Children are Sociopaths
My class and I are finishing the semester with a reading of Augustine’s Confessions, and I always have found amusing, troubling, and insightful his discussion of the selfishness of infants. He writes:
“Thus, the infant’s innocence lies in the weakness of his body and not in the infant mind. I have myself observed a baby to be jealous, though it could not speak; it was livid as it watched another infant at the breast. Who is ignorant of this? Mothers and nurses tell us that they cure these things by I know not what remedies. But is this innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing fresh and abundant, that another who needs it should not be allowed to share it, even though he requires such nourishment to sustain his life?”
Yesterday, The Onion reported on a study confirming Augustine’s suspicions. Here’s a taste:
“MINNEAPOLIS—A study published Monday in The Journal Of Child Psychology And Psychiatry has concluded that an estimated 98 percent of children under the age of 10 are remorseless sociopaths with little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures.
According to Dr. Leonard Mateo, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study, most adults are completely unaware that they could be living among callous monsters who would remorselessly exploit them to obtain something as insignificant as an ice cream cone or a new toy.”
In other news, Jesus has apparently turned down a multi-million dollar contract to be Notre Dame’s new Head Coach:
“SOUTH BEND, IN—Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Savior of All Mankind, and current defensive coordinator at Middle Tennessee State, said Monday that He would not accept Notre Dame’s 3-year, $5.6 million offer to coach the Fighting Irish. “I love Notre Dame and respect their football legacy, but no matter what you’ve accomplished before coaching there, once you’re a Golden Domer, the expectations, frankly, are unrealistic,” said Christ, whose family has been involved with the university since its founding. “I’ve had people turn on Me before, and it really put Me through hell. But even more importantly, I’ve made a commitment to stay with the Blue Raiders through 2015.” Christ denied asking Notre Dame to remove His likeness from the building overlooking their stadium, saying He liked a good joke as much as anybody”
And Psychiatry has concluded that an estimated 98 percent of children under the age of 10 are remorseless sociopaths with little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures.
The bad news is that then they become tweenagers and finally teenagers!
Evelyn Waugh famously defined children as “imperfect adults.” Suffer the little children [...], suffer the flu. Take up your cross. Not exactly Christian, maybe, but one plausible response to normal experience.
Freud saw infants as “pure id,” interested only in instant gratification of their own desires. Although a lot of Freud’s theories have gone out of fashion or have been discredited, he was probably right. How could it be any different when all you know is your own needs and desires and have no conception of how fulfilling them impacts other people. As an infant, you have very little idea of what other people are except insofar as they provide for your needs.
Does this mean I am in agreement with Augustine? It would be an unusual position for me. :-P
Children in some Puritan dispensations were sinners. Now they’re sociopaths? The medical model triumphs once again.
I have to go now Clarice. My friend Jimmy is coming over for a play date. Afterwards, I think he will stay for dinner. He will go nicely with a juice box and some pureed fava beans.
My eight Grandchildren are so much more pleasant and so little trouble compared to what I remember my 6 children were at their age .. I say ba-humbug to Augustine and the Minneapolis study.. too damn hot in Hippo and too damn cold in Minneapolis.. do a study in California where all the flowers grow tall and colorful!!!! All our sociopaths are from elsewhere..
My observation is that children are kinder, more generous and better persons than adults. So if Augustine is right about children, what does that say about us?!
I hate to agree with Augustine on anything, but what Hobbes wrote about life seems to apply also to children …. nasty, brutish, and short :)
In “The Scientist in the Crib” the authors (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl) tell us that the video camera has been to the study of child development what the microscope was to the biologists, and the field of child development has blossomed. No, they have not found that children are monsters. Just that they are small people whose thinking processes are far in advance of what had been assumed and their their mental life is enormously complex. Utterly surprising to me in many ways and totally fascinating.
Also take a look at Alan Gopnik’s “The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us about Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life”, Fascinating!
Yes, St. Augustine takes somef hits :-)
Alice Gopnik…not Alan. I gave my daughter the book so she could gauge how philosophical the children were.
Oops — thanks, Ms. S. My books say she’s Alison.
What I particularly like about the books is that she knows some philosophy. For instance, she sees that the problem of Other Minds is to some extent a question even for tiny infants. Amazingly they catch on as tiny ones that there are other minds besides their own, and before you know it they’re starting to show empathy. By the age of two not only do they show empathetic feeling they also offer comfort. Causality is a big thing with them too. Their understanding of intentions is totally amazing. In “The Philosophical Baby” Gopnik says,
“We’ve seen that even one-year-olds already understand human intentions and differentiate intentional and unintentional actions. And even babies seem to blame people based on their intentions.”
(It’s studies like these, I think, that will ultimately provide the data for answering the question: How do we know a person when we find one?)
Ann: Your comment that even tiny children catch on “that there are other minds besides their own” makes me wonder again why the problem of Other Minds seems to be, for some philosophers, such a problem. What’s the problem? And does it differ from the problem of knowing anything else in the world?
Some have it here that I automatically knock Augustine. Well he seems to fit this time also. It is the Adults who are killing the Donatists because they disagree. And pushing people into ovens in the 20th century! We call this original sin, remember. The reason we are not necessarily seen as psychopaths as the children is that we disquise it better. Most of us are followers and fear to think for ourselves. In other words to have a conscience. Ratzinger’s beloved bishop said he had no opinion on the Jewish question, i.e. whether they should be exterminated or not. Or we do not canonize a brave leader who was shot presiding over the Eucharist but canonize people who do not exist or have devotions to shrines which have a dubious history.
