Benedict Option, 2B: The Domestic Monastery & The Monastery Effect

My last post on what Dreher calls the Domestic Monastery of the home got me thinking about the Neil Postman book The Disappearance of Childhood that I read last fall. I actually emailed Dreher a passage from that book that he posted to his blog. It's buried deep in that post if you're interested. But I thought I would dust off Postman a bit to interact with Dreher here.

Dreher's central metaphor for the family is that we ought to function within our homes like little monasteries, with fathers as abbots and mothers as abbesses. The goal is to create a rule of life for our families similar to what exists within the walls of a monastery. I really like that metaphor as a way of thinking about passing down meaning and truth to my children. 

Postman's concerns are not as religiously motivated as Dreher's own, but the result of each man's diagnosis of culture is remarkably similar. Postman's concern is that the ideal of childhood, created by the inception of mass literacy, is being steadily and perhaps irreversibly denuded by our technopoly. In his concluding chapter, Postman floats a hypothetical question: Is the individual able to resist the techification of all things. His response is beautifully articulated and very Benedict-y.

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

I concluded my post last fall by saying the following in response (sorry to quote myself; that seems weird): 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow. 

This, I take it, is the goal of the Benedict Option. Not to fully extricate ourselves from modernity, but to resist its dehumanizing impulses for the good of modernity. To help people see beyond the immediate and the pleasurable and find joy. To drink from the well that quenches our thirst eternally. It is a large and monumental task. But the evangelization of the world has always been the mission of the church. And I don't think it was ever meant to be easy.

How to Make Childhood Reappear

I noted in my first post on Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood that one thing I appreciated is his epistemic humility at the book's outset. Too often people reach too far in attempting to provide pat conclusions to complex issues. I appreciated Postman's reticence to do anything in his book beyond diagnosis.

However, upon finishing the book a clear suggestion is implicit: opt out. Postman's argument is that childhood is disappearing in our culture because we have replaced text-based literacy with image-based illiteracy. Whereas mass literacy prompted the development of childhood as an age distinct from adulthood--little kids can't read at advanced levels of cognition and adults can--our culture is removing the distinctions by flattening the differences. You can see these previous posts that spell out how Postman comes to this admittedly controversial thesis. 

But as I finished the book it became evident that a solution exists: resist the flattening caused by television and other mass media. Refuse to let your kids be indoctrinated into the world of the image and adhere to the world of print. In a move that would make the reformers proud, be iconoclasts. Smash the icons and idols of the modern technocracy.

Postman himself gets to this in the concluding chapter. He offers there a set of questions and responses for what to do if you happen to accept his thesis. His final question is "Is the individual powerless to resist what is happening?" The very wording of the question certainly implies that there might be a way forward (or backward, depending on your point of view). I'll quote his answer at some length:

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

There is much to unpack here and by no means do I intend to do justice by all of it. The parts that I have put in bold are indicative of what I am focusing on for now. I have long had the sense that parenting in the way I feel called to do it is both an implicit and explicit rejection of our culture at large and even some of the subcultures I inhabit. The values that my wife and I value are out of step with the pull of American culture. The way we pursue them strikes others as extreme and over-the-top. But you cannot subvert a decadent culture with half-measures. 

Moreover, as Postman affirms in dubbing this the Monastery Effect, the goal of such parenting is firmly rooted in this world. The parents who make the decision to defy the culture are doing so for the good of the culture, ultimately. Christians, and here I break from Postman's own classically liberal concerns, are to live our lives for the life of the world. We reject culture not to reject the people that comprise that culture but in order to better love and serve them. 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow.

What Are Children? Rousseau vs Locke

Getting back on track with my Neil Postman posts.

In The Disappearance of Childhood Neil Postman compares the theories of what exactly constitutes childhood that developed during the Enlightenment. His chapter, "Childhood's Journey," is fascinating stuff and will be required reading for my Sophomore Honors class as we begin tackling Lord of the Flies next week, a novel that the French teacher at my school lovingly referred to as Golding vs Rousseau. 

In this chapter, Postman compares the philosophies of childhood of the two thinkers. Most succinctly, Postman delineates the difference as follows: 

We might call them the Lockean, or the Protestant, conception of childhood, and the Rousseauian, or Romantic, conception. In the Protestant view the child is an unformed person who through literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame may be made into a civilized adult. In the Romantic view it is not the unformed child but the deformed adult who is the problem. The child possesses as his or her birthright capacities for candor, understanding, curiosity, and spontaneity that are deadened by literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame.

These differences in the goal of childhood was extended into the metaphors each used to describe childhood. Locke is famous for his tabula rasa, or blank slate. Rousseau, on the other hand, compared children to plants that grow naturally and can only be minimally aided by cultivation. Postman makes clear the contrast: "Locke wanted education to result in a rich, varied, and copious book [making the blank slate filled with meaningful material]; Rousseau wanted education to result in a healthy flower." 

Postman then goes on to argue that the major educational philosophies of the twentieth century--Freud in the Lockean camp; John Dewey in the Rousseauian camp--have left us with a synthesis position between the two doctrines. In other words, we want to maintain the Lockean emphasis on education as a developing and civilizing force, but one that does not constrain the natural exuberance of children praised by Rousseau. 

