Comrade-Z
5th July 2007, 06:19
My thesis points for this discussion:
1. Organized religion is a tool that originates alongside the commodification of children as parental property (at roughly the dawn of class society); religion is, in large part, a tool that enables parents to more effectively control their offspring-property.
2. This institution of children as commodified investments can partially explain the continued conservatism among adults even to this day. As long as parental tyranny continues, as long as parents remain petty-capitalists who depend on the existing order to protect their investments in the form of child-loyalty, they have an incentive to reinforce the existing order. Their consolation prize in capitalism is their little petty fiefdom that they get to rule over--which, just like conventional fiefdoms, is a vestige of feudalism and the feudal family unit.
3. The family unit is THE institution for propagating religion. As capitalism further erodes the institution of the family (both through commodification of the family relations and the state's increasing usurpation of family roles such as education, young-age welfare, and old-age welfare), religion and parental despotism will both have a more difficult time of asserting themselves. Another seed of capitalism's own destruction (see Hobsbawm's analysis below). It is possible that capitalism will only undermine itself once we have finally cleared away all vestiges of pre-capitalism (including the family) and put capitalism up to the task of standing on its own logic.
4. The key to ridding capitalism of parental fiefdoms, and thus of adults' incentive to maintain the status quo, is:
*****Weakening religion (the 2nd-best tool of parental authority).
*****Decreasing children's dependence on parents for their material survival (this dependence is THE most effective tool of parental authority, the material basis of their despotism).
5. On whomever children are dependent, that person or institution will have the same power (and the same incentives) as parents do now. If we make children dependent on the state for their material well-being, the state will have an incentive to make children into investments of its own. It will formulate a statist quasi-religion (an official ideology such as Nazism or Stalinism, not to be questioned, complete with a cult of personality around a parental, "father-like" figure) to maintain its indoctrination of children and thus maintain their loyalty to the state. State-usurpation of family roles is not the answer!!!
6. Instead, we must strive for complete children's liberation. No dependence on any authorities for children's material well-being! Our demand should be: free housing, free food, free medicine, free transportation, and free informational access for children! No strings attached! No compulsory education! Children are not commodities, and neither should they be dependent on them! Above all, let the children determine their own upbringing! (For a more detailed plan, see below). This will both produce freedom-loving citizens and remove parents' incentive for maintaining the status quo, leading to the end of commodification, capitalism, and class society. I don't expect parents to be keen about this, even self-avowed "radical" parents, so I imagine that children and adolescents themselves will have to be the main ones to push for this.
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1.
First, some basic, incontestable ideas on parenthood:
*It is a major investment (requires time, money, effort, etc.)
*Parents expect to earn a return on this investment. This return usually comes in the form of forced domestic labor in the household, on the farm, remittances, and old-age care. So, to a considerable extent, the decision to become a parent is at least partly an economic decision. This is plainly evident in how birth rates drop in developing countries as agriculture and domestic industry become less prevalent. Also note how children are treated like property in divorce settlements.
Parents need tools for managing their investments. Their first overarching tool upon which everything else is predicated is the child's material dependence on its parents (just as the origin of patriarchy was predicated upon the female's dependence on the male's agricultural work). The child cannot obtain food, living arrangements, etc. on its own, and if the child tries to run away to seek better, kinder, more generous providers (or some other independent arrangement), the parents are legally entitled to track down their runaway property, like a slave, and bring the child back. This material dependence also means the child is in less of a position to challenge the ideology of the parents, to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much the child thinks s/he can get away with and depending on how much punishment the parents are willing or legally able to dispense. For the child, this means the child is usually obligated to attend the parent's church. (Just as the worker is in no position to challenge the employer's ideology in a way that would get back around to the employer in a way that damaged the employee's reputation in the eyes of the employer---which is why, as communists, we should fight foremost to decrease the working class's dependence on the employing class and its institutions, such that we are in a stronger and more confident position to further organize and challenge the status quo.)
Parents also have the material advantage over children of being physically stronger and verbally more adept (advantages that capitalists do not have over workers), greatly increasing the parent's ability to use physical violence and emotional manipulation/intimidation.
But these tools are cumbersome and messy. First, you actually have to catch the child disobeying you. If the child knows that s/he can disobey you behind your back without you knowing, the child will probably do so. Then, when you do catch your child disobeying you, to make the material dependence tool useful you have to be prepared to withhold wants and needs from the child on occasion to make the threat credible. But this damages your investment in two ways: by physically harming the child, and by making the child hate you and thus more likely to abandon you before having returned a profit in the ways described above. This is also increasingly labelled "child neglect" and thus as an illegal act in the advanced capitalist countries (which is no historical accident--as the family as an institution breaks down and is increasingly supplanted by the state and by voluntary organizations, the child becomes less dependent on parental despotism and more dependent on the state (which can also be quite despotic) and/or voluntary networks with non-authority caretakers (friends, relatives, etc)). The same handicaps apply to the parents' use of physical or emotional violence: destructive to the property and its loyalty, and increasingly illegal.
Parents can play realpolitik and admit that their authority is arbitrary and only based on material dependence, but that the child will get his/her turn to rule over his/her little family empire when s/he gets older, making it in her interest to continue with the pattern rather than swim against it. But the child may reply that s/he doesn't want children, or doesn't want to determine their existence in that way, possibly in line with other radical, liberatory changes in society that would make up for that lost privilege. In any case, this tactic is shaky and rarely used.
