CHILDREN IN THE PRESENT WORLD SITUATION

CHILDREN IN THE PRESENT WORLD SITUATION* JAMES MARSHALL

Fwma Pddcnt of the B o d of Edrrcoron, City of New York

READ an article in the Sunday paper recently that told of the find of I the bones of an ape man who had invented crude weapons with which he bashed in the heads of less-advanced apes a million years ago; and how it was now suggested that man had first appeared upon this continent some 400,000 years ago, not a mere 20,000 as formerly estimated. When I had finished reciting these vast figures, enjoying-in rather a nouveau rich manner, I suppose-this new information of the immensity of evolutionary time, my wife said, “The important question is, Shall we be here two years from now?”

Of course that’s the point. We evolved from these head-bashing ape men, got the notion that we were little lower than the angels, forgot about great- great-grandpa with his cold and glittering eye and his hairy paw clutching the first artifact, an instrument for head-bashing, until looking down we discovered that, conceiving ourselves as being little lower than the angels, we had played a t being God. We created nuclear fission and nuclear fusion and now had an A-bomb in one hand and an H-bomb in the other. Now we are capable of using less hairy hands, more refined hands, in head-bashing on a scale which we ourselves cannot imagine. Of course we have one thing on great-great-grandpa, the ape man, in that we can feel more guilty than he and can pacify our sense of guilt by the quick realization that the new super artifacts for colossal destruction can also be put to humanitarian uses-and will not be used destructively except for ideological purposes.

It is in this smog of hydrogen, uranium and ideologies that we twentieth- century head-bashers bring children into the world and want to see them thrive, want desperately to have them grow up in a better world than we now live in, put all our most prayerful thought into the wish that they will survive not just two years, but normal lives, with a chance for greater longevity than we have.

We have come a long way since the ape man, a long way even in the last few hundred years. In Shakespeare’s day, footpads held men up a t night in the cities and highwaymen did on the roads, so man went about armed in the night and on the highways. Everyone bolted his door-he didn’t just turn a little lock or leave the door on the latch-and the wealthy had great oak doors bound in iron or brass. Famines not only swept over Asia but over Europe as well. Plagues, to use Walter Lippmann’s phrase, helped “redress the balance’’ between hungry mouths and unproductive soil. In spite of the

Presented at the 1953 Annual Meeting in the Opening Session, “Orthopsychiatry ond EdUC8tiOlL’’

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JAMES MARSHALL 455

more pessimistic Malthusians we do have reason to believe that we have famine licked. And though there is much hunger in the world and some starvation we have increasing technical knowledge with which to multiply the productivity of nature. Of course, there are many who believe that we shall never hold a redressed balance by multiplying the productivity of nature unless we also reduce the productivity of mankind. This is particularly so in view of the triumphs of medicine and public health.

A pest of locusts in Syria or an epidemic of cholera in India or of smallpox in Egypt mobilizes the sprays and serums of the world to check them. F A 0 and WHO and all the member nations would also help the Iron Curtain countries destroy the Colorado beetles in Poland and the plague in North Korea and China, if it were not more to the advantage of those in power there to spew the world with the falsehoods that the United States was using germ and insect warfare.

In many ways life has become more secure as well as more comfortable. It is more sanitary and offers a greater quality and variety of goods, occupa- tions and inactive recreations than even a hundred years ago. More secure for bodies-if one forgets nuclear fission and fusion. But a man with ideas, with hopes that he tries to articulate, what about him? In half the world he must live in fear that some slight deviation, one little criticism, one passing caustic comment may bring the police to his home a t night, drag him from his family and send him, if not in confused confession to stand before the firing squad, then to some slave labor camp to build canals or railroads or to mine uranium. And if he lives in our part of the world it is possible, just possible, that he may wake some morning to find his name in headlines, held up to hatred and contempt, condemned as disloyal, as un-American, without hearing, on the say-so of some informer or as a result of the libel-free denunciation of some public official. The psychological weapons for head- bashing today are certainly a great refinement of the crude methods used by great-great-grandpa ape man.

