AFFECTION AND SYMPATHY
Many readers may think that I have hitherto unaccountably neglected
affection, which is, in some sense, the essence of a good character.
I hold that love and knowledge are the two main requisites for right
action, yet, in dealing with moral education, I have hitherto said
nothing about love. My reason has been that the right sort of love
should be the natural fruit resulting from the proper treatment of the
growing child, rather than something consciously aimed at throughout
the various stages. We have to be clear as to the kind of affection to
be desired, and as to the disposition appropriate to different ages.
From ten or twelve years old until puberty, a boy is apt to be very
destitute of affection, and there is nothing to be gained by trying
to force his nature. Throughout youth, there is less occasion for
sympathy than in adult life, both because there is less power of giving
effective expression to it, and because a young person has to think of
his or her own training for life, largely to the exclusion of other
people’s interests. For these reasons, we should be more concerned to
produce sympathetic and affectionate adults than to force a precocious
development of these qualities in early years. Our problem, like all
problems in the education of character, is a scientific one, belonging
to what may be called psychological dynamics. Love cannot exist as
a duty: to tell a child that it _ought_ to love its parents and its
brothers and sisters is utterly useless, if not worse. Parents who wish
to be loved must behave so as to elicit love, and must try to give to
their children those physical and mental characteristics which produce
expansive affections.
Not only must children not be commanded to love their parents, but
nothing must be done which has this result as its object. Parental
affection, at its best, differs from sex-love in this respect. It is
of the essence of sex-love to seek a response, as is natural, since,
without a response, it cannot fulfil its biological function. But it
is not of the essence of parental love to seek a response. The natural
unsophisticated parental instinct feels towards the child as towards
an externalized part of the parent’s body. If your great toe is out
of order, you attend to it from self-interest, and you do not expect
it to feel grateful. The savage woman, I imagine, has a very similar
feeling towards her child. She desires its welfare in just the same
way as she desires her own, especially while it is still very young.
She has no more sense of self-denial in looking after the child than
in looking after herself; and for that very reason she does not look
for gratitude. The child’s need of her is sufficient response so long
as it is helpless. Later, when it begins to grow up, her affection
diminishes and her demands may increase. In animals, parental affection
ceases when the child is adult, and no demands are made upon it; but
in human beings, even if they are very primitive, this is not the
case. A son who is a lusty warrior is expected to feed and protect his
parents when they are old and decrepit; the story of Æneas and Anchises
embodies this feeling at a higher level of culture. With the growth
of foresight, there is an increasing tendency to exploit children’s
affections for the sake of their help when old age comes. Hence the
principle of filial piety, which has existed throughout the world and
is embodied in the Fifth Commandment. With the development of private
property and ordered government, filial piety becomes less important;
after some centuries, people become aware of this fact, and the
sentiment goes out of fashion. In the modern world, a man of fifty may
be financially dependent upon a parent of eighty, so that the important
thing is still the affection of the parent for the child rather than
of the child for the parent. This, of course, applies chiefly to
the propertied classes; among wage-earners, the older relationship
persists. But even there it is being gradually displaced as a result
of old-age pensions and similar measures. Affection of children for
parents, therefore, is ceasing to deserve a place among cardinal
virtues, while affection of parents for children remains of enormous
importance.
There is another set of dangers, which has been brought to the fore by
the psycho-analysts, though I think their interpretation of the facts
may be questioned. The dangers I am thinking of are those connected
with undue devotion to one or other parent. An adult, and even an
adolescent, ought not to be so overshadowed by either father or mother
as to be unable to think or feel independently. This may easily happen
if the personality of the parent is stronger than that of the child. I
do not believe that there is, except in rare morbid cases, an “Œdipus
Complex”, in the sense of a special attraction of sons to mothers and
daughters to fathers. The excessive influence of the parent, where
it exists, will belong to the parent who has had most to do with the
child--generally the mother--without regard to difference of sex. Of
course, it may happen that a daughter who dislikes her mother and sees
little of her father will idealize the latter; but in that case the
influence is exerted by dreams, not by the actual father. Idealization
consists of hanging hopes to a peg: the peg is merely convenient,
and has nothing to do with the nature of the hopes. Undue parental
influence is quite a different thing from this, since it is connected
with the actual person, not with an imaginary portrait.
