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Promiscuity, Illegitimacy, and Abortion

 

Promiscuity is neurotic; it is a constant change of partner in the hope, of finding the right partner at last. But the right partner never is found, for the fault lies in the impotent, neurotic attitude of the Don Juan or his female counterpart.

 

If the term free love has a sinister meaning, it is because it describes sex that is neurotic. Promiscuous sex--the direct result of repression - is always unhappy and shameful. Among a free people, free love would not exist.

 

Repressed sex will attach itself to any likely object: a glove, a handkerchief, anything connected with the body. Thus, free love is promiscuous because it is lust without tenderness or warmth or real affection.

 

A young woman, after a period of promiscuity, said to me, “With Bill I have an orgastic life for the first time.” I asked why this was the first time. “Because I love him and I didn’t love the others.”

 

There is a tendency among those children who come late to Summerhill (thirteen or over) to be promiscuous in desire if not always in practice. The roots of promiscuity go far back in a child’s life. The chief thing we know is that they are unhealthy roots. Such behavior leads to variety, but seldom to fulfillment and almost never to happiness.

 

Real freedom in love does not lead to promiscuity. Love may not last forever. However, with healthy people while love does last, it is true and loyal and happy.

 

The illegitimate child often has a hard road to travel. To tell him, as some mothers do, that his father was killed in the war or died of disease is definitely wrong. He develops a sense of injury because he sees other boys with fathers. On the other hand, the social condemnation of bastardy cannot fail to reach him in some way. At Summerhill, we have had a few children of unmarried mothers, but no one cared a brass button. Under freedom, such children grow up as happily as children born in wedlock.

 

In the world outside, the bastard child sometimes blames his mother and behaves badly toward her. Again, he may adore his mother and fear that one day she will marry a man who is not his father.

 

What an odd world it is! Abortion is illegal, and bastardy too often means ostracism. It is gratifying that today many women do not accept the social disapproval of bastardy. They openly have their love children, are proud of them, work for them, rear them well and happily. As far as I have seen, their children are well-balanced and sincere human beings.

 

No woman teacher in a public school could have an illegitimate child and keep her job. More than once have I heard of a parson’s wife who threw her maid out when she became pregnant.

 

The abortion question is one of the most sickening, hypercritical symptoms of the illness of humanity. There is hardly a judge, parson, doctor, teacher, or any so-called pillar of society who would not prefer an abortion for his daughter rather than have his family face the disgrace of bastardy.



 

The rich often avoid unpleasant complications by sending their daughters to swanky nursing homes. There they are supposedly treated for irregularity of their menstrual periods, or what not. It is the lower middle class and the poor who are left, literally, holding the baby. There is no other alternative for them. If a middle-class girl tries hard enough, she can find a doctor who will perform an abortion for a goodly sum. Her poorer sister either runs the danger of an abortion by an unskilled, perhaps unscrupulous abortionist or she has to have her child.

 

In London there are clinics where women can be fitted with contraceptives. It is generally true that only when a woman shows a marriage ring will the clinic fit her. The borrowing of a wedding ring, however, is not a crime.

 

The whole business reminds one of pornographic writing on the walls of a public urinal. It typifies a civilization that deserves the price it pays for its spiteful morality. That price in the end is the ills that flesh is heir to, plus misery and hopelessness.


 

 

FOUR

RELIGION AND MORALS

 

Religion

 

A recent woman visitor said to me, “Why don’t you teach your pupils about the life of Jesus, so that they will be inspired to follow in his steps.” I answered that one learns to live, not by hearing of other lives, but by living; for words are infinitely less important than acts. Many have called Summerhill a religious place because it gives out love to children.

 

That may be true; only I dislike the adjective as long as religion means what it generally means today--antagonism to natural life. Religion as I remember it, practiced by men and women in drab clothes, singing mournful hymns of tenth-rate music, asking forgiveness for their sins-this is nothing I wish to be identified with.

