That was the title of a request for legal advice submitted to Reddit by someone with the user name “HelpfulButterscotch2”. Here is the whole post:
[CA] A student at the preschool I work at is only being taught a fictional language
I’m twenty, and I work part-time as an assistant at a small daycare in California.
There is a four year old who speaks very very little and poor English. Knows the most basic of words but is at the level of maybe a two year old English-wise compared to the other kids, including several who are both native Spanish/English speakers. Basically knows “yes”, “no”, “juice”, etc.
He’s only been here for less than a month and I’ve seen his incredibly limited vocab double in that time. I’m embarrassed to say it but I’m very uneducated about this type of thing and I thought he was speaking Portuguese or something similar up until last week. The kids are split into small groups by age and I’m usually not in charge of his group unless it’s at the end of the day, in my defense.
The hosts of the daycare are very into nerd culture and some of the daycare is very decorated with (child friendly) sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I’m not too into it myself but I like listening to them and I (usually) like their passion.
One day I was curious what language the child was speaking so I looked up what Portuguese actually sounded like and realized it wasn’t that. Looked up a lot of languages and for the life of me could not identify it. The single dad who picked him up looked like a nice dude and one day he was one of the last people to pick up that day so I asked him what language his kid spoke.
The bosses of the daycare were there too when I asked and they all suddenly got big smiles on their faces and explained to me in depth that the guy was a linguistics hobbyist who was trying to recreate an experiment where he raises his kid to speak a language from the tv show Star Trek (klingon.)
He explained how at home he only has spoken Klingon (which is apparently a real full language) to the kid and that’s all he knows. My bosses LOVE that he is doing this and he does too, he told me to look up the experiment and read about it. My bosses even learned a small bit of the language themselves so that when they talk to the kid they don’t say it.
It sounded kinda cool at the time but I didn’t really think about it too much. When I looked it up I found out that the guy who did it taught his kid Klingon AND English at the same time. I assumed that this guy was doing the same and I just misunderstood but when I clarified next time he confirmed that the kid was ONLY being taught Klingon on purpose and he was going to try and continue the “experiment” for as long as possible.
He also told me about his blog and I checked it out where he describes this all and he basically states in it that he is fully aware that this will make it “slightly” hard for the kid to speak english later but that the experience is worth it. He even has limited the kids intake of media very severely so far to avoid shows with a lot of speaking/words.
The kid is fairly isolated and generally acts a bit socially “off”, if I can say that without being mean. Not like misbehaving but he clearly has small issues interacting with kids his age who all talk a lot already.
I’ve brought it up casually with my bosses but they basically love this dude and what he is doing and don’t see a problem with it. I feel terrible but I feel like I should report this? Is this child abuse? This guy basically is mispurposely not teaching his kid to how to interact with other people for the level of “it’s just a social experiment bro”, it’s nuts to me.
If I’m wrong and this isn’t dangerous I apologize. It feels awful to me though. I like my job otherwise but if I had to lose it for this i could find another one, have some savings, i feel too bad for this kid.
That is eerily similar to the scenario I imagined a couple of years ago in a post called “The morality of not teaching your child English”. I started by asking whether it would be wrong to raise your child to speak only Welsh. No, I answered. “Welsh has over half a million speakers and a magnificent corpus of poetry, literature and song. Speaking Welsh alone does not remotely count as linguistic imprisonment”. Then I asked the question again for languages with smaller and smaller numbers of speakers. 50,000? 5,000? 500? That last figure is about the number of Cornish speakers. I wrote:
Very recently the Cornish language has been revived. 557 speakers claim it as their main language, 20 young children are native speakers. Let me stress that in real life all of these children are being brought up to be bilingual in Cornish and English. But when you get down to a group of that size and imagine its children being brought up monolingually, the mental walls do begin to close in.
How small would the village be before it became a prison?
The specific example of Klingon was brought up in comments by William H Stoddard. He cited the fairly well-known case (also mentioned by “HelpfulButterscotch2”) of another child who was taught Klingon from babyhood by his father back in the 1990s, but – and this is a crucial distinction – that child’s mother spoke to him in English. As I said,
…when the child began to notice that the people he met outside didn’t speak this language he began to stop talking in it (a common way for attempts to raise bilingual children to break down, as I’m sure you know), and the father did not persist and risk damaging his relationship with the child. It was getting to be a pain for the father too, as Klingon doesn’t have equivalents for a lot of the everyday English words that the boy was meeting as his world expanded. Given that the child also learned English, the only ethical issue, and a much smaller one, was whether one should make one’s child mildly famous as an experiment.
At the time I had reservations about naming the child, but without need. The story of how d’Armond Speers tried to raise his son to be bilingual in Klingon and English is all over the internet. Stephen Fry interviewed him. The son is grown up now, speaks English normally, and has forgotten his Klingon.
But the child described by “HelpfulButterscotch2” has not been raised to speak a conlang alongside English. He has only been exposed to the artificial language and, if the post is to be believed, has been prevented from learning English. Though to be fair that isolation from English has now ceased, given that he now goes to a normal US preschool.
In principle it should make no difference whether the language the child is being raised in is a conlang or a natural language. Esperanto is a constructed language, but it has had quite a few native speakers, usually the children of parents from different countries who met at Esperanto conferences. Apparently Esperanto was the mother tongue of the financier George Soros. It does not seem to have held him back. However one problem with Klingon that d’Armond Speers mentioned in his interview with Stephen Fry is that, compared to Esperanto which has been going for well over a century and has several million speakers, Klingon is the work of one man and has a limited vocabulary. That point was made even by the conlanging enthusiasts who discussed this story when it was cross-posted to the subreddit dealing with constructed languages, /r/conlangs. The general reaction there was disquiet. The top comment is by “chrevs” and reads,
It’d be different if he was being raised as bilingual, but he’s stunting the kid’s ability to to get on where he lives. Not to mention that if things were to be going horribly wrong at home, like his father decides he also needs to be practicing the kind of ritual combat the Klingon do, the kid can’t express that he’s in danger to teachers or other trusted adults. It’s not okay
Another commenter called “Esosorum” says,
I worry that, from a biological perspective, this child’s brain isn’t experiencing language-acquisition the way it was meant to. I just don’t think conlangs have as much to offer as natural languages. I don’t disagree that conlangs can be wonderfully expressive and complex, but natural language is rooted in culture in a way that a conlang can’t be.
It could be that the post by HelpfulButterscotch2 is not to be believed. It was submitted under a pseudonym and the author joined Reddit one day before submitting it. That means that we are not in a position to get a feel for their sincerity (and sanity) by looking at their comment history. I find it curious that there is no link provided to the blog where the father of the boy is claimed to describe what he is doing. Some people do take an odd pleasure in passing off bizarre fictions as truth just for the buzz. On the other hand having joined Reddit one day ago is not inconsistent with a person not knowing who else to turn to for advice about a situation that worries them deeply. Equally, HelpfulButterscotch2 may be sincere but have misunderstood the situation. I hope so.
