O for the simple life
Is there a problem with closed religious groups (and with closed groups in general)?
I commented on – or intruded on – a blog post about the Amish the other day. I didn’t set out to intrude, I thought I was just offering some data, but I got called a militant atheist and compared to Leninists (!) and generally told to fuck off, so clearly I was intruding. Must do better. But about the Amish…
I think there is a problem with closed religious groups (and closed groups in general). I think closed religious groups are incompatible with many of the rights in the UDHR. I think that’s why they are closed – and that’s the problem. Why are some religious groups closed? 1) So that outsiders won’t come in and 2) so that insiders won’t leave. There is secrecy, and there is restriction. Secrecy can cover up treatment of people that would not be acceptable in the larger (open) world, and restriction can make people unable to escape that kind of treatment.
What are closed religious groups like? What are they? Jonestown. Yearning for Zion Ranch. Heaven’s Gate. (I’m not sure how closed Heaven’s Gate really was. It was secretive, but I don’t think it was forcibly closed. It also didn’t have children. That makes a large difference.) Branch Davidians. The Amish.
They don’t let children go to school. Most of them subordinate the women, and keep them under observation. They don’t want their members to leave.
Not being able to leave is the key, I think. It’s the key because it is a violation of rights in itself, and because it motivates other violations of rights. Amish children who stay in school are much more likely to leave than those who quit school after the eighth grade. What does this mean? That children who know more about the world, and who have some qualifications beyond primitive farming, often choose not to stay, while children who don’t, don’t. In other words children who are handicapped – deliberately handicapped – for life in the larger world are more likely to stay, and the Amish want those children to be handicapped. Children who do stay in school have a choice; they can leave or they can stay. Children who quit school at age 14 don’t have a choice (or have much less of a choice); they have to stay.
Universal education is based partly on the idea that children should have choices of that kind. Closed religious groups that prevent their children from having choices of that kind are highly dubious.
So I think the decision in Wisconsin v Yoder was unfortunate. Douglas wrote the only dissent (and it was only a partial dissent; the decision was unanimous).
The Court’s analysis assumes that the only interests at stake in the case are those of the Amish parents on the one hand, and those of the State on the other. The difficulty with this approach is that, despite the Court’s claim, the parents are seeking to vindicate not only their own free exercise claims, but also those of their high-school-age children.
Well exactly, except that should have been a real stumbling block, not just a gesture at one. The Amish (adults) want the Amish to continue, and a lot of Americans who like the idea of having a few buggys and bonnets around want them to continue too. But the price of doing that is allowing generation after generation of children to be handicapped. We don’t fancy that when it’s Yearning for Zion Ranch. Why do we think it’s okay for the Amish?
Ruth Irene Garrett doesn’t think it’s okay.
To many outsiders Amish life seems simple and peaceful – but for Ruth Irene Garrett it was a prison with rules based on fear…Born into an insular Amish community in Iowa, Ruth says she always felt trapped by the rigid way of life which avoids all dealings with the outside world and keeps boys and girls apart…She went to an Amish school until she turned 14 — the age when most Amish children leave their studies to begin working on their families’ farms. Boys work in the fields while the girls focus on quilting, sewing, cooking, milking, cleaning and gardening…Ruth said women were second-class, subservient and discouraged from speaking their minds…Ruth said the Amish rarely smile or laugh, and believe if something is funny then it is bad. She explains in the book: “They take their religious, agrarian life seriously, living by the motto that the harder it is on earth, the sweeter it is in heaven.”
So they make life on earth nasty on purpose, thinking that will make it sweeter in heaven – an unfortunate misunderstanding.
I think pluralism is good up to a point – but I think human rights are one good way to determine what that point is. (I think smiling and laughing is another. Imagine life without laughter. Just imagine it. Imagine finding nothing funny, ever. Imagine thinking funniness is bad. Imagine hell on earth.) I think it’s fine for people to light out for the territory, to run away from home and have adventures (provided they don’t leave their own children behind, like Pilgrim), to drop out of the mainstream, to simplify, to set up communes, to join a kibbutz. I don’t think it’s fine for people to subordinate women, and I don’t think it’s fine for them to handicap their children.