 

I personally have nothing against the man who believes in a God--no matter what God. What I object to is the man who claims that his God is the authority for his imposing restrictions on human growth and happiness. The battle is not between believers in theology and nonbelievers in theology; it is between believers in human freedom and believers in the suppression of human freedom.

 

Some day we will have a new religion. You may gape and exclaim, “What? A new religion?” The Christian will be up in arms and protest: “Is not Christianity eternal?” The Jew will be up in arms and protest: “Is not Judaism eternal?”

 

No, religions are no more eternal than nations are eternal. A religion--any religion--has a birth, a youth, an old age, and a death. Hundreds of religions have come and gone. Of all the millions of Egyptians who believed in Amon Ra through the better part of 4,000 years, not a single adherent of that religion can be found today. The idea of God changes as culture changes: in a pastoral land God was the Gentle Shepherd; in warlike times, He was the God of Battles; when trade flourished, He was the God of Justice, weighing out equity and mercy. Today, when man is so mechanically creative, God is Wells’ “Great Absentee”, for a creative God is not wanted in an age that can make its own atom bombs.

 

Some day a new generation will not accept the obsolete religion and myths of today. When the new religion comes, it will, refute the idea of man’s being born in sin. A new religion will praise God by making men happy. The new religion will refuse the antithesis of body and spirit. It will recognize that the flesh is not sinful. It will know that a Sunday morning spent in swimming is more holy than a Sunday morning spent in singing hymns--as if God needs hymns to keep Him contented.

 

A new religion will find God on the meadows and not in the skies. Just imagine all that would be accomplished if only ten percent of all the hours spent in prayer and churchgoing were devoted to good deeds and acts of charity and helpfulness.

 

Every day my newspaper tells me how dead our present religion is. We imprison; we stifle opinion that does not agree; we oppress the poor; we arm for war. As an organization, the church is feeble. It does not stop wars. It does little or nothing to temper our barbarous criminal code. It rarely takes rides against the exploiter.

 

You cannot serve God and Mammon. To use a modern paraphrase, you cannot go to church on Sunday and practice bayonet fighting on Monday. I know no blasphemy so vile as that of the various churches, which, during a war, contend that the Almighty is on their side. God cannot believe both sides are right. God cannot be Love, and at the same time be the patron of a gas attack.

 

For many, organized conventional religion is an easy way out for individual problems. If a Roman Catholic sins, he confesses to his priest and the priest absolves the sin.

 

The religious person casts his burden on the Lord; he believes and his path to glory is assured. Thus the emphasis is shifted from personal worth and individual behavior to credo. “Believe in the Lord and you shall be saved.” This, in effect, says make a declaration and your spiritual problems are over. You get a guaranteed ticket to heaven.

 

Fundamentally, religion is afraid of life. It is a running away from life. It disparages life here and now as merely the preliminary to a fuller life beyond. Mysticism and religion mean that life here on this earth is a failure; that independent man is not good enough to achieve salvation. But free children do not feel that life is a failure, for no one has taught them to say nay to life.

 

Religion and mysticism foster unrealistic thinking and materialistic behavior. The simple truth is that we, with our TV sets and jet planes are farther away from real living than the African native is. True, the aborigine also has his religion born of fear; but he is not impotent in love, nor homosexual, nor inhibited. His life is primitive, but he says yes to life in many essentials.

 

Like the savage, we too seek religion because of fear. But unlike the savage, we are a castrated people. We can teach our children religion only after we have unmanned them forever and broken their spirit through fear.

 

I have had many a case of a child ruined by religious training. To quote such cases would not help anyone. On the other hand, any Salvationist, too, can quote cases by the yard, cases that were “saved” by being “washed in the blood.” If one postulates that man is a sinner and needs to be redeemed, then the religionists are right.