But assuming that this is really happening as described, it does raise some sharp questions for Libertarians. When do we get on the phone and send the state sweeping in to “save” a child from their parents?
If parents handicap their children, why should I try to change their decisions?
It’s evolution in action and either gives my children an advantage in survival and/or mating, or it does not.
For myself, I will always need LoFo LoQs to clean my toilets and do other tiresome or nasty chores for minimum wage.
I too am a parent and want to see my children flourish. Unlike you, I do not see the world as a zero sum game and believe in liberty and non-aggression precisely because these principles allow all to flourish.
I do not know what “LoFo” and “LoQs” mean. Please speak English.
It’s self-regulating. Soon enough, the kid is going to start picking up language from the other kids, which (presumably) will be a mixture of English and Spanish. Then comes school, and he will pick up even more. When I was an exchange student in the US at 15, my host family told me that they would occasionally get students in with little more English than this kid (yes, no, juice), and they’d be fully functional in a month. Need is a powerful teacher, and languages aren’t actually that difficult, and less so the younger the kid.
To me (as a parent) the subject of child rearing is an important one, and one where you hit the margins of libertarianism. The underlying principle of libertarianism is limited by the fact that children are not capable of making choices for themselves. The exercise of liberty requires cognitive functions that children simply don’t have. As a consequence their liberty is assigned to a parent or guardian who will make the choices for them. However, there is a “contract” involved here. By the parent/guardian taking over the child’s rights and liberty they have also taken on a duty to exercise it in the best interests of the child. And here is the point — the government, or somebody anyway, does have a legitimate role in ensuring that the parent is acting in the best interest of the child.
Now “best interest of the child” is extremely hard to define. And there is another important point here — generally speaking there are only one or two people in the world who are willing to take on the burden of a child and so that child has few options. If the parents are not acting in the best interest of the child there are few options to improve the situation for the child. All options are bad. State custody is appalling, and fostering is a crapshoot at best. (To be clear, there are many loving and wonderful people who foster children, but there are also many who are neither loving nor wonderful.)
So if there are two options: stay with bad parents, or remove the child to an institution or chance it with fostering, then the parents have to be VERY bad before such a change offers a decent probability of improving the child’s situation. This is compounded by the fact the the DCFS is one of the most dreadful agencies the government has ever created.
So it is a difficult thing, but it is a thing in which I believe the government has a legitimate role — since they act on behalf of those who cannot act for themselves and whose guardians have failed to act with their best interests in mind. However, although there might be a legitimate case for the government to act, there is, in reality, very little they can actually do to improve a child’s situation.
One of the biggest problems is that there is no common definition of what “in the child’s best interest” truly is. There are some areas that are obvious — the child needs to be fed a relatively nutritious diet, the child needs an education, the child needs hygienic conditions and a safe place to live. However, for some of these they represent a slippery slope that makes any petty jobsworth little tyrant (and the DCFS is full of such busybodies) salivate with joy. What is a “nutritious diet”? If a kid is 100lbs overweight does that indicate neglect? What about an education? Should parents be allowed to homeschool their kids with, what the state might consider, a substandard education? What if the parent is religious and doesn’t teach the kid about evolution, or teaches the kid that homosexuality is wrong? Or teaches that killing infidels is righteous? If you live on the south side of Chicago — an extremely dangerous place — or send your kids to some of the dreadful, dangerous public schools, are your failing in your duty to provide the kid a safe place to live and learn?
And what language to chose is simply one of those judgement calls. I think a more stark question might be regarding cochlear implants. Deaf parents often are extremely resistant to having their child have these implants in a belief that it is an insult, a rejection of deaf culture. This is in many ways similar to the language issue. Is that a legitimate choice? Should parents rob their children of the chance to hear in order to save a culture that the think is important to preserve? I think it is crazy to stop your child from hearing for such a small reason. But there are many parents who do so, and aggressively assert their right to do so.
And what about health? Given the irrefutable evidence for the benefits of most vaccines should parents be forced to vaccinate their kids? If you say no to this, how about this situation: a child suffers an accident that causes serious blood loss. The parents are Jehovah’s witnesses and refuse the hospital permission to give the child blood products, something that will certainly lead to the child’s death. Should the hospital, perhaps with intervention from the DCFS, treat the child anyway? Should the parents’ rights be suspended or removed for such a choice?
These are not easy things to answer, and they challenge the limits of the generative capacity of libertarianism to answer some very hard and important choices as to how a government should function.
On the one hand what some parents do to their children makes you want to bring back hanging, drawing and quartering. But what the DCFS does to children and parents can be utterly terrible too. A stark choice indeed.
Hmm. This one really made me think.
I was brought up speaking only Dutch from birth to age 3 1/2.
At which point, the family upped sticks and moved to the UK. This was in the days before there was such a thing as kindergarten. And my parents and older sibling spoke almost-exclusively Dutch in the home. My father spoke excellent English, but with an accent. My mother spoke no English at all beyond grade-school instruction, and to this day speaks broken English with a powerful accent.
I know that by the time I went to infant’s school at age 5 (and only just, my birthday is in August) I was speaking English indistinguishable from my classmates, and by age 7 or 8 I was a star pupil in English, reading and speaking far above grade level.
I mentioned in a post just a few days ago that I went to school with a boy with Polish parents, and I will now expand. George and I met on the first day of infant’s school and we went to the same UK schools until we went off to different colleges. Although he was born in the UK, he, his parents and his siblings all spoke fluent Polish, and spoke Polish almost-exclusively in the home. And, like me, he showed up on the first day of school speaking English indistinguishable from our classmates and, like me, by age 7 or 8, he was also a star English pupil. In those days, there was no concept of ESL education or other aids to learning a language for young children – it was sink-or-swim.
My experience suggests that children at that age have a staggering capacity to absorb new language and will become fluent and capable in a matter of months, if suitably exposed. I recall a Nigerian boy of Ibo parentage (Eze) who joined our classes at about age 7 or 8, and a Japanese boy (Tadashi) who came along perhaps a year later, both with rudimentary English, who were both completely-proficient in a matter of months.
My experience also suggests that children who come to a new language late or not-by-birth tend to absorb that language much better and become more-proficient than their native-speaking peers. Whether by dint of having to try harder, or by extra effort on the part of parents and teachers, is hard to say. I know that at age 8 or 9, my father would have me read him the Times editorials in the evenings, helping me with new words and concepts. All I can say is that, even after 40+ years in the US, I still speak Home Counties English with flawless, received pronunciation, and have been able to pass myself off as a native upper-middle-class twit at will ever since Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.
So I don’t have too many concerns about the child described, despite the antics of his idiot father. What a maroon. Klingon? Really? If you’re going to try and force a language on your child, why not choose something useful that will help him on his way, instead of using him as a playground for your nerd fantasies? Klingon? Moron, more like.
My only concern would be if the father is involved in strange child-rearing practices beyond the stupid language fetish. The fact that it’s Klingon matters little – if he was teaching him Japanese, nobody would bat an eye, so the only question is that he’s wasting the boy’s potential by his inane, egocentric language choice. But I think that’s well-within the bounds of parental discretion over which the state and other should have no say. So long as he’s not seriously-disrupting the child’s physical or emotional well-being – and I set the bar for proving that quite high – I say it’s solely within his parental discretion and nobody else has a word to say about it.
