Progress and children's rights

Itard's "...The Young Savage", and Rousseau's "Politics and the Arts."

Fascinating class. First there was Itard. We began by watching some clips from Truffault's film "The Wild Child" which I, as I always have, found very moving. Truffault found such empathy for the young boy, and he was played so brilliantly by Jean-Pierre Cargol, not, as I said in class, Jean-Pierre Leaud, although the film is dedicated to him.

What was interesting about showing the movie is not that we saw the film and could comment on the story, but rather that we saw another interpretation of the story of the Wild Child, one which understood him as being alone and scared in the world, and facing " institutionalization, a big theme for Truffault. In comparison to Itard's book, which attempts to be a more philosophical/scientific view of the boy, it underlines the one problem of the subject: the boy could not express himself in our context and so was left to be "used" towards the ends of the interpreters.

Itard's project, to examine "man in his natural, primitive state", was quickly shot down in class as having no scientific footing to stand on. The boy is now thought to have been abused and autistic, and his sample size of one hardly allows extrapolation to a general concept.

In spite of Michael's attempts to get us to focus on Itard's project, we couldn't. But perhaps it is not Itard's project that matters. What matters is our fascination with the figure of the social outcast, the child thrown out of our midst to fend for himself. Whether it is Truffault, Itard, or us reading the book, we couldn't help but feel a fundamental empathy for him, lining up our sympathies so clearly in defense of his nature and situation. We felt pity for his "alone-ness", his disadvantage. We took responsibility for it: he was abused and cast out, he was autistic, learning impaired. It wasn't his fault. Somehow, we innately feel that being in civilization is the only possible way to survive and be happy and feel anxiety about those who are left out.

So Itard may very well be right: "that moral superiority which has been said to be natural to man, is merely the result of civilization, which raises him above other animals by a great and powerful stimulus" (Itard, p.144) Our pity for him was raised by our sense of empathy for his isolation. It's how we would feel if we were cast out of society, man's natural state.

Rousseau was fun. Such a flawed and powerful document. The big questions it raised were: "how do we create good citizens," and "if family is no longer the core of society, then what is (can be)?"

The problem, to me, is how do you "create" a citizen without a totalitarian government? The failed communist states whose demise bred the faction-ism Rousseau apparently feared, is example enough of the problem of trying to accomplish this task.

The only remaining example is the USA, which poses another set of problems. I think that advertising is the very thing that Rousseau was arguing against in this text. Without foreseeing it, he imagines that any medium so connected to pleasing the audience and citizenry could never instruct. Society would be too consumed with vanity and desire for the "spectacle-makers" to risk offense. The US, and indeed the rest of the western world, although Europe's long histories help galvanize people in their identities to an extent not found in North America, is driven by the consumer culture, which is fueled by the control of desire and stimulation of growth by advertising. But what growth? I think that we've seen in recent events that this growth was false, a balloon of wants built on borrowed money. A pyramid scheme that ran out of time. And so what kind of citizens are we? Are our core values based on our relations to each other and our society? Or are they related to our possessions and ambitions?

I rather detest much of Rousseau's "Solution", but can't help to recognize the problem he outlined as being alive and well and living 250 years later, undoubtedly on a scale not even he would have anticipated. Although I'm sure I sell his imagination short.

But what to do? The Conservative government would like to legislate taste, but the idea is abhorrent to me, mainly because their taste is a throwback to a time that can't survive out of the enclaves that this particular government comes from. They want our culture to reflect the world of the straight, married family. A world I don't see thriving around me anymore. And one which excludes very good people from having, what?, franchise or agency in the world simply because they differ from the "norm".

Moreover, there's a challenge brewing in court over polygamy. The government tried unsuccessfully to prosecute on the grounds of Canada's anti-polygamy laws. The case was struck down as being un-prosecutable. The lawyer representing the government in the case told me the problem, as he saw it, is that there are more people living in what could be seen as poly-amorous relationships in Vancouver than there are in Bountiful, B.C. Cluny's story is case in point. If her boyfriend were to move in, or even stay there three nights a week with her, her ex-husband and children, the government would then have grounds to investigate, going firmly against Trudeau's famous dictate that "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But this is the power that the government seeks! The case has since been refered to the BC Supreme court for a ruling on the constitutionality of the anti-poligamy laws. If they are struck down, the only legal recourse would be to prosecute on behalf of the young girls co-opted into marriages and sex before the age of 16 (this is the preferred course of my lawyer-acquaintance).

The family as the core of our legal and moral structure is on its last legs.

So how do we structure our society if not on the family? I think the beginning of the answer lies as much in the last case as it does in the Wild Boy of Aveyron: children's rights. We're now seeing a global movement to enshrine the rights of children. Not only are they entitled to human rights as all are, but they entitled now to special rights: the right to a level of care that supersedes the parents individual authority. These rights are interesting because they do two things: they grant rights without a demand of responsibility from the rights-holder, and they legislate duty. Perhaps it's in these two poles that the beginning of a new understanding of citizenship can begin.