Parents need a much better tool for controlling their investments...preferably one that operates continuously, lasts throughout life, and has maximum deterrence. The obvious solution is to indoctrinate the child with the belief that the parent is an omnipotent being--a god! The parent says, "Don't you dare disobey me! I can see everything that you do, every act of sin, of disobedience, and I have the ultimate power to send your spirit to hell!!! Oh, and if I seem like I didn't notice something that you did, or if my behavior seems inconsistent or inexplicable, well, I'm god. I'm far too transcendent for you to understand. My designs are far too complex. I work in mysterious ways. But I promise, I am always watching...oh, and P.S. I love you!"
This tool might work for a while...until the child stumbles across another child, and they begin to compare notes. "Wait, your daddy says that HE is god? I thought MY daddy was god..." Alas, not every parent can be god. But every parent CAN be the servant of one central god. In addition to making this logically consistent on a societal scale, this setup has added advantages:
*You don't actually have to catch your child in the act in order to deliver punishment. The child thinks that god is always watching, so the child punishes him/herself.
*In addition to punishment in hell, you can promise cataclysmic punishment on earth...something a human cannot obviously deliver, but god supposedly can.
*It displaces responsibility from the parents. Instead of seeming like sadistic, exploitative assholes, parents are only "doing god's work" (nevermind the fact that the parents invented this "god" idea in the first place...)
*If a parent self-evidently screws up or receives misfortune as god, well, that casts a lot of doubt on the validity of the god-claim. But if a parent screws up or receives misfortune as god's servant, the parent can explain it by saying that it was a result of not following god closely enough--i.e. this is what happens when you disobey god. It only reinforces the claim.
*It introduces an efficient division of labor. Instead of each household going through the trouble of formulating and teaching conflicting moralities, the parents can drop the kids off at Sunday School, and a clergy is there with pre-formulated morality with all of the essentials (obey thy father and mother, or else you get stoned to death, keep the cycle going for the next generation by only having children within the framework of traditional marriage and by giving your kids religious instruction, etc.)...for a price...the clergy gets to insert some of its own stuff in there. Meanwhile, the parents don't have to go through the trouble of pretending that they are god. They don't have to worry about consistency, falsifiability, or any of those threats to their scam. A single, invisible, omnipotent god who is completely unfalsifiable is the best weapon imaginable, and the simplest to explain.
*If you want to sell your child into the hands of another family as a slave, it is more useful for all of the parents involved for the child to fear a god who is unbound from any particular family unit.
Note the explicitly parental imagery in most religious texts: god as the "father." The idea that since god created you, god owns you and has the right to tell you what to do. In the early polytheistic mythologies, the link was even more explicit: the gods literally married, had sex, and produced children, who were beholden to them, giving rise to huge family trees of gods and godesses, leading all the way down to humans themselves, giving them a direct genetic link with the gods, and thus a supposed obligation to obey their parents, the gods. However much religions may vary, though, I guarantee you that one of the tenets will NOT be "Question your parents."
I don't doubt that many parents are fervent believers without a shred of intention towards cynical manipulation their children with religion. That doesn't change the fact that there is a reason (a material-incentive one) why certain people find it easy to rationalize such things as religion, aside from indoctrination and cultural inertia. Cultural inertia, or religion as an infectious "meme," as Richard Dawkins has described, both have truth to them, but they can't possibly explain the whole story because cultural memes don't propagate forever. Memes, commonly-held ideas that once seemed self-evident, quickly collapse when the material incentive for their existence vanishes. Otherwise, we'd still believe in the "droit du Seigneur" or other such bullshit. The point is, humans are very good at genuinely believing things if their survival depends on it (and conversely, not knowing something if one's salary depends on one not knowing it, as the old saying goes). If you ask parents, "Why are you affiliated with such-and-such a religion?" the parents are not likely to answer, "Because it is a useful tool for maintaining my children's loyalty and for increasing my child's marketability in our current society." But still, gnawing at the edges of their minds are the thoughts, "But without religion, how would my children learn MORALITY??" ("Morality," of course, meaning the set of beliefs that dispositions that happen to be useful for preparing the child for the "real world," in such a way that the child will be able to successfully conform and so earn a return on the parents' investments, part of which the child will send back to the parents in remittances, old-age help, etc.) I have even read of atheist parents in Britain sending their children to religious schools so that their children will learn "morality," "life-lessons," etc.! (i.e. so that their children will be more obedient to their parents, and so that they will conform better to the prevailing society, so as to be more marketable, fetch a greater return on investment, and send more back to the parents.)
Interestingly, we increasingly see some families who no longer bother with indoctrinating their children with religion. How can this be, if religion is supposedly such a vital tool for ensuring children's loyalty to the parents?
1. This is partly a simple result of the family unit breaking down. As the parents (and extended family) are around less and less often together with the kids, as a family, to give religious instruction, to attend church as a family, and to enforce religious morality, it is increasingly difficult (hopeless?) to try indoctrinating kids with religion.
2. Kids can inform themselves about religion in a critical manner much more easily nowadays with the Internet, contact with a broader array of religions, etc.
