This
may seem like sadism on the part of the mothers, but it probably functioned to
soothe the bitterness arising from the child’s jealousy of a younger nursling.
It would also help to settle some of the ambivalence toward the child’s mother,
which comes about inevitably as a response to disciplining and other
unavoidable frustrations.
Another example Briggs describes
seems even more pointlessly sadistic at first glance. A little girl’s aunt
takes her hand and puts it on a little boy’s head, saying, “Pull his hair.” The
girl doesn’t respond, so her aunt yanks on the boy’s hair herself, making him
think the girl had done it. They quickly become embroiled in a “battle royal,”
urged on by several adults who find it uproarious. These adults do, however,
end up stopping the fight before any serious harm can be done. As horrible as
this trick may seem, Briggs believes it serves to instill in the children a
strong distaste for fighting because the experience is so unpleasant for them.
They also learn “that it is better not to be noticed than to be playfully made
the center of attention and laughed at” (177). What became clear to Briggs over
time was that the teasing she kept witnessing wasn’t just designed to teach
specific lessons but that it was also tailored to the child’s specific stage of
development. She writes,
Indeed, since
the games were consciously conceived of partly as tests of a child’s ability to
cope with his or her situation, the tendency was to focus on a child’s known or
expected difficulties. If a child had just acquired a sibling, the game might
revolve around the question: “Do you love your new baby sibling? Why don’t you
kill him or her?” If it was a new piece of clothing that the child had
acquired, the question might be: “Why don’t you die so I can have it?” And if
the child had been recently adopted, the question might be: “Who’s your daddy?”
(172)
As
unpleasant as these tests can be for the children, they never entail any actual
danger—Inuit adults would probably agree Hector Salamanca went a bit too far—and
they always take place in circumstances and settings where the only threats and
anxieties come from the hypothetical, playful dilemmas and conflicts. Briggs
explains,
A central idea
of Inuit socialization is to “cause thought”: isumaqsayuq. According to [Arlene] Stairs, isumaqsayuq, in North Baffin, characterizes Inuit-style education
as opposed to the Western variety. Warm and tender interactions with children
help create an atmosphere in which thought can be safely caused, and the
questions and dramas are well designed to elicit it. More than that, and as an
integral part of thought, the dramas stimulate emotion. (173)
Part
of the exercise then seems to be to introduce the children to their own
feelings. Prior to having their sibling’s life threatened, the children may not
have any idea how they’d feel in the event of that sibling’s death. After the
test, however, it becomes much more difficult for them to entertain thoughts of
harming their brother or sister—the thought alone will probably be unpleasant.
Briggs also points out that the
games send the implicit message to the children that they can be trusted to
arrive at the moral solution. Hector knows Leonel won’t let his brother
drown—and Leonel learns that his uncle knows this about him. The Inuit adults
who tease and tempt children are letting them know they have faith in the
children’s ability to resist their selfish or aggressive impulses. Discussing
Briggs’s work in his book Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism,
and Shame,
anthropologist Christopher Boehm suggests that evolution has endowed children
with the social and moral emotions we refer to collectively as consciences, but
these inborn moral sentiments need to be activated and shaped through
socialization. He writes,
On the one side
there will always be our usefully egoistic selfish tendencies, and on the other
there will be our altruistic or generous impulses, which also can advance our
fitness because altruism and sympathy are valued by our peers. The conscience
helps us to resolve such dilemmas in ways that are socially acceptable, and
these Inuit parents seem to be deliberately “exercising” the consciences of
their children to make morally socialized adults out of them. (226)
The Inuit-style moral dilemma games seem strange,
even shocking, to people from industrialized societies, and so it’s clear
they’re not a normal part of children’s upbringing in every culture. They don’t
even seem to be all that common among hunter-gatherers outside the region of
the Arctic. Boehm writes, however,
Deliberately and
stressfully subjecting children to nasty hypothetical dilemmas is not universal
among foraging nomads, but as we’ll see with Nisa, everyday life also creates
real moral dilemmas that can involve Kalahari children similarly. (226)
Boehm
goes on to recount an episode from anthropologist Marjorie Shostak’s famous
biography Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman to show that parents all the way on the
opposite side of the world from where Briggs did her fieldwork sometimes light
on similar methods for stimulating their children’s moral development.