Well, you know that I’m a hundred percent behind you on this, Ophelia, having ‘intruded’ (as you put it) in the other discussion also. I think closed religious societies, where children’s education is partial and truncated, not only have nothing to teach us, but badly need intervention and reform — for the sake of the children. As Rebecca says, if you want to go off and live without electricity and the amenities it provides, that’s fine. If you want to use a buggy instead of a car, that’s fine too. But if your lifestyle is such as to maim the lives of children, so that their choices are constrained by yours, then that, it seems to me, is not fine at all. As you say: “I don’t think it’s fine for people to subordinate women, and I don’t think it’s fine for them to handicap their children.”
For reasons past my understanding, religion still seems to get off almost scot free with abuse — not necessarily sexual abuse, though this seems never to be very far away — and it’s time we stopped thinking that, because they are religions, they have a right to define human rights in any way they choose. Religions, despite what people apparently think, do not have any special expertise in morality. (That should be evident to anyone after hearing Murphy-O’Connor and Rowan Williams speaking on contemporary issues of moral concern.) Some religions do incredibly immoral things in the name of faith. So why should we suppose, just because they do it in the name of religion, that closed societies like the Amish, are not abusive? The fact that they are closed is a sure sign that they are abusive.
The idea that parents have the right to ‘educate’ their children as they choose, without the requirement to meet minimum standards of literacy and understanding, or that they have the right to withdraw children from school at a certain age, without giving them the choice to go on to higher levels of education, is a right that should be questioned. This goes beyond the limits of an acceptable pluralism.
If closed societies respond that, without control over children’s upbringing they could no longer preserve the lifestyle they have chosen for themselves, then they have proved the point. Given sufficient knowledge, and the freedom to pursue it, their children would not choose to live as their parents do. This is simply a measure of their suppression of their children’s rights.
Closed religious environments are mentally/psychologically toxic/mortal places to grow up. I spent my whole childhood in a closed off from the world industrial school and would not advocate to my worst enemy such an environment. Closed religious environments breed anomalous behaviour patterns in human beings. For example, children in these closed off settings have turned to each other in order for all their wants to have been by them fulfilled. Some other older children/staff members had the propensity to force themselves sexually on other children for over long periods. Even religious adults on a daily basis turned to children to act out their sexual desires on them – because their minds had imploded so much because of their closed off abnormal settings. The Adults in charge were beholden to nobody. They could do whatever they liked to children. No laws of the land pertained to them at all. All and sundry from the top down saw the religious as been pillars of society. Children in Goldenbridge were forever and a day told by the religious sisters to smile at the religious own family visitors. False images to the outside world were forever by the religious portrayed to them. Closed environments nurture secrecy and secrecy breeds violence of all descriptions. People who have never had experience of growing up in enclosed religious settings such as the above oftentimes have such romantic/plasticized/abnormal, (abnormal, from the perspective of those who grew up in them) views of these places. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose. Outsiders who came to visit were always enchanted/besotted at the holiness of the religious. They forever praised them for the wonderful work they were doing in caring for children. Yet behind these closed doors, children were on a daily basis lined up and flogged for minor misdemeanours, like not having reached their quota in the enclosed secret rosary bead factory or because of having wet their beds.
Rebecca,
“On the other hand there is in implicit assumption that we are somehow better or more right than those who choose another lifestyle, and that our version of human rights is more enlightened than theirs. I think that I probably do believe that, but I question whether that is an appropriate view.”
It depends on how one defines “our.” There’s no need to define it in some invidious way – that was the point of calling the UDHR that – it is universal. The whole point was to come up with a universalist set of human rights. That makes the “our” a very large group indeed. That’s in the ideal, of course; it’s possible to sign the UDHR and go right on ignoring it. But still – there is a framework for an officially internationalist universalist version of human rights; it’s not a western plot or an imperialist project.
