On the matter of children and oath taking

I’ve been thinking of children because of the blogposts I’ve been reading and essays and conversations I’ve been reflecting over, and the furrows on my head have grown deeper, and for different reasons. 

This post sort of takes off from the “Lemmings…” post for which Suvro da posted a link and in connection to the particular matter of oath taking and Girl Guides.

The leader of the Girl Guides in an effort to be “relevant” took the old oath about “being true to God, Queen, and country” and changed it to “being true to myself, and my beliefs”. What made me laugh one early morning was that I started thinking about children – the real children that I’ve known (including myself), heard about, read about, and thought about. Children, I think, normally know better than to trust their batty beliefs and they don’t entertain too many fancy notions about their changing “self”. I’m not sentimental about children, and I know 5 or 6 year-olds or even younger children and certainly older ones can be viciously cruel or hurtful or malicious or spiteful or just plain dumb or just vain or silly - both from personal experience and having known myself. But children can also be imaginative and curious and are more engaged in living and investigating and experimenting and can, I know play for hours with a little string or a thread or in a sandpit or with a colourful piece of paper or make a tent with a bed-sheet apart from engaging in reading and writing or thinking provided that there are a few of the external factors in place and no immediately repressive inhibitors and some active encouragement (from teachers in school and/or parents). They can also be stubborn and also very unreasonable but also sharp. And comic strip writers especially and children’s writers and writers writing upon children have pointed out that children can also be intelligent. Calvin knows better – that’s why he speaks with and listens to Hobbes. Dennis (whom I sadly ignored rather often) may not explicitly have a friend he speaks to, but he speaks of a “conscience” with cookie eating. Zooey in ‘Franny and Zooey’ speaks to Jesus. The Little Prince has his Rose. The very real little child in ‘The Selfish Giant’ makes the ogre-ish giant come alive with his love, and the child is no other than the little boy Jesus, and he’s there when the Giant passes away. The girl in a story called “A little bit of Sorcery” has an omnipresent friend when she finds herself most disillusioned and depressed whom she could then call upon. So many children talk to some other part of their Self – a deeper Self, and so do grown-ups….I have talked about this earlier in old posts. 

So to take that original oath of “being true to God, Queen, and country”: I think young children if left to their own devices within the framework of a given culture may prefer talking and arguing and seeing the world with God, Jesus, maybe Lucifer, story book characters or conjure up somebody else with whom they can exchange stuff while the world and the adults around them comes across as confusing and disturbing or just muddled or disgusting or plain hypocritical. In fact, after some more thought on the matter, I say it’s better to talk with the Queen. At least a child’s version of what the Queen implies and what the Queen might or might not say gives the child company to sort out what she sees in the outside world. The whole deal of the oath is that the child knows that there is somebody else within to keep one company…even country makes sense. Being true to one’s country is a deep oath and there is nothing frivolous or inane about it even if one cannot talk with one’s country so to speak in the same way as one would talk with the Queen…. The writer of the "Lemmings..." article was not overrun with sentiment to believe that the original oath of “being true to God, Queen, and country” would make brilliant little thoughtful girls who would go on to do incredible things with their lives. Even with the oath the writer knows that maybe, just maybe one or two or three of the little Girl Guides may be shaken out from their states of sleepy self-satisfaction.

So to go back to the “true to myself and my beliefs” bit. It brought to my mind a story I’d read in my first Enid Blyton (Ruby story book), from which I remember two tales and one was titled, “Because my mother does….”. It had made a very strong impression on me. I won’t go through the whole story but to provide a synopsis from what I remember: thunder and lightning and a storm breaks out while the primary school kids are in the middle of a class, and a couple of very young kids hide under their table and one kid shakes with fright and a couple run to the window to admire the storm, and the teacher asks the two frightened kids why they are hiding under the table. The children shaking with terror say, “because my mother does.” Why did the two kids run to the window? "Because our mother does." And the teacher starts asking the other kids in class about why they do some of the things they do, and don’t do some of the things they don’t and it turns out that all the kids do what they do, “because my mother does…”. A little extreme, maybe, but Blyton transmits her point with a sharp nudge – with the teacher talking with the children, and getting the children to enjoy storms and hold little frogs and some such other stuff, and takes them to the farm to see some cows – and she points out that children tend to do what their mothers do but that there is nothing automatically good or reasonable or noble about doing everything or not doing everything their mothers do. The children are also rather quick on the uptake, and they realize that they are somewhat silly for being scared of so many different things simply because their mothers are. Of course these days such a story would probably be banned on the grounds of being sexist but let me not get into all that. 

To go back to the oath then with the ‘be true to myself, and my beliefs’ . With no God or Queen or country in the proceedings – who are little Girl Guides going to be true to? They might not want to trust their batty beliefs in entirety but the little girls can now be true to their mothers and their mother’s beliefs, and be little clones of their mothers. Or else they can have the whole of society in their minds  – and be true to that society with all its concomitant sicknesses, and do exactly and only what society tells them is alright or any dogmatic tradition of beliefs that manages to wheedle itself into minds which have forgotten or which have never known what is good and beautiful or have only faintly wondered about meaning and purpose in life, and why these elements matter. The same idea, if one thinks about it raises its ugly and evil head in ‘Harry Potter  and The chamber of Secrets’. Ginny, the lonely child who has nobody else starts writing in a diary which starts writing back, and Riddle is able to control her for his own demented purposes, and yet Ginny being essentially good is able to fight back. There are other examples that I can think of – but this is sufficient, for now....

This is not a matter limited to little girls. 
And people in their teens, mid twenties and older and older still – the grand middle class in the world is converging towards some unspeakable and mindless and horrifying mean; conforming to the standards that have been laid down by the consumerist culture and the accompanying bombarding ubiquitous messages – buy, splurge, booze, eat, shop, preen in public, go with what titillates the senses but nothing more, and make sure you have the cash to throw out. And that’s what we have…an increasingly mindless planet in which the masses cannot distinguish at all amongst what is shallow and filthy and crude and disgusting or mind-numbing and what lies in the middle and what is the true and the good and the beautiful. It makes me go back to my original rant that little children need to be taught what is good and beautiful and what is ugly, among other things...And what can I say about the great majority of sociologists who ignore the matter of "values" altogether or imagine that values are too "fuzzy" to talk about as sociologists or don't want to investigate why it is that we are becoming so mindless that "50 shades" becomes a best-seller and the "gangnam style" video gets million hits and is applauded by VIPs around the world...maybe for more than most it is a matter of "living in glass houses" when they aren't in their academic towers or maybe we are happy taking pot-shots at the "culture industry" and the media, and maybe many haven't ever articulated what values they themselves live by. While being prodded into being reminded of "A Brave New World", I was reminded of Orwell’s "1984", and there is a very interesting comparison between the two books on Wikipedia ("Anthem" is a book I'd place in the same category but as a mirror image). 

What I do wonder about is why people who when young and have the opportunity to learn a little from someone who is better don't try harder. 

I know how easy it is to feel unnervingly lonely or be swept away or to feel horrified and this in spite the fact that I've always been, as far as I can remember, a thinking & feeling being more than anything else, I think, and I know I've been deucedly lucky and blessed in a couple of ways, which makes me wonder all the more at times. 

 So I still hope because...And I stick to the hope because of the because... More, later.