Fascinating thought experiment. Thank you for bringing it.
llater,
llamas
Incidentally, the Japanese boy (Tadashi) that I mentioned above, has gone on to great things. I heard him speak publicly recently, and his English, while not perfect, still retains the suburban Surrey accent he picked up all those years ago. It would seem that, just as language is very easy to assimilate in a certain age range, it is also very solidly ‘set’ in the mind and will stay that way for a long time.
llater,
llamas
Fred Z: children who are mistreated thus aren’t part of any Darwinian process: the children aren’t causing this but their moronic parents are. What’s happening in this case is a disgraceful situation. I’m unsure what should happen in a fully libertarian society but I’d like to think that doing just nothing isn’t right, either.
Clean your own toilets, you lazy twerp.
In a moderately or mostly “libertarian” legal/social environment I would not argue for intervention.
After all, in a largely libertarian social setting no one else becomes responsible for supporting poorly raised children–they either adapt, find REAL charity, or die.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in the world where a marginally functional adult gets support from the state, which is to say my tax dollars. *I* don’t mind[1] my tax dollars going to people with Downs or other congenital issues. People who lost limbs (either as children or through no fault of their own etc.). I would *prefer* real charities came back and took over because they tend to be less inefficient, but taking care of the unfortunate is not a bad use of “extra” resources.
But let’s be clear about this. This is a father *deliberately* and *actively* handicapping his child because it amuses him. It’s not an experiment, it’s no different than binding a little girl’s feet.
It *isolates* the child from other children his age and gives him only one person he can speak to. It makes it impossible for him to *communicate* with anyone other than his father.
It’s child abuse, and it’s going to be on the backs of California and American tax payers to sort out.
It would be karma if dad suffers some sort of accident in the home and the child *cannot* communicate with the 911 operator.
[1] But I generally vote against and argue against these sorts of schemes because just because I don’t mind doesn’t mean I think YOU should have a gun pointed at your head and forced to contribute.
“A student at the preschool I work at is only being taught a fictional language”
And there’s your problem right there. The child in question is not even a pupil: he/she is a child, possibly barely more than a toddler. The epithet “student” confers a level of maturity and agency that is not warranted at best and could, at worst, imply a dangerous attitude on the part of the staff towards the care and nurture of their tiny charges.
Whose child is this? Who owns and raises these children? Are they ‘owned’ by their parents, or by society? Who is to determine that specifically avoiding English instruction is any more abusive to a child’s upbringing than allowing them to enjoy rap and gangsta role modeling? Does PappaDork smoke pot at home? In front of the kid? Does he eat his veggies? Does PappaDork rail loudly for or against Brexit anytime it comes up on the boob tube? What constitutes abuse?
I think if you arent free to raise your child as you see fit… you arent a free range human… you are just another breeder of a future tax resource.
@Darryl
I think if you arent free to raise your child as you see fit… you arent a free range human… you are just another breeder of a future tax resource.
Nonsense. Children have rights too, and parents can, and often do abuse those rights. Are you, for example, ok a parent raising their child to be a suicide bomber? Are you ok with parents having their children pay their way through life by offering sexual services? Are you ok with parents deciding to send their kids up the chimney as chimney sweeps? Are you ok with parents locking their children in a dark damp basement for 23 hours a day, or punishing minor imagined infractions with brutal physical punishments?
Children have rights too, and if parents want to exercise these children’s rights on their behalf then they have a duty of care in doing so. Otherwise they are free to give their children up for adoption (as many people do.) Liberty and shirking legitimately acquired responsibility are not the same thing, in fact they are almost opposites.
The extent of that duty of care is not easy to define, language being one area where it can be a bit gray, but “anything goes” doesn’t work.
Do the parents only speak “Klingon”, or do they speak English at work and so on?
If the latter is the case then they are indeed harming their child – they are BAD PARENTS, which makes them BAD PEOPLE. And what of the mother? Does the mother have no say in how her child is brought up? Why is this just a matter for the father?
The Isle of Man was conquered by the Vikings – a warrior culture much like the “Klingons”, yet future generations spoke Manx (a Celtic language) not Norse (the language of the Vikings), because the MOTHERS decided what language they would speak to their children in.
Language is important – as Noah Webster (the creator of the Webster dictionary) was fond of pointing out, the word we use for a thing or concept helps (does NOT completely determine – but partly shapes) how we think about that thing or concept. For example the word “Brexit” sounds flippant (indeed absurd) – it would be silly to take such a thing or concept seriously, to regard it has having much importance. Whereas “independence” sounds like an important thing or concept – something to be taken seriously.
As for a child who can speak nothing but “Klingon” the future is clear – a violent criminal, what else could they do? Not even a very good criminal – at least till they learn English in prison. And YES the child will always be at a disadvantage – even if they later learn English at school.
I do feel that learning other languages could be important and from experience have found that it seems to help extend the linguistic capacity of the mind. For example, I grew up to speak 3 languages fluently:
* Welsh (a compulsory language in North Wales primary and secondary schools).
* English (mother tongue and a compulsory language of tuition in North Wales.)
* French (from attending European schools where French was compulsory).
From the latter schools I was also taught passable conversational use of:
* Spanish.
* German.
– and to speak Esperanto like a native.
.
Some years later, I needed to learn conversational Thai whilst working as an expat in SE Asia.
I found the European languages to be relatively easy to pick up, because they tend to be logically similar and share common roots in Latin (with Russian arguably being “more English than English” in that regard). However, Thai was a real challenge as it has a different logic and a 5-tonal vowel set with about 33 vowels and about 44 letters of the alphabet and no permutation of verbs and no tenses. I still haven’t learned to read/write Thai script though.
But the language that probably gave me the best foundation for learning to speak other languages would be Welsh. To be able to speak Welsh, one needs to have:
(from, as I recall, The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok article on the Welsh art of self-defence called “Llap Goch”). If you can speak Welsh properly, then you can probably pronounce words in any other language relatively easily – including Urdu (a form of Hindustani), or Persian (Farsi), for example.
So, being taught to speak Klingon might be helpful for more easily picking up other languages, but to make it the child’s only or 1st language would seem to be a cruel experiment on a child and likely to create difficulties in social interactions and social acceptance for the kid. I somehow doubt the post is genuine.
This didn’t happen.
Guys, this is the internet. Anything posted on Reddit by a new account should be viewed suspiciously. Anything posted like this (there’s some really weird thing going on with kids) from a one day old account? 99.999999999% a trolling attempt. In addition, its darn near written to a template for these sorts of thing.
Frankly, unlike in real life, you shouldn’t give internet posters the benefit of the doubt as to whether its trolling or not. Trolling is nearly cost free online. If it has the slightest whiff of ‘this might not have really happened’ then its almost certain its a trolling attempt.