I know what you mean about feeling torn. But I think the reality is that that feeling just ends up making things easier for the powerful and harder for the subordinated. The idea is not to impose rights on subordinated women, but it damn well is to make rights available to subordinated women. (And any other subordinated groups.)
Eloquent, Eric.
I think that’s absolutely right – I think it is an infringement of children’s rights. I’ve been thinking about this more and more in the last few years. It’s a terrible knot, because ‘this kind of constraint of freedom is [indeed] assumed to be justified.’ But I suppose at least raising the issue is step one.
Yeah that’s because I don’t think the very late sabbatical counts for much.
I question some of my terms, just maybe not the ones you think I should. By ‘universal education’ I do mean normal education, yes; that’s because I’m aware that a hell of a lot of ‘home schooling’ is either Christian nonsense or no schooling at all. Amish people do give their children vocational training, but it’s vocational training for working on a pre-industrial farm. That’s not vocational training as commonly understood, because who the hell wants farmworkers trained in pre-industrial farming, except more Amish people? My point is that ‘normal’ education (except when it’s so bad it’s all but useless, which it often is) offers choices while Amish education doesn’t.
“The same statements about conformity and rigid way of life can be heard most days in the Guardian or the BBC concerning our own society.”
I know, I know; the Madeleine Bunting school. And I think those statements are largely bullshit! That’s part of my point. There is of course plenty of conformity, and ‘normal’ middle class life is far from perfect, but it’s a lot easier to escape and to modify than Amish life is.
You’re quite wrong about the Roma, I would have included them if I’d thought of it. I don’t know much about them, but I certainly don’t exempt them from anything.
I don’t think children under 16 should have as much freedom as those over 16. That’s not my point. My point is that no children should be systematically handicapped.
I never heard of the Hutterites before until I read Eric Mac Donald’s post. I thus checked them out @ http://www.hutterites.org
I note that the children do not eat with adults until they are fifteen years old.
In Goldenbridge, children also never experienced mealtimes with adults.
Although children knew in their minds that the Sisters of Mercy went three times daily to the convent for their meals they could never relate this to the fact that they virtually ate food.
It was approximately as if these sisters were goddesses from an alien planet. The same was applicable to the way children never saw the religious in states of either dress/undress.
They were categorically not Homo sapiens like us children.
When I left Goldenbridge and went to Switzerland, I recall having humungous exertions with eating food in a family setting. The family found my ways very outlandish and could not be au fait with why I was continuously at mealtimes so unreservedly flustered.
This practice, believe me, is abnormal!
Wow, that’s interesting.
What a lot of ways the nuns found to make life weird and disabling and nasty. What a strange impulse. What a lot of layers there are to peel back to get at all of Goldenbridge.
I’m not convinced that all home schooling is bad or that all state schooling is good. 20% functional illiteracy in the UK makes the Amish vocational training look comparatively better.
The pieties of religious cretins doesn’t actually worry me much. In Darwin’s time everyone was creationist and that was the only truth children were taught. Yet today when only a handful of people are creationists, we are supposed to panic because that rump might teach their children some creation myth. Sense emerged for our ancestors without the need to ban the teaching of Creationism. So please, a bit less of the Daily Mail style moral panic.
My children are taught all the pieties of today like fair trade, recycling and windmills even though any rational observer can see they are less than they are cracked up to be. Every age has its certainties that prove nonsense.
This issue is about the conflict between the negative right to be free of government and the positive right of the collective to enforce the supposed rights of the child. JS Mill wanted education made compulsory but didn’t want the state to provide it. Logically, if the state decided what was best we would lose the benefits of liberty.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Mill.html
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/pdfs/mills%20dilema.pdf
This example echoes the debate about free speech. If you don’t defend the rights of obnoxious people, then the rights are worthless. I’m saying I don’t like the idea of what the Amish are doing but I defend their right to do it. I do so because I’m not convinced the harm of destroying the parent’s rights outweighs the harm done to children by being forced to lead a lifestyle that I dislike. You don’t even weigh these issues! Where will you go next? A lot of parents on sink estates never read to their kids; they’ll be overfed and under exercised. That’s even more disabling.
