Читать книгу Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 11

Fragile though it might be, our sense of being a person is the most important part of our life. Newborn babies show very clearly that they are determined to survive physically. If a light tissue is placed over the baby’s mouth and nose, the baby will struggle to remove it. Babies also arrive in the world determined to survive as a person. They search for the one thing they need for survival – the attentive face of another person. Babies arrive in the world ready to feed, and able to single out a face from their surroundings. While it has always been known that babies need sustenance, it was not until the end of World War Two that the importance of a relationship with another mothering person was recognized. Midst the turmoil of the aftermath of the war in Europe there were children who had survived without being in the care of adults. Some were the survivors of places like the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps, some had been separated from their parents as they fled from the enemy, and some were the blond, blue-eyed children conceived as part of Hitler’s plan for the master race and brought up in Nazi institutions, and abandoned as the Russian army advanced on Berlin. Amongst these children were those who had survived physically but, in the absence of anyone to take a personal interest in them, they had not become what we would regard as someone like ourselves. Some of these children distrusted all adults and related only to other children, while some were unable to create a relationship with any human being. To become ourselves we need other people.

Our physical makeup ensures that we can be aware of something only if that thing stands in contrast to something else. If we lived in a world where nothing ever died, we would have no concept of life because there was no death. If everyone invariably told the truth, we would have no concept of truth because there were no lies. We know our self because there is not-self – the world around us and other people, that is, other selves. It is only recently that this has been understood. Writing in the early twentieth century, William James described the newborn baby as seeing the world as nothing but a ‘booming, buzzing confusion’, while Freud believed that a baby cannot tell where his body ends and the world begins. (These men might have fathered babies but they did not spend much time in the daily care of them.) Studies where newborn babies are shown a number of objects, and the length of time that the baby spends looking at each object is measured, have shown that a baby is born not only knowing how to identify a face from other things but preferring to look at a face, even just a simple cartoon of a face, than at anything else. Dangle some small object about a foot in front of an infant. The baby will look intently at the object, and then reach forward with one or both arms in the attempt, sometimes successful, to touch the object. This is not proof that the baby is aware that the object is not part of his body, but it does suggest that he is beginning to understand that he can use a part of his body to reach something he can see.

The weight of evidence suggests that the newborn baby sees a world of patterns, and that some of these patterns have considerable significance, that is, meaning for the baby. Moreover, the baby is keen to discover the means whereby he can influence some of those patterns. When babies are given the opportunity to suck on a dummy fixed so that the changing pressure on the dummy switches some music on and off, they will readily learn how to do this. The patterns babies want most to engage with are faces. Moreover, right from birth, babies show a clear preference for faces that look directly at them, rather than faces that are turned away.

If you are unused to being in the company of young babies you can be quite unnerved by finding yourself the subject of a young baby’s thoughtful gaze. You might even think that the baby is gravely assessing you and finding you wanting. You might hasten to decide, as many psychologists do, that this must be an illusion. How could a baby assess you when he does not yet know that he himself is a person? These psychologists know that, when mothers say that they have little conversations with their baby, the mothers are deluded. Babies might appear to converse, but, according to Michael Tomasello, babies cannot understand that they have intentions to communicate with others, and others have intentions to communicate with them, until they are nine months old.¹ Babies might seem to communicate, but this is a pseudo-communication. However, Tomasello was examining those communications where two people have a common subject that they are discussing. There is another form of communication, often used by mothers and babies younger than nine months, where the mother notices what the baby is feeling and responds to that. The baby then responds to the mother’s response. In a similar way, a baby will notice that his mother is dispirited and try to initiate a conversation. Such attention from her baby can often produce a much happier response from the mother but, if the mother does not respond, the baby will try again once, perhaps twice. If the mother still does not respond, the baby looks elsewhere rather than at the mother’s face. Adults often communicate in the same way. I observed a woman my age looking at a teenage girl whose need to be fashionable had quite overcome her sense of the ridiculous. As the woman shook her head and turned away, she caught my eye. I smiled, and she smiled back. Nothing needed to be said.

Psychologists will argue that there are good scientific reasons for rejecting the theory that babies are born with some degree of a sense of self and an ability to perceive a sense of self in other people. However, science is concerned with probabilities. Any statement of absolute certainty cannot be scientific. Deciding whether a particular probability is so significant that it can be acted upon is a subjective judgement. For instance, you have about one chance in fourteen million of winning the UK National Lottery. Such a probability has never tempted me to buy a ticket, but millions of people do, many on the grounds that, ‘Someone has got to win it.’ More often than not, whether we see a particular probability as being significant depends on whether it fits with the way we see things. There are many adults, and not only psychologists, who want to see themselves as being superior to children. When you were a child, how many adults did you meet who spoke to you as an equal? Did you try to bear this as best you could, or did you resolve that, when you grew up, you would do to children what had been done to you?