An adult with whom a child is in constant contact may easily become so
dominant in the child’s life as to make the child, even in later life,
a mental slave. The slavery may be intellectual, or emotional, or both.
A good example of the former is John Stuart Mill, who could never bring
himself, in the last resort, to admit that his father might have been
mistaken. To some degree, intellectual slavery to early environment is
normal; very few adults are capable of opinions other than those taught
by parents or teachers, except where there is some general drift that
carries them along. The children of Mohammedans are Mohammedans, the
children of Buddhists are Buddhists, and so on. It may be maintained
that intellectual slavery is natural and normal; I am inclined to
admit that it can only be avoided by an education _ad hoc_. This form
of excessive parental and scholastic influence ought to be avoided
carefully, since, in a rapidly changing world, it is exceedingly
dangerous to retain the opinions of a by-gone generation. But for the
present I shall consider only slavery of the emotions and the will,
since that is more directly bound up with our present topic.
The evils considered by psycho-analysts under the heading “Œdipus
Complex” (which I regard as misleading) arise from an undue desire on
the part of parents for an emotional response from their children.
As I said a moment ago, I believe that the parental instinct in its
purity does not desire an emotional response; it is satisfied by the
dependence of the young, and the fact that they look to parents for
protection and food. When the dependence ceases, parental affection
also ceases. This is the state of affairs among animals, and for their
purposes it is entirely satisfactory. But such simplicity of instinct
is scarcely possible for human beings. I have already considered
the effect of military and economic considerations, as shown in
the preaching of filial piety. I am now concerned with two purely
psychological sources of confusion in the working of the parental
instinct.
The first of these is of a sort which occurs wherever intelligence
observes the pleasures to be derived from instinct. Broadly speaking,
instinct prompts pleasant acts which have useful consequences, but the
consequences may not be pleasant. Eating is pleasant, but digestion
is not--especially when it is indigestion. Sex is pleasant, but
parturition is not. The dependence of an infant is pleasant, but the
independence of a vigorous grown-up son is not. The primitive maternal
type of woman derives most pleasure from the infant at the breast, and
gradually less pleasure as the child grows less helpless. There is
therefore a tendency, for the sake of pleasure, to prolong the period
of helplessness, and to put off the time when the child can dispense
with parental guidance. This is recognized in conventional phrases,
such as being “tied to his mother’s apron-strings”. It was thought
impossible to deal with this evil in boys except by sending them away
to school. In girls it was not recognized as an evil, because (if they
were well-to-do) it was thought desirable to make them helpless and
dependent, and it was hoped that after marriage they would cling to
their husbands as they had formerly clung to their mothers. This seldom
happened, and its failure gave rise to the “mother-in-law” joke. One
of the purposes of a joke is to prevent thought--a purpose in which
this particular joke was highly successful. No one seemed to realize
that a girl brought up to be dependent would naturally be dependent
upon her mother, and therefore could not enter into that whole-hearted
partnership with a man which is the essence of a happy marriage.
The second psychological complication comes nearer to the orthodox
Freudian point of view. It arises where elements appropriate to
sex-love enter into parental affection. I do not mean anything
necessarily dependent upon difference of sex; I mean merely the
desire for a certain kind of emotional response. Part of the
psychology of sex--that part, in fact, which has made monogamy a
possible institution--is the desire to come first for some one, to
feel that oneself is more important than any other human being to
the happiness of at least one person in the world. When this desire
has produced marriage, it will only produce happiness if a number
of other conditions are realized. For one reason or another, a very
large proportion of married women in civilized countries fail to have
a satisfying sex-life. When this happens to a woman, she is apt to
seek from her children an illegitimate and spurious gratification of
desires which only men can gratify adequately and naturally. I do not
mean anything obvious: I mean merely a certain emotional tension, a
certain passionateness of feeling, a pleasure in kissing and fondling
to excess. These things used to be thought quite right and proper in
an affectionate mother. Indeed, the difference between what is right
and what is harmful is very subtle. It is absurd to maintain, as some
Freudians do, that parents ought not to kiss and fondle their children
at all. Children have a right to warm affection from their parents; it
gives them a happy, care-free outlook upon the world, and is essential
to healthy psychological development. But it should be something that
they take for granted, like the air they breathe, not something to
which they are expected to respond. It is this question of response
that is the essence of the matter. There will be a certain spontaneous
response, which is all to the good; but it will be quite different
from the active pursuit of friendship from childish companions.