I accept you would have written about the Roma children but how many of your friends on the left would have done so. My brother in law, an ex-teacher from Bradford, noted that every year Asian girls would disappear from class for months at a time or even permanently. Little was ever done about it, in stark contrast to what would happen if a white girl didn’t show up to school. No one there is a ideological post modernist; this is just the certainties of the day. These are nice people who are doing what they think is right, but it’s actually stupid. I don’t want those certainties imposed on me or my children. The cost of my freedom to stand outside the mainstream is to allow idiots like the Amish to share my freedom.
I think all of these things can be handled by some concept of children’s rights. Children have a right to be prepared to enter and flourish in adult society. Obviously, the fact that circumstances differ will mean that some children are better prepared than others, and some will accordingly flourish more fully than others. But the fact that children are required to receive an education to a certain level can be understood within the scope of the concept of children’s rights. We don’t need to apologise for the mandatory aspect of it.
After all, adults are required to pay income tax, they are required to do other things that may benefit the state, such as serve on juries, serve in the military, and in other capacities. Rights are not without duties and demands, but the duties and demands must be consistent with the rights they enable.
I don’t have a complete argument for this, and obviously a lot of spade work needs to be done. I began, way back in the 70s to do an PhD dissertation on children’s rights. But then I got sick, was out of commission for awhile, and my life took another course. However, the idea of children’s rights, rights which seem, lately to be widely abrogated, is one that needs, I believe, to be taken more seriously. With the resurgence of religious forces, the growth of fundamentalist Islam, the deepening conservatism of the catholic church, and the tendency, that goes along with these trends, to insist that children be raised in narrow cultural and religious ways, it seems to me that the time to affirm the rights of children has really come.
The cost of someone’s freedom to stand out of the mainstream gives no one the right to indoctrinate children. Indoctinate themselves if they please, but the children must be given the tools so that they can make informed choices of their own, so that they too, if they wish, can stand outside the mainstream.
Nobody prevents anyone from leaving. Your beneficent tyranny is particularly obnoxious.
The Amish do prevent people from leaving in the sense of making it extra-special difficult. There is heavy social and theological pressure not to leave. This is suspect because if a society is desirable, people don’t want to leave. A system that works hard to prevent people from leaving is a sign of a system that is not attractive enough on its own.
There is also the educational handicap, which is worse.
Also – by the way – just exactly what ‘beneficent tyranny’ have I recommended? Quote me the place where I did that. You won’t be able to, because I didn’t. The whole post is about pointing out problems; it nowhere makes a positive recommendation. I said I thought the decision in Wisconsin v Yoder was unfortunate – so at the most you can accuse me of thinking that Amish children ought to have the same school-leaving age as non-Amish children. That’s a pretty pathetic entry for the beneficent tyranny sweepstakes.
But don’t be shy, reach for the can of whipped rhetoric, that’s fine.
But I didn’t deny that the Amish can and do leave. I know some leave.
You haven’t particularly outstayed your welcome, it’s just that the discussion is a little frustrating because it’s mostly at cross-purposes; you keep disputing things I haven’t said. (For instance you spent a lot of words telling me public education is not ideal; but I already know that, and what’s more, I already said that.)
I know that leaving any group can be difficult. The point is that the Amish make it very very difficult, and that they do that in some dubious ways. I raised some questions about that. I didn’t make any firm recommendations; I raised some questions. You asked me if I had any doubts yet but I never said I had no doubts. Cross-purposes.
Tingey,
Point 1 is not a point, it’s a big slice of question begging.
Point 2 is not a point, it’s another question.
Point 3 requires some evidence. “A lot..?”
1) If it’s question begging, then No, not relevant.
2) Well, how about taking a position in relation to this specific case?
3) Ah, so you make an assertion, then suggest I google it for evidence. Excellent.
I have no idea whether the Amish tend to have 6 fingers. Might be a bit of natural selection – you can hold more nails for those barn building activities…..
Oh, Tingey…
There’s a difference between making a claim yourself and then being asked for evidence, and making a claim yourself and telling the person to whom you are making the claim to look for evidence. Jeezis.