 

But I ask parents to take a wider view, a view far outside their immediate circle. I ask parents to foster a civilization that will not have sin thrust on it at birth. I ask parents to eliminate any need for redemption, by telling the child that he is born good- not born bad. I ask parents to tell children that it is this world that can and must be made better, to direct energies to the here and now--not to a mythical eternal life to come.

 

No child should be invested with religious mysticism. Mysticism offers the child an escape from reality--but in a dangerous form. We all sometimes feel a need to escape from reality, or else we should never read a novel, or go to the movies, or drink a glass of whisky. But we escape with our eyes open, and very soon we come back to reality. The mystic is apt to live a continuously escapist life, putting all his libido into his Theosophy or his Spiritualism or his Catholicism or his Judaism.

 

No child is naturally a mystic. An incident that occurred at Summerhill during a spontaneous acting class one night emphasizes a child’s natural sense of reality if his reactions have not been warped by fear.

 

One night, I sat down on a chair and said: “I am St. Peter at the Golden Gate. You are to be folks trying to get in. Carry on.”

 

They came up with all sorts of reasons for getting in. One girl even came from the opposite direction and pleaded to get out! But the star turned out to be a boy of fourteen who went by me whistling, hands in his pockets.

 

“Hi,” I cried, “you can’t go in there.”

 

He turned and looked at me. “Oh” he said, “you are a new man on the job, aren’t you?”

 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

 

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

 

“Who are you?” I asked.

 

“God” he said, and went whistling into heaven.

 

Nor do children really want to pray. In children, prayer is a sham. I have asked scores of children, “What do you think about when you say your prayers!” Everyone tells the same tale he thinks of other things all the time. A child must think of other things, for the prayer means nothing to him. It is an imposition from without.

 

A million men say grace before meals each day, and probably 999,999 men say it mechanically, just as we say “Beg pardon” when we wish to pass someone in an elevator. But why pass our mechanical prayers and our mechanical manners on to the new generation? It is not honest. Nor is it honest to force religion on a helpless child. He should be left entirely free to make up his mind when he reaches the years of choice.

 

A greater danger than mysticism is the danger of making a child a hater. If a child is taught that certain things are sinful, his love of life must be changed to hate. When children are free, they never think of another child as being a sinner. In Summerhill, if a child steals and is tried by a jury of his fellows, he is never punished for the theft. All that happens is that he is made to pay back the debt. Children unconsciously realize that stealing is sickness. They are little realists, and are far too sensible to postulate an angry God and a tempting devil. Enslaved man made God in his own image, but free children who face life eagerly and bravely have no need to make any God at all.

 

If we want to keep our children healthy in soul, we must guard against giving them false values. Many of the people who doubt the theology of Christianity have no hesitation in teaching their children beliefs that they themselves question. How many mothers literally believe in a fiery hell, and literally believe in a golden heaven of harps? Yet these thousands of unbelieving mothers are warping their children’s souls by dishing up these antiquated primitive stories.

 

Religion flourishes because man will not, cannot, face his unconscious. Religion makes the unconscious the devil, and warns men to flee from its temptations. But make the unconscious, conscious, and religion will have no function.

 

Religion to a child most always means only fear. God is a mighty man with holes in his eyelids: He can see you wherever you are. To a child, this often means that God can see what is being done under the bedclothes. And to introduce fear into a child’s life is the worst of all crimes. Forever the child says nay to life; forever he is an inferior; forever a coward.

 

No one who in childhood has been threatened with fear of an afterlife in hell can possibly be free from a neurotic anxiety about security in this life. This is so even if such a person rationally understands that a heaven and a hell are infantile fantasies founded on nothing but human hopes and fears. The emotional warping one gets in infancy is almost always fixed for a lifetime. The stern God who rewards you with harps or burns you with fire is the God whom man made in his own image. He is the super-projection. God becomes a wish fulfillment; Satan a fear-fulfillment.

