States of Nature
Itard: Wild Boy of Aveyron (1801; 1806)
A. Huxley, Brave
Itard’s work amounts to a theoretical treatise on education - what are we humans naturally, instinctively endowed with?; what is cultural? Even before working with the wild boy who he would name Victor, Itard’s philosophy of education was very constructive. Heading into his venture of educating Victor, he believed that “if a child knows the name of the natural sign of the objects he uses … “yes” and “no” and can use them correctly, then all is not lost” (p.88) and that “hereditary forms of mental retardation are extremely rare” (p.87). No doubt the influence of Philippe Pinel, a psychiatrist who in the late 1700s brought more humane living conditions to inmates of asylums, played a role in the Wild Child’s more or less humane treatment.
Itard wrote, five years after starting his work with Victor, that the development of the physical and the intellectual are simultaneous and their influence reciprocal (p. 152, from Report on Progress: 1806). Evidence for this statement is made plain in the fact that an adolescent’s ability to learn and become socialized is in direct proportion to his history of socialization. It is thought that the Victor had been with his family until the age of about four because he was able to learn, to a certain extent. This speaks to the importance of having a companion early in life (p.91-92). “Man is only made to be by his external circumstances”. (It is even thought, although this is only conjecture, that the Victor was left for dead by his family because he wasn’t developing normally - did he have autism? However, we’ll never know and it may as easily have been that he got lost in the great upheaval and migrations that took place over the years following the French Revolution.
“…he wandered about during the severity of a most rigorous winter, clad only in a tattered shirt. At night he retired into solitary places, approaching, as the day advanced, the neighbouring villages; and in this manner he passed a vagrant kind of life, till the time in which, of his own accord, he sought refuge in a dwelling-house in the Canton of St Sernin.” (p.95). This description convinced me that Mary Shelley had read this treatise before completing Frankenstein (the report being published only a few years before she wrote the book). The following description, man in his most natural possible state: “…a disgusting, slovenly boy, affected with spasmodic, and frequently with convulsive motions, continually balancing himself like some of the animals in the menagerie…” (p.96). I believe that if we were to grow up with animals, we would behave like animals. Itard’s account of Victor’s education magnifies the fact that so much of what we have become is the result of cultural forces that have a very tenuous connection to nature at all. Think of Victor’s reaction to some of the “finer” things in life: “…[he has] a complete aversion towards the object of our pleasures and our factitious wants” (p.99), (namely alcohol and snuff), and he remains profoundly and inextricably tied to his natural surroundings. In Itard’s descriptions of Victor, there are several examples of the melancholic and ecstatic effect that Nature has on the “Savage” (p.104, but one example). And another from Report on Progress: 1806: “He drinks his water standing at the window, eyes turned towards the countryside as if in this moment of sheer delight this child of nature seeks to unite the only two things which remain from his lost freedom, a drink of clear water and the sight of the sun on the countryside”. (p.155)
Like Rousseau, Itard is searching for the real, the authentic, the roots of human nature. By reduction Rousseau is trying to figure out what is natural. Similarly, Itard tries to answer: What are we fundamentally? What is our original/initial ‘equipment’?
It was stressed in class that one should be wary of using statements that include the phrase “Human nature” as they are loaded and can be applied to whatever belief system one may support. Given that, I’d like to revisit some of Rousseau’s writing one day and determine exactly what he thought of humanity in his day and how he believed that humanity would look like if it did stay close to a state of nature. (I cannot believe that he would want humanity to look like Victor, the Wild Boy. What a waste that would be! And to live without snuff!?)
So if Victor is the “bottom line”, “bare-bones” human, how did we leave this very basic state of nature? Several suggestions follow: We, in our primeval state, gave over our sovereignty to a lord or leader who kept us under control so as to keep us from killing one another willy-nilly thus enabling us to progress and to live communally. Rousseau’s idea focuses more on the division of labour, exploitation and property from what I recall. But I am still curious about what Rousseau’s idea of utopia was.
Would such a utopia include and “accept” our wild animal instincts even though they might work against community living? Many of our basic instincts are aggressive in nature. To address some of the questions that came up in seminar: Should Victor have been given a chance to express the “forest culture that he was familiar with” and was he somehow short-changed by Itard in this respect? The thought of the professor in The Lives of Animals came to my mind: She suggests that bats and cats have their own culture. They are batty or catty… “We might not value cats the same way we do humans, but they do have their own thing going on”. Should the same consideration have been given Victor? I think it is clear enough that the very notion is ridiculous. Had this boy been found and had Itard not try to civilize him (or “educate him” or “make him more human”…however you want to describe it), Victor would be worse off and there would be criticisms of Itard to this day. Moreover, this study is not comparable to how Europeans tried to “civilize” the Natives of North America because the Natives had language skills and were socialized in a way that Victor certainly was not.
