So people have been yelling “Grow Up!” at us a lot lately.
And it's in a really weird context.
Maybe you've been hearing “grow up” a lot too,
and maybe you'll recognize the context.
Quick background:
We recently made a video about the author Neil Gaiman,
and how there's really good reason to believe he committed sexual assault
and so we do believe that.
And distributed through the general excuse-making
and denial and apologia that you'd expect was a theme.
People yelling “Grow Up!” at us
all, apparently independently, coming up with this thing
that we really needed to hear.
The problem is that you guys glorify entertainers to a hero status.
You brought that on yourself. Grow up. Grow up.
Children have heroes.
Adults should not aspire to be another adult
Grow Up! Acknowledging that people
that move our hearts and minds have human flaws, too, is a sign of growing up.
You don't even know what this video is about.
Go back to college
Heroes are for children.
This is only a problem in an infantile civilization.
The Infantilisation of Western Culture.
Published August 1st. 2000 and ugh
I'm not reading all that F***ing hell
You get the idea!
They say we're not being realistic, that we're being immature.
We're children
either for having heroes or for thinking that everyone isn't a r*pist
or for thinking that celebrities are perfect or that they're not human,
whatever that means.
Basically, if you've got an issue with sexual assault, you need to grow up.
But why??
like this bothered me so much! Why?
Why “grow up” and I know
mean people being mean on the Internet
blokes who disbelieve women and defend r*pists
What's the mystery? They're just nasty.
They're just nasty men.
There's no sense in us setting up a whole Rube Goldberg machine in here
with a chandelier and a net
and then pulling the mask off the ghoul to discover that
Oh, it was nasty men all along.
Surely this is
as so many videos make obvious before you've even clicked on them
The f*cking patriarchy,
*JINKIES!*
And yet grow up feel so specific,
so particularly fine tuned to pick on certain vulnerabilities and flaws that we
maybe all feel as less than perfect adults or as not quite normal folk.
It picks on those sensitivities while simultaneously
seeming to have so little to do with s*xual assault.
So we were curious
and we asked some of our YouTube friends
if they'd noticed and well...
Pillar of Garbage: Grow Up!
The Hogwarts Legacy controversy slash boycott failed
because the sane people have finally had enough of you
terminally on the internet freaks and
Hoots: Grow Up, will you!
If we were needed to ban every children story that seemed
outdated and problematic - Open your eyes!
Grow up. (grow up)
Talis: Grow up.
So then, seeing that these examples also seemed to have
something to do with naivete and wanting to change the world
and pushing back against injustice, we were frankly even more confused!
Now, why we're all these people saying Grow Up?
What are we doing exactly when we deploy insults like these?
Why, without just taking the answer for granted, is being grown up good?
And why is not being grown up bad?
What do people mean when they invoke maturity?
It seems that if you put yourself out there
with even the vaguest of gestures towards justice: Boom!
there will be a great deal of naysayers angry at you,
waiting to criticize you in a very specific and predictable way.
Sarah’s voice: Your children.
Exactly.
They'll say that you’re children
Sarah: No, Neil. Your children, the baby.
Oh, yes.
We have children and we just had a baby and we quite like the baby.
The baby is brilliant.
And it got us to thinking
Why come people think that being childlike is bad?
So.
yeah.
🎵 frantic high energy Jazz drum solo 🎵
🎵 snare roll 🎵
🎵 drums continue 🎵
🎵 tension on the drums builds 🎵
Have you ever said it? Yelled at someone “Grow Up!”
or said it sincerely, like, “I think you need to grow up.”
I have.
So I'm guilty as charged.
And I think a lot of us have.
I think it's a very normal putdown.
It's possibly the most succinct way of saying I big and good
you small and bad, but that doesn't mean it's ineffective.
It's quite maddening
and sometimes pretty hurtful and usually incredibly frustrating
to get these comments.
And I think it's fair to say they're difficult to counter.
Let's look at this example.
You are simply children who can't fathom the fact that people are multifaceted.
I mean, dude, your hair says it all.
This is in response to a video about credible r*pe allegations.
What kind of person looks at the despair and anger
that inevitably follows a high profile
s*xual assault case and says grow
Woman: Don’t you wave your hand at me!
I wave my hand at you
Senator: when you grow up I’ll be glad to
Women: “When you grow up??”
That was Senator Hatch dismissing a group of women who opposed his endorsement
of Judge Brett Kavanaugh because Kavanaugh, you remember, credible r*pe allegations.
So this is a high profile example of invoking grow up to shut down
a conversation about s*xual assault.
But it is also an example of grow up as an expression of power within a hierarchy.
You've got a sitting white male senator.
He's up here operating within the grossly unjust system,
and you've got this group of activist women
Grassroots. Speaking with nothing but their own voices,
attempting to call the system into question.
It seems to be the case that “grow up”
or more accurately, references to childlike behavior are common
when someone in a hierarchy is speaking to someone from a group below them.
This is illustrated quite comprehensively by legal scholar and professor
of Constitutional Law Ruth Colker in her paper The Power of Insults.
In it, she argues that
Legal Kimchi: the economic and political power elite
has effectively hurled insults at civil rights activists,
plaintiffs and their lawyers to undermine civil rights reform.
I think most of us can recognize that activists, lefties
and basically anyone trying to create positive change in the world.
Those trying to push civil rights reforms have to put in much more work
than the power elites sitting on their status quo,
and Overton Window-ing their way into oblivion.
But as Colker says
Legal Kimchi: insufficient attention has been paid to how the power
elite uses the cultural tool of insults to undermine these reforms.
As she points out, insults are part of a long tradition of class reproduction.
She takes us back to the early years of the USA, to the 19th century,
the time between the revolutionary and civil wars, which was a particular
hotspot for duels of honor, a time in which
FD Signifier: many respectable, educated men
eagerly avenged even the slightest of insults by
repairing to the local field of honor and blasting holes in each other.
A lot of men, some of them very famous, were shot
in some duel over some petty insult.
I am Alexander Hamilton and I'm a fragile little gentleman.
But duels weren't universal.
If some upstart from the lower classes happened to insult
the honor of a gentleman, this would not be followed by a duel.
Oh, no, no, no.
This would be followed
by beating the wretch with a cane or lashing the reprobate with a horsewhip.
And funnily enough, not funny at all, actually.
This is also how children have been historically disciplined in respectable
Western societies,
in educational and religious institutions up until very recently.
It's arguable that like the impoverished lower classes of the 19th century
children have historically also had no honor to defend.
But anyway, insults!
Colker points out how, just like in the 1800s,
those currently in power exist in a completely different world
in terms of how insults work.
She points out that insults function
both as a distraction from civil rights reforms
and that those insults are more likely to be successful
because of the preexisting weakness of the civil right in question.
That is, if someone is lower on the social hierarchy, they have to do a great deal
more proving themselves of worth as part of their response to an insult.
Putting it my own way, I would say that
if a disempowered person is dealing with the gallery, the audience
...
over insults and slings and arrows, then they have far less control
of the narrative than the person with power.
This means that the insult itself causes group based harm
and it fuels negative stereotypes about that disempowered group
and it deflects attention away from their struggles.
So surprise, surprise! There are countless examples of Trump doing this.
Did we want to...? Do you wanna...?
We want to talk about Trump?
Are we are we talking about this?
Have we heard about this?
Trump.
This is the neo-fascist playbook.
Insult anyone with integrity over and over and get the client media to report on it
and ham it up and repeat it until no one remembers
anything about that person of integrity except the insult that you made up.
Most people remember Trump impersonating and mocking journalist Serge Kovaleski
at a campaign rally in 2015, flapping his arms and such.
But what Colker points out in her paper, and I'd forgotten this,
is that that whole thing started because Trump had made a false claim
that the Muslim community in New Jersey
was cheering as the World Trade Center fell on 911.
And Kovaleski, being a journalist, had published words
that said, No, they didn't.
The whole situation devolved into “Will this boorish behavior
derail Trump's campaign?”
Instead of spotting that Trump had used ableism to Trojan horse Islamophobia,
he did it again when he mocked NFL players
for taking a knee during the national anthem.
Successfully distracting from
the major issue of police brutality against Black Americans.
And again, when he described Haitian and African immigrants
as coming from, quote, ‘shithole countries’ and describing Mexican-Americans
as drug dealers, and r*pists, all as cover for his administration rescinding DACA
a policy that allows certain individuals who came to the United States as children
to stay in the country.
Remember that?
No. Neither does anyone else.
And all of that maybe feels like old news when at time of writing Elon Musk
and a bunch of fortune gobshite cronies are locked in some government
vault, pressing Control plus A, Delete on America.
But it's very relevant because the elite deploying insults and slander
and dehumanization is at its most rampant and shameless right now.
Returning to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,
a Trump appointee.
At a time when there was ongoing
investigations into credible allegations of s*xual assault against Kavanaugh.
Trump, of course, mocked the alleged victim,
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Trump: How did you get home?
I don't remember.
How did you get there?
I don't remember. Where is the place? I don't remember.
How many years ago was it?
I don't
Once again, using insults to gain political advantage.
That is, another conservative Republican judge on the Supreme Court
now is not quite the same thing as telling me to grow up?
Yes.
No.
kind of.
It would be a mistake
to think that insults are just the thing that the bad guys do
many voices: Grow Up!
There is growing division among general online leftish folk
over whether using certain insults
is necessary to express ourselves and show some urgency and strength
and to make our points well and uncompromisingly.
Or maybe insults are pretty much always hierarchy reproducing and
Elon Musk won't see your body shaming tweets, but your dad bod friends will.
And obviously there's always been an ideological difference
between those who believe to whatever extent that the politics of identity
should come second to and are a distraction from the politics of class.
At it's most cliched and stripped of nuance
That's a blue haired wokey arguing with a tankie
both of which are insults that never seem to actually land
or hurt anyone because, you know, they're very silly.
Communists respond to being called “Tankies”
the way that gay people respond to being called “sodomites.”
Like, what did you just call me?
It's so cute.
A Tankie?? Oh, I'm a sodomite!
Yeah, I am.
So given that bit of noise,
there are actually only a few things that I can say definitively about insults.
One, this is not a well-studied area.
We basically can't say with any confidence,
whether it's practice to go low or it's counterproductive to go high.
We just don't seem to know.