3. Most interestingly, religious indoctrination seems to mirror socio-economic trends in capitalism in general. Religion is a stick. If that's all you got, you use it. But if you happen to have some carrots as well, you probably want to rely on those more as they are easier to use--they have less "blowback." So, if you are a poor, starving peasant in Thailand who needs his kids to work hard, obey their parents, send remittances, and help their parents in their old age, you are going to use the stick of religious indoctrination very vigorously because you don't have any carrots. But if you are in the advanced capitalist countries, you can bribe your kids to a certain extent with various commodities in exchange for loyalty. Just as businesses in the "New Deal Era" of capitalism in the U.S. could ease off the stick of violence and obtain employee loyalty from minimal concessions.
2.
I've had this feeling that I've been onto something for a while. When trying to figure out why people still support the status quo to such a degree, even in the advanced capitalist countries, I kept on coming back to the realization that elderly people, religious people, and parents made up the backbone of this support. What did this trifecta have to gain from the status quo? And why are there still religious people on planet Earth? The evidence is now FIRMLY established against religion for anyone who cares to take an honest look. Religious people nowadays must really think they have something EARTHLY to gain by holding onto religion...like religion has some vital use to preserving their society, and their niche in society, maybe, and that maybe they have a sense of this deep down in a vague, inarticulated sort of way.
Why are these two essentially pre-capitalist institutions, family and religion, still present in our epoch of capitalism? My idea is that the family unit as it is currently constituted, ruled by a parental despotism and involving children as their investments, gives parents a powerful incentive to maintain the prevailing order so as to maintain these investments, this niche as lords of their own little fiefdoms. This is how many adults can still convince themselves that our capitalism is an inclusive, Weberian "social capitalism" that tries to promise something for every parent---a little empire of their own, a way to "get ahead." Even if you didn't get that Ph.D., you can send your kids to college, if you've managed their human capital successfully in a way that maintained their loyalty to you and ensured that they would be conformist, marketable commodities whose services will earn good money, some of which will hopefully end up back in your pocket. Religion remains so strong, in turn, because it is one of the best ideological tools for making children obedient, marketable, and generally molded into the type of individuals that you wanted. Hey, it's your investment, after all!
Each year, though, capitalism is eroding religion and the family unit, threatening the parental empires. I think some parents sense this. They sense that the spectacle of commodities at the Mall is much more enticing than "duty," "obligation," "morality," and all that boring stuff. If capitalism can no longer protect these traditional concepts that have proven so useful to parents, then what good is it? What good is a capitalism that ruins your investment? None. Why not overthrow it, then? I think capitalism's beneficiaries are noticing this and are scrambling to halt the damage that capitalism's commodity spectacle is doing to piety. But like a corrosive acid, the drive towards consumerist materialism and scientific achievement is insatiable and overpowering. These beneficiaries of capitalism who are trying to spearhead a religious revival are setting themselves upon a hopeless task. Religion, the family unit, and parent imperialism, like all other pre-capitalist institutions, will dissolve in the acids of capitalist materialism, and with them, much of the incentive for parents to remain loyal to capitalism will dissolve as well.
These arguments are supported and elaborated by the appendicies below:
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Appendix 1: British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on the decline of the family unit in late-capitalism:
In The Age of Extremes (an excellent book), starting on page 337, Eric Hobsbawm writes,
"The institutions most severely undermined by the new moral individualism were the traditional family and traditional organized churches in the West, which collapsed dramatically in the last third of the century...
Women's liberation, or more precisely women's demand for birth control, including abortion and the right to divorce, drove perhaps the deepest wedge between the Church and what had in the nineteenth century become the basic stock of the faithful...vocations for the priesthood and other forms of the religious life fell steeply, as did willingness to live lives of celibacy, real or official...The Church's moral and material authority over the faithful disappeared into the black hole that opened between its rules of life and morality and the reality of late-twentieth-century behavior...
The material consequences of the loosening of traditional family ties were perhaps even more serious...the family was not only what it had always been, a device for reproducing itself, but also a device for social cooperation. As such it had been essential for maintaining both the agrarian and the early industrial economies, the local and the global. This was partly because no adequate impersonal capitalist business structure had been developed before the concentration of capital and the rise of big business began to generate the modern corporate organization at the end of the nineteenth century, that "visible hand" (Chandler, 1977) which was to supplement Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market. But an even stronger reason was that the market by itself makes no provision for that central element in any system of private profit-seeking, namely trust; or, its legal equivalent, the performance of contracts. This required either state power (as the seventeenth-century political theorists of individualism knew well) or the ties of kin or community...Indeed, even in the late-twentieth-century, such links were still indispensible in criminal business, which was not only against the law but outside its protection...
Yet just these non-economic group bonds and solidarities were now being undermined, as were the moral systems that went with them. These had also been older than modern bourgeois industrial society, but they had also been adapted to form an essential part of it. The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification...
What few realized was how much of modern industrial society up to the mid-twentieth century had relied on a symbiosis between old community and family values and the new society, and therefore how dramatic the effects of their spectacularly rapid disintegration would be. This became evident in the era of neo-liberal ideology, when the macabre term "the underclass" entered, or re-entered the socio-political vocabulary around 1980...
