Conscience & The State

39. Do not suppose that cooperation and competition are antithetical or opposite. Rather cooperation as learned from the good mother is the base foundation for all economic interaction. To wrong one’s trading partner, to hoard at the expense of others or at the expense of the exchange system itself, are each violations of the good mother’s originary example of cooperation. The good mother's example is a check on competition so that it does not begin to resemble some Hobbesian world of individuals in constant war with one another. The good mother’s example of cooperation allows mutual benefits to be maintained between trading parties in the absence of codified laws and regulation.

45. It is the good mother who develops and encourages conscience in the child. Conscience is cooperation embodied. He learns to feel his violation of cooperation and altruism physically. His conscience warns him with the racing of his heart, the sweatiness of his palms, the sinking feeling in his stomach.

48. Cooperation, altruism and the gift resist systematic codification in law. Indeed, the growth of the State and the expansion of regulation and law may be seen as a further factor undermining the institution of good motherhood. The State’s prohibitions are appealed to as a guide to economic interaction rather than conscience as developed by the good mother. The State, rather than the conscience of individual men, becomes the sole caretaker of the economic system, and any activity in accord with the State’s regulation is understood to be legal and just. Loopholes and other systematic abuse is legal and therefore acceptable. The State, rather than the conscience of individual men, is the arbiter of acceptable conduct.

The Good Mother

4. The family is the first group. The family survives through cooperation, not competition. The good mother is savings and sacrifice. There is no family without her.

12. The bond between mother and child begins at conception with her body feeding the fetus’ development inside her, and later, after his birth, she nourishes him from her breast. The intimacy of these experiences and their shared genetic lineage founds the powerful connection between them. She gives of her body so that the child may live. Her attention is always in regard to the child. She speaks to it and plays with it. She gives of her body and time without any expectation. There is no calculus in the relation of mother to child.

17. From the good mother he learns cooperation, altruism, and the gift. The good mother’s care is the expression of man’s first and most basic institutions, and it is upon these institutions that others are founded. The good mother prepares the child for his future and to do so she forgoes consumption today. That is her sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and the child is her savings.

29. Motherhood is not simply preparing a child for the economic institutions he will encounter later in life. It is not about getting him a head-start on other children by making him an early reader, or educating him in Chinese, or forcing him to learn an instrument. If educating a child to gain a competitive advantage relative to other children was the objective of motherhood then it could be performed by anyone and, verily, this conception guides the Western mother. A nanny can nurse the child on formula while she is away at work. A good pre-school can advance his education. The Western mother argues that specialists are better equipped to care for her child and instruct him. And paying specialists for her child’s care also allows her to have a work career.

38. Child care is a nuisance for the Western mother. It diverts her from her career, which represents her independence from her husband and her family. She rationalizes that the economic benefits of being able to work while a surrogate mother cares for her child is best for both the child and family. Economic considerations are primary to her and thus to the Western family. No longer does the Western mother wish to be identified with her family and with her children. Rather her career, her bank account, and the clothing and possessions she has purchased is how she identifies herself.

50. The undermining of motherhood and the family has extended to the home itself. The home as the dwelling place of the family has more recently become an investment, an asset to leverage and borrow against for further consumption.

52. Whether it is as a result of indebtedness or the desire to earn more for further consumption, the mother is no longer at home. The family is split through by economic considerations. The child develops with a mostly absent mother and only a limited experience of cooperation, altruism and the gift that only she can provide him.

55. For many Western women, motherhood consists simply in providing food and shelter until the age of eighteen, and access to an education that prepares the child for economic life. Her time, she argues, is her own. With divorce laws erected to favor these careerist mothers, many cease to maintain their attractiveness to their husbands. They become emotionally cold, deny them sex, allow themselves to fatten, and call upon their husbands only to fix things around the house. In her refusal to be good wife and good mother, the family is compromised.

69. Abortion, the selection of sperm donors or other manipulations of pregnancy, choosing not to breastfeed (also nutritionally damaging to a baby), homosexual partners or single fathers raising children, etc. are all distortions of motherhood that damage the originary institutions of cooperation and altruism.

76. The good mother cooperates to make the family possible. The good father competes with other men to provide for the family.

77. The good mother is irreplaceable to the child. The good father though, is more easily replaced. Beyond the income he provides the family, he need only be present as a model of hard work and competitive effort for the child.