Another is, as I said earlier, that insults are a useful tool for power elites
and that they are deployed by the enemies of the working class
and of disenfranchized people to distract from and sabotage civil rights reforms.
So it is interesting that Ruth Colker in her conclusion,
doesn't fall one way or the other on the go low go high dichotomy.
She doesn't recommend that we do insults or that we do not do insults.
She recommends a contextual approach.
She suggests that we ask, what is the context of the insult?
What are we trying to achieve?
And I think that's smart.
Adding to that,
I can infer from her paper that it might be smart for us to hold onto
and focus on the original struggle before the Trumps and Musks of this world
turn any given emancipatory thing into a nonsense ad hominem game.
So we should learn from what happened with Serge Kovaleski and keep our eyes
on the goal as it existed before all the distraction tactics.
But importantly,
as much as we don't know whether insults unambiguously reproduce hierarchy,
we can say with some confidence that they reproduce social groups
in-groups and out-groups.
Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is not necessarily a good thing.
It is a thing thing.
As professor of psychology, Karina Korostelina puts it:
Hoots: An insult is a social act
constructed mutually by social groups
on the boundary between them.
Which is to say,
one of the ways that we create and reinforce social groups
and the differences between those groups is through insults.
Which got me to thinking.
When someone says Grow Up.
What is the in-group? And what is the outgroup?
It's not adults and children, right?
I don't think that these commenters are accusing Sarah and I
of being actual children, especially since
Sarah was visibly pregnant and I look f***ing old.
Have you seen these new video essayists they've got these days?
Tirrrb and José María Luna? Skin like baby angels.
No they're not saying that we’re children.
They're saying we're something else, something child like.
And so they tell me to grow up that everybody in the world is corrupt.
So hush and shush.
And if you're trying
to push for justice, rest assured we can't because it's just the world.
So you better get more mature.
Sarah, I feel like an awful tosser doing all this Hamilton stuff, I really, it's
tremendously cringe.
So I once again looked through the comments and tried to find a theme.
I know I'm a glutton for punishment,
but it was important to understand what “Grow Up” means.
And then I remembered.
I've said it.
I have.
What did I mean?
And I remember I meant grow up like
be more Irish, be more like me.
It had been during a fight with Sarah about parenting because Sarah is American
and I'm Irish, and American culture seems to put romantic partners
and offspring on an equal footing.
Whereas, like, Irish culture is a little more oriented
around babies and reproduction.
So we value the children in a family kind of over the adults, it seems to me.
Sound off in the comments
if you think I'm wrong about that, or if you think one or the other
of those two cultures is repugnant. I think it's just a difference.
At least, I think it’s just a difference
when I'm not arguing with someone about it,
but when someone else is saying that my culture is wrong
and I have to argue that their culture is wrong,
there is a tool at my disposal well within reach.
Grow Up.
There's only one objective answer here.
The one that the grown ups are willing to admit to.
And with that insight, I could see that these comments did fit a pattern,
not an immediately obvious pattern,
but one which revealed a lot about our implicit understanding of society
and the world. Hierarchies we share in common
so deeply and unknowingly that we rarely glimpse them.
Grow Up, as it turns out
is a very special kind of insult.
But in order to understand why, we need to move on to the next
most obvious question, why is it even a problem to be childlike?
Why is this an insult?
Why is it bad?
Why? Of all of the possible ways that we could group people together,
do we hate this group?
Children.
🎵 bass note 🎵
So why get bent out of shape
about being told to grow up?
No, this is actually bollocks.
🎵 Jazz drum solo 🎵
This is actually bollocks
because by the time we get to the conclusion,
we're not going to be talking about insults at all.
It's like a red herring, you know.
Sarah: Why don't you talk about something positive?
Insults are just a negative bit.
we need something uplifting.
Neil: I mean, look.
we're going to talk about nice, hopeful love things.
It's just that and the first comment that we're going to get is going to be
why are you talking about this when the world is on -
this shouldn't be here, sweetheart.
Why are you talking about childism when, like, you know, we're all going to die?
I don't mean - I'm sorry Sarah: besides
if we set ourselves up to only talk about the worst things.
That's all we'll ever talk about.
And people still won't be happy.
🎵 jazz hihat 🎵
You're getting too caught up in the commenters again.
Both: Just talk about children.
Have you noticed that it's kind of socially acceptable
to say you hate children or at least to say you don't like them?
It's definitely socially acceptable to say that you don't want them around
to shoot a look of disdain
at a traveling companion because you've spotted a baby on an airplane.
Or to judge the parenting of a child who's crying at the grocery store,
or to suspiciously keep an eye on a group of teenagers at the movies.
Adult-only spaces are normative, and even spaces which allow children do
so only if they're well-behaved.
Is itsocially acceptable for a crying baby
to be in a fancy restaurant? Or would you expect that
their mother would whisk them out until they calmed down?
Maybe judge her for bringing a baby there in the first place?
Look it up.
Search the phrase I hate children because I did that and it wasn't good.
People are mean.
People are mean to babies.
I found screeds at various levels of professionalism, disliking children
for being boring or loud. Disliking them, for taking up space,
blaming parents for being too lax about discipline, opining that children
should not be allowed in public until they learn to act properly.
So here's an example.
A paper out of Australia documented that during a public debate
about whether dogs should be allowed in cafes, the conversation
quickly turned from dogs who were ultimately doing fine to children
who were seen as the real threat to peace, enjoyment and public order.
The paper quotes one person's take on the matter.
Talis: I'd really like to see it go further
and remove all children from public areas.
Holiday spots and traveling options should be classed as
for and not for children.
Make these disgusting things, travel in their own special carriages and planes
and live in their own areas.
The world would be a much better place
if all children were just locked up until they were old enough to behave.
This idea that children a class of people
should be confined to private spheres is somehow not controversial.
For young children, this discrimination is justified
by evoking their disruptiveness or vulnerability.
Either that they're too unruly to be allowed access to public space
or that they're too vulnerable, easily corrupted
or stealable or otherwise hurt by being allowed in public.
Older children, however, are not seen as vulnerable, but instead as criminal.
As one paper puts it:
Rohan Davis: after around age twelve
adult society recognizes children, particularly children of color,
no longer as helpless pieces of property, but instead as the reckless criminals
devoid of any sense of responsibility
or understanding of their lives.
As a result, young people are driven out of public spaces.
Teenagers are routinely overtly profiled or kept from accessing public space.
Think of the Mosquito, a device which emits a high pitched ring
which teenagers can hear but adults can't.
Installing the Mosquito
in parks or outside of buildings prevents teenagers from “loitering.”
You know, the crime of appearing in public without spending money.
This is a particularly impactful limitation for teenagers
who tend to have very little money and very few places to go.
The mosquito is widely used in Australia, North America and Europe,
despite the fact that it contravenes articles on human
rights from both the European Convention on Human Rights
and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
and that it's capable of causing children physical harm
with symptoms such as dizziness, headache, nausea and sensory impairment.
The risk is greatest for non-speaking children and infants who may be exposed to
the sound for prolonged periods of time by parents who can't hear it themselves.
And so they don't know why their child is in distress.
And yes,
this bias against children is impacted by other mechanisms of marginalization,
especially race and class.
Spaces that privileged children can access freely
like parks or schools are often inaccessible
to children from minority groups.
Here in Ireland,
Traveler children are technically invited to attend public schools,
but they face persistent discrimination ranging from more benign erasure,
their culture and language is absent from the Irish curriculum
to the more extreme forms of hostility from classmates and teachers.
The result means that Traveler children
are incentivized to leave school at an early age.
As one traveler put it:
Caelan Conrad: my parents wanted me to go to school,
but because of the discrimination that there was in secondary school, I left
after six months of secondary school.
I just couldn't stick it.
I was really good at school.
I was never in trouble.
I was never sent home.
They used to call me (slur)
Or you're a dirty (slur)
Go wash herself.
Racialized children are, in fact, frequently denied childhood altogether.
Elliot Sang: Racial bias treats Black children
as physically stronger,
more sexually knowledgeable, less innocent, less sensitive to pain,
and more culpable than white children.
This exclusion shows that entitlement to the ideal of childhood is not a given,
but is instead a privilege that is largely exclusive to white children.
This is something we should all be familiar with
through high profile cases like 12 year old
Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun in a park when police officers shot him.
Or Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old walking in public shot
by a vigilante for the crime of walking home from a convenience store.
The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, who in his spare time paints
images like this, was acquitted of all charges.
The jury clearly agreeing that an unarmed black child walking
out of the store constituted behavior suspicious enough to justify murder.
Seemingly paradoxically, Black adults are often viewed as more childlike.
Showing the mutability of these categories.
How we invoke adulthood to make racialized children appear dangerous
but invoke childhood to make adults seem
as if they're undeserving of rights.
In either case, we're using age
as a mechanism of control and terror.
But thankfully,
there's a philosophical movement meant to question the morality of this assertion.
It's called Childism, and it's exciting.
It's new.
It's compatible with leftist goals.
And it feels congruent
with a lot of the stuff we've been exploring over the last couple of years.
But before we go on in the style of better video essays,
we must outline the term
so childism can refer to two distinct concepts.
The first is discrimination against children.
That's an “ism” the way that racism describes
discrimination against people of different races.
The second conception of childism is a philosophy
one that proposes more egalitarian relations
between adults and children.
This is an “ism” in the way that feminism proposes more egalitarian relations
between genders.
In this essay, when we say childism, we'll be referring to the philosophy
to the foundational idea that children are people
and more importantly, the responsibility that we have to reconfigure society
so that it serves the needs of both children and adults.
Because right now it only serves the latter.
And children are people.
Really take that in for a second.
Children are people.
It doesn't sound revolutionary to say that children are people,
but when you stop to consider the way we currently operate, it becomes clear
that we don't see children as people.
We see them as future adults or almost people.
This goes all the way back to Aristotle, who argued that an organism's
mature form is its definitional form, fulfilling its actual purpose.
All of the stages leading up to that are oriented to the goal of adulthood.
Though rather than seeing this as an Aristotelian conception, we're likelier
to view children through a lens of developmental psychology.
As someone who has not yet developed their full capacity
for empathy or their real eyesight abilities,
this is how Piaget described children as existing at various stages of being.
Where those stages are defined by deficit when compared to an imagined adult norm.
And even if we don't consciously think of children as deficient adults,
we often see them as beings in the process of becoming
who should be nurtured in that process by those of us in power:
Adults. Until such a time that that child develops their full abilities
and crosses the threshold into adulthood themselves.