The physical frontiers of the world have been reached. And the frontiers of the mind are hardening, are being closed by our fear of our new-found power, of the power of the gods in hands that have changed little from those of the ape man-because his primitive terror and his wrath are in us still in spite of all the pretty things we have said and written, in spite of all the things we can do to make man comfortable and clean and healthy, in spite of our discovery of God.

This is the world of our children. In what we call “the free world” we pride ourselves that we encourage our children to think for themselves, to use their reason, to have free minds. But we are afraid ourselves to have free minds. Is not this brought home to our children? What happens to youngsters brought up by people who fear and who hate? What kind of science is the

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science of fearful people, or of hate-filled people? Tell me, are we really as interested in the cancer cures that may be worked by isotopes as we are that we, not the Russians, are the first to develop an H-bomb?

I suppose there was an important crisis in evolution when great-great- grandpa the ape man began to use that dull brain of his to guide his hairy hand into the fashioning of an instrument which would give him greater power to destroy those that threatened him. A second major crisis occurred four hundred years ago when scientific method gave a tool of incalculable power to man, who promptly fancied that with his mind he could now control not only nature but himself as well. Today we are at another crisis in this evolutionary history of our race. Can our far more able and imaginative brain, preening itself on its capacity to reason, keep our more agile hands from bashing in our own heads?

We have more understanding of ourselves than did our distant progenitor; we don’t know it all, but we do have a considerable body of knowledge as to the nature of hostility and its counterpart love, of the social highlights and shadows of aggression and cooperation. Can we make use of that knowledge? Uneasily, rather guiltily, we still profess to being little lower than the angels-in spite of genocide, slave labor camps, racial discrimination and character assassination-and we are endowed with a limited but effective power of choice. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; there- fore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed.”

Will we make that choice? Will we choose good and l ife-or let fly a few H-bombs? They certainly will alter the history of our evolution. For even those of us who survive, we are told, will live in an atmosphere so full of radioactivity that if we should not become sterile at the very least our genes would be subject to strange and unpredictable mutations. If we have children then, they will doubtless be quite different creatures from those about whose mental and physical health, welfare, education and moral well- being we are now so solicitous. Of course it would be unscientific of me not to suggest the possibility that a healthier, nobler, more intelligent race sprouting angelic wings might issue from those transmuted genes. But I wouldn’t bet on it, if I were you. The chances are that great-great-grandpa, the unabashed head-basher, would return.

This is the background of the world of our children-and I guess by now you are aware of my thesis, which is that the world of our children is our world and although we can dabble here and there in special consideration for our children, the great crisis of emotion, mind, and spirit which is our day is shared by parents and children. We are not going to make a better, safer world, nor will the world survive our new power, for one generation if not for the other.

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Now let us be more specific. In spite of all of the improvements in man’s lot, those improvements are not evenly divided. Two thirds of the world is hungry, undernourished, and some people do starve in an age that could produce sufficient for all, if not plenty for all. Two thirds of the world is illiterate. Half the world is in bad health-it has bad teeth, malaria, tuber- culosis, amoebic or some other form of dysentery, yaws or some other worm, vitamin deficiency and so on. Those people could not produce adequately even if they had the seed and fertilizer, the tools, machines and raw products a t hand to which they might apply that item we so generously export, American know-how.

Know-how! How would you feel if people came and told you that they were willing to make you a great industrial nation with their know-how when what you wanted was some relief from the old feudal system of land tenure or the high interest rates of the moneylenders, and enough food to eat year in, year out with a little meat and some fat thrown in? We cross the seas with our superior ways rationalized as superior know-how. We say in effect, “It’ll be foolish of you if you don’t make use of what we offer you.” Behind our mission to raise other people’s standards many of them see the bogey of American imperialist capitalism about which they have been mis- led, and which makes them think that European imperialism of the nine- teenth century is on the march again under the American flag. Or a t best i t means grade-C Hollywood movies replacing native forms of art and enter- tainment and Coca-Cola taking the place of traditional native beverages.