Aforismo para Colombianas

An aphorism for Andreas of Braunau, Austria

The young Latinas say first among their priorities is the family. To have children, to be a joyful, simple and caring woman, to find the love of an honest man, these are her goals. Yet she sees the conspicuous wealth, the shopping malls, large homes, and fashionable women of the West and she thinks, ‘Now, if only I could have those things too.’ But she does not realize that the Western woman has given up families, the care for children, and her joy in exchange for grand material consumption.

Shadows of Consciousness

1.The female migrating swallow is passionate in her care for her chicks. Her day is occupied with their nourishment and she will sacrifice her life to defend them against a predator. But when the flock of migrating swallows appears signaling the end of the season, the mother swallow will immediately leave her chicks to migrate with the others. She joins the migrating flock and abandons her chicks to certain death. She acts without hesitation or evidence of confusion.

2. Some chimpanzees from the Gombe group were observed as they came upon a strange female chimp carrying a baby. The Gombe chimps immediately seized upon the baby chimp and killed it as they might have killed a pig or a monkey. “Humphrey was beating its head against a branch; then he started eating its thigh muscles and the poor infant went limp. Mike was allowed to tear off a foot. But now confusion seems to have overcome the attendant apes. They watched intrigued, but none begged a portion. They did however inspect the carcass, and Humphrey too began poking and sniffing rather than eating it. He even groomed it, then dropped it and walked away (prey is devoured by the group with not so much as a scrap wasted). Others retrieved the small corpse, only to play, examine or groom it, often giving it the respect accorded a dead community member. The carcass changed hands six times and, although battered beyond recognition, very little had been eaten.” (The Ape’s Reflexion, Adrian Desmond, pg 220)

3. Humans feel a deep sense of horror at the neglect, abuse or killing of a child by its mother or another adult. This outrage also extends to the abuse or killing of babies of other social species (puppies and kittens in particular). The case of the migrating mother swallow is curious to the observing ethnologist for this reason. In many ways her conduct appears similar to that of a human mother, but then in one astonishing moment, without any hesitation, she abandons her children to migrate with the group.

4. I previously used the metaphor of a suddenly stopped film to describe the appearance of consciousness. It was as though you were at the cinema when midway through a film the screen went blank, the lights came on, and the story in which you had been immersed is gone. You are suddenly aware of yourself sitting in the cinema. Consciousness appears as a similar sort of breakdown and awareness. The world in which one has been acting, its fluid, narrative-like quality, is abruptly broken. One is aware of himself and a world outside himself, seemingly distant. He feels very alone. He hesitates to act. What causes this hesitation? What triggers the conscious moment?

5. The mother swallow joins the migrating flock so that she may survive the winter and there is no evidence that she is conflicted over the abandonment of her children. The Gombe chimps by contrast appear conflicted over the infanticide. Humphrey and Mike carry out the killing, but when the others fail to join them in eating the dead infant both Humphrey and Mike hesitate. When the others (likely more than two) poke and sniff at the carcass Humphrey imitates them. Some of the others then play with the carcass or groom it, one seemingly treating it as a dead community member.

6. There is confusion among the chimps over what has happened and its significance. Though the gender of the other chimps was not recorded (were some or all of them women, mothers perhaps?), it is clear these chimps do not consider the infant chimp to be prey. Humphrey and Mike do not follow through on their impulse to eat the dead infant. None among them is certain how to act.

10. In their own chimp manner Humphrey and Mike have become aware of the conflict between their impulse and the behavior of the other chimps. To conceive this conflict is to become conscious. They are self-conscious because they are conscious of others.

21. Man’s consciousness is rooted in his sociability. There is no self-consciousness without consciousness of other selves. The two require each other. In much the same way a man’s genetics express themselves through the institutions that surround him, his self-consciousness requires the consciousness of others to express itself.

35. Consciousness emerges from a disagreement between genes and the institutions that exist for their expression. A man unwilling to express himself within the institutions around him feels alone, world-less. There is a breakdown of sociability. The institutions that surround him are no longer welcoming. Instead of acting he hesitates. He fears the disapproving look of the others, their judgment, if he acts otherwise. When the others are not present to provide the disapproving look his conscience provides it. The others physically, or through the institutions he was born into and through which he expresses himself, are part of him.

49. Institutions define what is expected, they define appropriate behavior and standards of conduct. Certain institutions are more deeply coded into man’s genes and to break with them will produce in him a physical anguish, the pang of conscience.

68. Motherhood is the original institution. Upon the model of the mother’s care for her child other species specific behaviors are based. Changes to the institution of motherhood as a result of birth control; first pregnancies in their late thirties; refusal to breast feed; employment of nannies to care for children born to careerist mothers; etc. pose specific challenges for institutions throughout a society.