Grows up.
We often think of the child as a sort of evolution in miniature.
First, you're a baby and you can't see well,
you can't speak, you can't walk, etc.
Then you're a toddler.
You can speak, You can walk a bit,
but you can't really engage with long term plans or complex operations.
And then you're a child, then a teenager.
Always there are developmental milestones you are supposed to hit.
And finally, adulthood.
You've reached your final form.
This is a philosophical concept called recapitulation, that the development
of an individual child mirrors the phylogeny of the human species.
And like with the modernist misconception of evolutionary theory,
we believe that the ultimate form is the best one,
the one to strive for
the Blastoise
This is the reason people tell us to grow up.
It's unseemly for us to still not have progressed to adulthood.
But it's a mistake to view evolution hierarchically.
Apes are not better than monkeys.
They are adapted to different environments.
And there's actually no such thing as a Blastoise
Likewise, Social Darwinism
was a misapplication of evolution.
Viewing some societies
as more evolved than others when they were just differently adapted.
The idea that you are not a person until you have hit these developmental
milestones is essentially the same as you not being a person.
If you're non-normative and have, for example, a disability,
maybe you have poor eyesight like an infant,
maybe you have poor social skills like a young child,
maybe you have poor emotional management skills like a teenager.
Ableism interacts with Adultism so strongly that they start to feel like
almost the same thing.
The idea that respect is only earned via growth to this ideal of adult,
a physically and emotionally independent being.
Zoe Bee: Childism dissolves this
dichotomy of independent adults
and dependent young children by emphasizing mutual dependency
on various levels as a fundamental to human existence.
Human beings, emotions, and agency
are shaped through relations to other human beings
and to their emotions and agency, as well as to non-humans.
That is, animals, microbiomes, the climate, etc..
This challenges the notion of liberty and freedom and raises the question
what does freedom actually mean in the light of the understanding
of social and more than social relations as characterized by interdependence
and in light of children's experience and practices of this interdependence
between human beings as well as between humans and non-human species,
and materiality, child ism asks us to stop equating dependance with subservience,
but rather to see all of us as partially dependent
and partially independent in ever changing webs of interdependence.
Even the most independent person is still dependent on human society,
and any period of relative independence is going to be brief.
Sandwiched between starting off as babies and experiencing
increasing forms of disability.
So why not abolish the hierarchy and embrace the fact that nothing we do
is ever really independent?
Even for babies, as I've just learned with breastfeeding.
It's a cooperative effort
between the baby and I, with both of us learning and adjusting for the other.
In order for it to work.
It's not something that I can impose on the baby.
Childism at its most basic points out that children are people.
Children are people.
My baby is a person
with a physical experience of the world and a social experience of the world.
They have needs that differ from adult needs and that does not make
those needs any less important.
They have a right to express themselves socially
without that expression being taken as distasteful,
without their social experiences, needs or self-expression
being reduced to some inconvenience for whatever adults are nearby.
So if we are really ready to wrestle with this, what would it look like?
To say that children have rights that babies have rights?
In some ways it makes us rethink what we mean by rights,
because I don't think my infants should be casting a ballot in the voting booth.
Not only because I don't think that that would benefit society,
but because I don't think it would benefit them.
I don't think that when a kid wants to exclusively eat ice cream, their parent
is violating their foundational human rights if she makes them eat some carrots.
But those examples reflect a misconception of rights
that is very individualistic and taken to their extreme.
They lead us to some very uncomfortable places.
I frequently cite Firestone de Beauvoir and Foucault on this channel,
and while I really like a lot of their work,
they all tackle this phenomenon and end up in, frankly, the wrong place.
All of them are uncomfortable with hierarchy
and all of them want children to be our equals.
But they seem to get stuck on the idea that treating children as equals involves
giving them free rein
because in many ways they conceive of freedom
as the benchmark right
And some of their writing
gets unconscionable when they, to different extents,
explore this in the context of adult and children sexual relations.
And I know that all philosophy, when taken to an extreme,
can sound problematic,
but Simone, Shulamith, Michele,
So what if instead of valuing freedom or independence
as the ultimate benchmark of respect, we pick different rights?
Like Care?
the right to be cared for, the right to have one's needs met.
That right is the same,
whether we’re talking about an adult or a child,
we all need shelter, food, connection
or what about the right to community?
So the right to have your needs be considered
when making group decisions, the right to access spaces,
the right to have your voice hear
the right to be a participant in the world
rather than just have the world impact you.
So how would this look?
Well, I'm an immigrant and so my assumptions about how life works
get challenged all the time because certain
aspects of life work quite differently here in Ireland.
And children are treated much differently here than they are in the US.
As an example, let's look at that very Irish center of community:
The Pub.
Pubs have the same components as bars in the US.
They may have racks of hard alcohol.
They may have televisions playing sports.
They may have music.
They certainly have the regulars who may or may not have
substance use disorders,
but they also have children,
and not even necessarily the well-behaved children.
But children who run around underfoot, children who cry,
children whose parents aren't reining them in at all.
Last year, I wandered into the pub, not realizing that
it was confirmation season and I found tons of kids.
They were dressed up in their best outfits, running from one
end of the pub to the other, shrieking happily while their parents got sloshed.
This wasn't a private event.
The pub wasn't rented out.
It's just socially acceptable here for kids,
even kids hyper on sugar and special event energy
to share a social space with adults.
Children here are closer to having the right to community recognized.
Another example: let's look at Japan.
The extent to which the built environment is structured to meet
the needs of children is really different there.
I remember moving to Japan and seeing for the first time
a five year old confidently walking down
the sidewalk alone, not a parent in sight.
Having been a preschool teacher in the US.
Walking my classroom anywhere outside of the building was terrifying.
An event we minimized as much as possible.
But in Japan, even in major cities,
kids walk alone.
Don't mistake this for the idea
that Japanese children are more mature or better behaved.
instead, Japan has cultural
and structural differences which allow children to be out in public.
The sidewalks are broad and generous.
Speed limits are low.
Children are taught to raise their arms
as they cross the street in order to make themselves more visible.
But all the same drivers expect children to be in the crosswalks,
so they watch for children in the crosswalks.
During times when children are likely to be commuting to or from school.
Networks of volunteer adults place themselves along well-traveled routes
so that they can watch out for anything dangerous.
There's a popular Japanese TV program
called Hajimete no otsukai
which documents the right of passage of children
going on their first solo errand.
So cameramen follow these children ranging from ages 2 to 5
as they navigate crowded city centers or wild rural countrysides.
to bring home a packet of fish or to bring cookies
to their grandma. They do this completely on their own.
And the show is really, really charming.
I would recommend you watch
public infrastructure in Japan
is designed to some extent with children in mind.
This feels very different from how we live in the English speaking world.
As one paper puts it:
Cogito: parents across socioeconomic
backgrounds in Western cities
consider public space unsafe for children, a concern fueled by media
hype around stranger danger and an increasingly risk averse society.
Hence, children who are still seen out about in the street with an adult
are often regarded with a mixture of suspicion and worry.
These paradoxical positions share a view that children should remain in child
friendly places such as school, home organized after school activities
or the playground.
This was from a research paper called No Messing Around,
which looked at how children view public spaces in Dublin.
So don't let my romantic view of the pub influence you too much.
Children here are still quite marginalized when it comes to
access to public spaces.
Beyond those explicitly carved out for them
with special deterministic functions like a formalized playground
with literal boundaries versus a large car free avenue,
which would facilitate more free creative play.
And God, does Dublin need that?
I'm sure many people from the US who've been to Ireland
and by Ireland they just mean Dublin are thinking.
But is it Dublin just idyllic?
And that's precisely the problem.
Dublin is so solely focused on tourism,
on presenting this quaint little twee image of Ireland
so that it can extract as much money as possible from said tourists.
That it fails locals in general, and especially fails children.
A few years ago, security at the Temple Bar, a pub famous
for having the most expensive drinks in Ireland and for being a place
that no self-respecting Irish person would ever set foot in.
Well, they got upset that children, a 13 year old and 16 year old specifically
were skateboarding on the pedestrianised street outside of the pub.
So, you know, being in public, using the street,
presumably making the atmosphere
less conducive to selling thirty euro pints or whatever.
So now the pub is also famous as one where the security guards
assault children for having the audacity to play in the public space.
Seriously. Boycott the Temple Bar.
But it's grim in other places too.
A paper on children in urban spaces focused on a neighborhood in L.A.,
specifically the neighborhood around South Central Avenue, southeast Los Angeles,
which is a primarily low income, high density area
where residents are majority Latin-American and Black.
Children are marginalized in the same way that we've mentioned before.
Few places to congregate, streets that are unsafe for commuting, etc., etc..
You get the idea, but also by factors unique to the area,
like through criminalization and institutionalization.
The paper's author, Meredith Abood,
documents how children move through
regimented spaces, each day.
The majority of children go to afterschool programs,
which means that they are in an institutional setting
from 7:30 a.m. until 6 p.m. each day.
But when surveyed, only 9% of fifth graders like their after school programs
and based on Abood’s writing, I don't blame them for disliking them.
José María Luna: The children in the program are
for the most part, institutionalized, disciplined and controlled.
Students are commonly told to put their hands on their heads
until the room is silent, often for upwards of 20 minutes,
or told they cannot go play until they learn to make a perfectly
straight line, meaning they are often standing still in a line
for 15 minutes until they are released and given permission to play.
Students who misbehave because they refuse to silently work on their homework
or do not put their hands on their head for the entire 5 minutes are “benched”
and spend the majority
of the three hour block sitting alone with their heads down.
If they are lucky, they just have to pick up 50 pieces of trash
as if they are convicted criminals serving probation.
Remarkably, however, students rarely question
the hyper-disciplined environment because
they cannot conceive of anything else
in a built environment that constrains their play,
autonomy and freedom,
where police can search children and youth without cause
and where more money is spent on prisons than schools,
Children often do not even realize
they can ask for or expect anything more
I think it's particularly noteworthy that this demographic of children
is also primarily made of children of color.
Children who are not awarded
the same premise of helpless innocence as their white peers.
As a paper on Black girlhood puts it
Ember Green: racialized gender and sexuality, i.e.
Black genders and sexualities in and under white supremacy
and colonization, negate and obliterate
the very idea of the subject position.