But the Communists come differently. They live with the coolies and the untouchables in the city alleys. They sleep on the dirt floors of the tenant farmers. They promise freedom from “capitalist imperialism,” from the landlord, the effendi, the zamindar; they promise racial equality. And when they offer help they do not attach strings, they do not say, “Here is wheat if you will support our side”-at least not until after the kill. The Com- munists come to the people who are on the borders of a subsistence level with promises they can understand, promises which indicate some apprecia- tion of their needs and experience. But we come with know-how of things that are mostly without meaning to those poor people, and instead of solving their land problems we take land for bomber bases. In Justice Douglas’s recent book he says:

I told the Mongol prince that this was not a new and casual program so far as America was concerned. I told him of the Declaration of Independence and its tenet, etc.

“That’s wonderful,” the Mongol prince replied. “Very wonderful. But the peasants of Asia do not know these things. America in their eyes is identified with their feudal lords. America is not to them the advocate of social justice.” . . . Finally the Mongol prince spoke. “Why does not America try to set up bases in the hearts of these people rather than on their lands?”


How can one set up bases in the hearts of people? How can love win when we know the ape man is so much in ourselves still, more dangerous because he is so often suppressed, so often ignored, so often painted over with the heart-warming conceit of being little lower than the angels? Yet bases in the hearts of people are the bases that count for survival, the only bases that can hold even a promise of a good life for our children and our children’s children. How can we build them, how can we build them in the jungle of our primitiveness? That is our challenge, especially the challenge to those who are engaged in the psychological sciences.

All across the world there is change. We are accustomed now to think of Asia as a continent in transition. Thousands of young Americans have seen something of the changes that have taken place in Japan. We read of some of the changes in India, China, Korea. Changes are also occurring in Indo- China, Pakistan and Burma. The oil-rich Near East and Middle East are changing. Indonesia is a new nation having new experiences. The cultures that gave rise to the dances of Bali and Cambodia are rapidly passing.

We are becoming aware of the great changes in Africa and the tensions they have brought there-apartheid in South Africa, independence in Tunis, Morocco and Kenya, the Egyptian claims to Suez and the Sudan. In a recent dispatch Cyrus Sulzberger wrote:

The common dangerous forces are fermenting. Anger against racial injustice has united Asian and Negro. The demands of industrialization have attracted hundreds of thousands of natives to slums in cities which cannot afford to house them properly. Improvements in health standards are meanwhile overpopulating tribal reserves. The slow spread of education gradually provides leadership for surly undercurrents.

Many white men, aware of these pressures, can find no satisfactory formula for easing them. They are bound together by the fear of being eventually submerged themselves. In the interim they often seem intellectually paralyzed.

All the Negroes complain with bitterness: “The whites don’t know us. They don’t even look at us. To them we are only a depersonalized problem.”

We forget that similar changes are fermenting among our neighbors ot Latin America where again hostility is mobilized about the question of land tenure and where the Catholic Bishops recently spoke warningly about this battleground and the danger of the present landholding systems. In Asia and Africa and Latin America we of the United States have played with those in power, those who possess the land and charge the exorbitant rents and interest rates. We have forgotten the bases in the hearts of the people. We have forgotten the ringing words of our Revolution, of our Declaration of Independence, of our Bill of Rights. We have put them under glass pre- served by ultraviolet rays in our national archives. (Is there something symbolic in removing them from a living library to a documentary morgue?)

We have taken the defensive against the specious promises of Man , Lenin and Stalin, promises so readily acceptable to those who lie in the dust be-

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cause they offer not only slick assurances of pie in the sky, but because they also appeal to the deep-seated hatreds in men, to the ferocious animal that great-great-grandpa the ape man was. We deprive ourselves of our true strength, and limit our greatest appeal when we, who broke the back of feudalism on this continent, support or accept it on other continents.

Well, this is the world of our children. And no one knows it better than you who in your professions must be alert to the undercover presence of our ancestor.

