Safe and Insane

by PHILIP WYLIE

I

THE past fifty years of what we call civilization have utterly ruined childhood. The automobile, by restricting children to the yard or the block, by conditioning their very impulse to chase a ball, and by hooting at them like a beast whenever they appear on the margins of its sacred raceways, has taken away their last rights. The city itself is, of course, no place for children. Today the millionaire’s son is as much immured as the child in Victorian slums; perhaps the chauffeur drives him to and from school, but he is walled in by the hooting iron and is altogether cut off from Nature.

The needs of children are perfectly described by those recent psychological discoveries which show that the development of each person follows the evolution of the entire species. The infant is the instinctual animal; the tot, a savage with the savage’s fears, curiosities, unwitting cruelties, and naïveté; the grade pupil is the advancing barbarian, full of lawless enterprises, excitements, rituals, outdoor achievement, and tribal activity; the adolescent is the medieval mystic; after him comes the adult — if all the other stages have been thoroughly experienced and assimilated. But in the modern city, suburb, town, and even to a great extent in the village, the child has been deprived of any normal opportunity to engage in these cultural phases.

There is no adequate way for children to wage war against this fierce and universal imprisonment. Their parents try increasingly to barricade them from perils, to fence up their schoolyards, and to hire more supervisors for them, more life guards, more cops at corners, more counselors at camp. Their own so-called adult properties and interests constantly militate against childhood necessities. Their very working hours and pastimes make children a handicap rather than an interest. Indeed, the American child is impounded as soon as it can crawl in what is wretchedly called a play pen — a convenience to every mother which keeps the tot from chewing through electric wires and the like, but which frustrates its every vital instinct.

The expression of natural instincts in towns and cities, limited to the unnatural material at hand, is necessarily of an “illegal” nature. In open country — woods, fields, farms, lakesides — the world is every child’s oyster. In towns and cities, everything is “owned” save that which lies in the gutter. This presents the child with total dilemma, total frustration. His environment ought to belong to him and he ought to be a free agent in it. But if he even takes the bark off a tree to make a miniature boat to float in a pool, the urban child destroys somebody’s birch, his dad has to pay, and the old lady who owns the goldfish pond has him chased by policemen.

The rebellion of city children naturally takes the form of property destruction, for property has become their enemy instead of their friend. They steal from stores; they steal cars; they smash windows; they set fires; they interfere with traffic; they damage trees and public benches; they paint brick walls and iron deer. Most of these are enterprises in which I, myself, have engaged. Generally, I was not caught; when I was caught, my family could pay. But the children of families who cannot pay, when caught in such activities and others analogous, are known as juvenile delinquents, taken before judges, sent to reform schools, and cemented into criminal habits.

Such rebellion, however, is merely a negative act which expresses resentment over the fact that the child has been deprived of all suitable opportunity to practice his impulses. The child of modern civilization takes his real revenge — or makes his compensation — when he has shaken off the trap of youth and has become, legally at any rate, an adult. The great majority of Americans alive today are preoccupied with such acts of revenge and compensation. They are performed in three principal categories, besides outright criminality.

The overweening passion of grown Americans for games, play, pleasures, and vicarious sports via stadiums, ball parks, radio, movies, and newspapers is the first great evidence of misspent — or, rather, unspent — childhoods. The second is the aggressive, hostile, irresponsible exploitation seen so commonly in businessmen — the littlest along with the greatest. Disguised as “go-getters,” “individualists,” “builders,” and “progressives,” they usurp as much power as they can, with total disregard for human welfare — as a revenge for and a protection against the damage society did them in childhood. They feel that by becoming owners they can make up for having lived for many years amidst universal deprivation. The third category results from a complete ruin of the adult by the distortions of childhood environment, and in it are some 20 per cent of the population: the hopeless neurotics and the insane. These people are popularly supposed to be unable to face the grown-up world; actually, they are unable to face the terrible destitutions of their childhood.