The poor parts of the native-born urban Negro population in the U.S.A., that is to say, the majority of U.S. Negroes, became the standard example of such an "underclass," a body of citizens virtually excluded from official society, forming no real part of it or--in the case of many of its young males--of the labour market. Indeed, many of its young, especially the males, virtually considered themselves an outlaw society or anti-society. The phenomenon was not confined to people of any skin-color...
These were the political dangers of the fraying and snapping of the old social textures and value systems. However, as the 1980s advanced, generally under the banner of pure market sovereignty, it became increasingly obvious that it also constituted a danger to the triumphant capitalist economy.
For the capitalist system, even while built on the operations of the market, had relied on a number of proclivities which had no intrinsic connection with that pursuit of the individual's advantage which, according to Adam Smith, fuelled its engine. It relied on "the habit of labour," which Adam Smith assumed to be one of the fundamental motives of human behavior, on the willingness of human beings to postpone immediate gratification for a long period, i.e. to save and invest for future rewards, on pride in achievement, on customs of mutual trust, and on other attitudes which were not implicit in the rational maximization of anyone's utilities. The family became an integral part of early capitalism because it supplied it with a number of these motivations. So did "the habit of labour," the habits of obedience and loyalty, including the loyalty of executives to their firm, and other forms of behavior which could not readily be fitted into rational choice theory based on maximization. Capitalism could function in the absence of these, but, when it did, it became strange and problematic even for businessmen themselves. This happened during the fashion for piratical "take-overs" of business corporations and other financial speculations which swept the financial districts of ultra-free-market states like the U.S.A. and Britain in the 1980s, and which virtually broke all links between the pursuit of profit and the economy as a system of production. That is why [several] capitalist countries...made such raiding difficult or impossible.
...
As we take for granted the air we breathe, and which makes possible all our activities, so capitalism took for granted the atmosphere in which it operated, and which it had inherited from the past. It only discovered how essential it had been, when the air became thin. In other words, capitalism had succeeded because it was not just capitalist. Profit maximization and accumulation were necessary conditions for its success but not sufficient ones. It was the cultural revolution of the last third of the century which began to erode the inherited historical assets of capitlaism and to demonstrate the difficulties of operating without them..."Appendix 2: Practical plan for children's liberation within present-day capitalist society (this takes the form of articles of a hypothetical constitution):
Article 1 (Limits on public use of religion).
The undisturbed practice of religion is not guaranteed in cases in which religious practice violates the rights of others (see Article 2).
Article 2(Freedom of development).
(1) Care and upbringing of children shall ultimately proceed at the discretion of the children themselves. The parents upon whom a child is naturally incumbent shall be entrusted with the care of the child until such a time or circumstance that the child demands otherwise.
(2) In the case that the child demands separation from his/her parents, the child shall be given the opportunity to find alternative state-sponsored care (available until the assumption of full citizenship) or, assuming the child has passed the 7th year examination (see Article 3), the child will also have the option of being provided with independent/peer-communal/alternate-adult-communal living arrangements that shall be entirely subsidized with respect to housing, food, transportation, and medicine.
(3) Orphaned children shall be provided with the same opportunities and provisions.
(4) Children shall be fully informed of these opportunities on a regular basis, starting at age 4, and children shall be encouraged to seek the aid of state authorities in case of parental abuse, bullying, threats of violence and pain on the part of the parents or parentally-designated theological forces, forced religious observation and attendance, forced political allegiance, forced labor, or other forms of parental coercion.
(5) While entrusted with the care of children, parents will be given child-specific coupons or other types of child-specific reimbursements commensurate with the requirements for entirely providing for the child with regards to housing, food, medicine, and transportation. If the child feels that his/her parents are misusing these provisions, the child is entitled to directly receive the provisions and/or seek alternate living arrangements as described above.
Article 3 (Education).
(1) For reasons of practicality, the official languages of the Federal Earth Democracy shall be English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Esperanto. This document, as well as all other official documents of the state, shall be available in each of these languages.
(2) Education until the 7th year shall be non-compulsory. Before reaching the 7th year, each individual shall be obligated to complete a state-sponsored examination to demonstrate a basic level of literacy in at least one of the five official state languages (see above), as well as basic arithmetic skills and technological literacy (such as being able to retrieve information using computers and internet searches).
(3) The entire examination system is under the supervision of the state.
(4) Upon passing the examination, the child shall be exempted from compulsory education. Upon failing the examination, the child shall be required to attend compulsory state-sponsored literacy sessions until the child can pass the examination. Individuals may retake the examination at 6-month intervals as many times as necessary.
(5) Other state-sponsored examinations will be made available at 6-month intervals, free of charge, to provide various higher levels of secondary school and professional certification. The only compulsory certification is the 7th-year certification.
(6) State-funded school systems shall offer free education up to secondary school levels of certification.
Article 4 (Citizenship, voting, and sexual consent).
(1) Citizenship shall be bestowed upon having passed the 7th-year examination and reaching the 14th year of age.
(2) All citizens are eligible to vote and to run for any public office.
(3) The age of sexual consent is 14. Near-range age exceptions are made if the ages of both partners fall within 12-15 or 13-16.
(4) Completely secular, scientific sexual education shall be freely made available to all children through abundant means, especially targeting children from age 10 onwards.