The natural tension between these two positions is obvious; everywhere in our culture we see children being tugged towards these poles. On the one hand, children are made to attend government-run schools (many of which look startlingly like prisons) from 7:30 to 3:00 each day. On the other, the teachers at these schools tell them that they are unbridled vessels with unbounded potential. We agree with Rousseau that children need playtime to cultivate their natural virtues, and we schedule such playtime with Lockean precision from 4:30-5:15--after homework is completed and before soccer practice. 

It is hard, I imagine, for children to live under two dispensations. My students struggle with this all of the time. They are told to seize the day! but also get into a good college and therefore participate in 17 clubs, sports, and other civic organizations. Oh, and take 5 AP classes per year each with an hour of homework per night. But still be a kid. High school, ah, what a great time! Isn't this fun, damn't!

I might personally be more Lockean in my view of children and their education, but I think the real problem here isn't that there are competing schools of thought but that we want to have both at once. This strikes me as basic opportunity cost economics: you simply can't do everything; to adopt any theory is to say no to its various competitors. To adopt two competing theories is simply to pull yourself apart.

The Disappearance of Childhood

If you happen to be much of a reader I trust that you have had the experience of reading a book that somehow seems designed with you in mind. As if the author was addressing you personally, individually. That books can create this type of intimacy across centuries and cultures is incredible. Reading truly is, in the words of Frankenstein's monster, a "godlike science." 

This short paean to reading is not distracting from the purpose of this post but directly to the point. In Neil Postman's book The Disappearance of Childhood he makes the rather controversial claim that it is precisely the decline of print-based culture and its replacement by the image-based culture of television that is quickly killing off childhood in our culture. 

For anyone who has read Postman's more famous work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, this thesis might not be altogether surprising. As Postman convincingly argues in that work, we are becoming a people addicted to entertainment, obsessed with glowing screens to the detriment of our humanity. Postman's argument here is a slight shift: here he asserts that it was precisely mass literacy that created childhood in the first place, creating a distinction between literate adults and pre-literate children. Television, with its flattening tendency, is destroying childhood and, as Postman will proceed to argue, adulthood as well. 

I plan to spend some time lingering in the arguments of this book. I mentioned in the prefatory post that one thing I appreciated about Postman's introduction is its epistemic humility. He insists from the outset that he will resist offering solutions to this seemingly intractable problem. As I will argue in the concluding post, though, his solution is fairly implicit throughout.

_____________________________________________________________________

For right now I want to briefly expound on the crucial first step in Postman's argument: the idea that childhood was created by the dissemination of print culture in the early modern period. Before I get into his ideas I want to note that this idea is not altogether new to me. In the hand-wringing of my parent's generation over these darned millennials (that they, ahem, raised), the emergence of an understanding of adolescence is cited as developing about 100 years ago. With sentimental children's literature beginning in the nineteenth century it is clear that our understanding of childhood shifted, but Postman's argument goes deeper than that.

Postman argues that, with their emphasis on education, the Greeks came the closest to inventing childhood. Though they would be flabbergasted by contemporary ideas of child nurturing, their ideas were close enough to ours to be recognizable. Postman further credits the Romans with another indispensable link in the development of childhood: the notion of shame. He asserts that "without a well-developed idea of shame, childhood cannot exist." In particular, children must be safeguarded from adult secrets especially relating to sex. 

The Graeco-Roman conception was snowed under with the Middle Ages, according to Postman's reading. Literacy was basically non-existent outside of small cadres of scribes and education, too, was mostly dead. He sums up the medieval view thusly: 

What we can say, then, with certainty, is that in the medieval world there was no conception of childhood development, no conception of prerequisites or sequential learning, no conception of schooling as a preparation for an adult world. . . The seven-year-old male was a man in every respect except for his capacity to make love and war.

The entire world was open to children. There was no effort to protect adult secrets from them. While some of this is certainly attributable to high childhood mortality and the resistance, therefore, to commit too much emotional energy into any one child, but Postman claims that this argument cannot be given too much weight. For example, in England in the mid-eighteenth century half of all total deaths were children under the age of five yet the idea of childhood flourished in that dark environment.

The major difference between childhood of the post-Renaissance period and its lack in the medieval period was not death rates but the printing press. 

I'll pick up there in the next post.

Neil Postman and Epistemic Humility

I just started reading Neil Postman's small book The Disappearance of Childhood. I am not nearly far enough in to comment upon the book, but I do want to make note of something he says in the introduction. I will quote him at some length here:

There is one question of great importance that this book will not address--namely, What can we do about the disappearance of childhood? The reason is that I do not know the answer. I say this with a mixture of relief and dejection. The relief comes from my not having the burden of instructing others on how to live their lives. In all my previous books I have presumed to point to a more effective way of solving one problem or another. Professional educators are, I believe, supposed to do that sort of thing. I had not imagined how pleasant it can be to acknowledge that one's imaginative reach for solutions goes no farther than one's grasp of the problem. . . But I have consoled myself with this thought: If one cannot say anything about how we may prevent a social disaster, perhaps one may also serve by trying to understand why it is occurring.

What I appreciate so much about this sentiment is its acknowledgment that sometimes we can more readily identify a problem than come up to a solution for how to repair the break. It is always disheartening to read a novel, an article, watch a movie, or engage with any other cultural product that diagnoses a problem with alacrity but fails utterly in its attempt at a solution. Postman's position here is to avoid that temptation and simply not feel obligated to provide a half-baked solution. It might be unsatisfying to a degree--I wish he saw some way out of the morass of modern childhood--but it is better than a crude or half-baked attempt at a solution. Perhaps the key move that needs to be made is not some large institutional change, but a recognition of the problem being addressed.