And the categories of child, childhood, girlhood and human
in tow of such configurations
is the denial of innocence
in the traditional sense of the word, where Blackness blots out
naivete, not knowing and exemption from responsibility.
Or, to put it more crudely, children of color aren't given
the presumption of innocence that white children are routinely granted.
We are dominating and subordinating young people just because we can.
And in the cases of racialized children, we are even more cruel and harsh,
potentially creating a scenario where kids go
from institutionalization on the basis of their age
to institutionalization on the basis of their race.
The school to prison nexus.
And I ask you genuinely, Is this how we want to treat people?
Is this how we want our society to run?
Have you heard the baby in the background?
Neil actually just ran out with them.
But I think you might have heard a little bit of it.
They're here and we're not doing that because we're showing off.
I mean, maybe you think
that I'm trying to monetize them or make a shift to mommy blogger,
but I'm not. Don't worry.
I don't plan to make videos which feature them.
We're not that sort of channel.
And like many of you,
I would worry about the ethics
of exposing someone to a public life that they didn't consent to.
But this is also my job, and I think children should be allowed at workplaces.
And I know there might be some loss of productivity.
There's been some loss of productivity today.
And sure, maybe not every job, certainly not the dangerous ones.
But the system we have now requires institutionalization.
The system we have requires carers to either
give up their careers entirely
to focus on their children, or to segment their day into sections
where they're isolated from their children and their children are in care.
And I don't want to do either of those.
I really like that most European countries have generous maternity leave,
but I'd also be pretty miserable
if I spent every second of maternity leave
focused solely on the baby and completely neglecting
my own need for intellectual stimulation or to participate in society.
Babies should be allowed in public for their own sake, but doing so
would allow their parents to maintain their public access as well.
And that's why the baby's here
Because they're a newborn and they can't be left alone.
Because I'm breastfeeding every few hours,
because I don't want to put them in daycare.
And if you take me less seriously as a thinker or as a professional,
because I've got a baby strapped to my chest,
that's your Adultism showing.
Everything I've discussed today
gets extra depressing when you see what children want
and how easy it would be for us to give it to them.
when they're asked, children want to be integrated
and valued in their communities.
They want to feel safe
and they want to be able to move through their neighborhoods.
They want to be able to conduct
a variety of activities like playing sports or exploring.
They want public art.
They want green spaces.
They want tangible interactions with nature.
They want spaces where they can meet up with their peers.
And this one was especially heartening.
Spaces where they can mix with kids from different
ethnic and religious backgrounds than their own.
So, like, they want what we all want but shaped like them.
Usable for them.
Public sculptures that they can climb on.
Adequate lighting for dark areas.
Bird feeders.
Graffiti walls where they're allowed to paint.
Seating protected from the elements.
Doesn't that sound nice?
I hesitate to give many concrete examples of what changes
that we should make for children.
Because I'm not a child.
I'll just be designing
around an idyllic image of a child.
But children aren't an idea.
They're a cohort.
They can tell us what they want.
We should invite children to the table and not tokenistically
but with the intention of actually engaging and taking them seriously.
Otherwise, we'll keep perpetuating an unfair adult framework, as Abood puts it.
José María Luna: If children and youth
do not have a way to empower themselves
and shape their communities, they will remain victims of an adult world
that has continuously demonstrated that it does not care.
I like children.
I like having children sharing my commute.
I like having children running underfoot at the pub.
I don't think children should be confined to a narrow range
of child friendly spaces like fenced in playgrounds.
But whether you like or don't like children shouldn't matter
because they're people. They have just as much right to be
in public life as you do, regardless ofyour feelings on that matter.
🎵 bass note 🎵
We can't make anyone watching
care about children.
We can't make -
(Loud Click)
Neil, what happened??
🎵 jazz drums 🎵
Neil: I don't know.
We don't have Philosophy Tube’s budget, do we?
🎵 more drums 🎵
Recently, I spent some time in a maternity hospital.
It was interesting.
There was an atmosphere of tension and of excitement and magic, actually,
and horror and grossness and mundaneness and occasionally tragedy.
We had some time to soak up all of it.
Sarah was in there for almost ten days, having the baby.
Her labor had to be induced.
And unfortunately, it wasn't a very successful induction
and little Bábóg had some trouble coming out into the world.
Basically, contractions, but no dilation, no progression, just a little baby
stuck in there getting squished by a womb,
displaying increasingly distressed and distressing vital signs.
And of course, Sarah in absolute agony, but kind of for no reason.
We had very good care.
There is very good maternity care in Ireland,
and that was particularly striking for Sarah
coming from the States where there are statistically poor maternity outcomes.
In fact, the death rate isn't just high in the US, it's actively increasing.
And it felt like the staff there in Galway, a combination of doctors,
nurses, medical students and midwives all were fully in it.
Hearts invested, life purpose being fulfilled,
at least from my perspective, it felt like
and I may be come across as a little bit of a wanker
putting it this way, but it felt so authentic.
It's just such an authentic experience having a baby.
I mean,
when they held up our baby,
our new shining nexus of unimaginable potential and beauty
and the boundaries of reality were as wishy-washy as my tear-veiled vision
and the force of love itself,
which had taken such a deep breath
finally exhaled.
It felt authentic, you know, like it felt like something was happening.
But anyway, that's not the point of the story.
There was a different bit to that bit
There was a bit where I stood outside of the hospital and I was holding burritos.
I just bought these mediocre burritos right?
And I felt as I stood there
that I was standing between two very different worlds.
On the one side was this magical
hospital place where people fulfilled their life's purpose.
This really rather difficult and involved and body-horror-infused
and emotionally fraught business of birth and medicine and care.
And on the other side, past the pedestrian crossing and the busy road
was Tesco
and Burritos
and chain pubs and moneylenders.
And we're sort of expected to think that these two are the same world
and that in fact the hospital world depends for its survival
and viability on the Tesco and burrito and money lender world.
But this is of course not true.
We've been caring for each other
for a lot longer than we've been selling assembly line burritos.
Ireland almost has a public healthcare system, and Sarah and Bábóg
basically got free care for the duration of the pregnancy.
And it feels right, actually,
that that should be something that society exists to do.
It feels right that we all collectively should be simultaneously protective
and welcoming towards Bábóg and that we should be challenged
in an outward radius from Bábóg’s needs to reevaluate the world.
It feels deeply wrong to think of their future welfare being based on money.
And so following that logic, it should be deeply morally wrong that any child
or any person should have their future welfare, be based on their economic value.
Their value in reality, in a moral sense, is coming from somewhere else.
So I want to circle the block
of this Childism philosophy thing
with exactly that dichotomy in my mind, a society of children,
which is a society of schools and hospitals and playgrounds
and mutual interdependence and so forth, versus a society of adults,
which is money and exploitation, and Tesco and techno feudalism.
See, no matter how lofty or far reaching or academic this gets,
ultimately this is still a story about a baby in the world,
just like how your story is ultimately about a baby in the world.
That's you.
And you know
the movie Three Men and a Baby is actually about Three Babies and a Baby,
if you think about it.
(embarrassed laugh)
Okay.
So one of the things
that we could accidentally do here that we might want to, you know, not do
is to build a whole picture of childism that makes you think,
oh, I get it!
This is like “children are brilliant. The Philosophy.”
This is wrong.
That isn't it?
That would be as silly as coming to the conclusion that feminism is.
“Women are brilliant. The Philosophy.”
which I'm aware, is a conclusion that some people do come to,
and I wish they wouldn't.
Some people get these sorts of things wrong on purpose, actually,
and they quite actively throw a spanner in the works
by responding to feminism with,
“Well, men are great too!”
or “are you saying women never do anything wrong??”
and thus participate at whatever level in a sort of ratcheting
of misinterpretation that tends towards making feminism look silly?
And much like our discussion of insults earlier,
erases productive conversations about problems like
patriarchy or gender based violence.
Similarly, people interpret critical race theory as this kind of
inelegant, half-assed exaltation of non-white
racial identities or some kind of cult of Negative Nellies who hate the whites,
which you'd have to be pretty generous to actually interpret as misunderstanding.
But I digress.
This is important, though, because as I now start to talk about the details
of things like democratic representation for children,
political participation for children,
youth activists, equality for children imagined in new and concrete
ways, you might find yourself somewhere on that spectrum of
“But we can't really be serious about all of this.”
“We're not really considering children as people in this way, are we?”
And this is just something I would ask you to be aware of as we go,
because there is such a thing as invisible ideology.
ideas that you hold
that you didn't come up with that don't even necessarily serve you,
that you nonetheless reproduce on the behalf of your oppressors.
This is part of what makes a status quo,
however unjust and dysfunctional that status quo is
more comfortable than particular imaginable alternatives
in John Walll's paper.
Can Democracy Represent Children? Towards a Politics of Difference
He points out that history regards the political role of children
in often more generous ways than we do now
That Dang Dad: In the past, children have been kings
and queens played important roles in the labor movements, marched
with Gandhi to liberate India, helped desegregate the United States South,
and been involved in one way or another in all manner of political movements.
Have you ever heard of the Newsboys Strike of 1899?
It's a long and storied and controversial tale
that we can't fully indulge here today.
But basically, newspaper hawkers of the time, young men
and boys had a strike for two weeks which effectively halved the circulation
of the papers of both Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.
Now, they didn't exactly succeed in their aims.
Neither Hearst nor Pulitzer agreed to pay them more,
but they did leverage buybacks for the papers that they didn't sell,
so they successfully impacted their own poverty at the expense
of those famously miserly capitalists c***s
And that's a win for the little fella.
It's all somewhat faithfully recreated in the Disney film Newsies
and the Broadway musical of the same name, neither of which I've seen,
but Biz Berkeley has.
So you can just watch the video that she did about it
🎵 swelling music 🎵
🎵 When I Dream 🎵
Anyway, the news hawkers were an exploited workforce.
Absolutely.
And it sucks that children were part of an exploited workforce,
but they also organized and used collective action.
This gets referred to as “Youth Activism” now because of course
it's different to just activism because they're children.
It's so cute.
They think that they're people.
But I'm going to put a pin in this
(pin!)
and it's a lynchpin,
it’ll be really quite important and have something to do with
Youth Activism and kids fighting for the whole world.
You'll see it's a whole thing
because children, it would seem,
are the cohort most patently aware of how f*cked the world is
and just how urgent and necessary it is
to stop playing adult games and unf*ck the world immediately.