Children have been sacrificed to “civilization” as much as if they had been poured by millions into the belly of a red-hot idol. The cost, as any good psychologist would expect, is to be found in the national pall of adult infantilism and regression. Most adults remain children all their lives, often even those who are known as statesmen, senators, generals, admirals, and industrial tycoons.

The life of a child ought, to be a process of adventure, experience, and exploit, graduated upward to suit his rising consciousness — which, as I have said, follows the unfolding pattern of all instinct. In this process, if he is to become truly adult and thus mentally and emotionally secure, he must make contact with the evolutionary experiences of his forebears, for only thus can his emotions mature and only thus can he get a biological sense of those fundamentals of human life and society which sustain civilization even at its most citified summits. But instead of aiding and abetting this procedure, we have done everything we can think of to shield and protect our children from the facts of life.

2

ALL my adult life I have been appalled at the absence of basic experience in my associates. They think they know what they are doing, but they live in a world of dreams; and the very fact of their ignorances inevitably fills them with enormous hostilities and with immense insecurities.

I have met countless people who are active in various health, hospital, welfare, and hygiene societies, but who have never seen a chicken killed or a kitten born. They cross the Atlantic, but they cannot swim. They have slept in hotels in Cairo and Bombay but never in the woods. They drive to the top of Bikes Peak, but they have never shinnied a tree or climbed a cliff. They install automatic heating plants in their homes and air-conditioning in their offices, but they could not be trusted to burn trash in a back yard. They make ice in their kitchens, but they have never skated or skied or snowshoed. They eat all their lives, and wear carnations and orchids, but they have never planted a seed or raised a crop.

Now, these people, for all their wonderful accomplishments, such as the atom bomb, are not really conscious, because they have had no true primary experiences in life. They do not know what it is like to feel alive or to be alive. All of them are terribly frightened of their civilization. Their fears run from an entirely rational anxiety about crossing their own streets to the equally rational panic over the possibility that they may get into another war. Such fears, of course, make them aggressive — which greatly increases the chances of wars. They vacillate between worry and escapist work and play. They are, that is, supremely childish.

Communism and fascism, from this point of view, merely represent attempts to manage the increasingly infantile behavior of all people in our increasingly industrial societies. They are systems of treating adults as permanent children — of making the state into a universal father and mother; systems of ruling populations by absolute authority (by cajolery on the one hand and physical punishment on the other) not only over the activities of every individual but over his mind and his emotions as well. And the more childish we Americans become in compensation for our destruction of American childhood, the more vulnerable we become to some form of state absolutism.

Most of this change took place in my own lifetime, and today most parents are themselves the products of the sort of background I have described. The fears they feel concerning the world they do know are projected ignorantly, hence doubly, upon that normal, real, and natural childhood environment of which they lack the knowledge. Thus they keep eliminating, forbidding, and discouraging the very sorts of activity which are essential for youngsters. This is done in the name of safety and sanity. Its purpose is to protect the young from danger and from shock — such shock, that is, as would upset these very unstable and subnormal adults. Actually, of course, the adult world is more terribly dangerous than it ever was in history. Actually, ignorance itself is dangerous, and the only hope of security lies always in understanding. And actually, of course, it is dangerous every minute to be alive anywhere at any time.

A normal childhood is normally dangerous. It is only through an experience of dangers, graduated to his age, that any child can grow up emotionally. Excessive protection is, for him, famine. A real adult will have real self-reliance and true independence, and will be deeply trustworthy, only if he has successfully passed through a great many experiences in which his own mistake could have caused his serious injury or even his death. A human being who has never had such experiences is likely, for instance, to be unqualified even to drive an automobile, since it represents the constant equation of “error equals injury and death.” However, for the sake of adult convenience, of adult “freedom from worry” — and because of the projection of adult neurosis on childhood — safety and protection have been legislated into childhood to a degree that is murderous of adult personality. Not only are the unnatural restrictions of the city and town placed upon the youngster, but to them are added all the sickly prejudices, squeamishnesses, and ignorant dreads of the average urban parent.