We really do not know people until we have had a substantial transaction with them. Either about money or sharing scarce food.
Actually, children have more cause to act out because we organize their lives minutely. We even insist when they can hug or not. But children are infinitely more happy than adults. It is when we insist they be as boring as us that they scheme for a better way. Instead of teaching children how to be generous, we teach them how to fake it. Like us. I agree with Jim Pauwels on this.
Augustine should have played with children more. Perhaps his own.
JAK ==
I don’t think I said Other Minds was a problem for the babies — I said it was a *question* for them. kGopnik goes so far as to say that they learn that there are other minds so fast that they seem to be pre-programmed to do so. (Something like a set of Kantian categories built into their little brains/minds, including one for “mind”?? One more thing for Dawkins to explain???)
However, the notion of Other Minds assumes that there are *two* minds involved. But tiny babies don’t seem to have a clear notion of themselves as a self or mental mega-unit. Early on they don’t even always distinguish self and object. So yes, there is the problem of the external world for them, but from what those books say I don’t think the psychologists yet know how the babes come to think that there is a world independent of themselves. Further, sometimes it seems tha their empathy is due to a sort of identification of self and Other — self and Other simply aren’t always differentiated. How they learn to distinguish self (such as it is) from the external world and Others as other, seems to be by trial and error which involves a very primitive sort of scientific method, trying all the possibilities until they hit on an answer to their question. That is why a baby will hit something on the floor, lick it, smell it, chew on it, try to pull it apart, etc. But Gopnik gives no explanation of that final leap: I am not it, it is not me!
The philosophers for whom Other Minds is a problem are some of Wittgenstein’ followers. He seems at times to be saying that we never know other minds, that what we know are only people using languages. He even denies that we reason by analogy to the existence of other minds. But he also talks about concepts as if other people have them, and images, etc. Utterly contradictory, I think.
The basic problem is, I think, solipcism, and the Other Minds problem as presented by Witt. is just part of it.
I think that Witt. is a bit crazy when it comes to this topic. Yes, literally crazy. One of his main disciples (who is now an executor of his literary estate) wrote an article (in the 50s?) attempting to show that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus exhibits schizophrenic thinking in some parts, and not just at the end where he says what he has written is “nonsense”. (There is actually a non-crazy interpretation for that, but I won’t go into it.) I have yet to see that article in any bibliography. It’s as if his disciples are trying to sweep a fact (Witt.’s touch of schizophrenia) under the rug. Of course, I might just be missing the point that Witt. is trying to make.
So if he was crazy why give him such attention? Because he made some very major contributions to philosophy of logic and, of course, philosophy of language, not to mention some other areas. Further, he provokes us into seeing problems differently, which is always a help, I think. Still, I’m convinced that part of the difficulty of reading him is that there is some craziness in parts of his writings.
Sorry if this doesn’t answer your questions. There are some other questions involved I can’t answer.
In defense of Augustine, later in that same “Book I” of the Confessions, he argues that Christ’s exhortation to be like children still stands. It’s just that children ought to be emulated for their humility, not their purity and innocence. He does indeed think adults are worse than children because we have our rationalizations and self-righteousness. He seems to think that most children are pretty quick to admit they are wrong (or at least express shame) and seek to regain the favor of their parents, quite unlike the typical response of most adults to being called out for their sins.
Fr. K. For the Problem of Other Minds and how it originated and Augustine’s contribution see Fergus Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein. I am half way through it and it is quite fascinating.
Right Alison, not Alice.
I’ve read Kerr’s book, and felt that he goes too far in his admiration of Wittgenstein. As Francesca Murphy pointed out in a review that Kerr responded to in an afterword to his new edition, he comes close to collapsing the individual subject into a mere creature of language.
JAK –
I agree about the Kerr book. I didn’t nearly finish it. Kerr’s the sort of disciple of Witt. who is unable to see any flaws in the master. But I sympathize — Wittgenstein has so very much to offer anyone who needs to know more about how ordinary language really works. Oh, how I wish the liturgical decision makers knew more about him.
Anyone who has had care of toddlers will know that babies are not born with all the virtues. They do exhibit jealousy, possessiveness, anger, etc.
And Augustine did have a child of his own. A son named Adeodatus(sp).
Finally, I don’t get the hostility to Augustine.
Terrence Tilley has a mind-opening chapter in “The Evils of Theodicy” in which he uses speech-act theory to disassemble the “Augustine” to whom the hostile are hostile. I can’t do it justice in the 5 minutes availale right now. Everybody, go read it!
John Rist’s book on Augustine is also worth reading. Rist presents Augustine as at once a man of his time and place and a brilliant, original thinker, who never ceased to ask questions and was quite capable of changing his mind.
I have only read the first three chapters of Kerr’s book so I have not come to an overall judgment–although I have found Kerr helpful otherwise–but I think his picture of the mind in chs. 1-3 as it is found in so many philosophers of quite disparate interests–Christians, atheists, agnostics–is well drawn so far. There is a thread that first (?) appears in Plato, runs threw the Neo-Platonists appears in Augustine and his followers, and takes a new life with Descartes et al. The other Sunday we had a homilist, who is also a professor of Theology, who told the faithful that of course the true self was the soul that survives death. I was really startled. But his homilies are often odd except for one he gave on the Trinity which seemed almost out of character.
I don’t know if St. Augustine spent enough time with little children. In my observations as a classroom teacher, I believe most kids operate with an inate sense of fairness and expect it in return. I also believe there is a lot of goodness in the average child, and it gets messed up by well-intentioned and not so well-intentioned adults. Kids have a hard time escaping what they have been raised with. God bless the little children!