FURTHER COMMENTS ON ARIES

CORBETT RESPONSE TO STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS

Friday, February 25, 2000

After reading the first assignments and some of the questions people were asking or themes they read into the text, I think I need to try to clarify a bit more the ground of Aries' work.

I would begin by more strongly recommending the optional reading I had recommend, my review of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's book, SILENCING THE PAST.   I think this might well help many of your to place this work of Aries.

I'll do briefly here somethings I deal with in that review in more detail. Typically a historian likes to deal with hard evidence, written evidence is the best and most sought after. Here is a contract between Jones and Smith, date March 3, 1151 etc. Nice.

However, a huge portion of what goes on in history is never, in much of any "hard" sense recorded. And, as Aries points out, much less of the poor is recorded than of the wealthier. But recording data is just the ground floor.

Such recorded material is often discreet -- this birth certificate, then that certificate and then a thousand of them. And so on. After a while there is just more than can be held, safe-guarded and passed on. Thus decisions are made. What data will get "archived," that is, put into very safe keeping and preserved for long-term.

Next we come to the individual historian. He or she goes to the archives and digs out information. But, telling a coherent general story is not simply to publish archives. Rather, from the archival data the historian tells the story he or she is after, using the archival data to support the conclusion.

At least that is text-book history.

Even here, in this ideal world, ALMOST ALL OF HISTORY is lost. Most events are simply not recorded, or weren't until recently. Then even less was archived, and often these were lost to fire, incest, wars and whatnot. In the process a huge portion of our past is simply silenced.

Philippe Aries is a totally new breed historian. He searches for ways to dig out history where there is not traditional historical data. This book, the founding document of the entire huge academic field of the history of childhood, put this issue on the intellectual map.

Aries argues, in effect: Look, we don't have much, even any, data on the family structure of the common folks in antiquity. They just don't appear. Is there nothing we can do? Time travel? Delightful as an idea, but so far the tickets on that train are hard to get. What do we do?

Aries ingeniously dug out data where people had never seen data. I have chosen two chapters which emphasize two sorts of evidence:

1. Paintings and related data.
2. Word usage in society.

In the first Aries argues that we can notice certain regularities and from those regularities we can make reasonable generalizations. He was a museum keeper and art historian. He noticed a weird thing: painters who could perfectly well paint the musculature of adult men and women all tended to paint not the child as well see them, but little adults, without the real bodies of children, but with adult bodies. How could this be. Aries argues that this cannot be a failure of technique. If you can paint a perfect apple and pear, then you can paint an orange. If you do in fact paint a perfect (realistic) apple and pear and something very different for an orange, then something weird is going on. Maybe it is evidence that oranges had never been seen in your community and you were going by travelers accounts, where you actually saw, touched and ate pears and apples. Maybe something else -- perhaps it was a sacred fruit and the gods would be angered if you painted it. The point is, the anomaly seen in such painting would alert us that something odd is happening and we need to figure it out.

Thus in the paintings he notes a number of things in addition to the musculature. There is only a gradual sense of age-differentiation and care about such differences.

These things tip off Aries that young people were simply not regarded in the same way we regard them.

But I think more becomes clear in the focus in chapter two on language. We use language to describe our experience. What we call things has a lot to do with how we see them, if fact EVERYTHING. If we see the invention of a new word in a language we have some fairly solid evidence that some new way of seeing the world has come to be and that language reflects that.

It is very rare than the creation of a word precedes a change in sight. But it happens. Huxley writes BRAVE NEW WORLD and creates the concept of "Big Brother." Then people SEE big brother in our own world and the phrase enters into every day language. But that is in no way the typical manner. Rather, the seeing typically comes first and then language gradually follows.

This is what goes on a great deal in so-called "politically correct" language. In the past when people saw a person who was physically not the same as them and couldn't do things that most people could those people WERE SEEN AS and WERE CALLED crippled or handicapped. In our time SOME people have worked on problems of human equality and difference and came to see that this "seeing" is not quite accurate to how they see the world. Thus, as they explored how they saw the world gradually the term "differently abled" began to replace handicapped or crippled in some folks language. Will this language (and the sight that goes with it) STICK and become the dominant language? That's very difficult to say. Language takes time.

Aries focuses on the coming into being of new ways of talking about young people. Aries' thesis is: how we call them is how we see them. Or, perhaps better phrased to emphasize what is first here: We see them in a certain way and THUS we call them such and such.

The world prior to the Industrial Revolution (really began in earnest in the 1840s, but has elements back to the end of the Middle Ages), was heavily agricultural. Most people worked the land with their hands. This was family work and the dominant social institution was not even the nuclear family, but the extended family (the elders and all their relatives). They tended to live in enclaves and eked out a living on the land. Life was hard. Every hand was needed.

