my favourite movie, Braveheart was my answer.
With time I came to understand that I yearn for total and unmitigated freedom above all else. Freedom to express, to love, to penetrate and expand. And as William Wallace let out his “FREEEEEDOM!” at the end of my adolescent years, somehow that need was met — to taste, if only tangentially, a life lived from such a place… — Eivind Figenschau Skjellum, http://www.masculinity-movies.com/movie-database/braveheart
Plus, Americans always had an affinity towards royalty and the warrior code. Despite all the flag waving and utterances of democracy and patriotic slogans, the US always had a strange love affair with its old rival and closest ally, Great Britain. The US was always hungry to know about Princess Diana or Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth. US movies about warriors, empires, and kingdoms oozed authoritarianism backed by a nationalistic sense of duty and righteousness.
There was also this cartoon series I loved as a child. Macross fans say what you will, but as a child, I was hooked on Robotech and still have an affinity towards the series. One of the most interesting characters in the series were the Robotech Masters. The Masters were once descended from a race of scavengers, but after the discovery of some phlebotinum called protoculture, they transcended nature and became a somewhat immortal, transhumanist race of super-beings bent on galactic conquest. Their entire societal structure revolved around a hierarchy of triumvirates (three clones acting in unison) with the Masters being at the top. The Masters left their humanity far behind and based their existence on being the sole arbiters of their people’s development and protoculture. As such, they hated humans with every fiber of their being for using their technology against them.
I was intrigued by their technology and their rigid, hive-minded society. They used their technology to better themselves, and they suspected humans just as much as I did at the time. There were many things in the series which reminded me of the society I grew up in: over-bearing at times, nationalistic, heavily focused on progress and success, militaristic, authoritarian, and the ever-present foreign or phantom enemy.
As an impressionable child ruled over by adults, it was no wonder the world inside my head was ruled by a senate of dictators. It was the only thing which made sense at the time.
The Masculine Mystique & The Culture of Work
“Ah! curst ambition! to thy lures we owe
All the great ills that mortals bear below.” ~ A. Thirkell
In Dr. Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Prescription, he describes the masculine mystique in great detail. Bear in mind, this is the viewpoint of many men and their chagrin with post-industrial modern life. This is not an endorsement, merely an astute observation.
We live in a time of increased automation. The electronics revolution has long since passed and is still ongoing. Men are working fewer hours doing actual labor. What hours are left are reserved for activities where physical prowess, strength, and stamina are unimportant. “They are being paid more for less physical work performed in fewer hours than ever before. This causes anxiety and frustration. They feel guilty and uncomfortable because this is the opposite of what they have been taught. They have been brought up to believe that self-worth is only possible by hard, painstaking work. Automation is in direct conflict with the Puritan ethic and is causing men to lose self-esteem.” ~ Dr. Peter, The Peter Prescription, Ch. 11 Sex and Society or Life After Birth, p. 35
Communication also had its revolution and with it new challenges for male identity. In the time since the Peter Prescription has been written, feminism’s coarse message against a male dominated hierarchy and the media’s caricatures of men as incompetent boobs became a rotting Albatross fastened with an anchor around the necks of young men. The common formula the media used was: “Women are smarter than men, children are smarter than women, animals are smarter than children. The unfortunate male who has lost his identity and has been ridiculed by the communications media now finds that his masculine preserves are being invaded by women. In defeat he is called a male chauvinist pig. He tries to retain his masculine self-concept, but his attempts at romance brand him as a sexist female-exploiting dog.”~ Dr. Peter, The Peter Prescription, Ch. 11 Sex and Society or Life After Birth, p. 36
In summary, the masculine mystique is a young man growing up in a post-industrial, Dilbert sort of world and realizing all the old stereotypes of Calvinist manhood did not grow-up with him and instead took on William Wallace as the new ideal.