For twenty years we have been speaking of the child-centered school. Before that there was the child-centered home, not only here but among the higher-income classes of Europe too, except perhaps in England where the public school, that is, the elite boarding school, forged the character of future British leaders. So we find Anna Karenina’s sister-in-law saying:

And it’s true, as papa says,-that when we were brought up there was one e x t r e m e we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s just the other way-the parents are in the wash-house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.

Benjamin Spock, after whom I have taken the liberty of naming this age of American culture, is the articulate symbol of a movement that has sub- stituted the family-centered home for the child-centered home. Whether you approve or not he is to the American mother today as important and indis- pensable as Fletcher’s Castoria was to an earlier generation. Now the child is to be treated as a part of the family, as he is said to be among the Arapaho Indians, swaddled or not swaddled. You don’t shush when baby goes to sleep; you pay more or less attention to him and he to you when you have company; you do not spare him from crime on television or sex in the news- paper headlines. You make him independent by giving him a room of his own if you can afford it, or if you can’t by letting him fight his way to maturity in the same bed with three or four siblings-not brothers and sisters, but siblings of course. You send him to a play school or kindergarten as soon as you can and you and the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins lavish love on him. Fathers have become adroit a t diapering, seem not nearly so bored in the park on Sunday morning as they used to, and, in- cidentally, like the washing machine have relieved Mother of some house hold chores, which gives her more energy for showing a continuing love for the first child when baby number two arrives.

This is splendid. Dr. Spock has really done a great deal of good to Ameri- can home life and American children. But I think i t is a mistake to believe that this movement to encourage closer family life and greater release of love for the children must be spread to other lands so that hostility may be reduced by establishing the Spockian era on a world-wide basis. The fact is we Americans needed this; few other peoples do. The fact is, as you know,


that American family life has been breaking down. Novelty, change, speed- up, mobility which have been resisted in most lands have been active forces with us. Advertising and public relations practically put the family and the church among the museum pieces. Now the churches are taking to advertising and public relations. The family is less well organized for this purpose and so i t must be saved from the outside-by you and by the schoolteachers, the city planners and the recreation people.

But people from land after land will tell you that this crisis of ours has not come to them; their family life is still strong. You can witness family solidarity even in such western countries as France and Italy today. Only in Africa, perhaps, the breakdown in tribal life may present a social and psychological situation similar to that which has affected the American family.

What will happen when and if mobility is increased in southern and western Asia by the development of urban, industrial life and the multiplication of cars? What will happen when people there and others places are able to afford radios, more frequent cinemas, television sets and Coca-Cola parlors ? What will happen to their family life?

Improved standards of living, increased technical development and more widespread education today often mean the stimulation of greater tensions and more hostility. Insecurities due to change, to the breakdown of old institutions and traditional beliefs that are challenged by new standards which are set by technology, must produce more emotionally unstable people. As individuals, parties and nations, they will gain destructive power that appears to grow by geometric progression as a result of greater literacy, more mass media to arouse their appetites and hates, and greater capacity to be destructive because of Point IV technical assistance. How are we preparing to meet this crisis?

All about the world instead of facing the truth of their own nature, men through the ages have tended to put the responsibility on some super- natural being, excusing their own brutalities as being in the cause of some god or explaining their cruelties as divine retribution. I suppose we do look less horrible if we conjure up a god more cruel than ourselves. I am afraid that we do not really have faith in our God of love or in our own love because we know that our ape-man ancestor is secreted in the same room.

We of the western world also avoid facing ourselves by imagining that we were once good creatures until we got knowledge, and that we were noble, happy savages, but that times and men have gone from bad to worse as in the verse:

My grandad in his house of logs Said “things are going to the dogs.” His grandad in his old skin togs

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Said “things are going to the dogs.” His grandad in the Flemish bogs Said “things are going to the dogs.” There’s just one thing I have to state: The dogs have had a damn long wait.

But probably the most dangerous self-deception is in the Communist thesis that promises the future of a happy, loving society divorced from any belief in God, a society which will be classless and in which the State as an instrument of power will have withered away if the masses-who are inher- ently good and gentle-will only submit to a dictatorship for their own good and hate everyone whom they can call bourgeois, capitalistic, imperialistic or what they will. I need not emphasize to you the explosive potential of fantasy laden with hatred.