When young were born they were reared toward the farm. The first three years, usually, were infancy. Then often they would be given small jobs. That these jobs were small did not mean they were unimportant. I am about to post a reading from CONTEMPORARY Haiti which shares much of this pre-industrial life-style today. You will read about little Gental who begins his "work" with the family when he can barely walk.

Thus infancy, to answer one person's question, was from birth to about 3 or 4.

3-5 was sort of iffy, sort of between infancy and young adulthood. But by 5 one was a worker in the family farm. The early days were sort of apprenticing (school) where one learned to farm (or other self-contained family businesses like baking, barrel making, horse tending or whatever).

By 7 or 8 one was fairly much into the adult world and doing jobs as one was able, moving up the line as quickly (or slowly) as one's ability, motivation, energy and health allowed. In the body of the full book Aries recounts dozens of stories of very young people have authority over many much older folks and doing so because they were clearly the best leader the social unit had for the job.

Not only did they move into the work world. The WHOLE world was open to the young. They were not seen as "innocent" and "to be protected." Rather, they were seen as adults, albeit small and young ones, who needed to be socialized into the full world of adults including birth, death, sex, war, and the complexities of life and fortune, both good and bad. In short, one had to learn to be responsible. (Given the trend for contemporary middle class parents to economically fund -- thus keeping dependent -- they off-spring in our world even into the 30s, the 25 year olds of today are typically much more juvenile and dependent than a typical young person of age 10 in almost any period prior to the twentieth century.)

Using Aries' startling thesis: childhood simply did not exist until about the 15th-16th centuries and then only among the very privileged. Actually, again on Aries' account of his evidence, this didn't change until the turn of the 20th century in the anti-child labor laws. Once young people were kicked out of the work world, of course they got into trouble and committed crimes or socially unacceptable behavior. Schools were IN FACT in great measure simply prisons to keep unemployed kids off the streets. (They are in significant measure that today I would think.)

I would like to note the tragic trade-off. Working conditions in the 1880s we simply horrible. People were routinely maimed and harmed in the workplace. The harmed "people" were men people and women people of all ages. Young people were especially prized in the manufacture of textiles since their smaller hands could work the dangerous and complicated machines better than the larger hands of older workers. Many were harmed. So were the older folks, both men and women.

When serious protests from humanitarians and "do-gooders" began to put tremendous pressure on capitalists to sacrifice some of their profits for safer work what happened is astonishing. Quite frankly a trade was made. The hand-writing was on the wall: Industrial society was going to be a much richer society than agriculture society. If the nuclear family replaced the extended family as the basic social unit, then ONE worker could probably support the nuclear family.

Thus labor laws were written in which both "children" (these new fangled things) and the women were bared from many work places. Now men continued to be the dominant workers, but nothing changed in the profit margins not the safety factors. The unsafe labor conditions (which continued well into the depression) were continued, but the humanitarians and "do-gooders" were brought off by simply saving the women and children from this fate.

Not a very good deal for the working class. The capitalist loved it. The new machines were replacing workers and they needed to drastically reduce the labor force in order to better pit worker against worker to keep wages down and profits up. These laws served their interests almost ideally.

In the process childhood was born for the masses.

What's the point of all this? Childhood took a form:

1. Children were innocent.
2. They were incapable of autonomy and taking care of themselves.
3. They needed to be protected from all that was unseemly.
4. The family was deeply split between the "able" and the "unable."
5. Children were no longer socialized to competence until much later in life (if ever).
6. School became the fate of children.

It seems there is no question about it: today's young are CHILDREN. Yes they are. They are precisely the removed, unable, protected and controlled beings quite incapable of serious responsibility that the idea of childhood says.

The question are:

1. How can it possibly be maintained, in the face of historical evidence, that childhood is "by nature."?
2. By the same token, it cannot be maintained, in the face of the 20th century, that you people are by nature "able."

Young people, like older people, will in great measure be how they are treated and allowed to be. Who and what we all are is in great measure a social construction of power relationships.

Yet there is also no question that many, if not most, parents sincerely love their young (as did people in antiquity), and want the best for them. But what is this best? That is a moral question, a value question. Neither age, the "ancien regime" that Aries investigates didn't raise the question. They took their social system to the NATURE. Modern parents don't. They take childhood to be by NATURE.

Aries' book is to say: there is no "nature" in any of this. Young humans are phenomenally malleable. Adults have more power and will be able to structure the social institutions that the young will have a very difficult time in rebelling against, but they can (and obviously do).

Aries doesn't really take a stand on what he favors. Nonetheless I think there is an undercurrent to romanticize the "ancien regime" and to value the free and able young of the past. But that is NOT what his book is about. Rather, it is a hard-nosed historical book trying to muster all the evidence he can dig up in this difficult world of social history, where the more normal "hard data" just don't exist.

Does this help? I welcome your questions, puzzles, disagreements or developments.

Bob Corbett

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