Psychologically, parents should be a background, and the child should
not be made to act with a view to giving his parents pleasure. Their
pleasure should consist in his growth and progress; anything that he
gives them in the way of response should be accepted gratefully as a
pure extra, like fine weather in spring, but should not be expected as
part of the order of nature.
It is very difficult for a woman to be a perfect mother, or a perfect
teacher of young children, unless she is sexually satisfied. Whatever
psycho-analysts may say, the parental instinct is essentially different
from the sex instinct, and is damaged by the intrusion of emotions
appropriate to sex. The habit of employing celibate female teachers
is quite wrong psychologically. The right woman to deal with children
is a woman whose instinct is not seeking from them satisfactions for
herself which they ought not to be expected to provide. A woman who
is happily married will belong to this type without effort; but any
other woman will need an almost impossible subtlety of self-control. Of
course, the same thing applies to men in the same circumstances, but
the circumstances are far less frequent with men, both because their
parental instincts are usually not very strong, and because they are
seldom sexually starved.
It is as well to be clear in our own thoughts as regards the attitude
we are to expect from children to parents. If parents have the right
kind of love for their children, the children’s response will be just
what the parents desire. The children will be pleased when their
parents come, and sorry when they go, unless they are absorbed in
some agreeable pursuit; they will look to their parents for help in
any trouble, physical or mental, that may arise; they will dare to be
adventurous, because they rely upon their parents’ protection in the
background--but this feeling will be hardly conscious except in moments
of peril. They will expect their parents to answer their questions,
resolve their perplexities, and help them in difficult tasks. Most of
what their parents do for them will not enter into their consciousness.
They will like their parents, not for providing their board and
lodging, but for playing with them, showing them how to do new things,
and telling them stories about the world. They will gradually realize
that their parents love them, but this ought to be accepted as a
natural fact. The affection that they feel for their parents will be
quite a different kind from that which they feel for other children.
The parent must act with reference to the child, but the child must act
with reference to himself and the outer world. That is the essential
difference. The child has no important function to perform in relation
to his parents. His function is to grow in wisdom and stature, and so
long as he does so a healthy parental instinct is satisfied.
I should be very sorry to convey the impression that I want to diminish
the amount of affection in family life, or the spontaneity of its
manifestations. That is not at all what I mean. What I do mean is that
there are different kinds of affection. The affection of husband and
wife is one thing, that of parents for children is another, and that
of children for parents is yet another. The harm comes when these
different kinds of natural affection are confused. I do not think the
Freudians have arrived at the truth, because they do not recognize
these instinctive differences. And this makes them, in a sense, ascetic
as regards parents and children, because they view any love between
them as a sort of inadequate sex-love. I do not believe in the need of
any fundamental self-denial, provided there are no special unfortunate
circumstances. A man and woman who love each other and their children
ought to be able to act spontaneously as the heart dictates. They will
need much thought and knowledge, but these they will acquire out of
parental affection. They must not demand from their children what they
get from each other, but if they are happy in each other they will feel
no impulse to do so. If the children are properly cared for, they will
feel for their parents a natural affection which will be no barrier to
independence. What is needed is not ascetic self-denial, but freedom
and expansiveness of instinct, adequately informed by intelligence and
knowledge.
When my boy was two years and four months old, I went to America, and
was absent three months. He was perfectly happy in my absence, but was
wild with joy when I returned. I found him waiting impatiently by the
garden gate; he seized my hand, and began showing me everything that
specially interested him. I wanted to hear, and he wanted to tell; I
had no wish to tell, and he had none to hear. The two impulses were
different, but harmonious. When it comes to stories, he wishes to hear
and I wish to tell, so that again there is harmony. Only once has this
situation been reversed. When he was three years and six months old,
I had a birthday, and his mother told him that everything was to be
done to please me. Stories are his supreme delight; to our surprise,
when the time for them came, he announced that he was going to tell
me stories, as it was my birthday. He told about a dozen, then jumped
down, saying “no more stories to-day”. That was three months ago, but
he has never told stories again.
I come now to the wider question of affection and sympathy in general.
As between parents and children, there are complications owing to the
possibility of abuse of power by parents; it was necessary to deal with
these complications before attacking the general question.