Of course, those who are frankly our enemies have no monopoly of hostility. Many of our own people talk and act with hatred, are merchants of hate or politicians who in themselves are so insecure they must conceal their inadequacy with the fire of aggression. In Washington today there are wor- ried looks. The cheeks of men and women are cracked like old leather; their spirits are becoming desiccated and flaking away with compromise after compromise so that no accusing finger can be pointed their way. All about is the fear of the new scarlet letter, the dread of being unjustly branded with a red C. This is particularly true among the policy makers. It is true, too, among those engaged in intellectual activities in our universities and our schools. It is not the atmosphere for world leadership or for the balance that will assure peace.

Out of these festering and bursting hostilities of the world, these domestic and foreign cold wars, come fearful people, fearful government employees, fearful teachers, fearful psychologists and social workers too. This is also the world of our children.

If hate could be isolated behind national borders we might not have cause to be troubled for the world and for the existence of mankind and all i t holds dear. But we know how contagious hatred can be. We have seen the interplay, the infectiousness of hostility; and we have no public health serv- ice to protect us from people driven by anger. The anthropologist and the sociologist have made some little impression in the field of international understanding of the things that move people. But very little has been done by those engaged in the psychological sciences.

If there be any answer to the war cry of the ape man, if the hand is to be withheld from releasing the guided missile with its atomic war head, you have an important, a critical part to play. You who know more than most of us about human motivations and possible therapy for the human wild animal and his destructive impulses dare not sit continually in clinics and


social agencies until the full truth of human behavior is revealed. Important as the individual is, you must not emphasize the individual patient at the risk of losing the human race. It is as though the medical profession should refuse to treat cancer until its causes and definitive cure were known, or as if the public health authorities were to ignore a plague because the virus could not be isolated or a sure prophylaxis prescribed.

The psychological sciences of course have also discovered group behavior and engaged in group therapy. We’ll come to that. (It is interesting to note that the greatest stimulus to group orientation came from one who com- menced his studies in a zoo, his point of departure being the behavior of caged animals.)

We have noted that the child-centered home in our country is tending to become the family-centered home again. As the American school became more child centered it concurrently tended to be more group conscious. This was the civilizing effect of that system of education which is a horror to the rugged individualist and autocrat and which is variously called “progressive education,” “the new methods of education” or “the activity program.” But teachers and parents are by no means adequately versed and trained, even in the language of the layman, to understand group behavior, or in the technique of developing healthy group relationships.

For most people professionally engaged in the field of psychology, the work of the clinic, the social agency and the psychiatrist’s office deals largely with individual cases-though at times extended to the treatment of other members of the family. But even then the object is the adjustment of the individual patient. Gardner Murphy is correct when he talks of the “fetish . . . involved in defining individuals by isolating them.” Men and women are fictions outside a time-space continuum and a social matrix.

As a source of scientific inquiry and technical training the treatment of individuals and their social adjustment is necessary. Nevertheless, it a p pears to a layman that you place too much emphasis on individual therapy, not sufficient on the interactions of larger numbers of persons. As I have watched the Bureau of Child Guidance of the New York City school system, for example, i t has tended to become immersed in itself and preoccupied with its clinical character. There is little purpose in its being part of a school system. This is true, I have been told, of other child guidance bureaus. A child who comes to such a clinic is not an isolated unit, as the clinician well knows, but he might just as well be on that desert island, of which we hear so much, sitting under a coconut palm with the orthopsychiatric triad. I repeat that the child guidance clinic, like other clinics, is essentially for re- search and training purposes; but if it stops there its services are too expen- sive. Even a wealthy economy such as ours cannot long afford that over-

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head for the c u r r r let’s be conservative and say treatment, not necessarily cure-of a very few individuals.