1. Organized religion is a tool that originates alongside the commodification of children as parental property (at roughly the dawn of class society); religion is, in large part, a tool that enables parents to more effectively control their offspring-property.
2. This institution of children as commodified investments can partially explain the continued conservatism among adults even to this day. As long as parental tyranny continues, as long as parents remain petty-capitalists who depend on the existing order to protect their investments in the form of child-loyalty, they have an incentive to reinforce the existing order. Their consolation prize in capitalism is their little petty fiefdom that they get to rule over--which, just like conventional fiefdoms, is a vestige of feudalism and the feudal family unit.
3. The family unit is THE institution for propagating religion. As capitalism further erodes the institution of the family (both through commodification of the family relations and the state's increasing usurpation of family roles such as education, young-age welfare, and old-age welfare), religion and parental despotism will both have a more difficult time of asserting themselves. Another seed of capitalism's own destruction (see Hobsbawm's analysis below). It is possible that capitalism will only undermine itself once we have finally cleared away all vestiges of pre-capitalism (including the family) and put capitalism up to the task of standing on its own logic.
4. The key to ridding capitalism of parental fiefdoms, and thus of adults' incentive to maintain the status quo, is:
*****Weakening religion (the 2nd-best tool of parental authority).
*****Decreasing children's dependence on parents for their material survival (this dependence is THE most effective tool of parental authority, the material basis of their despotism).
5. On whomever children are dependent, that person or institution will have the same power (and the same incentives) as parents do now. If we make children dependent on the state for their material well-being, the state will have an incentive to make children into investments of its own. It will formulate a statist quasi-religion (an official ideology such as Nazism or Stalinism, not to be questioned, complete with a cult of personality around a parental, "father-like" figure) to maintain its indoctrination of children and thus maintain their loyalty to the state. State-usurpation of family roles is not the answer!!!
6. Instead, we must strive for complete children's liberation. No dependence on any authorities for children's material well-being! Our demand should be: free housing, free food, free medicine, free transportation, and free informational access for children! No strings attached! No compulsory education! Children are not commodities, and neither should they be dependent on them! Above all, let the children determine their own upbringing! (For a more detailed plan, see below). This will both produce freedom-loving citizens and remove parents' incentive for maintaining the status quo, leading to the end of commodification, capitalism, and class society. I don't expect parents to be keen about this, even self-avowed "radical" parents, so I imagine that children and adolescents themselves will have to be the main ones to push for this.
---------------------
1.
First, some basic, incontestable ideas on parenthood:
*It is a major investment (requires time, money, effort, etc.)
*Parents expect to earn a return on this investment. This return usually comes in the form of forced domestic labor in the household, on the farm, remittances, and old-age care. So, to a considerable extent, the decision to become a parent is at least partly an economic decision. This is plainly evident in how birth rates drop in developing countries as agriculture and domestic industry become less prevalent. Also note how children are treated like property in divorce settlements.
Parents need tools for managing their investments. Their first overarching tool upon which everything else is predicated is the child's material dependence on its parents (just as the origin of patriarchy was predicated upon the female's dependence on the male's agricultural work). The child cannot obtain food, living arrangements, etc. on its own, and if the child tries to run away to seek better, kinder, more generous providers (or some other independent arrangement), the parents are legally entitled to track down their runaway property, like a slave, and bring the child back. This material dependence also means the child is in less of a position to challenge the ideology of the parents, to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much the child thinks s/he can get away with and depending on how much punishment the parents are willing or legally able to dispense. For the child, this means the child is usually obligated to attend the parent's church. (Just as the worker is in no position to challenge the employer's ideology in a way that would get back around to the employer in a way that damaged the employee's reputation in the eyes of the employer---which is why, as communists, we should fight foremost to decrease the working class's dependence on the employing class and its institutions, such that we are in a stronger and more confident position to further organize and challenge the status quo.)
Parents also have the material advantage over children of being physically stronger and verbally more adept (advantages that capitalists do not have over workers), greatly increasing the parent's ability to use physical violence and emotional manipulation/intimidation.
But these tools are cumbersome and messy. First, you actually have to catch the child disobeying you. If the child knows that s/he can disobey you behind your back without you knowing, the child will probably do so. Then, when you do catch your child disobeying you, to make the material dependence tool useful you have to be prepared to withhold wants and needs from the child on occasion to make the threat credible. But this damages your investment in two ways: by physically harming the child, and by making the child hate you and thus more likely to abandon you before having returned a profit in the ways described above. This is also increasingly labelled "child neglect" and thus as an illegal act in the advanced capitalist countries (which is no historical accident--as the family as an institution breaks down and is increasingly supplanted by the state and by voluntary organizations, the child becomes less dependent on parental despotism and more dependent on the state (which can also be quite despotic) and/or voluntary networks with non-authority caretakers (friends, relatives, etc)). The same handicaps apply to the parents' use of physical or emotional violence: destructive to the property and its loyalty, and increasingly illegal.
Parents can play realpolitik and admit that their authority is arbitrary and only based on material dependence, but that the child will get his/her turn to rule over his/her little family empire when s/he gets older, making it in her interest to continue with the pattern rather than swim against it. But the child may reply that s/he doesn't want children, or doesn't want to determine their existence in that way, possibly in line with other radical, liberatory changes in society that would make up for that lost privilege. In any case, this tactic is shaky and rarely used.