A thought-provoking post, and some good comments especially from Fraser Orr and llamas. I think Fraser has laid it out the ethical and societal issues very nicely in his first comment, and whilst I second his remarks pretty much in their entirety, I’d like to suggest that the missing element here is social pressure; i.e., that there is another option besides doing nothing and reporting this guy to the relevant governmental agency. Opprobrium is a powerful force, although sadly in this case I suspect the father is “on the spectrum” and wouldn’t listen, especially not to a daycare worker. (Anyone who treats their child as an “experiment” is clearly out there.)
However, as llamas has pointed out, even at age four the poor child isn’t lost, though I suspect he may have trouble with some phonemes (if there are some that exist in English but not in Klingon) since children learn these at a younger age, before words start to come out.
Is this child abuse? Loosely speaking, yes. Legally, I sincerely hope not. I don’t like or agree with governmental control of education, and this (or something like it) could be used as the thin end of the wedge that ends with the prevention of home-schooling, etc. “Hard cases make bad law” and all that.
Since the other daycare workers are clearly too puerile to act (and hey, if this is a government daycare, isn’t it partly the government at fault? so more government? nah), then the Reddit poster should say something to her colleagues or a supervisor in order to generate sufficient opprobrium. I doubt she’d lose her job.
llamas, you write,
I think you are right about capacity to absorb a second language. I have a similar story. At my primary school a Venezuelan boy (sad to recall, he talked of 1970s Venezuela as a great place to live) went from having zero English other than the numbers 1-10 to being one of the most talkative kids in the class in three or four years. However all your examples and mine were all kids who had ample exposure to a fully functioning language (Dutch, Polish, Ibo, Japanese, Spanish) while their brain wiring was being laid down. It doesn’t seem to matter what language a child learns first (it doesn’t have to be a spoken language; sign languages as used by the deaf will do fine) so long as they get enough vocabulary and grammar coming in they can learn to think properly. The worry here is that if this child is ONLY hearing Klingon, with its limited vocabulary, his mental development may be hampered by lack of stimulation. D’Armond Speers spoke Klingon extremely well and is a computational linguist by trade and thus presumably very much aware of these issues – and even he (sensibly) dropped the Klingon when his son started to resist it. The father in this case might be (a) not a very good Klingon speaker, (b) not well informed about how children’s brains develop, (c) more fanatical than Speers in his determination to keep the experiment going even if it looks as if the child is not thriving. I wish I knew what language the boy’s mother is speaking to him.
If this story is true at all. You may be right, Slartibartfast (Edit: and Agammamon). The detail that makes me wonder most is the mention of the father’s blog but the lack of a link to it. If he is actively trying to publicise what he is doing, surely a newspaper would have picked it up by now. There was great interest in the d’Armond Speers story and there would be even more interest and controversy about this one because this time round it is claimed that the child is not being taught English.
P.S. Slartibartfast, I thought no one but me remembered the Monty Python Papperbok. Was that the one which kept directing you to something really big on Page 73, and when you turned to that page all it had on it was an enormous “73”? Or was that The Goodies Book of Criminal Records?
I was just reading yet another story about two lesbian moms raising a young (eight year old) boy. The boy supposedly feels as if he is a girl, and so the moms are raising him as a girl. They fully expect that he will live his life as a female, and surgery has been discussed (for much later.)
The moms are socially applauded for their open-mindedness and their uncritical love for the boy. Are they good parents? Good people? (Entirely separate questions.)
In the Christian Bible, we read about Abraham being ready to kill his son upon an altar as his god has commanded him to do. In some societies, children were thrown into volcanoes to appease various gods. Good parents? Good people?
Parenting is an essentially non-libertarian pursuit. A parent is granted dominion over his child by society. Regulation of a parent’s actions is deemed necessary to protect the child’s libertarian interests from the parent’s whims and values – but the choice of regulation comes down to social pressure. Thus, it’s illegal to throw your child into a volcano in most of the West, but it’s legal to throw your child into incipient mental illness and lifelong disfunction by imposing your diseased views of human sexuality on them.
It’s a numbers game. There is more of an advantage to humanity to allowing parents to control their children than not – fewer children will end up being harmed by being sentenced to speaking Klingon than will be harmed by moving child-control into the state’s hands. Yes, we will end up sacrificing some kids – the Klingon speaker, the confused “girl”, the volcano-bound – but more kids will benefit from living under their parents’ control.
bobby b’s comment is the one that i find most agreeable: not sure that i agree completely with it, but i am mostly in agreement, and certainly it’s worth thinking about.
Closely related is my disagreement with a factual statement from J. Pearce:
Memes are as much a Darwinian process as genes; and parents who pass on bad genes are “causing this” as much as parents who pass on bad memes.
I know this, because i was passed on bad memes myself.
1. Does it? To me, the libertarian response is ‘Geez, your Dad is a dickhead’.
2. What basis is there for finding Klingon sounds like Portuguese? Portuguese sounds nothing like Klingon, which, if anything, has some of the guttural sounds of Castilian Spanish or Arabic ‘Jaime, bajame la jaula, bajamela. Portuguese sounds like this, the estimable, late Professor Antonio de Saraiva, nephew of the last Portuguese veteran of WW1 to die. Brazilian Portuguese sounds like, well, birds chirruping peninsular Portuguese.
3. This is California, the chosen State of Charles Manson.
4. As the Sage notes, the term ‘mother tongue’ is no accident. The Austrian Formula 1 racing driver said once that he realised he was working too hard when he got home to his (non-Germanophone) wife and young children and found that they he could not communicate with them nor he with them. They spoke their mother’s language (IIRC Portuguese).
5. Children can learn other languages certainly up to the age of around 8 if they are immersed. I have an Italian friend who come to England aged 8 and who speaks perfect English with only the lack of any regional accent being an indicator of not being native, and who is a qualified professional only rarely tripped up by the odd English word which is not phonetic, and who cannot distinguish Antipodean accents easily from English accents. Mind you, to me, many American accents are a mystery, with only a vague idea beyond distinguishing a broad Southern accent or New York City area accent, and with and a gradual realisation as the distinct nature of a Canadian accent.
6. I saw it once attributed to Bernie Ecclestone the statement: ‘Anyone who doesn’t speak English isn’t worth speaking to.’, rather unfair, but actually it strikes me as a useful rule of thumb for most circumstances.
BTW this reminds me of an article i read somewhere, a long time ago, about some intellectual i never heard about before, or since.
The article said that he was mortified when his son came back from school (or possibly kindergarten) and told him: other kids don’t have to speak Latin at home!!
Which of course is related to llamas’ comment:
Interesting issue you raised, Natalie, which is pertinent to ethics and political philosophy generally, and especially to libertarianism, regardless of the reason for or veracity of the Reddit comments. Thanks.
And a good discussion follows.
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Fraser:
Truer words were never.
I speak as a fellow Illinoisan, unfortunately personally acquainted with DefCon (as I prefer to call them). (“Busybodies” applies to more than just DefCon meddlers, by the way. And social pressure itself is often unjust and counterproductive, one may as well note in passing. It can ruin reputations, lives, and fortunes.)