Nisa seems to have been a greedy
and impulsive child. When her pregnant mother tried to wean her, she would have
none of it. At one point, she even went so far as to sneak into the hut while
her mother was asleep and try to suckle without waking her up. Throughout the
pregnancy, Nisa continually expressed ambivalence toward the upcoming birth of
her sibling, so much so that her parents anticipated there might be some
problems. The !Kung resort to infanticide in certain dire circumstances, and
Nisa’s parents probably reasoned she was at least somewhat familiar with the coping
mechanism many other parents used when killing a newborn was necessary. What
they’d do is treat the baby as an object, not naming it or in any other way
recognizing its identity as a family member. Nisa explained to Shostak how her
parents used this knowledge to impart a lesson about her baby brother.
After he was born,
he lay there, crying. I greeted him, “Ho, ho, my baby brother! Ho, ho, I have a
little brother! Some day we’ll play together.” But my mother said, “What do you
think this thing is? Why are you talking to it like that? Now, get up and go
back to the village and bring me my digging stick.” I said, “What are you going
to dig?” She said, “A hole. I’m going to dig a hole so I can bury the baby.
Then you, Nisa, will be able to nurse again.” I refused. “My baby brother? My
little brother? Mommy, he’s my brother! Pick him up and carry him back to the
village. I don’t want to nurse!” Then I said, “I’ll tell Daddy when he comes
home!” She said, “You won’t tell him. Now, run back and bring me my digging
stick. I’ll bury him so you can nurse again. You’re much too thin.” I didn’t
want to go and started to cry. I sat there, my tears falling, crying and
crying. But she told me to go, saying she wanted my bones to be strong. So, I
left and went back to the village, crying as I walked. (The weaning episode
occurs on pgs. 46-57)
Again,
this may strike us as cruel, but by threatening her brother’s life, Nisa’s
mother succeeded in triggering her natural affection for him, thus tipping the
scales of her ambivalence to ensure the protective and loving feelings won out
over the bitter and jealous ones. This example was extreme enough that Nisa
remembered it well into adulthood, but Boehm sees it as evidence that real life
reliably offers up dilemmas parents all over the world can use to instill
morals in their children. He writes,
I believe that all
hunter-gatherer societies offer such learning experiences, not only in the
real-life situations children are involved with, but also in those they merely
observe. What the Inuit whom Briggs studied in Cumberland Sound have done is to
not leave this up to chance. And the practice would appear to be widespread in
the Arctic. Children are systematically exposed to life’s typical stressful
moral dilemmas, and often hypothetically, as a training ground that helps to
turn them into adults who have internalized the values of their groups. (234)
One of the reasons such dilemmas,
whether real or hypothetical or merely observed, are effective as teaching
tools is that they bypass the threat to personal autonomy that tends to
accompany direct instruction. Imagine Tío
Salamanca simply scolding Leonel for wishing his brother dead—it would have
only aggravated his resentment and sparked defiance. Leonel would probably also
harbor some bitterness toward his uncle for unjustly defending Marco. In any
case, he would have been stubbornly resistant to the lesson. Winston
Churchill
nailed the sentiment when he said, “Personally, I am always ready to learn,
although I don’t always like being taught.” The Inuit-style moral dilemmas
force the children to come up with the right answer on their own, a task that
requires the integration and balancing of short and long term desires,
individual and group interests, and powerful albeit contradictory emotions. The
skills that go into solving such dilemmas are indistinguishable from the
qualities we recognize as maturity, self-knowledge, generosity, poise, and
wisdom.
