There is an outstanding article on the interesting new blog The Line is Here called I am no longer a child and I strongly commend it to everyone. It captures the essence of the New Totalitarianism in a very different way to my polemical approach to the subject and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.
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What A great label that makes:
THE NEW TOTALITARIANS
Can we each name some; and why the title fits?
Yes that does look like a worthwhile new blog to add to my ever growing daily read list, cheers!
If I had to pick a single “best and most infectious meme” you’ve come up with, it’s the New Totalitarian one. My God Daughter used your linked “What does ‘totalitarian’ actually mean?” article as part of a school project of hers last year and apparently caused a barney to break out in the staff room later. I’d been meaning to mention that 🙂
The man had very much the same childhood I did, as I have been telling some of the regulars here.
I have no children myself, but others of you have.
How do we get that kind of freedom and magic back?
One of the commenters there asks “how did it happen so rapidly?” He’s amazed at how he, at 25, had such a different childhood to someone who is 16. The changeover was indeed very fast, and it’s useful to ask why in a “seeking an answer” sense as well as as a rhetorical expression of dismay.
I think I have a (partial, at least) answer. The Padeophile Panic. The PP was a slight toning down and rebranding of Satanic Ritual Abuse, the moral panic that began in the US Bible Belt and spread like wildfire through the feminist left after the publication of Michelle Remembers.
The Christian Fundamentalists wanted to believe that everyone other than themselves was a satanist. In the radical feminist’s mind this was easily retooled into what they already believed; that all men are rapists. It was easy as 123 to imagine the men of the world organised into rings using Satanism as an excuse.
Of course, it was also an incredibly fucking silly idea to 99% of the population. It even got debunked (after a succession of disastrous attempts to convict people of it, here for example with the Orkneys case) but by that point, the damage had been done. The idea had been placed within the public consicousness that child abuse is endemic, and that men cannot be trusted. The left wing establishment had to drop the “Satanic Ritual” element, but the concept of a network of padeophile abductors remained, and remains with us still. Thus, parents were easily guided into a position of believing that allowing children unsupervised play is irresponsible, that there is a paedophile on every corner.
One can usually spot a well organised moral panic by the introduction of specific terminology into the vernacular. For instance, “bogus asylum seeker” suddenly arriving on the lips of the masses, in the media and in the pronouncements of the Ruling Clas. Returning to SRA, “grooming” (now a ubiquitously used term) was first used in association with SRA to describe the induction of children into the Satanic Circle. Most telling of all was the word “paedophile” itself; one a term used by experts and professionals, it rapidly came into general usage as the cancerous meme spread.
The result was a permanent change in the way ordinary people saw other people. Parents in the past weren’t ignorant. They were aware of predatory others, but also perceived this as rare. They warned children not to accept sweets from strangers or to get into a stranger’s car and so on. But they also perceived this threat as a rare one. Even after the horror of Brady and Hindley, that was seen as a grotesque abberation, something beyond comprehension since the assumption was that most adults are protective towards children. The PP was a wild success in reversing this assumption to a belief that most other adults (particuarly male ones) are a threat towards children. Parents no longer felt that their children being in a public place, observed casually by other adults, would keep them safe. Now the perception became that those other adults sould be presumed to be predatory.
An entire social sytem based on informal adult cooperation to protect and support children broke down. To give an entirely anecdotal example, when I was a little boy an old man in our close was a keen gardener, and a few times I went into his house, he encouraged my amateur gardening and taught me a bit, gave me some seedlings, which is a nice little happy memory. I think he was probably a little lonely; the chance to share his knowledge with a child a pleasure for him. Nowadays eyebrows would raise. “What’s he up to inviting little boys into his house?” people would say.
Anyway I’m typing too much again and I think I’ve made my point. The Left’s destruction of informal social relations has advanced in many ways; but from a historical perspective I think their Great Leap Forward was the Paedophile Panic. It was the crowbar they used to smash the informal adult network that had throughout previous history given children the freedom to play as normal; an almost total inversion of normal relations that was carried out at a breakneck pace, over a few short years.
Ian,
The Christian Fundamentalists wanted to believe that everyone other than themselves was a satanist.
I don’t know where you are from, some stuff reads Brit, but this, to me, reads American.