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Llamas,
More light on the issue, and another good comment altogether.
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Martin,
Kindly do not bring practical clarity into the discussion. *grin*
Although I think that “languages aren’t actually that difficult” is truer for some than for others.
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Natalie,
Give that woman a cigar!
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Paul,
I have wondered what is your beef with “Brexit.” Now I understand your objection perfectly.
I may have mentioned (loudly and often) that “calling things by their right names” is important. And the direct moral reason for wanting to sever yourselves from the EU is indeed independence from what amounts to an illegitimate sovereign, practically speaking.
I think that is what most of us non-Brits who are pro-independence types generally, but are libertarian- or conservative-ish, read as the very meaning of the word “Brexit.”
I don’t have a legal answer to apply in any present society. But my underlying model is that the parent is not the child’s owner, but a trustee for the child’s person against the day the child can exercise self-ownership. Trustees have duties, including caring for (in this case) the child’s person as the eventual adult would wish it to have been cared for, and being accountable to that adult. If you aren’t prepared to do that to the best of your ability, you have no business being a parent, and maybe some sort of legal intervention is justified, though letting the state do that is dangerous.
But I think that most kids plunged into a social milieu where nearly everyone speaks language A will pick up language A, even if their parents speak language B or language X. So I don’t know if this counts as substantial harm. When I think of the more commonplace things abusive parents do, it looks pretty minor.
See, this is why libertarianism fairs poorly in the wild. It’s too tempting to interfere. Through out most of human history kids faced far worse than this. It’s either self righting as the school will teach the little boy English or, he will never learn and likely die a virgin.
It is sad some humans are poor parents, but they have to fail to allow everyone else to know what works.
Freedom is not free, or easy.
Who knows it might even provide a hidden benefit. The boy learns to overcome adversity and prospers.
This should not be enough reason to interfere with a family.
I speak as a father who is teaching his kid English.
@bobby b
It’s a numbers game. There is more of an advantage to humanity to allowing parents to control their children than not
To some extent that is true. But there are surely egegious cases where all would agree that stepping in was the right thing to do. If someone really was tossing their kid in a volcano, or keeping their kid in a basement 23 hours a day in a room full of feces, and spoiled food, then surely intervention is justified (by anyone by the way, not just the government.) How you draw the line between that and taking a kid from parents because she has a skinned knee is not easy. And frankly it changes over time.
However, I think it is important to not confuse the loudest with the most agreement. I think you will find a very small number of Americans and Brits who are in favor of letting two mommies lop off a little boy’s penis because he “feels like a girl” whatever the hell that means. Unfortunately, those who are very loud and willing to use the most vile tactics will shout down, intimidate and silence the people who think common sense. What is going on for example in the US right now with regards to Bret Kavanaugh, I keep expecting someone to pop out and yell “you got punk’d”. The situation is so farcically ridiculous I can’t believe that these people can say some of this shit with a straight face.
Oh, gosh, yes. But, as you said (essentially), “egregious” is in the eye of the beholder. I’m just saying that, if we need to chose between state or parents as a general rule, I’d choose parents, but then I’d interfere as I see fit. (Because my ego is strong enough to let me believe that my definition of “egregious” is probably as good as, if not better than, most others’.)
Unfortunately, “society” – in most cases, “PC society” – gets to define “egregious”, and currently it’s “egregious” to let your ten-year-old play alone outside in some jurisdictions, while it’s not “egregious” to bolster mental illness and confusion and appalling suicide rates by scrambling your child’s gender identity. Heck, the poor kids who are living with these gender-nonspecifying parents probably stand an equal chance of a good life as did the kid chosen as the next volcano offering.
It’s one of those areas where choice and discretion ought to be in the hands of right-thinking people. Like us. But, as in any area in which we allow for discretion, idiots will (rightfully) claim that power, too.
As for Kavanaugh – so far, every fanciful tale I’ve heard pales compared to what some drunk girls did to me several times back in the day – I was a high school football stud! – and my only regret is that I didn’t play along at the time. If women are so fragile that they can suffer psychological harm through such actions being done to them, then we really need to get women out of the public and into some guarded, nurturing shelter from birth, just to spare the poor breakable dears their pain.
Itellyounothing: See, this is why libertarianism fairs poorly in the wild. It’s too tempting to interfere. Through out most of human history kids faced far worse than this.
In some cases recently. When I lived in San Diego there was a news story about a toddler whose parents left her in the care of her aunt and uncle. They bathed her in water so hot that she died from the heat—whether from burns or thermal stress I never learned, but it must have been ghastly.
It turned out that the aunt and uncle had lost custody of their own children some while ago for abusive behavior. But there were these parents willing to trust their little girl to them. So there are limits to how much children can be protected. On the other hand, this sort of thing is also why we have retributive justice.
@Natalie Solent (Essex):
Sorry, can’t answer your Q. I do remember some of, but no longer have access to my copy of the Monty Python Papperbok (was lost in a fire).
I don’t recall the “directing to something really big on Page 73” and I never read The Goodies Book of Criminal Records. A duckduckgo search didn’t turn anything up either. 🙁
fwiw, I had a colleague who was a monoglot Italian, whose family emigrated to the US when she was about eight or nine years old. She was just sent to school, just like that, and to begin with (she says) sat at the back of the class understanding not a word.
When I met her, she was probably in her early thirties, working (in Philadephia) in a highly technical IT-related role in a global Pharma company. Her (American) English was faultless.
So no, I don’t think the child in this story (assuming for the sake of argument that it’s true) will come to any harm at all, beyond being regarded as a bit of a nerd/freak for a while.
Home at last.
@ Natalie Solent, who wrote:
“P.S. Slartibartfast, I thought no one but me remembered the Monty Python Papperbok. Was that the one which kept directing you to something really big on Page 73, and when you turned to that page all it had on it was an enormous “73”? Or was that The Goodies Book of Criminal Records?”
It was – but it is Page 71, not Page 73. How do I know this? Well, it’s right next to Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book For Boys and Girls. I do not, however, possess The Goodies Book of Criminal Records, to my everlasting disappointment.
llater,
llamas
It occurs to me that if a child needs saving, why leave it up to the state? I like to think that people living nearby to children might keep an eye out for them.
This (quite possibly mythical) incident has made a useful test of readers’ libertarianism – a test which, frankly, I feel not everyone in this comment stream has passed with wholly flying colours.
Llamas is so right that children of that age can and will learn languages – the difficulty would be to prevent them, and evidence is lacking of efforts to prevent this playgroup-attending child. The situation of one language in the home, another in the outer world, is as old as immigration. A made-up language will be more regular but very impoverished compared to a real one (just like socialism compared with free enterprise) but whether that’s a problem at the early-learning stage is unknown, and, as the kid will soon be speaking plenty of English, cannot be significant.
If you were tempted to think of state intervention in this case – not even in the uglier cases of the deaf or lesbian parents mentioned elsewhere in the thread but in this case, where the analogy to immigrants from a tiny language group is so close and the certainty of this playgroup-attending child learning English so reliable – then what kind of libertarian are you? I think of myself as a very moderate one – but I’m not quite as ‘moderate’ as that.