Our “safe and sane” Fourth of July is an example. It is true that fireworks used to maim and kill children. Not many — as child-killing goes in this nation — but a few. There are, however, no statistics to show how many children who would have been maimed and killed because of their ignorance, poor instruction, untrained recklessness, and general incompetence in using fireworks were saved by the ban. Quite likely, the majority of all such still do get maimed and killed from other causes: falling off the backs of hopped trucks, setting fire to themselves, drowning, and other little dooms that are reserved for the ignorant, stupid, overreckless, and incompetent among youngsters as amongst us all.

The institution of the “quiet Fourth” destroyed the greatest and most emotionally potent national fiesta America ever had. Its ceremony was handed down through generations. My father saluted sunrise on Independence Day with a brass cannon charged and fired by himself. He worked and saved to set rockets spattering the high dark of every July Fourth night. Bands, parades, and oratory were part of the celebration and they tied his emotions, by music, sights, and words, to the stirring deeds of his Revolutionary forebears. But the seal on that relationship was made by Father’s own loud, glamorous, explosive participation in the proudest and most important memory we Americans possess.

I was taught, at a very early age, to shoot off fireworks. Little fireworks at first, big ones in later years, and rockets and Roman candles when I was ten. The Fourth of July was the day of my greatest boyhood independence. I was allowed by public sanction to help wake up the whole town at the crack of dawn. I was permitted all day to make as much noise as I pleased. At night, it was my privilege to play gorgeously with fire. Instinct, tribal custom, fundamental human culture, here bound me gloriously to a supreme tradition of the fight of a bold people for liberty. In the whole adventure of being a boy there is no event so altogether satisfactory as a proper Fourth of July; the ritual is primitive and valuable beyond price.

When I was twelve, we moved to another State and the Fourth of July became a Boy Scout parade in hot uniforms, a lot of speeches, formal wreathlaying — in, of all places for such a day, the cemetery!— a long walk home, a late dinner, and fireworks distantly viewed that evening in a park.

In my thirteenth year, I accidentally discovered at a public library in this benighted State a book which told how to make black powder. I was not permitted by the librarian to take out this book on my card; so, naturally, I took it out under my coat — for good. In three different drugstores I purchased sulphur “for the roses,” potassium nitrate “for the plants,” and powdered charcoal “for dad’s indigestion.” These, when mixed according to directions, gave off a fine Hash. I then made a cannon by boring an oak block in the manual training shop, loaded it with my powder, packed it with toilet paper and blue stone from the driveway, and touched it off by lighting a newspaper.

The first explosion was slow but fiery. After further reading, however, I caught on to such ingredients as potassium chlorate — then in use as a gargle — tannic acid, and other substances. And my extreme delight can be imagined when, one day, the charge in my gun gave a mighty bang and the chipped stones smashed several cellar windows in the house next door. Father paid for the windows.

Chapters from the story of my childhood usually cause my present friends and acquaintances to gasp with anxiety or even to snort with unbelief. Of what they consider perils and hardships, onerous duties and inordinate responsibilities, I had a far greater share than most of my friends. My busy parents let me go my way — even urged me to take chances when I was reluctant; but they saw to it, first, that I had the knowledge and the disciplines necessary for the undertakings. That is the point. I lived a great deal in the out-of-doors when I was young — and that is where all mankind lived for a million years and until the few last unsatisfactory thousands of years.

I should like to point out to every protective mother and father that, while I got hurt many times — cut, skinned, bruised, sprained, and so on— through independent acts, the most careful supervision failed to spare me from harm. My worst burn was sustained when, a baby in my mother’s arms, I reached out as she stirred jam stewing on a wood stove and pressed my hand into its white-hot surface. My worst hurt occurred when I was about four and my grandmother was bathing me, standing, in a washbowl; somehow she let me fall. And the closest I ever came to death — during any protracted period — resulted from a bellyache for which my parents innocently called an old-fashioned osteopath. On three successive days he treated, by kneading, what had been from the start a ruptured appendix. I sustained my only severe fracture during a school gym period.