Well, in the UK the satanist scare had nothing to do with the Christians, it was all to do with the state employed social workers. They were the ones who created the hysteria over this particular fantasy, destroying families and lives while doing so.
I believe that the matter is more complex that you write, but I do know, that as a single male, I prefer not to be left alone with others young children. Not for their safety, because I know they are safe, but for mine. I do not want to be the target of anyones hysterical misrepresentations.
The worst part of the satanism scare is that, so far as I can remember, the social workers involved suffered little as a result of the exposure of their foul claims and actions.
This is one of the major downsides to state involvement in what used to be considered personal life. When a private organisation f***s up bigtime it will suffer bigtime, even to the point of going down the tubes. When a state actor f***s up, little happens. A few slapped wrists, or even rewards as the call for “more resources” get answered.
Fundamentally, with the exception of bidecadal elections, there is no mechanism by which the state can be forced to learn from its mistakes.
Yes, I’m British. Sorry I wasn’t clear. The SRA panic was started by American Christian Fundamentalists, then picked up by the social workers and their fellow travellers in both Britain and America (via Michelle Remembers and a flurry of “recovered memory” stuff).
It is more complex than I wrote, but this is a comment section on a blog, not a journal 🙂
“How do we get that kind of freedom and magic back?”
I’m not sure we’ve lost it. I know children who still grow up like that. Bear in mind that most of the robust games they play involve trespass, owing the the absence of public outdoor spaces, even in the countryside where I live. Bear in mind also that the kids throwing snowballs with rocks in at each other cheerfully turn round and throw them at the little kid walking home who’d much rather read a book than get pelted by rocks.
I agree with the sentiments of the article, but there’s no need to be rose tinted about it. There’s plenty of nimby-ism over this. Everyone wants ‘boys to be boys’ – just not in their train station car park, and not in the road behind their house, and not in the woods where they walk their dog.
To the extent that fewer children make use of the freedom to play outdoors – that has far more to do with parents’ own choices than any state intervention. It also has a lot to do with the children. At 14 most of them would rather rather be indoors eating and drinking with their mates that outdoors playing games. Kids would rather meet up at MacD’s and show of their new mobile phones, or meet up in an online game, than meet up at the lake and show off their new bikes and catapults. There is state interference, in the form of banning bikes from every park in the country and that sort of nonsense, but it’s a much wider social change. When local councils rip out play equipment because they can’t afford the insurance, that’s more the fault of a litigious society than a wicked state.
There are all sorts of new opportunities for playing. Children of 12 and 13 create modifications for online games and invite their friends to play in them. Kids can make music and films and share them more easily than ever, and they make full use of that opportunity. Online environments give children a chance to meet a far wider range of people than their neighbours and classroom friends.
I agree that it’s a shame they fenced off the local stream where it runs through the park ‘for safety reasons’. I agree it’s bad that penknives are illegal in many situations. But these are not society-changing restrictions. The reason kids do different things today is that kids are different and the world is different, and the change was not driven by the state.
I would have to disagree. At the core of this it really is the state, and the ‘litigious society’ is only possible because the state’s law permit absurd legal actions of the sort referred to.
Yes I agree and that is why I just cannot convince myself to join the Libertarian Legion of Despair who seem unable to realise that we are NOT losing ground on all fronts and in fact liberty is doing rather well in a great many areas.
I’m 23, and I have a toddler.
I grew up on the cusp of this change. I remember when I was about 8 I took a course at the local library. A former firefighter (or police officer, can’t remember) did a sort of self-defense type thing for us kids. Basically he wanted us to get over the idea that you’re not supposed to hit adults. He did this by encouraging us to beat the crap out of him while he tried to “abduct” us. The two basic lessons were ‘be mean’ and ‘be loud’. The thing is though, the unspoken assumption was that us 8 year olds would be out in the world on our own (and I was. There is a good sized park near my parents house with lots of forests).
When I turned 15 I started working at that library, and the course was no longer offered. From talking with one of the children’s librarians, the reason was that so few parents let their kids out on their own, so they thought it was unnecessary.
In raising my son I’m trying to find the good middle ground between safety and learning. You do your kid no favours by making things easy and not teaching them that actions have consequences.