 

Thus, what gives pleasure comes to signify what is evil. Playing cards, and going to the theater, and dancing come to belong to the devil. All too often, to be religious is to be joyless. The stiff Sunday clothes that children are compelled to wear in most provincial towns testify to the ascetic and punishing quality of religion. Sacred music, too, is more often than not, mournful in nature. For a great many people it is an effort, a duty, to go to church. For a great many people, to be religious is to look miserable and to be miserable.

 

The new religion will be based on knowledge of self and acceptance of self. A prerequisite for loving others is a true love of self. How different from being reared under a stigma of original sin--which must result in self-hate and, consequently, hatred of others. “He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small.” Thus Coleridge, the poet, expressed the new religion. In the new religion, man will pray best when he loves all things both great and small--in himself!

Moral Instruction

 

Most parents believe that they fail their child unless they teach him moral values, unless they continually point out what is right and what is wrong. Practically every mother and father consider that, apart from taking care of the physical needs of their child, the inculcation of moral values is their chief duty, and that without such instruction the child would grow up to be a savage, uncontrolled in behavior, and with scant consideration for others. This belief springs to a large extent from the fact that most people in our culture accept at least passively, the dictum that man is a sinner by birth, that he is naturally bad, and that unless he is trained to be good he will be rapacious, cruel, and even homicidal.

 

The Christian Church states this belief openly, “We are miserable sinners.” The bishop and the schoolmaster believe, therefore, that the child must be led to the light. It does not matter whether the light is the light of the Cross or the light of Ethical Culture. In either case, the purpose is the same--to “uplift.”

 

Since both church and school agree that the child is born in sin, we cannot expect mothers and fathers to disagree with these great authorities. The church says, “If you sin, you shall be punished hereafter.” The parent takes his cue from this and says, “If you do that again, I shall punish you now.” Both strive to elevate by imposing fear.

 

The Bible says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” It is much more often the beginning of psychic disorder. For to invest a child with fear in any form is harmful.

 

Many a time a parent has said to me, “I do not understand why my boy has gone bad. I have punished him severely, and I am sure we never set a bad example in our home.” My work too often has been with damaged children who have been educated through fear of the strap or fear of the Lord--children who have been coerced into being good.

 

The parent rarely realizes what the terrible impact on the child has been of a constant stream of prohibitions, of exhortations, of preachments, and of the imposition of a whole system of moral behavior, which the young child was not ready for, did not understand, and therefore did not willingly accept.

 

The overwrought parent of the problem child never thinks of challenging his own code of morals, being for the most part quite sure that he himself knows exactly what is right and what is wrong, and that the correct standard has been authoritatively stated once and for all in Scripture. The parent rarely thinks of challenging the teachings of his own parents or the teachings of his own schoolmasters or the accepted code of society. He tends to take the entire credo of his culture for granted. To think about these beliefs, to analyze them, involves too much cerebration. To challenge them involves too much shock.

 

Thus the overwrought parent believes that his boy is at fault. The boy is thought to be willfully bad. I declare my strong conviction that the boy is never in the wrong. Every such boy I have handled has been a case of misguided early education and erroneous early training. Some of the very fundamental principles of psychology are bypassed in the process of the usual early indoctrination of children.

 

To begin with, almost everyone believes that man is a creature of will--that he can do that which he wills to do. Every psychologist will disagree. Psychiatry has proved that a man’s actions are controlled to a large extent by his unconscious. Most people would say that Dillinger could have been a non-murderer if he had only used his will. The criminal law is founded on the erroneous belief that every man is a responsible person capable of willing evil or good. Thus, fairly recently, a man was imprisoned in London for splashing women’s dresses with ink. To society, the splasher is an evil scoundrel who could be good if only he would try. To the psychologist, he is a poor, ill neurotic, doing a symbolic act of which he does not know the meaning. An enlightened society would lead him gently to a doctor.