This is an outlook a lot of men both young and old, but mostly young men online, consider as gospel in this new post-industrial age. There is some truth to it, but this is hardly the fault of women alone. We are talking about the media here, and their job is to make you feel guilty and incompetent to get you to shut-up, get a job, buy a car, marry, have kids, etc.
Dr. Peter was not just taking the man’s side, however. He revealed at great length how society was and is structured around male hierarchies and all the curses and incompetence it brought. He described the Peter Principle, everyone within a hierarchy rising from a level of competence to an incompetent one. He elucidated how women use societal standards for masculinity as a means of pressuring the men in their lives into making poor decisions. It was the 1970s when the book came out. No doubt things have changed. Yet one thing remains the same. Men get tons of flack and pressure as they are compelled by forces too powerful for them to resist to participate in masochistic hierarchies and pecking orders (The irony is we are taught in the US to aspire to become individuals and cultivate our individual natures. However, much of what is required of us runs contrary to what we were taught). He pondered the new prospects of women struggling to become equals with men in a system.
“The equalization opportunity for the sexes could result in women becoming equally incompetent to men. If women accept their share of all jobs, they may free men from such formerly all-male entrapments as coal miner, subway builder, cargo loader, heavyweight boxer, sewer worker, and army draftee. This will only mean more men and women will be available to achieve higher levels of incompetence and further endanger the peace and safety of the world…. Should she dare to be the supercompetent who abandons the hierarchical struggle and sets new directions toward improvement of the quality of life in a cleaner, more peaceful, and beautiful land?” — Dr. Peter, The Peter Prescription, Ch. 11 Sex and Society or Life After Birth, p. 38–40
What Dr. Peter is saying is that women will succumb to the same sort of poppycock and malfeasance as men have. As women continually enter traditionally male occupations, they will no doubt become victims of not only other people’s incompetence but their own as well. Rather than struggling to obtain equal enfranchisement and representation in a system which seems tailor-made into dispensing equal amounts of misery with equal amounts of incompetent workers, we should all strive for better outside this archaic system.
Do not be disheartened. I am not suggesting the Women’s Right Movement was a mistake, or that there was little progress in improving women’s lives. On the contrary, these things were necessary. It was only through women’s liberation which opened opportunities for women to compete in previously male dominated occupations to reveal just how much our men were getting the shaft. We sometimes look at the inanities and buffoonery that women endure in the corporate world and naturally gravitate toward their suffering. Yet, the men deal with the exact same inanities and buffoonery and have dealt with them long before women entered the scene. Except instead of campy, sexual harassment about booty or whatever, it is sometimes about performance, as if performance at work equates to performance in bed, and other such male sexual tropes. “Many people mistakenly believe that harassment is limited to females.”
Growing up as a transgender woman, I got to see both sides of the issue up close and personal.
Remember Braveheart, Conan, and what Dr. Peter has said about the culture of work? Men are the victims of somebody else’s rotten designs. No where is this more evident than in the documentary Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity. Men have no choice but to comply according to their culture’s prescriptions or suffer horrendously in much the same way women have suffered horrendously.
So, it is not one or the other. We all share equal blame, but we are also sufferers in some equal measure. We all need to recognize the only way we can live harmoniously as equals is by fighting such antiquated systems, not joining them.
This is my attempt at making sense of the world through a synthesis of research and memories from childhood to present. These were things I remembered but never had the words or education to write down so concisely when I was much younger. Remember, I could only bring myself to write this from comparing what I knew, what I read, what I learned, what I observed as my present self, and then comparing these experiences to memories and experiences from childhood.
Our childhoods are not just a mirror of ourselves. They mirror the culture and history of the world around us through the senses and memories of our younger selves. By reexamining these tender moments and gauging them against our current experiences, we can reveal new truths. They are stories which help us grow and reconnect with our youth and other youths. Releasing these experiences to the greater public encourages them to do the same introspective exercise creating a more substantiated, comprehensive history.