There are fishing dads, stamp-collecting dads, baseball or cricket dads, church-brass-rubbing dads, cycling dads who will make their 4-year-old kids cycle 50 miles in a weekend – and loads of dads who do not find their tiny-tot sons interesting enough to involve them in their hobbies. The ability to speak fluent Klingon at an SF con will not open many doors, but that is true of a number of things parents involve their kids in.
Natalie Solent: LoFo, low information, LoQ, low IQ, American right wing blog slang.
Lots of evasive thought here today on evolution. Everyone wants evolution to help all children which is by definition nonsense. We are evolving, right now, this very instant and some genetic lines are not going to make it. The “nicest” possible way this happens is unfit lines simply breeding less. Ie, the Klingon children don’t have many, or any, kids of their own. But a common cause of children not breeding is death.
Natalie Solent: ” believe in liberty and non-aggression precisely because these principles allow all to flourish.” Not possible. Evolution happens. There are always losers and winners, unless we have somehow repealed natural laws. Right now we in western civ look to be the losers with aggressive Muslims and Africans conquering us and out breeding us by large margins. But who knows. For sure the risk our descendants face is the fate that White South Africans are now receiving. Has anyone ever noticed that the upper classes of Italy and Spain are too often light skinned, fair haired with green or blue eyes? Jeez, how’d that happen?
Johnathan Pearce: You so misunderstand evolution that I can hardly respond. Of course the actions of the parents are Darwinian in handicapping a child, just as they would be if the parent killed the child, or perhaps physically maimed it. These are all acts that make the breeding of the child less likely, 0% for death, and which therefore make less likely the continuance of both the parent’s line and the child’s slightly different line.
As for “lazy twerp”, that’s a very weak argument and actually a ‘tell’ that you don’t believe your own comment. Anyway, twerp is sort of true, but lazy? Never. I work very hard running several businesses even though I am 66 and intend never to retire. You’re apparently not much of an economist either if you think a high income person is “lazy” for preferring to earn lots of money but hire a house cleaner to maximize work time.
llamas: I enjoyed your comment the most. My milk tongue was German. I learned English at age 5 when I was sent to preschool in Canada. My sentences I sometimes still with a verb end. I don’t think the Klngon people are hurting their kid too much, but my real point I guess was a callous “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
Rearing a child to speak Klingon is barbaric. Teach him High Elvish, fool!
I don’t think anyone knows exactly when the linguistic “imprinting” period, where a child’s brain quickly and easily learns new languages, comes to an end. It probably varies somewhat between individuals. However, it is nowhere near preschool age, probably more like early adolescence if not later. For example, I know a fair number of people from China, and all of the ones who emigrated by about age 15 speak American English completely indistinguishably from everyone else. If this is really a true story (doubtful), it seems very unlikely that the child will have any long-term impairment. He will probably match the normal English proficiency for his age within a few months of starting school. The parent is nuts but they would be hard-pressed to prevent the child from achieving this. The real challenge will be in the teenage years…. those are very tough to get through when you have a mentally ill parent.
The kind of libertarian that doesn’t only consider the father’s liberty interests, but also the child’s?
If I see a bully beating a weakling, my libertarian tendencies (such as they are) do not compel me to avoid interfering with the bully’s liberty to beat. The weakling has a liberty interest in NOT being beaten. We must chose which liberty interest has equity on its side.
Personally, I would place the equity of the situation on the side of the father in the example in the OP. However, in other similar situations that vary only in severity (such as the raising of the gender-confused child or the volcano-feeders) I would rate the child’s interests as more paramount and compelling, and would act accordingly. Sometimes liberties conflict.
I am glad the story may not be true.
If true – to teach a child nothing but Klingon (no other language) would be such neglect of the duty of parents as to be child abuse.
Once you give the government a role as overseer of parents that role will very quickly expand into that of primary decision-maker. That’s why, in the US at least, people feel justified in calling the police if they see a child below the age of fifteen or so in public without parental supervision. Or why the government in some places will take your children if you spank them. And wasn’t there a case in the UK where a parent was arrested for sneaking non-government-approved food to her child at school?
At the edge case it’s easy to say “The government should do something”, but the legal and bureaucratic structure which gets created as a result does far more harm than the original problem, both to children denied their parents and to society at large.
I would question the notion that the way a child is brought up is somehow damaging long-term. I have met far too many people who were brought up in strict religious/political environments who go on to reject it outright, often from a later age when they can freely do so. At some point a child will understand better and exposure to other children will have far more effect as time goes on.
Keeping a child isolated perhaps is abuse, but language, religion, politics – I don’t see evidence that these have any long lasting effect. There may be secondary effects of an extremist ideological upbringing, such as violence or sexual abuse, but just the notion of learning something I personally would not agree with, I cannot justify as being a cause for intervention.
I see a lot of spectuation here, but is there actual real (scientific) evidence that just the ideology imposed on a child is damaging in later life, has this actually been studied? Sure there are children who grow up to be extremists and cause harm, but who is to say that would have happened anyway? There are plenty of adults who learnt their dangerous ideas later, and often in spite of their upbringing.
Mike:
Does it come to an end? I don’t know if there has been serious research on this.
I suspect that the only reason why adults find it more difficult to learn a new language, is that we have more complex thoughts, thoughts which cannot be articulated in a language that we do not yet know beyond survival level.
If we could avoid thinking seriously for a month or two, maybe we could easily learn a foreign language.
From a linguistic development point of view, there’s no reason for this to be harmful, regardless of the supposed limitations of the language. All the evidence shows that children will take even very limited creoles and turn them into fully-fledged, grammatical languages. This stuff is hard-wired.
The only real risk with language development is where children aren’t exposed to any language at all in their early years, and aren’t given the basics on which to build. This happens with some profoundly deaf children or in very unusual circumstances where children are brought up with no contact with speaking humans, and it’s a terribly sad thing to see.
Worth reading Stephen Pinker’s “The Language Instinct”, in particular as a way of avoiding reading any of Noam Chomsky’s research on this point. One fascinating point here is that the process even happens with sign language.
Also worth seeing the Frasier episode where he reads a prayer at his son’s Bar Mitzvah which he thinks is in Hebrew but is in fact Klingon.
Bobby, I was considering the child’s liberty interests. Your own earlier comments above explain well how poorly (on average) the state cares for children removed from their parents, so that sufficient probability of harm from the parents is needed merely to counterbalance the known probability of harm from the removal, but, in addition, it is not, I believe, usual for the young child to welcome their enforced removal from the family home to the care of strangers. In this case (note that I wrote, “in this case”), it seemed to me the ‘probability of harm’ requirement was surprisingly weak to prompt those thoughts of the state that some other commenters seemed to be having.
It also matters to me that there are historical reference points. Surely there were many cases in America’s history where immigrants, confident their children would learn English outside the home, consciously chose to speak “the old tongue” within it to preserve some elements of a culture they knew and valued, even when there was little likelihood the kids would encounter it elsewhere – and others when, due to their own slower learning of English, they had no choice but to do so.