 

The psychology of the unconscious has shown that most of our actions have a hidden source that we cannot reach except by a long elaborate analysis, and even psychoanalysis cannot reach the deepest parts of the unconscious. We act, but we do not know why we act.

 

Some time ago, I laid aside my many volumes of psychology and took up tile work. I do not know why. If I had taken up ink splashing instead, I would not have known why. Because in- laying tile is a social activity, I am a respected citizen; and because ink splashing is antisocial, the other man is a despised criminal. However, there is one difference between the ink splasher and me; I consciously like handiwork, but the criminal does not consciously like ink splashing. In handiwork, my conscious and my unconscious are working in unison; in ink splashing, the conscious and the unconscious are at odds. The antisocial act is the result of the conflict.

 

Some years ago, we had a pupil at Summerhill, a boy of eleven-bright intelligent, lovable. He would be sitting quietly reading. Then suddenly he would jump up, rush from the room, and try to set fire to the house. An impulse seized him, an impulse he could not control.

 

Many previous teachers had encouraged him, both by counsel and cane, to use his will to try to control his impulses. But the unconscious drive to start a fire was too strong to be controlled- it was far stronger than the conscious drive not to be poorly regarded. This boy was not a bad boy; he was a sick boy. What were the influences that made him sick? What are the influences that turn boys and girls into sick, delinquent children? I shall try to explain.

 

When we look at an infant, we know there is no wickedness in him – no more than there is wickedness in a cabbage or in a young tiger. The newborn child brings with him a life force; his will, his unconscious urge is to live. His life force prompts him to eat, to explore his body, to gratify his wishes. He acts as Nature intended him to act, as he was made to act. But, to the adult, the will of God in the child--the will of Nature in the child--is the will of the devil.

 

Practically every adult believes that the nature of the child must be improved. Hence it happens that every parent begins to teach the young child how to live.

 

The child soon comes up against a whole system of prohibitions. This is naughty and that is dirty and such and such is selfish. The original voice of the child’s natural life force meets the voice of instruction. The church would call the voice of Nature the voice of the devil, and the voice of moral instruction the voice of God. I am convinced that the names should be reversed.

 

I believe that it is moral instruction that makes the child bad. I find that when I smash the moral instruction a bad boy has received, he becomes a good boy.

 

There may be a case for the moral instruction of adults, although I doubt it. There is no case whatever for the moral instruction of children. It is psychologically wrong. To ask a child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist and the world belongs to him. When he has an apple, his one wish is to eat that apple. The chief result of mother’s encouraging him to share it with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother. Altruism comes later--comes naturally--if the child is not taught to be unselfish. It probably never comes at all if the child has been forced to be unselfish. By suppressing the child’s selfishness the mother is fixing that selfishness forever.

 

How does this come about? Psychiatry has demonstrated and proved that an unfulfilled wish lives on in the unconscious. Therefore, the child who is taught to be unselfish will, in order to please Mother, conform to her demands. He will unconsciously bury his real wishes, his selfish wishes--and because of this repression will retain his infantile desires and remain selfish throughout life. Moral instruction thus defeats its own purpose.

 

So it is also in the sexual sphere. The moral prohibitions of childhood fix the infantile interest in sex. The poor fellows who are arrested for infantile sexual acts--showing schoolgirls obscene postcards, playing with their genitals in public - are men who had moral mothers. The perfectly harmless interest of childhood was labeled a heinous sin. The child repressed the infantile desire. But that same desire lived on in the unconscious, and came out later in its original form, or more often, in a symbolic form. Thus the woman who lifts handbags in a department store is doing a symbolic act that has its origin in a repression due to moral teaching in childhood. Her behavior actually constitutes the gratification of a forbidden infantile sexual wish.

 

All these poor people an unhappy people. To steal is to be disliked by one’s group, and the group instinct is a strong one. To stand well with our neighbors is a genuine objective in human life. It is not in human nature to be antisocial. Egoism itself is enough to make normal people social. Only a stronger factor than egoism can make a person antisocial.