Parents need a much better tool for controlling their investments...preferably one that operates continuously, lasts throughout life, and has maximum deterrence. The obvious solution is to indoctrinate the child with the belief that the parent is an omnipotent being--a god! The parent says, "Don't you dare disobey me! I can see everything that you do, every act of sin, of disobedience, and I have the ultimate power to send your spirit to hell!!! Oh, and if I seem like I didn't notice something that you did, or if my behavior seems inconsistent or inexplicable, well, I'm god. I'm far too transcendent for you to understand. My designs are far too complex. I work in mysterious ways. But I promise, I am always watching...oh, and P.S. I love you!"
This tool might work for a while...until the child stumbles across another child, and they begin to compare notes. "Wait, your daddy says that HE is god? I thought MY daddy was god..." Alas, not every parent can be god. But every parent CAN be the servant of one central god. In addition to making this logically consistent on a societal scale, this setup has added advantages:
*You don't actually have to catch your child in the act in order to deliver punishment. The child thinks that god is always watching, so the child punishes him/herself.
*In addition to punishment in hell, you can promise cataclysmic punishment on earth...something a human cannot obviously deliver, but god supposedly can.
*It displaces responsibility from the parents. Instead of seeming like sadistic, exploitative assholes, parents are only "doing god's work" (nevermind the fact that the parents invented this "god" idea in the first place...)
*If a parent self-evidently screws up or receives misfortune as god, well, that casts a lot of doubt on the validity of the god-claim. But if a parent screws up or receives misfortune as god's servant, the parent can explain it by saying that it was a result of not following god closely enough--i.e. this is what happens when you disobey god. It only reinforces the claim.
*It introduces an efficient division of labor. Instead of each household going through the trouble of formulating and teaching conflicting moralities, the parents can drop the kids off at Sunday School, and a clergy is there with pre-formulated morality with all of the essentials (obey thy father and mother, or else you get stoned to death, keep the cycle going for the next generation by only having children within the framework of traditional marriage and by giving your kids religious instruction, etc.)...for a price...the clergy gets to insert some of its own stuff in there. Meanwhile, the parents don't have to go through the trouble of pretending that they are god. They don't have to worry about consistency, falsifiability, or any of those threats to their scam. A single, invisible, omnipotent god who is completely unfalsifiable is the best weapon imaginable, and the simplest to explain.
*If you want to sell your child into the hands of another family as a slave, it is more useful for all of the parents involved for the child to fear a god who is unbound from any particular family unit.
Note the explicitly parental imagery in most religious texts: god as the "father." The idea that since god created you, god owns you and has the right to tell you what to do. In the early polytheistic mythologies, the link was even more explicit: the gods literally married, had sex, and produced children, who were beholden to them, giving rise to huge family trees of gods and godesses, leading all the way down to humans themselves, giving them a direct genetic link with the gods, and thus a supposed obligation to obey their parents, the gods. However much religions may vary, though, I guarantee you that one of the tenets will NOT be "Question your parents."
I don't doubt that many parents are fervent believers without a shred of intention towards cynical manipulation their children with religion. That doesn't change the fact that there is a reason (a material-incentive one) why certain people find it easy to rationalize such things as religion, aside from indoctrination and cultural inertia. Cultural inertia, or religion as an infectious "meme," as Richard Dawkins has described, both have truth to them, but they can't possibly explain the whole story because cultural memes don't propagate forever. Memes, commonly-held ideas that once seemed self-evident, quickly collapse when the material incentive for their existence vanishes. Otherwise, we'd still believe in the "droit du Seigneur" or other such bullshit. The point is, humans are very good at genuinely believing things if their survival depends on it (and conversely, not knowing something if one's salary depends on one not knowing it, as the old saying goes). If you ask parents, "Why are you affiliated with such-and-such a religion?" the parents are not likely to answer, "Because it is a useful tool for maintaining my children's loyalty and for increasing my child's marketability in our current society." But still, gnawing at the edges of their minds are the thoughts, "But without religion, how would my children learn MORALITY??" ("Morality," of course, meaning the set of beliefs that dispositions that happen to be useful for preparing the child for the "real world," in such a way that the child will be able to successfully conform and so earn a return on the parents' investments, part of which the child will send back to the parents in remittances, old-age help, etc.) I have even read of atheist parents in Britain sending their children to religious schools so that their children will learn "morality," "life-lessons," etc.! (i.e. so that their children will be more obedient to their parents, and so that they will conform better to the prevailing society, so as to be more marketable, fetch a greater return on investment, and send more back to the parents.)
Interestingly, we increasingly see some families who no longer bother with indoctrinating their children with religion. How can this be, if religion is supposedly such a vital tool for ensuring children's loyalty to the parents?
1. This is partly a simple result of the family unit breaking down. As the parents (and extended family) are around less and less often together with the kids, as a family, to give religious instruction, to attend church as a family, and to enforce religious morality, it is increasingly difficult (hopeless?) to try indoctrinating kids with religion.
2. Kids can inform themselves about religion in a critical manner much more easily nowadays with the Internet, contact with a broader array of religions, etc.