I can’t see that. I can’t think of a single area in which we’ve gained ground, other than in new places which the statists haven’t quite got to grips with yet. For instance, over the past decade or so we’ve all got internets, free speech and free hobbit porn, which is an increase of freedom. But that’s only the case because it didn’t physically exist before. Nonetheless, if we look at the past ten years we’ve seen that freedom gradually reducing- not just through surveillance (e.g. the RIP bill) but in new laws regarding what you can download from your internet (e.g. introduction of BT cleanfeed, an upcoming law to ban rude cartoons of underage persons (how do you prove what age an anime girlie is?!)), the infamous American 2257 regulation and so on. Additionally there has been increased indirect interference by the state- governments leading on the web’s gatekeepers (the credit card companies and other services e.g. Paypal) to make life difficult for their enemies. I’m acutely aware of that compared to most people because I draw “adult” comics for a living and sell them on the web. No, no hobbits.
So new freedoms have appeared. I can now movies of- myself miming to popular hit tunes on youtube, or pretend to be a hobbit in an RPG- but these are simply new territories that the statists haven’t fully colonised yet. There has been no rollback in the state anywhere. It’s simply the number of things it can regulate has increased and it hasn’t entirely gotten around to regulating them yet.
I’d say we’re losing ground on every front.
My young daughter was incredibly photogenic as a child and many of my friends both male and female photographed her. The father of one of my friends who belonged to a camera club also photographed her and won prizes nation wide for some of his work. Her daughter my 10 year old granddaughter writes reviews of DVD’s destined for children in her age group for a satellite subscriber magazine. The reviews are accompanied by professional photos and I have to admit that I am not comfortable with the fact that such photos are available in quite a public forum. The times they have achanged! The Peter Sellars film The World of Henry Orient with his two pre-teen stalkers roaming New York on their own in their quest indicates the way things were. Alas that situation no longer exists.
There is an upside. The more the polity is taxed and regulated, then the less incentive there is to generate wealth, and the less wealth which is generated then the smaller are tax revenues extracted by the state. The job of a politician is to satisfy a coalition of supporters, by provisioning them with benefits and gifts at the expense of others (think of the standard of living enjoyed by communists party members under Stalin, or consider Hillary Clinton handing out gifts to her supporters from under a Christmas tree, as a recent advertisement depicted).
The problem for the politician, is that benefits and gifts are provisioned to the coalition of suppporters by taxation and regulation, which in turn decrease the incentive to generate wealth and therefore lower tax revenues. If tax revenues are lower, then fewer gifts can be handed out and less regulation enforced, which then makes it very difficult to provision the promised benefits and gifts to supporters.
This constraint on politicians acts as a counterincentive to ever expanding restrictions on liberty, since destroying liberty would cut their source of income which they need to stay in office.
Of course, the danger is that the coalition of supporters will contract, placing dictatorial powers in the hands of fewer people. In which case, a politician can maintain his or her office by provisioning gifts to benefits to a smaller coalition of supporters, therefore allowing them to erode liberty even more.
The upshot is this: if western political institutions can maintain a large coalition of supporters for a politician, then the constraint detailed above will act to limit the gradual erosion of liberty.
Or, I could be talking out of my ass. I am just throwing out a slightly more optimistic reading of the situation.
Lee- couple of replies off the top o’ my head-
Firstly bear in mind that our provincial government is normally voted in with a minority of the electorate. If memory serves Tony got 27%, barely more than one quarter. That’s all he needed to bribe.
Secondly, all we now get to vote for is a local representative, who offers his support to a provincial governor, who then gets to be 1/27th of the federal council, who then apparently will just choose a president at random who will him/herself need no electoral mandate whatsoever. Oh, and we get to elect a regional representative to a parliament with no legislative powers or means to check the
politburoexecutive who spend their days voting for flurries of legislation on such vital matters as the trans-fat content of cakes. Hardly anyone understand how the Brussels government works, or even that it’s a government, and it’s deliberately designed so that the source of any piece of legislation is obscured- laws ooze out of a kind of soggy sponge of governance without any easily traceable origin.Under such a corrupted system, how can any checks and balances operate, when the subjects don’t even know where the taxes, laws or handouts are originating from?