BTW, I completely agree with Surellin (September 26, 2018 at 1:24 pm). The father is an idiot to teach his son Klingon instead of Quenya !
(Not that I can talk. I can sign my name in Quenya, but not much else without the book.)
I suppose one could have a grudging respect for a man who taught his son Sindarin, though one feels it is “not the ideal”. 🙂
Ah. Okay, I have to agree with you so long as you’re speaking specifically of removal of the kid from parental custody. Much of my involvement with protective services came about in cases where the kid(s) stayed home, but the state imposed requirements – a formal agreement/plan, usually – on the parent, with the ultimate threat of removal being the biggest stick held over their head in order to gain compliance with the plan. As a guardian ad litem appointed specifically to represent the kids’ interests in the family court proceedings, I actually saw a fair bit of good done (for the kids) in many such cases.
There are easy and obvious cases for removal, and there are easy and obvious cases for leaving kids in place, and in between there’s a huge gray area where someone’s discretion is going to have to be exercised. It’s sort of funny how I, after years of experience in family court representing kids, have a much better regard for the good that the state’s people do for the kids in their systems than do many on this board. Yeah, their failures are maddening and atrocious, but their many quiet successes outweigh those by several orders of magnitude.
And, no, I wouldn’t remove a kid who was being taught Klingon. The state is likely going to have some involvement when that kid shows up for his first school day speaking only Klingon – which teacher is going to act as his interpreter? – and I would imagine that weird dad is going to have some uncomfortable conversations with them then – but there’s nothing damaging or unfixable going on. I wouldn’t necessarily remove a kid being raised as the wrong gender by ideologically-driven parents, but I would step in and try to fix the problem before the kid is irreparably damaged. As to the volcano-tossers, well, they’re right out.
Nonsense? All these terrible things and more have and will be committed by bad parents. More clearly spelling out the point of my comment: We are not state-owned cogs, nor even tribe-owned vassals. Push back on the trend to undo every individual act of agency.
@Fred Z
Everyone wants evolution to help all children which is by definition nonsense. We are evolving, right now, this very instant and some genetic lines are not going to make it.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that just because evolution is they way we got here that it is necessarily the way to move forward, or that resisting it is somehow unnatural. That isn’t true at all. Lots of natural things aren’t good. Women with small pelvises used to die in childbirth. Evolution made their pelvises bigger, but a surgeon can also alleviate that problem without the tragedy of someone’s daughter, sister, mother or wife dying in a horrible way. The filtering process of evolution is “survival of the fittest”. That is, in the view of most people, a deeply immoral principle. Just because evolution used it doesn’t mean it is good. After all, if I could I would stop the evolution of bacteria that mutate to cause antibiotic resistance, wouldn’t you?
There are always losers and winners, unless we have somehow repealed natural laws.
But we have repealed some of nature’s laws. For example, scarlet fever or childhood diabetes are no longer a death sentences. Our bodies’ adaptions to feast or famine in food today actually cause far more problems than they solve. We value the individual and think that the idea that our purpose is to propagate our genes is not the sum total of our purpose or life. What, after all, is more of a repeal of the laws of nature, what is more “anti-evolution”, than a condom?
@Darryl
We are not state-owned cogs, nor even tribe-owned vassals. Push back on the trend to undo every individual act of agency.
What about if you punched me in the face? Should the government intervene to prevent that individual act of agency?
“What about the children?” is the cry of every petty tyrant wanting to control you. But recognition of that fact does not change the need for a society have evolved a mechanism for considering “what about the children?” in legitimate ways. As is always the case with the government, the pressure is always to grow and overrearch. Give them the power to confiscate weapons from psychotic murders who commit mass killings and they soon demand that kids be expelled from school for bringing in water pistols. But that stupidity doesn’t mean that taking guns away from psychotic murderers isn’t the right thing to do.
Fraser,
Hm. You can look at it that way (obviously, since you do! *g*), but it seems to me that the invention of the condom represents an advance in human evolution — unless you think think we swang down from the trees or climbed up from the seas with our intelligence already full-blown. We have minds that can work things out, that can invent things, that can find ways to survive and to advance our several as well as our species’ interests, far in advance of any other species’ mental capacities that I know of.
It is true that Everything Has a Downside™, and I include life itself, which comes with inevitable death attached (unless our same evolved or evolving intelligence finds a work-around, or the Great Frog pitches us an un-heard-of fast one, which would be entirely against Its/His/Her wont). So in theory anyway there might be some de- or anti-evolutionary result of the use of the condom (and other birth control methods, including the rhythm method).
Too, birth control doubtless discourages the formation of babies whose own genes wouldn’t be positive additions to the human gene pool — however much this might be offset by the loss of other additions to our gene pool would be a net benefit overall to the gene pool, so to human evolution’s advantage.
Also: What humans do is just as much rooted in our nature as human beings as the doings of chimps or beavers or aspidistra or the tuberculosis bacillus are rooted in their species’ nature. And all these species’ natures are utterly rooted in natural law, which amounts to “the rules according to which things work,” which can never be “repealed.” (This does not mean that human nature as such is forever fixed and cannot undergo change in any particular; but only that if it does but still is properly called “human” nature, it does so in accordance with “the way things work.”)
We can have a fling at trying to break nature’s actual laws, like the LSDers who tried flying out of 34th-floor windows without the help of artificial devices; but there is an unbreakable Natural Law about the consequences of such attempts.
The invention of the condom, etc., is therefore in no way a “repeal of the laws of nature.”
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Similarly with the inventions of vaccines against scarlet fever and smallpox. And other lifesaving evolutionary developments, including our ability to adapt to varying conditions of foods’ abundances or scarcities. (Which is true, AFAICS, of the evolution of animals generally.)
Not true.
That is exactly the reasoning that led to eugenics and forced mass sterilization.
Correct.
‘The survival of the fittest‘ is not a prescription, nor is it an aspiration, it is but a description of reality, and a statement of likely outcomes. And then there is luck or fate, two strong, wealthy, bright and decent people may mate, and find that they both carry, say, cystic fibrosis, dooming their offspring, or perhaps none of them, or perhaps a quarter of them. A rich, fit well-fed and housed mediaeval Count might strut next to a farrier, but be swept away by the plague or pox whilst the farrier lives. Today, a thick, slovenly woman might have, in a welfare state, at taxpayers’ expense, more offspring than a professional woman, and thus more ‘success’ in terms of passing on her GATC.
Far too often, people forget that the struggle to exist has to be fought snd won every day, hence the Darwin Awards.
@Snorri Godhi
Not true.
I don’t find that a particularly compelling argument.
That is exactly the reasoning that led to eugenics and forced mass sterilization.
You are exactly wrong. The principle of “survival of the fittest” is exactly what has lead to eugenics and forced mass sterilization and a lot of other terrible things. Evolution would, for example, dispense with people with various handicaps, it would toss away old people, the infertile, the homosexual, the unattractive. Survival of the fittest is a truly horrible process, it is why nature is red in tooth and claw, why nature is amoral, why nature is brutal, and unkind, and unfair and ruthless.