For the children Briggs witnessed
being subjected to these moral tests, the understanding that the dilemmas were
in fact only hypothetical developed gradually as they matured. For the youngest
ones, the stakes were real and the solutions were never clear at the onset.
Briggs explains that
while the
interaction between small children and adults was consistently good-humored,
benign, and playful on the part of the adults, it taxed the children to—or
beyond—the limits of their ability to understand, pushing them to expand their
horizons, and testing them to see how much they had grown since the last
encounter. (173)
What
this suggests is that there isn’t always a simple declarative lesson—a moral to
the story, as it were—imparted in these games. Instead, the solutions to the
dilemmas can often be open-ended, and the skills the children practice can thus
be more general and abstract than some basic law or principle. Briggs goes on,
Adult players
did not make it easy for children to thread their way through the labyrinth of
tricky proposals, questions, and actions, and they did not give answers to the
children or directly confirm the conclusions the children came to. On the
contrary, questioning a child’s first facile answers, they turned situations
round and round, presenting first one aspect then another, to view. They made
children realize their emotional investment in all possible outcomes, and then
allowed them to find their own way out of the dilemmas that had been created—or
perhaps, to find ways of living with unresolved dilemmas. Since children were
unaware that the adults were “only playing,” they could believe that their own decisions
would determine their fate. And since the emotions aroused in them might be
highly conflicted and contradictory—love as well as jealousy, attraction as
well as fear—they did not always know what they wanted to decide. (174-5)
As
the children mature, they become more adept at distinguishing between real and
hypothetical problems. Indeed, Briggs suggests one of the ways adults recognize
children’s budding maturity is that they begin to treat the dilemmas as a game,
ceasing to take them seriously, and ceasing to take themselves as seriously as they did when they were younger.
 |
Brian Boyd |
In his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and
Fiction,
literary scholar Brian Boyd theorizes that
the fictional narratives that humans engage one another with in every culture
all over the world, be they in the form of religious myths, folklore, or plays
and novels, can be thought of as a type of cognitive play—similar to the
hypothetical moral dilemmas of the Inuit. He sees storytelling as an adaption that
encourages us to train the mental faculties we need to function in complex
societies. The idea is that evolution ensures that adaptive behaviors tend to
be pleasurable, and thus many animals playfully and joyously engage in
activities in low-stakes, relatively safe circumstances that will prepare them
to engage in similar activities that have much higher stakes and are much more
dangerous. Boyd explains,
The more pleasure
that creatures have in play in safe contexts, the more they will happily expend
energy in mastering skills needed in urgent or volatile situations, in attack,
defense, and social competition and cooperation. This explains why in the human
case we particularly enjoy play that develops skills needed in flight (chase,
tag, running) and fight (rough-and-tumble, throwing as a form of attack at a
distance), in recovery of balance (skiing, surfing, skateboarding), and
individual and team games. (92)
The skills most necessary to survive and thrive in
human societies are the same ones Inuit adults help children develop with the
hypothetical dilemma’s Briggs describes. We should expect fiction then to
feature similar types of moral dilemmas. Some stories may be designed to convey
simple messages—“Don’t hurt your brother,” “Don’t stray from the path”—but
others might be much more complicated; they may not even have any viable
solutions at all. “Art prepares minds for open-ended learning and creativity,”
Boyd writes; “fiction specifically improves our social cognition and our
thinking beyond the here and now” (209).
One of the ways the cognitive
play we call novels or TV shows differs from Inuit dilemma games is that the fictional
characters take over center stage from the individual audience members. Instead of being forced to
decide on a course of action ourselves, we watch characters we’ve become
emotionally invested in try to come up with solutions to the dilemmas. When
these characters are first introduced to us, our feelings toward them will be based on the same criteria we’d apply to real people who could potentially become a
part of our social circles. Boyd explains,
Even more than other
social species, we depend on information about others’ capacities,
dispositions, intentions, actions, and reactions. Such “strategic information”
catches our attention so forcefully that fiction can hold our interest, unlike
almost anything else, for hours at a stretch. (130)
We
favor characters who are good team players—who communicate honestly, who show
concern for others, and who direct aggression toward enemies and cheats—for obvious
reasons, but we also assess them in terms of what they might contribute to the
group. Characters with exceptional strength, beauty, intelligence, or artistic
ability are always especially attention-worthy. Of course, characters with
qualities that make them sometimes an asset and sometimes a liability represent
a moral dilemma all on their own—it’s no wonder such characters tend to be so
compelling.