But as I say, we’ll pin that because that is children outside of the establishment.
No matter how Other a group is, it's possible to picture them outside the gates
yelling and saying, “This Sucks!”
Even children don't get their usual erasure from that scenario.
But if we turn our attention instead to children sitting in the big chairs,
in the big rooms, making the big decisions
Like Bossy Baby baby or Blank Check or whatever
then it does start to sound a bit weird, right?
If we look at the various instances where there has actually been an attempt
to integrate children into democracy, to facilitate their participation
in the establishment, then our preconceptions,
our clichéd mental images
and our cognitive biases kick right back in again.
But it's true that attempts have been made at this very thing,
this more liberal version of representing children in politics.
And by looking at some of the examples of children's democratic
participation, hopefully it will help us to understand how,
One, the issues with involving children in democracy are actually quite arbitrary.
And Two, those issues are also really similar
to the issues that face everyone who gets excluded from democracy.
So again, drawing from John Wall's paper, there is something of a shift around 1989
with the establishment of the Convention of the Rights of the Child,
with various countries struggling to interpret or pay lip service
to listening to children without that actually being a concrete
legal obligation, you have New Zealand, South Africa, even Israel
establishing consultative bodies for children.
In more recent years,
many countries go a step further by introducing children's parliaments,
the idea being that adults assumptions about the needs of children
can be supplemented or challenged by children themselves.
But as Wall and others have pointed out, there's a few issues here.
He clears up the picture
of democratic participation for children by splitting it into three categories:
Agency, Interdependence and Difference
Okay, first: Agency.
That idea that you can just give children the vote, give them the microphone,
give them something, give them agency.
Some of the problems with this, we actually touched on already
First: which children?
that is, wealthier children from good schools are overrepresented in
even the most benevolent forward thinking of organizations.
Agency has the problem of simultaneously holding open doors for certain
kinds of people and closing doors for other kinds of people.
It tends to be that those who most closely resemble the existing power elites
will have disproportionately greater “agency” in political participation.
If we're talking about adults, they'll be the sort of people
who have the ear of the powerful, or they'll be part of existing institutions.
They'll have access to education, they'll have property,
they'll have savings, technology, other forms of cultural capital.
And if we're talking about children, even once you've gotten past the razors of
which kids, rich kids, the right kids, the white kids?
you still have the problem that they will be
the children who most resemble adults
and at that most resemble wealthy and powerful adults.
On top of that, you have Tokenism.
This idea that whatever diversity you is mostly decorative.
Now, at time of writing, most everyone even remotely left of center
is crying out for some decorative tokenism in the US
because it's better than the beady-eyed Ku Klux Klan bloodthirsty whitewashing
evisceration of the Republican Party under Trump,
and none of them have any eyebrows.
But we can still, I hope, recognize that sticking
some marginalized people in a committee does not actually emancipate them.
This is extra true of sticking children in a committee
That Dang Dad: as suppressed groups
throughout history have found citizenship in name can differ from citizenship
in reality. For example, children in civic councils in the UK report
feeling that, while they can participate and have a voice.
These councils are really controlled
by larger institutional structures that are run by adults.
There's a basic structural issue with the concept of agency,
as Wall puts it.
That Dang Dad: The problem is that
agency itself is a political norm
with historically adult-centered biases.
So he outlines his next category: Interdependence.
A different form of participation that isn't contingent
on hierarchical skills and knowledge and various forms of capital.
Now, interdependence is a term
we've already thrown around once or twice,
but we might now take a moment to actually understand
That Dang Dad: children can be
included as full rather than second class citizens,
the argument goes If citizenship is broadened to include
relational ties and social and political interdependencies,
that is persons simultaneously active
independence and passive dependance.
We exist in webs of relationships with different dependencies.
Drawing on other thinkers, John Wall points out that the idea of an independent
participant in democracy is kind of a fallacy in the first place.
Individuals, just like, y’know
your parents or your neighbors, the people commenting on our last video,
they cannot necessarily grasp political concepts,
economic or ecological problems,
clearly, they cannot grasp issues of public health and so on.
We need each other in order to outsource expertise.
And therefore, citizenship is a dynamic process
of active independence and passive dependance.
The idea of any category of person who is granted the respect to make salient
political decisions because of that category has always been silly.
Whether the category is landowner or man or white person or f***ing Baron or Duke
And that idea doesn't stop being silly just because now the category is adult.
Have you met adults?
As I will really emphasize later, a key missing component of functional
and benevolent democratic participation is education.
This idea that we must learn or outsource learning would require a willingness
to suspend entitlement when you don't know and to admit when you don't know,
to get good at accessing the experience of not knowing
and therefore knowing when it is that you are not capable of showing
greater judgment than someone who doesn't speak English
or someone with a mental illness or someone
with an intellectual disability, or indeed a child.
Sometimes you don't know better than a child.
That itself would radically transform democracy,
as Mark Jans puts it in
Children as Citizens: Towards a Contemporary Notion of Child Participation.
Babila: This citizenship of children
is based on a continuous learning process
in which children and adults are interdependent.
In this interdependency, the playful way in which children
give meaning to their environment has to be taken into account.
The play of children
cannot merely be considered as socially unimportant child play.
But there's still an underlying issue with interdependence,
and that is that it represents a failure of imagination
and will tend to bring us right back to situations that favor adults.
Usually, advocacy.
as in hey group that is dependent on us to represent them.
What kind of ice cream
would you like with this legislation that increases funding for the police?
Would you like Biden Genocide or Harris Genocide?
Interdependence as much as it is very much along the right path,
still has this implicit hierarchical order of things
in which power kindly squats down next to non-power asks it
how many sugars it would like in its tea, and then
defunds the committee in charge of tea
in order to begin to get around this and other issues with interdependence,
Wall proposes a third category: Difference
and this is the real blow-it-all-up
change our mindsets anti-colonial childist radicalism
That Dang Dad: on this model,
democracy means striving against historical norms of power
for the inclusion of the greatest possible diversity of social differences.
This isn't DEI,
this is f***ing
Die.
That's a bad joke.
In its simplest form, we can say that an inclusive democracy
should represent the specific needs of different groups
in their specific and different ways that those groups interact
with and understand society differently to each other.
This is the exact opposite of the Euro- Americananian norm
that if anyone should dare to try to make a life for themselves
in one of these golden imperial lands of the free, then they had better curtail
their bloody culture and adapt to the many horrible norms in said land of the free.
Conformities understood through the rhetoric of its richest
and most powerful and most c***-like
different cultures, be they from
foreign lands or minority religions,
or they're queer, or they have different needs or different neurotypes, or indeed
they are simply children should be represented in that difference,
by that difference, different democraies should be different.
Public spheres should be plural and many and different.
And the people watching who already know a thing or two
about decolonialism will know what I'm dancing around
is that the process of “civilizing” or “developing democracy”
is the same as the process of conforming to the will and design of the colonizers.
More on that later.
Because in the more macro, all encompassing complex high
end of this idea, some childists are proposing that in order
to do fair representation and utopia properly, democracy itself
should be deconstructive rather than consensus-oriented,
and the role of the citizen should be antagonistic towards power
rather than part of the mechanism that creates it
(sound of chair)
and the people watching who already know a thing or two about political anarchism
will also be saying Yes, yes, we know more on that, etc.
(chair)
But for me, while that's all huge and inspirational.
It's not quite substantive or actionable enough,
or at least it doesn't yet compose a material set of tools
and guidelines and things we can do
for that, I must draw your attention
back to this here pin, because I promise
there's actually a way of doing all of this,
at least an imaginable way.
In the meantime, what you’re probably
currently imagining as the democratic representation of children
is probably still somewhat mired in tokenism
and playing pretend and ultimately, at best,
advocacy with extra steps by adults for children.
I mean, this essay is in many ways no different.
It is adults.
Sarah and I thinking about what children need and speculating
on what young people think and advocating for what young people would say,
if only there was some way to listen to them.
Because let's face it, when you're not imagining these idealized
four foot tall activists and advocates who all look like Greta Thunberg
and speak six languages, and you instead imagine
actual children!
children you have met, I mean, like a crowd of them.
It's just a cacophony of chewing gum and monster energy drink and references
to Bluey, and it's impossible to make out a single word
Right?
No, obviously, that's bollocks.
But still, we do default to the adult- centric frame quite readily,
and it seems to be an irresistible worldview.
There seems to be a pattern
to the excuses we use to rationalize the disenfranchisement of kids:
Children can't engage with the political process, children can't articulate themselves.
Children aren't good at judging their own needs and so on.
And again, these excuses, when we set aside for a moment
that they're about children,
may be strikingly familiar to those who are disempowered in general
for trans people, for disabled people, for people with chronic illnesses.
“Oh, you're not understanding the system, you're extremist, naive-ists
and you're pushing people away from your cause!”
for mentally ill people, for pregnant people.
“You're not actually able to judge your own needs!
Have you been talking to Doctor Google again?”
for immigrants, for refugees,
for people on minimum wage, for anyone basically who stands outside
of the establishment halls of power,
No matter how perfectly you articulate your needs
and no matter how incontrovertibly you understand
and know your own needs, you don't get to actually represent yourself.
And it's familiar, right?
that even the people that do come close to representing you
are the richer, more educated, prettier and more urban version
of you and the means by which the participants are
then Disenfranchized is, of course, familiar too!
Participation transformed into manipulation, decoration and tokenism.
In fact, much of the language used to describe disenfranchisement
has the adult child dynamic baked into it Infantilizing, belittling, patronizing.
They're making it difficult for me to draw a parallel here.
And so, of course, when people seek meaningful change,
they get told to grow up, which is particularly unfair
on the cohort of literal children and young people who, when they grow up,
will no longer have the political concerns of children.
Of course, that's the idea because having just gone full circle,
we now see that the traits that make them children
are the very things that we otherize and objectify in the first place.
These otherized, objectified, childishnesses
are the things that become problems, whether they are
value neutral traits or needs or just phenomena peculiar to a cohort.
The idea is “come back to me when you're an adult!”
Very similar to “come back to me when you're no longer trans”
or you can lean in or talk like a white person, or you can
get out of that f***ing wheelchair or whatever.
And it may be, as ugly as it's going to feel,
that the things you think of as annoying about children are exactly
those otherized, socially undesirable, economically unproductive
and generally needy and vulnerable traits which your oppressor
wants you to hate about children
wants you to objectify and villainize and pathologize.