On kids: I am with J, more or less. Here in Israel the satanic scare thingy never reached us (duh), we are not yet as health-and-safety crazy as the anglosphere seems to have become, and many kids still do roam free. Only they roam to different places, doing different things: they roam to clubs and parties, doing drinks, smokes and even drugs at a tender age of 13, and some even earlier. Those that don’t, instead roam the net, and when they get tired of that, play their x-boxes and watch TV. J is right, the world and the people in it has changed, for better and worse. And the reason it has happened so fast is because technology has exploded over such a short period of time. I have been on the net for no more than 15 years.
J,
As so often happens in comment threads, I didn’t connect my thoughts in my comment over on The Line is Here. I was one of those kids that would rather read books than have a snowball fight. I was 2/3s the size of other kids my age and threw like a girl. (Am I allowed to say that in this PC age?) But those snowball fights that I didn’t avoid taught me a lot. I was the kid that noticed when there was dirt in the splat from a snow ball and made sure my friends knew too. And I occasionally got hit by an ice ball. Yes it hurt and I seem to recall once getting hit on the right side of my head. But those were even more valuable experiences, educationally speaking, because only the person getting hit knew about the ice core in the snowball. That was one of the times I learned that somebody’s public image could be at odds with their actions. Clever teacher’s pets would cheat. Who knew? 🙂 But in fact it was those kinds of experiences that helped to prepare me for dealing with the same sorts of people as adults.
I am glad to hear of the people raising their kids in what I consider a healthy and life skill developing way. I have a friend who is raising his two boys that way. One day while I was working with him on a country house project, his two boys, a Newfoundland, and an Australian Shepard wandered off and got lost in the woods. A couple of hours later we get a call from my friends wife telling us the two boys are at a farm house about a half mile away. Oops. But my friend and I both think the boys were completely safe. Especially with two dogs that easily outweighed the two boys. And the experience of being lost and working out a safe solution is a good part of their growing up.
On the nimbyism, I do not attribute all of the problems we had on one of our farms to kids from the nearby subdivision being allowed to run around. I attribute that entirely to children who came home to an empty house and were never taught or expected to respect the property of others. Like other commenters have mentioned, I also had to make good on any damage I did and face punishment besides. I strongly suspect that the minority of the kids who cause the most problems do not face either of those consequences.
One of the (no doubt many) reasons this all happened was that people suddenly got time to “care” about society. They had been to Uni, had read a lot of worthwhile books and had “thought about this,” whereas you hadn’t. You were just a drone, living your life without their wisdom. You didn’t know, and had to be told.
These people, the new leaders, had the time because they were being paid, increasingly, to have a non-productive job. Time on their hands to decide what was best. They weren’t leaders in the way that you needed if there was a war, or a crisis. They were leaders because they knew so much and it was bursting to get out.
So these concerned people could now invade your life without worry, confident put you right. They had intellect and superiority of political purpose on their side. Their friends told them they were right, so therefore we ordinary people must be wrong. We were ignorant, and needed to be shown the way.
More than that these leaders had a sense of purpose, and could “make a difference” in the lives of people. If they had heard of “live and let live” it was regarded as some silly saying that really meant nothing. It was more a case of “You may live the way I insist.”
They were thus empowered to organise, correct, guide and review. Life couldn’t be left to people alone. What if they made the wrong choice? What if they weren’t prevented from errors? People, wandering in this aimless life of theirs, were apparently crying out for help.
But no one could hear their pleas for help because of the noise of fear and confusion, of danger and injury and self-harm.
Many aspects of the media reflected this was all a Good Thing, and long overdue. Children for instance could not be allowed to look for conkers, as they were weapons on string so perhaps conker trees should be felled. It would certainly reduce injuries for kids throwing bricks up into trees to knock the horse chestnuts down.
Reducing the lives of the ignorant and unled to well defined areas, neatly parceled up, was a Good Thing To Do and earned praise from like-minded people. People who the new leaders admired (other new leaders) said those who did these Good Things were splendid people – shining knights slaying the dragons of ignorance.
We were all now “better off” so the need for more of it grew…
Loved this post. Linked it at A Tangled Web
http://atangledweb.squarespace.com/httpatangledwebsquarespace/lost-childhood.html
Perry,
In your linked polemical you mentioned “smiley face fascism”. Where did you get that from? It seems to be the inspiration for the cover of Jonah Goldberg’s latest book.
Pete D. I didn’t really get it from anywhere, at least not consciously. The term has been sloshing around London libbo circles for a while.