[From Bill Powers (950226.0730 MST)]
Bill Leach (950225.19:59 EST(EDT))--
It seems to me that "punishment" does have the 'ability' to create
conflict and the resulting reorganization activity. Even the 'sharp
NO!' is punishment, yes? It certainly is usually a disturbance to
a controlled perception.
Yes, I agree. Look at it this way: punishment is not an act (i.e.,
hitting someone) but setting up a contingency so that certain behavior
on another person's part will lead to consequences that person doesn't
want to happen -- consequences that amount to errors. Hitting someone
for no reason is just an attack. It's only a punishment if it's
understood that it follows from a rule: do that and I'll hit you
(implying: don't do it, and I won't hit you).
There are natural contingencies of this sort, but we don't call them
"punishment." If you're careless with a favorite toy it will break, and
that's just the nature of things. We would only call this consequence a
punishment if someone else made a rule like "Every time you talk back to
me I am going to break one of your toys." A punishment is something that
one person does to another because of a rule that person made (or
adopted from someone else) and is acting out.
It still seems to me, that prior to the ability to reason or handle
many "higher level" abstractions, punishment is a better way to
"induce" reorganization than the natural consequences of continued
behaviour.
At the very least, wouldn't the punishee have to be able to understand a
rule like "Each time you do X, I will do Y"? If the cause-effect rule
isn't understood, the punishing act Y will simply be perceived as an
attack delivered for no reason. When very young children are punished by
a parent, I think the message they get is simple: daddy or mommy hurts
me, or doesn't like me. Do this enough, and the child concludes "I am
unlovable and worthless." The idea that an abstract cause-effect
relationship is intended can't be understood before some age. If you
depend on reorganizing effects due to the punishing act itself, without
understanding, there is no predicting what kind of change of behavior
will occur. Skinner was against punishment for this reason. While it
could apparently cause a specific action to cease, what took its place
was completely unpredictable.
I think there's a finite window in childrens' development where
punishment -- if not sadistic -- will simply be accepted as a part of
life. Most games contain punishments: "Go to jail. Go directly to jail.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200." There isn't even anything one can
necessarily do to avoid them; they're just the breaks of the game, a
consequence of landing on the wrong spot. Other games have punishing
consequences, such as loss of points for lying about the cards you have
in your hand -- teaching the lesson that the crime is not lying but
getting caught lying. Games with winners and losers automatically punish
all but one person, the winner. I'm not quite sure what moral lessons
such games are getting across, but children accept the rules without too
much fuss. The main lesson they learn is that they have to accept the
rules if they want to play.
This window ends, I think, somewhere near adolescence. It ends when
children become aware of who is making the rules that lead to
punishment. One of the great insights is that if the rule didn't exist,
there wouldn't be any punishment. So if the rules are arbitrary and the
child doesn't see any general good in them, chances are that there will
be a rebellion against the rule-makers, who are seen simply as bullies
who insist on getting what they want (however, see below for a caution
that this may not be a universal truth).
Like it or not, we DO have this concept of 'responsibility' that
others will (attempt) to hold us to. This is life as it is. Some
of these 'responsibilities' are codified into laws (not saying that
they are necessarily codified very well -- but that is irrelevent
anyway). Others are just "rules" but rules which when 'broken'
have someone that has some ability to force consequences to occur.
Children will (hopefully) have to live long enough to have to deal
with this "rule system". Calling such "responsibility" or
"accepting the consequences for the results of one's own behaviour"
is the typical term.
This is why I was a problem child. I had to see for myself some good in
the rules before I would accept that they were worth living up to. A
great many of the rules that were imposed by elders seemed totally
capricious to me; the only consideration was not offending the rule-
makers enough to bring them down on my head. I was probably about two
steps from a life of crime. It took me quite a while to get all this
sorted out and develop my own ethical system so I could begin to have
some concern for promoting goodness in the world. Neither reward nor
punishment succeeded in making me docile, as some of my colleagues here
may attest.
When people speak of responsibilities they and others should have to
society, they're almost always thinking about the society they like, the
one they grew up in. So it appears that teaching children to go along
with the rules of their society is a good thing, promoting social
harmony and mutual support. What they don't seem to realize that this is
much too simple a principle and not at all a good thing to teach
children past a certain age. What it does is to bring up children to
believe that they must be loyal to their own society _no matter what it
does_. Then, when their horizons broaden and they come into contact with
other societies, they are unable to understand how other people could be
just as loyal to a social system that breaks many rules they were taught
(by reward and punishment) are important. Instead of promoting the
general social welfare, this principle of upbringing creates innumerable
little groups who are fiercely loyal to those they agree with, and
fiercely hostile to everyone else. There is a very fine line between
teaching mutual support and cooperation and teaching xenophobia.
If I were teaching responsibility to older children, I would follow most
of Ed Ford's method, but I would go beyond it. At some point I would
explain to children what rules are, and who makes them, and why. I would
explain not only why it is good to seek agreement and cooperation with
others, but why it is even better to figure out your own ways of living
with others. I would ask children of Democrats to imagine what it would
be like if they had been raised by Republicans, or Nazis, or hippies, or
athiests, and of course all the other combinations. I would ask them if
the things they believed in were true ONLY because they had been raised
to believe them, or whether they could find some reason to believe them
-- or something else -- that didn't depend on how they were raised. I
would give them problems, like supposing they had been raised in some
other society they know about, like North Korea, and imagining what they
would think of "right" and "wrong" as a result. In short, I would
introduce them to the study of ethics, which goes well beyond accidents
of upbringing.
Of course I would probably get tossed out by angry parents and
administrators, who definitely think that THEIR social rules are the
RIGHT ones, and everyone else's are wrong.
As in all attempts to "control others", this one will have its
limits and its problems. No doubt some children will be able to
"control around" some of the requirement with varying degrees of
success.
A question to ponder: if some children are found to "control around"
some of the requirements, why are they trying to do so? Are they just
nasty evil bad kids? Or is the system somehow trying to make them
violate something important to them? I'm reminded of one of the most
striking effects of Ed's program, which has been not a change in the
kids but a change in the rules. The definition of a "discipline problem"
has been changed so it does not apply to trivia like forgetting pencils
and not doing homework, but concerns only violations of the rights of
others to learn or to teach. We have to fix what's wrong with the social
system as well as what's wrong with kids' behavior.
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Bill Leach (950225.18:50 EST(EDT))--
We believe that this reality HAS consistancy and regularity. This
one, I admit, is a bit tougher. Though this assumption is the
basis for science, it is just as unprovable as any other
perception.
What is provable is that we can learn how to control our perceptions. If
action is properly related to error (inside us), our perceptions will be
affected so as to stay near their preferred values. It's only a short
step to infer that between the actions and the perceptions they affect,
there must be some reasonably consistent laws, out there where we can't
see them. We can't prove that there aren't some other, but operationally
equivalent, laws, but that there are laws seems beyond doubt.
By this I mean that there really may be 'inborn' reasons why people
generally have similar conceptions of 'right' and 'wrong'. Now
PLEASE don't let this set a _flag_!!
Who, me? I completely agree with you, totally, one hundred percent.
People generally believe that reincarnation is right and being bound to
the wheel of desire is wrong. It is right to raid your neighbors to take
their heads, as long as you do it for a good reason and show proper
respect while you eat the brain. It is wrong for races to mix, wrong to
be an athiest, wrong to be a Democrat. Everybody knows that. It's good
that we all have similar conceptions of "right" and "wrong." Otherwise,
we'd always be fighting with each other, wouldn't we?
;-)>
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Best to all,
Bill P.