Ugh, children on planes, children in restaurants, children needing
things, costing money, being born, bringing more misery into the world,
taking over my friends’ lives! As ugly as it might feel,
it may be that your oppressor wants you to hate those things
because those are the things that he hates about you.
(footsteps exiting the stage)
I bet there's a part of you right now that's thinking, okay,
this is great in theory, but in practice this is kind of hippie nonsense.
Maybe you're willing to go along with me
when I say that we're interdependent, that makes some intuitive sense.
No one does anything truly alone.
But what if I ask you to picture someone with no agency,
someone who has no active independence, someone who only takes and doesn't give?
Like, what about infants?
It's all well and good
to say that relationships with older children are reciprocal.
They can report on themselves, they can be reasoned with.
They can help come up with solutions when there's a problem
that they're facing, even they still need
your involvement for some of it.
They can even provide moments of care for adults.
Like one night I was up with the baby at 2 a.m.
and my 14 year old
step kid peeks their head in the door
because they thought they heard me
and they wanted to offer me a cup of herbal tea, which in that hazy,
sleep deprived state, it sounded like my absolute salvation.
So they made it for me and they brought it to me.
I was up because I was breastfeeding.
They were up because they're a teenager
and they did a sweet thing for me at a time when I really needed support.
But they're 14. What about younger children?
What about infants? What about my newborn?
I think many people would argue that my newborn isn't even a person yet.
Not really.
They’d argue that newborns are completely dependent.
They can't give back. They can't even reciprocate.
They're just creatures of instinct with no thoughts or feelings of their own.
They can't feel stress. They can't feel pain.
You think they're smiling?
That's actually just gas.
Except it's not.
Because newborns do feel stress.
And though they have a limited set of tools
with which to address it, they can do things like avert their gaze
from the object of stress in order to help regulate their heartbeats.
Newborns do feel pain, something we didn't learn until as late as the 1980s,
before which we were still sometimes doing surgery on newborns
without pain relief and wondering why they were dying of shock.
Recently, The Lancet, the world's most prestigious public health journal,
had to put out an article calling on doctors to properly medicate
newborns undergoing painful medical procedures as the current practice
of giving them sugar water doesn't actually address pain
and the repeated experiences of feeling pain, even in a baby
so young, is so disruptive that it can lead to brain damage.
And yes, mountains of relatively recent scientific evidence
overwhelmingly lead to the conclusion that newborns smile
not just as a reflex, but as a meaningful sign of social connection.
They do this as early as 36 hours old.
That's how long it takes for them to observe their caregivers smiling,
understand that this is a tool of social connection
and then reflect it back themselves.
In fact, they are so good at this that even during the pandemic,
researchers tested whether they could detect smiles under masks.
The results of the trial showed that even with the mouth part of a smile covered,
babies were able to observe the rest of the face enough to determine
that they were being smiled at and reciprocate by smiling themselves.
Babies, even when they're hours old, are already people.
They're not just biological computers
coded with instincts, dictating when they eat, sleep or poop.
They're already learning, taking in the world,
making connections with it.
They are people.
Just as valid as any one of us.
This isn't a moral imperative.
This is a scientific reality.
We see this same bias with animals.
Serious scientists have to put out papers saying,
“Actually, animals do love. Animals do mourn.”
as if that were a revelation.
A few years ago,
a whale named Tahlequah carried the body of her dead calf for weeks,
not because she thought it was alive, but because it was her calf,
because she was mourning.
She's actually recently lost another calf and carried its body with her again
long days pushing a dead baby around
because it's her baby, because she lost someone she loved.
This has captured headlines.
“Isn't it incredible that whales mourn?”
But animal studies tell us that lots of animals mourn.
Maybe even most, if you're brave, look up how dairy cows
react when their babies are taken away to go to slaughter for veal.
The standard practice in dairy farms so that we can take cows milk for ourselves.
Listen to the noise that mothers make or the way they thrash the footage of cows
chasing slaughter down the road to get their calves back.
At the cat rescue I worked at, we dealt with a situation where some scumbag
took neonatal kittens away from their mother
and the way that cat screamed for her babies
circled the house endlessly, desperately trying to get in.
I genuinely don't know why we feel that something
so obvious as “animals love each other” is surprising.
I don't know why we need studies to validate it
Or why, for a century at least,
we've dismissed the idea that newborns do, in fact
smile.
But a lot of harm has been done on the basis of this misconception,
or more cynically: fabrication.
What if we go further and consider that the environment itself should have rights?
Lawyers in various countries
have tried to get personhood status for notable areas like the Ganges River
or Mount Taranaki, but to me it seems that environmental rights
are inherent in childism,
even without considering the personhood of the natural world,
let's picture a small area of native forest
here in Ireland. We only have 1% of those.
Most of the forests you see here are ecologically dead farms
of Sitka Spruce and the rest of the land has been clear cut to raise cows and sheep
for us to consume dairy and milk,
but maybe you live in an area
where there is some native forest and that land goes on sale and you buy it.
Under an individualist framework, a buyer can get said land
clear cut the established forest and plant it with Sitka Spruce
to begin the process of growing, clear cutting and selling.
Through a childist framework, however,
you must consider the web of things dependent on that forest.
The trees themselves, sure,
but the animals, plants and fungi dependent on those trees.
And if there are humans who use the forest, you need to consider them too.
Is this forest a play area for children?
A picnic spot for families?
How would they feel,
If you clear cut it and fence it in?
How would they feel about the increase in pollution
they're going to experience from the machines that
you're going to be using to clear cut or the increased carbon released
from burning wood, the increased soil erosion, or the runoff
from fertilizer, which will cause algae blooms in the nearby lake, c
killing more wildlife and making it dangerous for humans to swim in.
Shouldn't you be obligated to ask locals how they feel?
Is it genuinely fair that you are able to impact
a community of humans and animals just because you have the money to do so?
Is it fair that any of us can trade some socially meaningful paper money
for socially meaningful paper deeds?
and then just do whatever the f*** we want?
Yeah, it might feel constraining to have to consider
every factor before you act, because for a lot of people
that's going to mean their actions are more limited.
For someone used to individuality, it can feel chafing.
But it's also right.
It's just right from a moral perspective to view things from the lenses
of interdependence and difference rather than through power and capital.
Because we need each other,
we need disabled people, we need children, we need a biodiverse ecosystem.
We need a livable planet.
Luckily, it's not up to adults to solely get their shit together.
Many children are already acting to bring us closer to this more just world.
Foreign Man in a Foreign Land: There are two key questions
consistently raised by children and youth
since the onset of the school strikes for climate in 2018 in the Global North.
Why study for a future which may not be there?
Why spend a lot of effort to become educated
when our governments are not listening to the educated?
You remember those protests?
the School Strikes for Climate seven years ago
Greta Thunberg and all that.
Yeah, that was back when Greta was in the media all the time.
But around about the time that she set her focus
on capitalism and colonialism, the media started to lose interest.
And by the time she was protesting Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza,
getting assaulted and arrested by police, the media was so silent
that, well.
(pin drops)
So that quote, There are two key questions Why study for a future?
Why get educated? and all that
is from the beginning of a paper
by associate professor of pedagogy at the University of Stavenger
and foundational thinker in the philosophy of childism
Tanu Biswas
Biswas is like the, uh, decolonial “let’s fix the future, education
and the planet” childist. A very interesting thinker.
That paper is called Becoming Good Ancestors,
A Decolonial Childist Approach to gGobal Intergenerational Sustainability.
And it starts with some very good questions.
Why study for a future that may not be there?
Why be obedient on the educational production line
to said non-existent future?
Why value truth and knowledge when the systems and the people
with decision making power do not at all value truth and knowledge?
To me, this feels like the same frustration
and puzzlement I feel when I see everyone
just carrying on as normal, ordering stuff from Amazon and booking holidays.
During this increasingly proximal climate crisis.
What's everyone doing?
What am I doing?
What's wrong with all of us?
This willingness to stand in the queue or fill in the form
while the building is literally on fire feels really quite adult, doesn't it?
But these troublemaking children back in 2018 create a really quite the disruption
of a really quite deceptively important thing
as Biswas puts it:
Foreign: a pivotal institution
of modern childhood and one of the foundational pillars
for sustaining an intergenerationally, unjust capitalist economy -
the contemporary school.
Now, before I get into my own critiques of the contemporary school,
and some people are already vibrating in anticipation.
over here, they're like, (gasp)
there's already enough conspiratorial anti-intellectualism out there.
What are ya doin Cooks?? Don't come for the schools!
And over here they're like, Yes, validate my resentment towards elementary school.
I hate you, Mrs. Doherty!
But before we actually do it and we will, we should make
an important carveout on behalf of educators
because those who teach
so often seem to be doing it for complete ideological reasons.
They're rarely financially incentivized. Underpaid US public schoolteachers,
English as a foreign language teachers who actually like being English
as a foreign language teachers, lifelong semi impoverished academics
searching for one really specific thing and then discovering to their delight
that it's actually a million specific things.
Those people seem to live in a world of their own with its own rules
similar to the world I stood outside with my burritos
but I'm getting ahead of myself.
How do we sort this out?
Well, Biswas draws a helpful distinction between two concepts:
education and schooling.
Education, Biswas sees as geared towards the future,
composed of its own pedagogical aims
and disruptions and endless reimaginings. We can all be engaged in education.
Education is a foundational human endeavor.
Schooling, on the other hand, Biswas calls a
“co-conspirator of capital”
a place to put children that is like work and teaches them about work
and teaches them how not to be trouble at work, she says.
Foreign: A key analytical and decolonial step
I took was to recognize ‘Western schooling’
as a specific mode of learning, a conspirator of capitalism deeply rooted
in philosophical racism and contributing to a global epistemological loss.
If we're going to be honest, we need to admit that a large part
of the purpose of education all over the world is employability.
That itself is an injury against children.
But it quickly becomes worse than that
when we realize that this employability often serves the purpose
of colonial wealth extraction,
creating middle management for the colonies
supervisors, civil engineers, tour guides and teachers
to expedite the theft of raw materials and capital from the developing world.
See, neither nor myself is being some glib lip service lefty
when we say “colonial”
it is in this case a very real and material
and fucked up phenomenon.
You ever heard of the term “school in a box?”
Yeah. It's not as cute as it sounds.