Even as group therapists, in the face of the world’s critical need, we are surface scratchers. For better or worse, in wisdom or ignorance, the real group therapists (in the broad sense of the term) or the perverters of children are their classroom teachers and parents. It is they who require on-the-job training. The family physician, the psychologist in the teacher-training institution and the supervisor in the school system cannot by their own efforts assure a sound social approach on the part of parents and teachers.

Every child who comes to your clinics is a source of on-the-job instruction to one or more group leaders, that is, parents and teachers. It is only through your combination with teachers and parents that there is hope of a conscious effort directed toward civilizing the ape man in us. (It is easier to teach by precept, but if we know anything from modern psychiatry and the whole procession of human experience i t is that little is learned from precept other than pretty language that leads to the byways of evasion or the cruel im- peratives that shrink men’s minds and souls.)

To recall that the individual lives in a social solution and not as a separate crystal, is not to forget his individuality or to deny him the opportunities to express it. Nor is it to reduce him to a featureless mass. Nevertheless, I venture to say that the major uses of psychological principles have been their application to masses, the mass application of psychology through advertising, political promotion, psychological warfare and other pressures. Even the atomic scientists after the enormity of their creation assumed social responsibility. It is time that the psychological scientists also assumed social responsibility when they witness the enormities to which their scientific findings are daily put.

How do you do this? I do not know. But at least there is need that you better orient yourselves to face the implications of a destructive world for the lives of children and the teachers and parents, who to so large a degree train and condition children. Day after day external events seem to confirm the nightmares of children, the nightmares of the whole human race. This, i t seems to me, is your opening, your field of operation. Here is your gate from the clinic to the development of behavior patterns in school and home which may lead to life or may lead to death.

The training of teachers and parents in the group approach may appear difficult. In most other lands the problem is even more difficult. For in few parts of the world are people as ready for group action as they are in the United States. In most places the technique of the seminar is unknown; the democracy of our committee system is not used; the committee and the classroom are autocratic; the family tends to be ruled by the elders. How do we


work with those people? How do we help them learn not to be subservient? Here too we require applied psychology used constructively, not as rabble rousing or as a call to holy wars or in a battle to win men and women to the labor of building air bases. To build bases in the hearts of men requires the application of psychological principles.

The greatest danger to our world comes from the driven people who tend to be the very ones who gain political power, the angry folk who nevertheless usually believe that they are kindly. But their compulsions show their ape-man ancestry in word and act. The peace of nations and the survival of our world is in their hands, the hands of people whose personalities are so often and so heavily laden with aggression. You know more than most of us about such people-not enough surely, but more than most of us. We need your consideration and instruction as to how to deal with authority, how to counteract the hostile uses of psychological knowledge-how free people when they go to the polls can recognize the degree to which the creature who predated human savages survives in the candidate, behind the promises and poetry of his oratory.

Let us sum up. What must we do for the children in the world situation today? In essence i t is what we must do for ourselves, for all people. All of us must have food above the bare level of subsistence. All of us must be helped to be in sufficient good health to work. All of us must have a chance for enough schooling to improve our condition, understand our problems and limitations, and gain more of the satisfactions of life than most of the world can today.

But as we have seen, improvement in the situation of people in the world creates more mouths to be filled, more hands and minds to be utilized, more spirits to be satisfied. This in turn increases demands and tensions, frustra- tions and hostilities. And so our primitive destructive impulses are continually aroused and we fool with the implements that can so readily release the holocaust.

Here is where the efforts of the psychological sciences are so desperately needed. Even without the full and perfect answers you have a t least the leads, you know the atmosphere that must be achieved to reduce tension and divert hostility. Something, too, you know of the means by which such an atmosphere can be created, how the social behavior of children can be conditioned, how parents and teachers can be made leaders in this condition- ing process. Only as the knowledge that is yours is diffused and applied can men's range of choice and capacity to choose be enlarged. Only then will man have half a chance to choose good instead of evil, love instead of hate, life in place of death. In your hands there is much light. Play it courageously, the best you can, in"the dusk.

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CHILDREN IN THE PRESENT WORLD SITUATION