Julie is right, though I’d say what she did in a slightly different way. Humans have grown beyond evolution and have developed a methodology of propagating the species and civilization based on a calculated morality that seeks to counteract these horrible parts of nature, that seeks to diminish, even eliminate our evolutionary past. Humans are not perfect, far from it, and don’t execute this design without a lot of flaws, and sometimes it goes badly wrong and we revert back to our animal instincts. But the story of human history is not that. It is one of increasing fairness, increasing justice, increasing compassion for others, especially the weaker among us, it is one of brain over brawl, of consigning the brutes to be outcasts.
We are far from perfect as a species, but the general trend is up precisely because we reject and supplant the evolutionary mechanism with a better way of becoming better.
Is that what I said?
My parents always regretted not teaching me Yiddish. All I learned was the swear words. There is not much of a Yiddish press left in America.
They wanted me to be totally American. (They were 2nd generation) I have met “Spanish” kids who can’t speak a word of Spanish. Not counting “la cucaracha”.
As to eugenics in this “modern” age. It is happening with little effort. In the first world women who don’t want to reproduce won’t.
Fraser:
Mine was not an argument: it was a factual statement. If evolution were “survival of the fittest”, then only the fittest biological species would survive. Instead, we see millions of species around us.
Besides, Darwinian evolution is about reproduction, not survival.
“Survival of the fittest” is just a slogan that has become a strawman.
There is some truth in that, but:
1. By blaming the principle of “survival of the fittest” you are implicitly exonerating Darwinism, although you seem to be unaware of that.
2. The principle of “survival of the fittest” led to eugenics by the same way that you are taking: the idea that we cannot allow natural selection to “dispense with people with various handicaps,” to “toss away […] the unattractive”, to use your own words. If you start on that road, the only possible conclusion is that we must make sure that there are no more such people born.
(I removed “old people, the infertile, the homosexual” from your quote, because there is obviously no need to sterilize old people, the infertile or, normally, the homosexual.)
Mr Ed:
This is an important concept, but i wished that you had written “reproduction with random mutation and natural selection”, rather than “survival of the fittest”. See my reply to Fraser.
This is great as it stands!
@Snorri Godhi
If evolution were “survival of the fittest”,
But that isn’t what I said, I said that it was the filtering mechanism, which is true. In your description:
“reproduction with random mutation and natural selection”
The other half is “natural selection” is determined by the filtering mechanism of “survival of the fittest”. Of course it is a stochastic process, that doesn’t mean the fittest always reproduced or the least fit always does not (and here by “fit” we mean best fit to environment, not strongest), it is, as I say, a stochastic process. This isn’t of course a full scientific explanation of the process, but is the fundamental driving mechanism of evolution. There are other important parts to the selection process, such as niche environments and random events, but this is not a textbook.
Instead, we see millions of species around us.
And each is remarkably well adapted to its niche by the filtering process of survival of the fittest.
the only possible conclusion is that we must make sure that there are no more such people born.
I may be missing your point, but the is plainly not the only possible solution. Instead we, as a society have chosen instead to support people who can’t support themselves. If one were to confuse the fact of evolution with the idea that it is somehow “right” or “proper” as was the point I was originally addressing, one may well think that we should either kill off or prevent the birth of people in need of support. So thank god we have rejected evolution as a system of morality. Nature is a brutal, ugly place, and civilization is the process of isolating ourselves from that brutal ugly place.
Fraser: if you think that natural selection can be reasonably described as “survival of the fittest”, then you are indeed missing the point. Human cooperation, far from freeing us from natural selection, is a product of natural selection: humans (and other social animals) who do not cooperate, are bred out of the population by natural selection.
As for eugenics:
It was good to make explicit the distinction between evolution as a fact and evolution as an ideal. However, your idea that eugenics came from taking evolution as an ideal, is a strawman set up by the charlatan Richard Hofstadter.
As a matter of fact, in the US, eugenics and the welfare state were set up together, by the same people (the “progressives”) because welfare and eugenics were seen as complementary. (The way things are going, the early “progressives” might yet be proven right on that.) The same in Sweden, substituting “progressive” with “social democrat”. Those were the 2 countries with the largest numbers of mass sterilization except for Germany, where eugenics was also introduced by socialists, of the national variety. BTW you might not be aware that, before ww2, the Swedish social democrats were frank admirers of Hitler and Mussolini.
What happens in childhood can have very serious effects on the rest of the person’s life.
You could look up the history of fantasy/SF writer Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband Walter Breen, an enthusiastic homosexual pedophile. He (with her consent) sought to raise their children to be homosexual. The children survived, but they still have nightmares.
Snorri: You put it much better than I did.
Rich: Interesting about MZB. I knew there are claims (but nothing on the Internet is ever wrong!) of pedophilia, but no other details.
You’re surely right about the effects of childhood experience.
To start with, when we find out that someone is raising a child in an English speaking country to communicate only in “Klingon”. Sheesh, what b@stards would do that to a child.
@Snorri Godhi
<em<Human cooperation, far from freeing us from natural selection, is a product of natural selection: humans (and other social animals) who do not cooperate, are bred out of the population by natural selection.
But you seem to be confusing “fittest” with “guy with the biggest muscles.” One important measure of fitness among some tribal animals, like humans is the ability to function within a society. Being social is fitness. Fit here means how well you “fit” in the environmental niche available to you, in the same way we would talk about “fitness for purpose”. And even here human society is rife with humans who greatly increased their chances of propagating their DNA by taking advantage of human societies to advance their ends, even at the expense of that society. If we are measuring an animal’s evolutionary success in terms of its ability to propagate its genes then someone like Genghis Khan is probably the most successful mammal of all time, given that he is the ancestor of 0.5% of the the species with the largest population of mammals. He was not a very nice man at all.
It’s interesting that “survival of the fittest” could eventually mean that the weak, pale, stoop-shouldered, incurious, social-media-addicted, urban introverts will survive because our society depends on them having just those qualities, while the strong, vibrant, intelligent free-thinkers will be washed away by evolution because they don’t serve the hive as well.
I suppose the question is always “fittest for what?”
Fraser: i seem to unintentionally have cajoled you into repudiating your own earlier comments. I wished i knew how to do that intentionally!
@Snorri Godhi
Fraser: i seem to unintentionally have cajoled you into repudiating your own earlier comments. I wished i knew how to do that intentionally!
I love repudiating my earlier comments. I believe they call it “learning”. However, I don’t seem to have learned much on the subject of evolution here. So perhaps I am missing something.
@bobby b
I suppose the question is always “fittest for what?”
Don’t be coy bobby. You know what the goal is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydrtF45-y-g
Unfortunately the slope shouldered weak don’t get much of that, which in a sense in the point. Society is a head fake really. It is a way to get the masses to cooperate with the powerful’s goals. The powerful can, and often do, use that powerful evolutionary drive to advance their agenda.