3. Most interestingly, religious indoctrination seems to mirror socio-economic trends in capitalism in general. Religion is a stick. If that's all you got, you use it. But if you happen to have some carrots as well, you probably want to rely on those more as they are easier to use--they have less "blowback." So, if you are a poor, starving peasant in Thailand who needs his kids to work hard, obey their parents, send remittances, and help their parents in their old age, you are going to use the stick of religious indoctrination very vigorously because you don't have any carrots. But if you are in the advanced capitalist countries, you can bribe your kids to a certain extent with various commodities in exchange for loyalty. Just as businesses in the "New Deal Era" of capitalism in the U.S. could ease off the stick of violence and obtain employee loyalty from minimal concessions.
2.
I've had this feeling that I've been onto something for a while. When trying to figure out why people still support the status quo to such a degree, even in the advanced capitalist countries, I kept on coming back to the realization that elderly people, religious people, and parents made up the backbone of this support. What did this trifecta have to gain from the status quo? And why are there still religious people on planet Earth? The evidence is now FIRMLY established against religion for anyone who cares to take an honest look. Religious people nowadays must really think they have something EARTHLY to gain by holding onto religion...like religion has some vital use to preserving their society, and their niche in society, maybe, and that maybe they have a sense of this deep down in a vague, inarticulated sort of way.
Why are these two essentially pre-capitalist institutions, family and religion, still present in our epoch of capitalism? My idea is that the family unit as it is currently constituted, ruled by a parental despotism and involving children as their investments, gives parents a powerful incentive to maintain the prevailing order so as to maintain these investments, this niche as lords of their own little fiefdoms. This is how many adults can still convince themselves that our capitalism is an inclusive, Weberian "social capitalism" that tries to promise something for every parent---a little empire of their own, a way to "get ahead." Even if you didn't get that Ph.D., you can send your kids to college, if you've managed their human capital successfully in a way that maintained their loyalty to you and ensured that they would be conformist, marketable commodities whose services will earn good money, some of which will hopefully end up back in your pocket. Religion remains so strong, in turn, because it is one of the best ideological tools for making children obedient, marketable, and generally molded into the type of individuals that you wanted. Hey, it's your investment, after all!
Each year, though, capitalism is eroding religion and the family unit, threatening the parental empires. I think some parents sense this. They sense that the spectacle of commodities at the Mall is much more enticing than "duty," "obligation," "morality," and all that boring stuff. If capitalism can no longer protect these traditional concepts that have proven so useful to parents, then what good is it? What good is a capitalism that ruins your investment? None. Why not overthrow it, then? I think capitalism's beneficiaries are noticing this and are scrambling to halt the damage that capitalism's commodity spectacle is doing to piety. But like a corrosive acid, the drive towards consumerist materialism and scientific achievement is insatiable and overpowering. These beneficiaries of capitalism who are trying to spearhead a religious revival are setting themselves upon a hopeless task. Religion, the family unit, and parent imperialism, like all other pre-capitalist institutions, will dissolve in the acids of capitalist materialism, and with them, much of the incentive for parents to remain loyal to capitalism will dissolve as well.
These arguments are supported and elaborated by the appendicies below:
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Appendix 1: British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on the decline of the family unit in late-capitalism:
In The Age of Extremes (an excellent book), starting on page 337, Eric Hobsbawm writes,
"The institutions most severely undermined by the new moral individualism were the traditional family and traditional organized churches in the West, which collapsed dramatically in the last third of the century...
Women's liberation, or more precisely women's demand for birth control, including abortion and the right to divorce, drove perhaps the deepest wedge between the Church and what had in the nineteenth century become the basic stock of the faithful...vocations for the priesthood and other forms of the religious life fell steeply, as did willingness to live lives of celibacy, real or official...The Church's moral and material authority over the faithful disappeared into the black hole that opened between its rules of life and morality and the reality of late-twentieth-century behavior...
The material consequences of the loosening of traditional family ties were perhaps even more serious...the family was not only what it had always been, a device for reproducing itself, but also a device for social cooperation. As such it had been essential for maintaining both the agrarian and the early industrial economies, the local and the global. This was partly because no adequate impersonal capitalist business structure had been developed before the concentration of capital and the rise of big business began to generate the modern corporate organization at the end of the nineteenth century, that "visible hand" (Chandler, 1977) which was to supplement Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market. But an even stronger reason was that the market by itself makes no provision for that central element in any system of private profit-seeking, namely trust; or, its legal equivalent, the performance of contracts. This required either state power (as the seventeenth-century political theorists of individualism knew well) or the ties of kin or community...Indeed, even in the late-twentieth-century, such links were still indispensible in criminal business, which was not only against the law but outside its protection...
Yet just these non-economic group bonds and solidarities were now being undermined, as were the moral systems that went with them. These had also been older than modern bourgeois industrial society, but they had also been adapted to form an essential part of it. The old moral vocabulary of rights and duties, mutual obligations, sin and virtue, sacrifice, conscience, rewards and penalties, could no longer be translated into the new language of desired gratification...
What few realized was how much of modern industrial society up to the mid-twentieth century had relied on a symbiosis between old community and family values and the new society, and therefore how dramatic the effects of their spectacularly rapid disintegration would be. This became evident in the era of neo-liberal ideology, when the macabre term "the underclass" entered, or re-entered the socio-political vocabulary around 1980...