O Brave New World…
“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” (Marshall McLuhan (1960s))
Aldous Huxley’s life is fascinating. He covered so much in his years and his curiosity is inspirational. In seminar, I was astounded at how much he had covered in his lifetime. His influence spans continents; his famous and influential friends were many and varied. He was wholistic, if I had to pick one word to sum up his life and philosophy. A proponent of the Gestalt movement (whose principle is "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts") and a member of Esalen (an institute that brings together the philosophies of the East and West and supports the Human Potential Movement), Huxley lived his message: “Give it your all!” What I found most agreeable was that he maintained that one needs to dive into relationships with others in order to delve into and to know one’s self.
Most of us have read Brave New World and understand what the themes are. Just prior to rereading the book this month, I learned that in his essay, Brave New World Revisited, (written in 1958) Huxley states that he’s surprised at the pace that humanity is accelerating towards his vision. I can’t help but wonder what he’d think of humanity today! We all walk around with phones… many are “smart, android phones”; some, iPhones. How do we know there’s no recording device within them where everything we say is catalogued somewhere… perhaps not for today, but maybe for tomorrow. Same thing with Facebook. There is something very dystopian about our time.
Mustafa Mond makes a CHOICE to give up science and to go into “control and management of happiness”. Maybe this is his own route to happiness. Maybe this is the difference, he is happy because he has a level of awareness about his decisions. I was interested in learning that his name likely came from “Mustafa Kemal Ataturk” a Turkish president who was very supportive of universal education for all (including adults and women!) While he was in power the armed forces implemented an extensive program of literacy that Atatürk heralded "The Army of Enlightenment". He personally instructed children and adults in schoolrooms, parks, and other places. Literacy which had been less than 9 percent in 1923 rose to more than 33 percent by 1938. He said “The government’s most creative and significant duty is education.”
US Constitution: “Life,
In Myth of Sisyphus: (p.53) “…the theme of permanent revolution is carried into individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is above all contemplating it”. This is just what the people in Brave New World were NOT given opportunity to do! To live on the edge: (p.50) “The danger, on the contrary, lies in the subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest - that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.” The “exhilaration” or “dizziness” Brave New Worlders get is from Soma; it masks the real experience that should be suffused with awareness.
On EugenicsIn reading background information for Brave New World I found that babies born deaf are necessarily raised differently and in order to learn faster, are schooled with other deaf children. No doubt, many of their friends and contacts are deaf. The society of the deaf insists - and rightfully so - that the deaf community is different and has just as much value in every sense of the word as the non-deaf community. Does this make it right for deaf parents to select for deaf embryos?
I don’t normally buy into slippery-slope arguments (abortion has not resulted in the breakdown of our moral fabric as far as I can tell; in fact the opposite can be argued.) and deaf embryos never possessed the ability to hear in the first place so they have not had anything taken away from them… but if this were done for the deaf, we could conceivably see prospective parents who are amputees, paraplegics or blind demanding the same thing, and why not?
Characters in Brave New World who claim to be “happy” are not far from happy, really, at least from how many people define the word. Many people’s time is filled with meaningless time-wasters to mask the inner discontent with how they spend their time. Perhaps we don’t want to pause and ask ourselves: why are we so busy? Is what I’m doing worthwhile? Does it have meaning? No wonder some of us can finally “breathe” when we’re at work because those 8 hours of time are already “spoken for” - we have little choice but to be there and the time spent at work is not “our” time - it is our employer’s and he is to direct it as he sees fit. Perhaps this is just one of multiple definitions of happiness. Does our obsession with maintaining a state of happiness indicate that we are refusing to become adults? We grow through suffering and hardship but this is something to be avoided at all costs.
"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities." Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).
On that note, “work” is very often used as an excuse: “I can’t do this or that because of work…” For some people, work is an escape, a refuge where we don’t have to focus on ourselves. For such individuals it is easier to be at work than maintain the level of activity needed to hide from themselves, or to actually face themselves. Avoid any thought that might indicate that life lacks purpose and meaning.
Is this the genius of the “Protestant Work Ethic”? Keep working incessantly because in doing just that you are doing God’s work, and God will look favorably on you (and it keeps you from thinking, and even questioning God. If you’re not working you have too much time, and are in the Devil’s workshop).
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