Holistic Systems

In these days of increasingly mindless violent crime, I found the following excerpt from Robert A Heinleins, “Starship Troopers” particularly relevant.

The book is set 5000 years in the future and was published in 1959. It was also made into a feature film in 1997 and a TV series in 1999.

This excerpt describes the lead character, Johnny Rico, recalling his memory of a “History and Morals” lesson from school. The lesson discusses our current attitudes to crime, punishment and juvenile deliquency and how we were lead astray by well meaning, but very wrong ‘social workers’ and ‘child psychologists’.

For the sake of brevity, I have not included a page or so of the start of the lesson, describing how and why you might house train a puppy.

I’m not strongly advocating that I agree with Heinlein and his views on corporal punishment, but it is food for thought.

“Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden by law,” he had gone on. “Flogging was lawful as sentence of court only in one small province, Delaware, and there only for a few crimes and was rarely invoked; it was regarded as a ‘cruel and unusal punishment’”.

Dubois had mused aloud, “I do not understand objections to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. Whilst a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment – and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse such a highly perfected survival mechanism ? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific psuedo-psychoilogical nonsense.”

“As for ‘unusual’, punishment must be unusual or it serves no purpose.” He then pointed his stump at another boy. “What would happen if a puppy were spanked every hour?”

“Uh … probably drive him crazy !”

“Probably. It certainly will not teach him anything. How long has it been since a principle of this school has had to switch a pupil?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. About two years. That kid that swiped …”

“Never mind. Long enough. It means that such punishment is so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. Back to these young criminals – they were probably not spanked as babies; they were certainly not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was; for a first offense, a warning – a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished – and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even that mild punishment, be given probation – ‘paroled’ in the jargon of the time.”

“This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment whatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinement. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so called ‘juvenille delinquent’ becomes an adult criminal – and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You -”.

He had singled me out again. “Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house … and occaisionally locked him up in an out-building but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a full grown dog and still not housebroken – whereupon you whip out a gun and should him dead. Comment, please ?”

“Why … that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”

“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”

“Uh… why, mine, I guess.”

“Again, I agree. But I’m not guessing.”

“Mr Dubious,” a kid blurted out, “but why? Why didn’t they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it – the sort of lesson they wouldn’t forget! I mean ones who did something really bad. Why not?”

“I don’t know”, he had answered grimly, “except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists’. It was too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder – but that is unlikely; adults most always act from conscious ‘highest motives’ no matter what their behaviour.”

“But – good heavens!” the girl answered. “I didn’t like being spanked any more than any kid does, but when I needed it, my mama delivered. The only time I ever got a switching in school I got another one when I got home – and that was years and years ago. I don’t ever expect to be hauled up in front of a judge and sentenced to a flogging; you behave yourself and such things don’t happen. I don’t see anything wrong with our system; it’s a lot better than not being able to walk outdoors for fear of your life – why, that’s horrible!”

“I agree. Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, does very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives), but their theory was wrong – half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalised charlatanary. The more earnest they were, the further it led them astray. You see they assumed that Man has a moral instinct.”

“Sir? But I thought – But he does! I have.”

“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with a moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not – and a puppy has none. We aquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind. These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to aquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.”

“But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you called your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive – and nowhere else! – and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivatins at each level, and resolve all the conflicts.”