Bridge International Academies, the world's largest
for profit primary education chain, has around 750,000 students
in its schools in India, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda and Nigeria.
Bridge is the brainchild
of two white American entrepreneurs, Shannon May and her husband Jay Kimmelman.
They saw an opportunity to undercut and outcompete
the schools in the city of Nairobi
for some of the world's most impoverished children.
And then from there, they continued to spread all over the developing world.
They successfully raised investment from some of Silicon Valley's finest
Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar amongst them.
As May herself said:
Shannon May: it was straight commercial capital
who saw, like wow, there are
a couple billion people
who don't have anyone selling them what they want
in order to successfully undercut
the existing private schools in Africa and Asia,
they needed to scale up ridiculously fast
and have irresponsibly outlay.
So, like, cutting the costs of classrooms,
of classroom supplies and teacher salaries, which they can slash
by having curricula centrally produced and distributed on tablets
so the teachers are high school graduates.
This is what it is to be a school in a box
Lola Sebastian: with scripted lesson plans
delivered by tablet, which detail
what teacher should do and say at every moment of each class.
The tablets are also used to monitor lesson pacing, record attendance
and track assessment.
Nicola Ansel's Shaping Global Education
International Agendas and Governmental Powers uses the example
of another school in a box: Omega Schools
Lola: a chain of for-profit schools
serving, 12,000 students from nursery to junior high school in Ghana.
Teachers are senior high school graduates who receive one week
of pre-service training and 2 to 3 days per term of in-service training.
Both Bridge and Omega are among 22 private school chains supported by
the Center for Education Innovations, which is funded by
the UK's Department for International Development.
Despite the seemingly low cost of such provision, studies suggest low cost
private education exacerbates inequality, with children from rural areas and lower
socioeconomic backgrounds underrepresented and a widening gender gap.
But it's not just low cost crapness
Bridge was opening schools so fast
that sometimes they weren't even obtaining approval to do so legally.
The Kenyan government had to close ten bridge schools in 2014
for violating children's basic safety.
At one school in Nairobi at least 11 girls were sexually assaulted
In 2019 at another school in Nairobi,
A kid was fatally electrocuted by an exposed livewire,
and Bridge reached a settlement with the child's mother,
which did require them to apologize.
Shannon May and her entrepreneurial stroke of genius
Bridge International Academies has received funding from the World Bank,
glowing praise from the New York Times and sits as the gold standard
for the future of for profit education the world over.
And I'm just going to let that sit with you at this time in this age
where we know that the plan is definitely not to make the Global South richer,
it is to make the poor everywhere poorer.
Tanu Biswas a self-avowed child ist with a penchant
for the anti-colonial, has other ideas about what the f*** we should do.
A different imaginable world.
She lays out four strategies to reimagine education
in no particular order.
One: move away from capitalism
as the modus operandi for which schooling is in service.
Forget bullshit jobs and employability.
Stop trying to create capital out of young people.
Foreign: the paradox of a global education agenda geared towards
generating human capital employable on a job market
is that most of those jobs, if at all, they will be there, continue
serving the very economic system that is threatening the right to life,
health, culture, especially for indigenous communities
and the best interests of future generations on this planet.
Two: restructure and reclaim
the spacio-temporality of global childhoods.
What does that mean?
it means that different places are different to each other.
And education should take place in community by community.
What Biswas calls, quote, adapting formal education to local realities.
See schooling takes children out of community and assimilates them
into standard capitalist aims.
Colonial wealth extraction molds them in the
Western norm of the employable upward climber.
Examples like Bridge and Omega show that a lot of the time standardizing
has less to do with meeting a high pedagogical standard
than it has to do with establishing an acceptable lowest standard.
Large scale standardized education is often an homogenizing force
self-replicating and modular and production line-esque
Even in the best of free education systems,
often schooling is fundamentally putting children in boxes.
This means that the differences between children can become a problem
and the differences between cultures equally so.
This is why Sami children in Norwegian schools have their culture brushed over
First Nations people in Canadian schools, Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals.
This is why Traveler children in Irish schools
don't get recognized as a different culture
except when they're being called slurs, of course.
Like there's a story from one paper
of a school in Ireland putting on an Intercultural Day
and they invited the media and everything,
and it was probably the only time in the whole year
that the Polish kids or the Ukrainian kids
or the kids from Nigeria had their culture celebrated.
But they had the traveler kids lumped in with the settled kids.
Like, officially categorizing them as not a culture
worthy of celebration or even recognition.
This absolute cultural vandalism that permeates global education
and “development” is the same phenomenon that allows a couple
like Shannon May and Jay Kimmelman
who, if you'll forgive just a wee bit of editorializing,
are a disgusting pair of white, money-hungry colonizer
Silicon Valley loveless c*** c***s who think they can just rock on over
to Kenya with zero cultural connection, zero curiosity and just pump out shit
standard schools, endangering children, ruthlessly profiteering,
all for the benefit of their investors and the future investors
in a more employable and exploitable Africa.
While Biswas cautions very directly against forces like nationalism
and xenophobia in embracing the community and culture side of education,
she nonetheless encourages indigenous teaching practices
and the school as a center of cultural celebration
and integration, which dovetails nicely with her next strategy.
Simply, make existing institutions and educational systems work.
So here we immediately step back into the science of pedagogy,
the best practices in education, the study of childhood.
There are things that work.
There are many things that work that schools the world over do not do
because they haven't caught up with the recent research,
or they're too expensive or they would work
but other things would have to be in place in the community for them to work.
And this is probably the broadest of all of Biswas’ strategies,
but that's because it runs the gamut of some really important stuff.
things like apprenticeship practices
and passing on skills, involving the community in teaching.
Helping parents to help kids, to help teachers, to help kids, to help parents.
As Biswas herself says:
Foreign: Existing institutional settings
such as kindergartens and old homes, can be used as intergenerational learning
sites to combine education and care for children and aging populations.
So finally, rethink the inseparable imaginations
of childhood and education afresh.
That is, completely blow up the invisible ideological assumptions of education.
Blow up the aims of children's advancement through that system.
Completely reimagine the life you want for these kids.
Foreign: Broadening epistemological horizons
on living a good life could enable
diverse forms of intergenerational relating with children
so that their learning is responsive to the broader cultural, socioeconomic
and political changes within their societies and beyond.
Like, we're going to be putting our little baby in school at some point.
I don't want Bábóg to have their imagination
curtailed by the goals that society invents for them.
I want to engender a very broad idea and a functioning broad idea
of what a good life is.
And I want this child to teach me what a good life can be.
And I want my dear baby's education to be an endless
unfolding of the possibilities of a good life.
So we're we're away with the fairies now, but in for a f***ing penny, right?
With a view to all of these strategies,
Biswas proposes we re-imagine education as community formation
Foreign: to foreground the intrinsic value
of learning and realign the entangled purpose of education, economy
and community livelihoods with the overall purpose of life on this planet.
I propose reimagining education by redefining development
as nurturing diversity and expanding the scope of intergenerational life.
And I'm saying
Yes And
let's reimagine learning and teaching and discovering and nurturing
as the foundational unit of human existence,
like, go with me here,
What are we doing?
What is life?
What is the purpose of this society thing that we've built?
Is it “line go up”?
like “our investments are currently relatively well future-proofed?
We're all very excited about AI.
All it's taking,
killing all the poor and filling everyone with murderous rage for outgroups
and just generally
a complete ideological brainwashing of whole generations of human
such that they will lose their very souls.
Price Of eggs a little high.
But price of gasoline surprisingly affordable, all things considered.”
Like, what are we doing?
Even when we propose these alternate theories of economic value
and I'm not a Luddite coming for Marx,
a lot of our work has a marxist underpinning.
But I'm actually just asking some childlike questions like why
in order to produce alternate imagined ways of structuring things.
And a big part of the reason why I'm so excited
by philosophical childism
is because, well, One: we've been saying
a lot of this stuff for years.
And two, you know, I kind of always had a suspicion that children were people.
But three, and most importantly, when I read those words,
“reimagine education as community formation”
I was transported back to that hospital car park where I stood
on the threshold between an economic world and a nurturing world.
And instead of that nurturing world
just vaguely existing in a cozy, but directionless utopia,
suddenly in my imagination, we had something to be doing:
learning and discovering and teaching
that already is a foundational human endeavor.
What if that were the basis of our entire society?
and I know what you're going to say.
It's not.
So grow up.
🎵 frantic jazz saxophone 🎵
Sarah: well, I think you'll have a conclusion now.
Neil: Yeah, uh, will I?
Will I have a conclusion?
because from where I'm sitting, we kind of just did the same thing we always do
where we raise the stakes, and it's all very urgent and important and inspiring.
But you know, what we didn't do actually?
is we didn't answer the f***ing question.
uh
“Why do people think being childlike is bad?”
Sarah: Neil It's video essay.
They have framing devices.
We don't necessarily need to have an answer to that question
Neil: but we could!
We could sit with people in their messy, embarrassing feelings
about kids, like the actual source of the nasty things that people say.
And we could like empathize with that and then come through it.
And you know, if we're worth listening to, we can still make a compelling case
for this philosophy with some love intact or whatever.
But if all we're actually dealing in is idealism, then it's just
set decoration.
Imagined worlds, but not much else.
(slam)
I have a pet theory,
a suspicion really, that a lot of people's discomfort with children
is that things in the world in this dark
timeline are so grossly out of whack with our things are supposed to be
that children existing in this world is not as it's supposed to be.
And so your relationship with children is not as it should be.
And so by extension, the children themselves should not be.
It's similar to the cliché.
I remember when all of this was trees as far the eye could see, except it's
I remember when childhood wasn't disgusting.
And there's a great deal I can empathize with
the way that parents become unreachable,
whether that's friends, like essentially ceasing to exist
as their own people or strangers seemingly parsing their entire existence aroundchildren
or it’s parents asserting their rights as parents
to dominate and dictate all of society up to and including their own children.
And you!
I can sympathize with not knowing how to interact with children.
It's not your fault that Western society, and particularly white American society
decided to be so age-segregated and gave you every reason to be ashamed
of your inherent childish qualities and therefore to race ahead
and escape childhood
while giving you zero tools to then engage
with the new children that, yknow, keep coming into existence.
I can sympathize with struggling with noise or with sensory stuff
because I'm autistic and I often find exactly those things rather difficult.
I find it especially difficult at first
when I'm interacting with a child that I haven't met before.