The poor parts of the native-born urban Negro population in the U.S.A., that is to say, the majority of U.S. Negroes, became the standard example of such an "underclass," a body of citizens virtually excluded from official society, forming no real part of it or--in the case of many of its young males--of the labour market. Indeed, many of its young, especially the males, virtually considered themselves an outlaw society or anti-society. The phenomenon was not confined to people of any skin-color...
These were the political dangers of the fraying and snapping of the old social textures and value systems. However, as the 1980s advanced, generally under the banner of pure market sovereignty, it became increasingly obvious that it also constituted a danger to the triumphant capitalist economy.
For the capitalist system, even while built on the operations of the market, had relied on a number of proclivities which had no intrinsic connection with that pursuit of the individual's advantage which, according to Adam Smith, fuelled its engine. It relied on "the habit of labour," which Adam Smith assumed to be one of the fundamental motives of human behavior, on the willingness of human beings to postpone immediate gratification for a long period, i.e. to save and invest for future rewards, on pride in achievement, on customs of mutual trust, and on other attitudes which were not implicit in the rational maximization of anyone's utilities. The family became an integral part of early capitalism because it supplied it with a number of these motivations. So did "the habit of labour," the habits of obedience and loyalty, including the loyalty of executives to their firm, and other forms of behavior which could not readily be fitted into rational choice theory based on maximization. Capitalism could function in the absence of these, but, when it did, it became strange and problematic even for businessmen themselves. This happened during the fashion for piratical "take-overs" of business corporations and other financial speculations which swept the financial districts of ultra-free-market states like the U.S.A. and Britain in the 1980s, and which virtually broke all links between the pursuit of profit and the economy as a system of production. That is why [several] capitalist countries...made such raiding difficult or impossible.
...
As we take for granted the air we breathe, and which makes possible all our activities, so capitalism took for granted the atmosphere in which it operated, and which it had inherited from the past. It only discovered how essential it had been, when the air became thin. In other words, capitalism had succeeded because it was not just capitalist. Profit maximization and accumulation were necessary conditions for its success but not sufficient ones. It was the cultural revolution of the last third of the century which began to erode the inherited historical assets of capitlaism and to demonstrate the difficulties of operating without them..."Appendix 2: Practical plan for children's liberation within present-day capitalist society (this takes the form of articles of a hypothetical constitution):
Article 1 (Limits on public use of religion).
The undisturbed practice of religion is not guaranteed in cases in which religious practice violates the rights of others (see Article 2).
Article 2(Freedom of development).
(1) Care and upbringing of children shall ultimately proceed at the discretion of the children themselves. The parents upon whom a child is naturally incumbent shall be entrusted with the care of the child until such a time or circumstance that the child demands otherwise.
(2) In the case that the child demands separation from his/her parents, the child shall be given the opportunity to find alternative state-sponsored care (available until the assumption of full citizenship) or, assuming the child has passed the 7th year examination (see Article 3), the child will also have the option of being provided with independent/peer-communal/alternate-adult-communal living arrangements that shall be entirely subsidized with respect to housing, food, transportation, and medicine.
(3) Orphaned children shall be provided with the same opportunities and provisions.
(4) Children shall be fully informed of these opportunities on a regular basis, starting at age 4, and children shall be encouraged to seek the aid of state authorities in case of parental abuse, bullying, threats of violence and pain on the part of the parents or parentally-designated theological forces, forced religious observation and attendance, forced political allegiance, forced labor, or other forms of parental coercion.
(5) While entrusted with the care of children, parents will be given child-specific coupons or other types of child-specific reimbursements commensurate with the requirements for entirely providing for the child with regards to housing, food, medicine, and transportation. If the child feels that his/her parents are misusing these provisions, the child is entitled to directly receive the provisions and/or seek alternate living arrangements as described above.
Article 3 (Education).
(1) For reasons of practicality, the official languages of the Federal Earth Democracy shall be English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Esperanto. This document, as well as all other official documents of the state, shall be available in each of these languages.
(2) Education until the 7th year shall be non-compulsory. Before reaching the 7th year, each individual shall be obligated to complete a state-sponsored examination to demonstrate a basic level of literacy in at least one of the five official state languages (see above), as well as basic arithmetic skills and technological literacy (such as being able to retrieve information using computers and internet searches).
(3) The entire examination system is under the supervision of the state.
(4) Upon passing the examination, the child shall be exempted from compulsory education. Upon failing the examination, the child shall be required to attend compulsory state-sponsored literacy sessions until the child can pass the examination. Individuals may retake the examination at 6-month intervals as many times as necessary.
(5) Other state-sponsored examinations will be made available at 6-month intervals, free of charge, to provide various higher levels of secondary school and professional certification. The only compulsory certification is the 7th-year certification.
(6) State-funded school systems shall offer free education up to secondary school levels of certification.
Article 4 (Citizenship, voting, and sexual consent).
(1) Citizenship shall be bestowed upon having passed the 7th-year examination and reaching the 14th year of age.
(2) All citizens are eligible to vote and to run for any public office.
(3) The age of sexual consent is 14. Near-range age exceptions are made if the ages of both partners fall within 12-15 or 13-16.
(4) Completely secular, scientific sexual education shall be freely made available to all children through abundant means, especially targeting children from age 10 onwards.