The most common fictional dilemma
pits a character we like against one or more characters we hate—the good team
player versus the power- or money-hungry egoist. We can think of the most
straightforward plot as an encroachment of chaos on the providential moral
order we might otherwise take for granted. When the bad guy is finally
defeated, it’s like a toy that was snatched away from us has just been
returned. We embrace the moral order all the more vigorously. But of course our
stories aren’t limited to this one basic formula. Around the turn of the last
century, the French writer Georges
Polti, following up on the work of Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi, tried to write
a comprehensive list of all the basic plots in plays and novels, and
flipping through his book The Thirty-Six
Dramatic Situations, you find that with few exceptions (“Daring
Enterprise,” “The Enigma,” “Recovery of a Lost One”) the situations aren’t
simply encounters between characters with conflicting goals, or characters who
run into obstacles in chasing after their desires. The conflicts are nearly all
moral, either between a virtuous character and a less virtuous one or between selfish
or greedy impulses and more altruistic ones. Polti’s book could be called The
Thirty-Odd Moral Dilemmas in Fiction. Hector Salamanca would be happy (not
really) to see the thirteenth situation: “Enmity of Kinsmen,” the first example
of which is “Hatred of Brothers” (49).
One type of fictional dilemma
that seems to be particularly salient in American society today pits our
impulse to punish wrongdoers against our admiration for people with exceptional
abilities. Characters like Walter
White in Breaking Bad win us over
with qualities like altruism, resourcefulness, and ingenuity—but then they go
on to behave in strikingly, though somehow not obviously, immoral ways. Variations
on Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes abound; he’s the supergenius who’s also a dick
(get the double-entendre?): the BBC’s Sherlock (by
far the best), the movies starring Robert Downey Jr., the upcoming series
featuring an Asian female Watson (Lucy Liu)—plus all the minor variations like The Mentalist and House.
Though the idea that fiction is a
type of low-stakes training simulation to prepare people cognitively and
emotionally to take on difficult social problems in real life may not seem all
that earthshattering, conceiving of stories as analogous to Inuit moral
dilemmas designed to exercise children’s moral reasoning faculties can nonetheless
help us understand why worries about the examples set by fictional characters
are so often misguided. Many parents and teachers noisily complain about sex or
violence or drug use in media. Academic literary critics condemn the way this
or that author portrays women or minorities. Underlying these concerns is the
crude assumption that stories simply encourage audiences to imitate the
characters, that those audiences are passive receptacles for the messages—implicit
or explicit—conveyed through the narrative. To be fair, these worries
may be well placed when it comes to children so young they lack the cognitive
sophistication necessary for separating their thoughts and feelings about
protagonists from those they have about themselves, and are thus prone to take
the hero for a simple model of emulation-worthy behavior. But, while Inuit adults communicate to children that they can
be trusted to arrive at a right or moral solution, the moralizers in our
culture betray their utter lack of faith in the intelligence and conscience of the
people they try to protect from the corrupting influence of stories with
imperfect or unsavory characters.
This type of self-righteous and overbearing
attitude toward readers and viewers strikes me as more likely by orders of
magnitude to provoke defiant resistance to moral lessons than the North Baffin’s
isumaqsayuq approach.
In other words, a good story is worth a thousand sermons. But if the moral
dilemma at the core of the plot has an easy solution—if you can say precisely
what the moral of the story is—it’s probably not a very good story.