3

A GREAT deal of attention has been paid by psychologists to the early sex training of children. Freud’s discoveries have shown how crazily we behave in this dominant aspect of life. But it is only part of the background of childhood, one facet in the direct contact with Nature which the child requires. Sex difficulties, of a certainty, are the commonest expression of our modern human incompetence. But beneath them lies the fact that the form and purpose of the last few millenniums of man’s development have been increasingly hostile to every opportunity for natural childhood.

Modern educators have followed the lead of modern psychologists and have attempted to set up systems which would give room for the development of the child’s ego in relation to its playmates and to mother-child-father situations. In some schools, all formal discipline has been abandoned to “liberate” young personalities. This is futile. The one discipline which the child is emotionally equipped to learn, and indeed must know to live successfully as an adult, is the natural discipline of cause and effect — the perfect honesty of Nature and the absolute inviolability of its laws. For in natural law is the basis of all human morality; but because it can be assimilated only through experience, we regularly observe —with absurd regret —that there seems to be no other way by which each generation can learn anything. The regret is absurd simply because it arises from our fallacious notion that somehow civilization could or should reach the child vicariously, without risk to it or worry or bother to its parents.

The fact is that nearly all the properties, buildings, streets, machines, gadgets, higher courses of learning, governments, armies, navies, weapons, monetary systems, and other “advanced” aspects of civilization are superficial to life. Indeed, people who lack them all seem to be both wiser and more contented than the average American. To a child, these things are totally superficial — wretched excrescences that filch his necessary environs and replace them with deadly walls. To think, as parents do, that children can be morally educated and emotionally prepared for maturity in such a setting, and by means which substitute, at best, supervised samplings of natural life for the child-long experience of it, is like thinking that a man could be prepared to live on Mars by occasional squints at the stars.

Essays such as this are, by “civilized” custom, supposed to conclude with neat plans to solve any difficulties or problems which they present. Obviously, the cardinal idea here implied is that the entire way of life of Western man is wrong and has been wrong since before Greece and Rome. The reader, granting my premises, will hardly feel equipped to set out to arrest and redirect a process in being for thousands of years. Yet the reader, if a parent, can do precisely that within the limits of one family and perhaps with good effect on several families.

He can do it by understanding the true needs of childhood, by realizing that the needs are “rights,” and by serving those rights above and beyond all other rights. Parents have no right, for example, to live in cities if they can possibly live outside them. Children have the right to observe and experience every fact of Nature — animal, mineral, and vegetable. They have a right to learn to be, step by step, independently able to live in natural environments. They have a right to take on such responsibilities as their age makes possible. They have a right to learn such truths and consequences as their emotional development permits, in environs that are not property — environs where they can dig, pluck, hoard, build, saw, cut, walk, swim, chop, paint, paddle, and pole without let or hindrance; environs where their normal impulse is neither inhibited by blue-jacketed guardians of every object nor confined by the artificial hazard of rushing, iron monstrosities. Children have the right to take, every day, such natural risks as their teaching in Nature gives them the competence to face.

Only that adult who is able to live successfully in a primitive world can bring enough knowledge and experience to civilized living to make it worth while. Without a realistic childhood background, he (or she) is a mere gadget himself. And a human being is not designed to be a by-product of a pile of buildings and a slew of machines or a parasite upon them.

I know that some readers, anxious mothers, will think this is a ghastly theory, and that I have never had charge of a child. The fact is, my brother and sister and I did most of the “bringing up” of our much younger half-brother and half-sister. The fact is that, as I write, my own daughter, who is fourteen, has just recovered from a badly broken arm which she sustained while riding a rough horse — I spent part of last summer encouraging her to ride by riding with her. I swam with her in “sharkinfested waters,” too, last summer. And when I found that she had gone swimming alone over the Bahaman coral reefs, it gave me quite a turn. I came in,” she said, “when I looked down and saw an enormous purple sting ray right underneath me.”

The reader will see that I have taught her to be prudent. And a few readers, perhaps, may see that my daughter has a good opportunity of growing up into a person with some experience of Nature - and a fair quantity of self-reliance. Such, anyhow, is my hope for her.