 

What is this stronger factor? When the conflict between the two selves--the self that Nature made and the self that moral education fashioned - is too bitter, egoism reverts to the infantile stage. Then the opinion of the crowd takes a subordinate place. Thus, the kleptomaniac knows the awful shame of appearing in the police court and of being written up in the newspapers, but the fear of public opinion is not so strong as the infantile wish. Kleptomania, in the last analysis, signifies a wish to find happiness; but because symbolic fulfillment can never satisfy the original wish, the victim goes on repeating his attempt.

 

An illustration will make clearer the process of the unfulfilled wish and its subsequent paths. When little Billie, aged seven, came to Summerhill, his parents told me that he was a thief. He had been a week in the school when one of the staff came to me and said that his gold watch had disappeared from his bedroom table. I asked the housemother if she knew anything about it.

 

“I saw Billie with the works of a watch,” she said. “When I asked him where he got it, he said he found it at home in a very, very deep hole in the garden.”

 

I knew that Billie locked up all his possessions in his trunk. I tried the lock with one of my own keys, and managed to open the trunk. In it lay the wreck of a gold watch, apparently the result of an attack with hammer and chisel. I locked the trunk and called in Billie.

 

“Did you see Mr. Anderson’s watch?” I asked.

 

He looked up at me with large innocent eyes. “No,” he said, and added, “What watch?”

 

I looked at him for half a minute. “Billie,” I said, “do you know where babies come from?”

 

He looked up with interest. “Yes,” he said, “from the sky.”

 

“Oh, no,” I smiled. “You grew inside your mommy; and when you were big enough, you came out.” Without a word, he walked to his trunk, opened it, and handed me a broken watch. His stealing was cured, for he had been only stealing the truth. His face lost its puzzled, worried look, and he became happier.

 

The reader may be tempted to think that Billie’s dramatic cure was magical. It was not. When a child talks of a deep hole at home, it is likely that he is unconsciously thinking of the deep cavern in which his life began. Again, I knew that the boy’s father kept a few dogs. Billie must have known where puppies came from, and he must have put two and two together and made a guess at the origin of babies. Mother’s timid lie drove him to repress his theory; and his wish to find out the truth took a form of symbolic gratification. Symbolically, he stole watches and opened them up to see what was inside them. I had another pupil who kept opening drawers for the same reason.

 

What parents must understand is that you cannot rush a child into a stage, which he is not ready for. People who are not satisfied to let their child develop naturally from the crawling stage to the walking stage, and who set an infant on its two little legs too early in life before he is ready to walk, only achieve the melancholy result of making the child bandy legged. Since the young limbs are not strong enough to support the child’s weight, the demand is premature. The result is disaster. Had the parents waited until the child was naturally ready to walk, the child would, of course, have walked perfectly well all by himself. Likewise, untimely efforts to toilet-train the child must produce baleful results.

 

The same considerations apply to moral instruction. To force a child to adopt values that he is not naturally ready to adopt not alone results in choking off the adoption of such values in due course and in due time, but also induces neuroses.

 

To ask a boy, aged six, to chin a bar four times is to make an excessive demand on the youngster. His muscles are not strong enough for such exercise. Yet if the same boy is left to develop naturally, he will easily achieve that result at age eighteen. Similarly, one should not attempt to hasten the development of a youngster’s moral sense. The parent must exercise patience, secure in the thought that the child has been born good, and that he inevitably will turn out to be a good human being if he is not crippled and thwarted in his natural development by interference.

 

My experience of many years in handling children at Summerhill convinces me that there is no need whatsoever to teach children how to behave. A child will learn what is right and what is wrong in good time – provided he is not pressured.

 

Learning is a process of acquiring values from the environment. If parents are themselves honest and moral, their children will, in good time, follow the same course.

 


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 676


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