There is no possible method of _compelling_ a child to feel sympathy or
affection; the only possible method is to observe the conditions under
which these feelings arise spontaneously, and then endeavour to produce
the conditions. Sympathy, undoubtedly, is partly instinctive. Children
are worried when their brothers or sisters cry, and often cry too. They
will take their part vehemently against the grown-ups when disagreeable
things are being done to them. When my boy had a wound on his elbow
which had to be dressed, his sister (aged eighteen months) could hear
him crying in another room, and was very much upset. She kept on
repeating “Jonny crying, Jonny crying”, until the painful business was
finished. When my boy saw his mother extracting a thorn with a needle
from her foot, he said anxiously, “It doesn’t hurt, Mummy”. She said
it did, wishing to give him a lesson in not making a fuss. He insisted
that it didn’t hurt, whereupon she insisted that it did. He then burst
into sobs, just as vehement as if it had been his own foot. Such
occurrences must spring from instinctive physical sympathy. This is the
basis upon which more elaborate forms of sympathy must be built. It is
clear that nothing further is needed in the way of positive education
except to bring home to the child the fact that people and animals
can feel pain, and do feel it under certain circumstances. There is,
however, a further negative condition: the child must not see people he
respects committing unkind or cruel actions. If the father shoots or
the mother speaks rudely to the maids, the child will catch these vices.
It is a difficult question how and when to make a child aware of the
evil in the world. It is impossible to grow up ignorant of wars and
massacres and poverty and preventable disease which is not prevented.
At some stage, the child must know of these things, and must combine
the knowledge with a firm conviction that it is a dreadful thing to
inflict, or even permit, any suffering which can be avoided. We are
here confronted by a problem similar to that which faces people who
wish to preserve female chastity; these people formerly believed in
ignorance till marriage, but now adopt more positive methods.
I have known some pacifists who wished history taught without reference
to wars, and thought that children should be kept as long as possible
ignorant of the cruelty in the world. But I cannot praise the “fugitive
and cloistered virtue” that depends upon absence of knowledge. As soon
as history is taught at all, it should be taught truthfully. If true
history contradicts any moral we wish to teach, our moral must be
wrong, and we had better abandon it. I quite admit that many people,
including some of the most virtuous, find facts inconvenient, but that
is due to a certain feebleness in their virtue. A truly robust morality
can only be strengthened by the fullest knowledge of what really
happens in the world. We must not run the risk that the young people
whom we have educated in ignorance will turn to wickedness with delight
as soon as they discover that there is such a thing. Unless we can give
them an aversion from cruelty, they will not abstain from it; and they
cannot have an aversion from it if they do not know that it exists.
Nevertheless, the right way of giving children a knowledge of evil is
not easily found. Of course, those who live in the slums of big cities
get to know early all about drunkenness, quarrels, wife-beating, and
so on. Perhaps this does them no harm, if it is counteracted by other
influences; but no careful parent would deliberately expose a very
young child to such sights. I think the great objection is that they
rouse fear so vividly as to colour the whole of the rest of life. A
child, being defenceless, cannot help feeling terror when it first
understands that cruelty to children is possible. I was about fourteen
when I first read “Oliver Twist”, but it filled me with emotions of
horror which I could scarcely have borne at an earlier age. Dreadful
things should not be known to young people until they are old enough
to face them with a certain poise. This moment will come sooner with
some children than with others: those who are imaginative or timid must
be sheltered longer than those who are stolid or endowed with natural
courage. A mental habit of fearlessness due to expectation of kindness
should be firmly established before the child is made to face the
existence of unkindness. To choose the moment and the manner requires
tact and understanding; it is not a matter which can be decided by a
rule.
There are, however, certain maxims which should be followed. To
begin with, stories such as Bluebeard and Jack the Giant Killer do
not involve any knowledge of cruelty whatever, and do not raise the
problems we are considering. To the child, they are purely fantastic,
and he never connects them with the real world in any way. No doubt the
pleasure he derives from them is connected with savage instincts, but
these are harmless as mere play-impulses in a powerless child, and they
tend to die down as the child grows older. But when the child is first
introduced to cruelty as a thing in the real world, care must be taken
to choose incidents in which he will identify himself with the victim,
not with the torturer. Something savage in him will exult in a story
in which he identifies himself with the tyrant; a story of this kind
tends to produce an imperialist. But the story of Abraham preparing
to sacrifice Isaac, or of the she-bears killing the children whom
Elisha cursed, naturally rouses the child’s sympathy for another child.