And even though I think people would say I'm good with kids,
I think I put on a good show and I put in effort.
But internally I'm struggling.
Adults would say that I'm good with kids.
Kids can see through my bullshit.
I mean, it's deconstructed, which is good.
I can especially sympathize right now
because I haven't slept in 13 f***ing weeks!
having a baby
I mean, this baby's remarkably chill,
but that doesn't mean that it's not screaming
and puking and pooping and all the rest.
And in between, it's the most disarming smiles and chuckles you've ever seen.
I assure you, newborns can smile socially and it's just as f***ing well.
See, I'm Irish. I don't.
I don't have to make sure that I'm coming across as positive or diplomatic.
You maybe don't know if I'm joking when I say that all children are bastards.
Pains in the arse!
But you know,
I'm actually doing something by admitting to myself
that I have negative thoughts about kids sometimes
or that I'm crap with kids sometimes
I'm being honest and frank and a bit ugly
not in order to escape a social responsibility,
but in order to understand why I find that social responsibility difficult.
Because I'll let you in on a little secret here.
I don't like adults either.
I don't like any of my social responsibilities.
I'm a recluse!
My favorite way to talk to people
is curated monologues uploaded to a YouTube channel.
I know that people's discomfort with people,
even with categories of person
comes from a place, has reasons that people think are justified.
And my suspicion
(smashy)
is that this growing discomfort generally towards children generally
comes from a combination of our segregating them,
our alienation from community
and our disgust more generally at the world that we live in
which is really f***ed up because those issues
really negatively impact children.
you and the children,
you are oppressed by common enemies on all of those fronts.
And I think if anyone was going to be disgusted by anyone,
it's children should be disgusted by us.
And when children and those that remind us of children
ask why the world is this way, how do we respond?
Grow up.
It's not a million miles away from “Shut up” is it?
Oh, my God. Sarah. Cormac, we've got a conclusion.
I've got a conclusion now! I can do a conclusion.
Conclusion!
(anticlimactic scarpering)
🎵 bass note 🎵
So why get bent out of shape about being told to grow up?
It's no big deal.
It's actually not a big deal.
We're admitting it 3 hours later.
Show's over, everybody! Byeeeee!
Turns out, grow up, it just wasn’t a big deal
It’s not a big deal.
Do you think we'd have gotten this far if we couldn't handle an insult or two?
We made a video about being vegan.
We can handle being insulted.
And “Grow Up” isn't even really an insult, is it?
It's just a
...
thing people say?
I maybe it would wound someone if they were particularly sensitive or vulnerable.
I mean, it's it's probably not nice to say, but an insult?
Had you thought about that before today?
Had you thought about what people mean when they say grow up?
Had you questioned what people generally think of children
and what people think of the qualities of being childlike?
Had you examined your own attitudes to those things?
Because in reality, grow up is an insult.
It's just an insult which polices very popular social conformities
And people do really think very little of children
and take a particularly dim view of the childlike qualities of vulnerability,
dependance, imagination and any insistence on asking the question “Why”
But, like with Grow Up, these are also very popular social conformities
I'm still not sure where I stand exactly
On the whole, going low going high thing
because, I mean, in the ridiculous
arena of politics on the Internet, I've definitely fired off
my share of insults, many of which I am frankly still proud of.
But know that I firmly stand by interrogating my own attitudes
and keeping an eye on what those insults are about.
These are insult heavy times. Far from duels of honor,
it just seems like the lowest common denominator of Twitter honourlessness
has taken over every other sphere of, in particular, American society.
It makes me wonder what will be considered childish tomorrow?
What level of injustice and violence and cruelty
will we be told next is just normal
and that instead of fighting it, we should just grow up?
What will be the next shifting of the goalposts, you know,
so that even more of the thoughtful, curious people
get mischaracterized as unrealistic children?
Sarah: drinking tea again
if you know, you know.
In caring for a baby,
I'm supposed to feel very adult, but I don't.
That's because “adult” is a social construct and “child” is a social construct.
Like, we know this.
Children face more lenient sentences in court.
So if a crime is bad, we decide to charge a child as an adult
we just wave a rhetorical wand, and now they're more complicit in their actions.
And when a white 20-something athlete sexually assaults someone,
we plead for mercy by calling him a college kid.
The frame of child or adult carries weight and biases our perceptions of reality.
And based on that misunderstanding, we make decisions that should horrify us
like separating calves from their screaming mothers or giving
infant children medical procedures without pain meds.
We have power over some people.
Some people are weaker than us.
Adults have power over children, but children's dependance
doesn't mean they're lesser.
The fact that they can be so utterly dominated does not make it moral to do so.
And you don't need to like children.
You don't need to enjoy the setting of an Irish pub during communion week.
I would advise you not to hate them though, because prejudice is stupid
and there are probably a lot of children
who fall outside of whatever stereotyped vision you have of them.
But I can't tell you how to feel.
I can tell you that you can't discriminate against them.
and that doesn't mean you can’t get
accommodations for your own needs.
I think we can come up with all kinds of clever solutions for competing needs.
If you're someone really struggles with noise,
then I think it's valid to have a designated quiet car on a train
that someone doesn't bring a screaming baby into.
But I don't think it's valid to have a child-free train car
because there's some kid out there who's like a little baby Neil who also finds
noise really upsetting and would also like to sit in the quiet space.
And this is all provided that it's just one portion of a train
and the screaming baby is still allowed somewhere
because the screaming baby is a human.
Besides, if you're from the States watching this
and I say this as a fellow USAnian
I promise you, you don't want to give Europeans the right
to kick you out of public spaces on the basis of the volume of your voices,
because rights shouldn't be something we grant based on
whether someone is likable or not, or whether someone has
good social awareness or whether someone is autonomous.
Our little Bábóg is not autonomous
they have woken me up
every few hours for the last few months to be fed, to be held, to be entertained.
And I'm delighted to provide that
I'm madly in love.
But it's not always easy either.
Caregiving isn't easy.
Watching out for the rights of others isn't easy, but it's moral.
It’s Praxis.
Next time you’re with a child
ask yourself if you’d treat an adult the same way you're treating them.
If you’d rip something out of an adult's hands
or make them ask permission to use the bathroom
or bar them from public space or hit them when you feel angry.
Because when you strip away
the social construction of adult and child, you're left with human
And one group of humans who is allowed to mistreat
another on the basis of their needing more care.
Neil: and hey, maybe we are being
hippy-drippy and unrealistic
Maybe we're being glib.
It's easy to be theater kids waving your arms and telling people
how exciting something is, but it doesn't put out the flames of a world on fire.
And while I'm keen, in fact desperate,
to really do something
I'm also aware of the white savior advocate
for marginalized group, well-meaning wanker trap
as Biswas puts it:
It is here that I invite readers to pause the hasty urge to lean
into performing the logistics of implementation.
But equally, this video might actually have
some small impact on how sound you are to children
and the amount of respect you treat them with, and that will materially affect
some children.
which matters. It's worth talking about!
on the bigger level,
yeah, we're pitching imagined alternative realities,
but every material improvement was once an imagined alternative reality.
I don't know what we do with the world now.
I really don't.
But in my lifetime, from my childhood through to my becoming
an adult and a parent, not necessarily in that order.
I know I've seen manufactured outgroups
designed disgust and hatred
towards groups that were at various points, not exactly beloved,
but at least more accepted.
I've seen change happen in real time, and I've heard enough rhetoric from people
who feel like finally they're free to just say that they hate kids.
And it really reminds me of a similar celebration in other spheres.
Finally, they say we can just openly hate a group of people.
People hate when they don't know any better,
but that thing that would make that better
Educstion, the thing that would make democracy better,
the thing that would make public health easier and climate change taken seriously.
That's a thing that adults reject because “education is for children.”
And we seem to think that children only need education
because they're so damned incompetent
and useless and they don't know how anything works.
We think education exists to successfully transform
children into adults, but it need not be so
we can imagine otherwise.
We can't make anyone watching care about children.
We can't make you reorient your worldview towards interdependence.
You're not even going to get social points for this one.
The power structure is just so in-baked.
but morality isn't determined by popular consensus
and clinging to the status quo isn't wisdom.
It's a failure of imagination.
As with any marginalized group,
some of the changes that children want will benefit all of us.
I know I'd benefit if I remembered that a sidewalk could be a place of play
rather than just the liminal space between work and home.
I think like a child, it's good for us to look at society and ask why?
Why have we constructed labor relations this way?
Why Have we created gender? Race?
Is this still serving us?
Why don't we change it?
I imagine we could do so much if imagining itself
wasn't seen as uncouth.
Childish.
Imagine what we’d do if when we grew up we still understood ourselves as
as full of potential, as incomplete, as malleable, as brave
and weird and unknowable as we were
when we were kids.
🎵 scratching 🎵
🎵 Peter and the Wolf set to hip hop 🎵
Hey, Editing Neil here
Hi.
I just wanted to say we were pretty harsh on commenters
and sort of on the concept of commenting, and please don't let that stop you
from commenting on this video because actually we often get very lovely comments
and it would be a shame to not have you comment here, so feel free.
I won't make you self-conscious.
Just, you know, do do your thing.
Leave a comment below.
Just to be clear, you don't have to comment.
Just if you were ...
whatever comment you were going to
just act, just act normal, just whatever comment you were going to leave.
Just put that.
I'll go.
Okay, I have noticed this one particular comment that's come in
and I did think this was going to happen,
so we didn't use the stage lights and that was an intentional artistic decision.
That's not a mistake.
It’s not cause we didn't know how to use them.
We wanted to have
because it's like a video essay.
It's like as if a video essay.
were a stage show.
So we used the video essay lights to
um
semiotically
signify
it was intentional.
I'm actually going to talk to Sarah about this
because I'm a little bit annoyed.
Sarah, we just got a comment that said
that we didn't turn on the stage lights
like by mistake, but that was an intentional artistic decision, right?
Sarah: I mean, I just
you didn't know where they were
(baby sounds)
Neil: but then I made the intentional artistic decison
to not use them because I didn't know where they were.
Sarah: Yeah, but that's not
that's not what intentional is, Neil
like I wanted to use the stage lights.
I wanted to find my light. I wanted
Neil: No, no, no,
it's fine. It's actually fine.
You can do whatever comment you want and this is
the worst sequence we’ve ever had
over the credits. Thanks.