If such stories are told, they should be told as showing the depths
of cruelty to which men could descend long ago. I once, as a child,
heard a sermon of an hour’s duration, entirely devoted to proving that
Elisha was right in cursing the children. Fortunately, I was old
enough to think the parson a fool; otherwise I should have been driven
nearly mad with terror. The story of Abraham and Isaac was even more
dreadful, because it was the child’s father who was cruel to him. When
such stories are told with the assumption that Abraham and Elisha were
virtuous, they must either be ignored or utterly debase a child’s moral
standards. But when told as an introduction to human wickedness, they
serve a purpose, because they are vivid, remote, and untrue. The story
of Hubert putting out little Arthur’s eyes, in “King John”, may be used
in the same way.
Then history may be taught, with all its wars. But in telling about
wars, sympathy at first should be with the defeated. I should begin
with battles in which it is natural to feel on the side of the beaten
party--for instance, the battle of Hastings in teaching an English boy.
I should emphasize always the wounds and suffering produced. I should
gradually lead the child to feel no partisanship in reading about wars,
and to regard both sides as silly men who had lost their tempers, and
ought to have had nurses to put them to bed till they were good. I
should assimilate wars to quarrels among the children in the nursery.
In this way, I believe children could be made to see the truth about
war, and to realize that it is silly.
If any actual instance of unkindness or cruelty comes under the child’s
notice, it should be fully discussed, with all the moral values which
the adult himself attaches to the incident, and always with the
suggestion that the people who acted cruelly were foolish, and did not
know any better because they had not been well brought up. But I should
not call the child’s attention to such things in his real world, if
they were not spontaneously observed by him, until after he had grown
familiar with them in history and stories. Then I should gradually
introduce him to a knowledge of evil in his surroundings. But I should
always give him the feeling that the evil can be combated, and results
from ignorance and lack of self-control and bad education. I should not
encourage him to be indignant with malefactors, but rather to regard
them as bunglers, who do not know in what happiness consists.
The cultivation of wide sympathies, given the instinctive germ, is
mainly an intellectual matter: it depends upon the right direction
of attention, and the realization of facts which militarists and
authoritarians suppress. Take, for example, Tolstoy’s description of
Napoleon going round the battlefield of Austerlitz after the victory.
Most histories leave the battlefield as soon as the battle is over;
by the simple expedient of lingering on it for another twelve hours,
a completely different picture of war is produced. This is done, not
by suppressing facts, but by giving more facts. And what applies to
battles applies equally to other forms of cruelty. In all cases, it
should be quite unnecessary to point the moral; the right telling of
the story should be sufficient. Do not moralize, but let the facts
produce their own moral in the child’s mind.
It remains to say a few words about affection, which differs from
sympathy in being inevitably and essentially selective. I have spoken
already of affection between parents and children; it is affection
between equals that I now wish to consider.
Affection cannot be created; it can only be liberated. There is a kind
of affection which is partly rooted in fear; affection for parents has
this element, since parents afford protection. In childhood affections
of this sort are natural, but in later life they are undesirable, and
even in childhood affection for other children is not of this sort.
My little girl is intensely devoted to her brother, although he is
the only person in her world who ever treats her unkindly. Affection
as to an equal, which is the best kind, is much more likely to exist
where there is happiness and absence of fear. Fears, conscious or
unconscious, are very apt to produce hatred, because other people
are regarded as capable of inflicting injuries. With most people,
as things are, envy is a barrier to wide-spread affection. I do not
think envy can be prevented except by happiness; moral discipline is
powerless to touch its subconscious forms. Happiness, in turn, is
largely prevented by fear. Young people who have a chance of happiness
are deterred by parents and “friends”, nominally on moral grounds,
but really from envy. If the young people have enough fearlessness,
they will ignore the croakers; otherwise, they will allow themselves
to be made miserable, and join the company of envious moralists. The
education of character that we have been considering is designed to
produce happiness and courage; I think, therefore, that it does what is
possible to liberate the springs of affection. More than this cannot
be done. If you tell children that they ought to be affectionate, you
run the risk of producing cant and humbug. But if you make them happy
and free, if you surround them with kindness, you will find that they
become spontaneously friendly with everybody, and that almost everybody
responds by being friendly with them. A trustful affectionate
disposition justifies itself, because it gives irresistible charm,
and creates the response which it expects. This is one of the most
important results to be expected from the right education of character.