All the evidence that infants can imitate, converse, feel self-conscious, understand intention, understand humour and how to deceive others has not changed the minds of those psychologists who are devoted to the theory that children have to be about four years old before they acquire a sense of self and an understanding that other people have a sense of self. My husband, who had a somewhat tangential relationship with truth, used to say that you should never let the facts stand in the way of a good story. He could have said the same about any theory on which a scientist has staked his identity. Abandoning a theory on which you have built your career and reputation with your peers will threaten your sense of being a person, and so you are likely to deny the evidence that shows your theory to be wrong.

So rarely does a scientist gracefully relinquish a theory which built his reputation that much is made of those occasions when a scientist does just this. In his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins tells the story of a respected elderly zoologist who was tremendously pleased when, in a lecture, a much younger scientist showed the zoologist that his long-held theory was wrong. Dawkins wrote, ‘We clapped our hands red.’²

If you are the student of a well-known or an up-and-coming scientist, one of the most dangerous things you can do is to obtain research results that throw doubt on this scientist’s theories. (Alternatively, one of the best things you can ever do is to produce results that disprove the theories of his competitor.) Vasudevi Reddy told the story of what happened when one of Piaget’s students, Olga Maratos, made a discovery that suggested that Piaget might be wrong. From his extensive research the great psychologist had concluded that it was not until they were about eight months old that infants could imitate another person because imitation requires some understanding of oneself and another person, and this a newborn baby did not have. Olga Maratos found that, if she poked her tongue at a baby no more than a month old, the baby, seemingly with much thought and effort, poked his tongue at her. Her fellow psychologists were sceptical, but, when she showed the great man a video of her research, he said, ‘Indeed they imitate!’ When she asked him what she should do, he said she would either have to develop his theory, or create a different theory from the data.

When Olga had presented her work at a conference of the British Psychological Society, in her audience was a young psychologist who went on to show that what she had found was indeed the case. Babies are born knowing how to imitate.

It was Andrew Meltzoff who, having persuaded a large number of pregnant women to allow him to be at their baby’s birth, established that, if you hold a baby who has just been born so that the two of you are looking at one another, and you poke your tongue out, slowly and carefully, the baby will copy you. Now, nearly a hundred studies of newborns have shown that babies within minutes of birth can imitate mouth opening, finger movement, eye blinking, and even one sound, ‘aaaa’. Reddy wrote, ‘The debate is just as passionate as it ever was, now having shifted to the question of whether we could actually call such acts “imitation”.’³ This reminds me of the phenomenon of ‘retrospective diagnosis’ which I observed in the psychiatric hospitals where I worked. The psychiatrists I worked with believed that depression was a lifelong chronic illness which could be managed by the psychiatrist with the use of antidepressant drugs. When any of my depressed patients came to the conclusion that it was their ideas that had led them to become depressed, and decided that they could change these ideas to ones that ensured a satisfactory life, the psychiatrist who had diagnosed this patient as being depressed would deny that the patient had ever been depressed. He had merely suffered from mild anxiety. Changing the facts so that your original theory still holds is a very popular form of falsehood called ‘hypothesis saving’. It is not just scientists who do this.

The question of whether newborn babies can imitate is important because, as Reddy said, ‘You cannot imitate that which in some sense you don’t understand.’⁴ To imitate you have to have some sense of self and to see something similar in the person you imitate. When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788 there followed a meeting between two groups of people whose paths had diverged some sixty thousand years before. When the first groups of homo sapiens left Africa, the distant ancestors of the officers, soldiers and convicts had settled in Europe while the distant ancestors of the Aborigines had set off on a long journey that eventually brought them to Australia. The two groups developed vastly different languages and cultures. Thus, when some of their number met on the shores of Sydney Harbour they could communicate only by facial expressions and gesture. What disconcerted the whites was the way the Aborigines could imitate them. The Aborigines could echo back to the English words and phrases that the white men had used. The Aborigines had no knowledge of what were appropriate manners in eighteenth-century England, but they could understand, say, how one man might display his power by the way he moved and gesticulated, and another his vanity. However, despite this and much other evidence that the Aborigines were the same species as the whites, the whites had to maintain their pride by insisting that the Aborigines were not just ignor ant savages but less than human. This belief has not entirely vanished from the minds of many white Australians today. Whoever you are, if you are treated as inferior by those who have power over you, you suffer. Children suffer when the adults around them treat them as their inferiors, as many adults do. Yet it is now quite clear that newborns do not merely imitate, they are able to distinguish human beings from objects, and understand wordlessly that people have intentions but objects do not, and that other people can confirm your existence but objects do not.

It seems that we are born with the ability to be a person but that this ability requires interaction with other people in order for it to manifest itself. In the company of attentive faces, the many and various facets of being a person begin to show themselves. In her book How Infants Know Minds Vasudevi Reddy gives an account of all of these, but here I want to look at the aspects of being a person that relate to truth and lies.

Infants perceive and respond to another person’s emotional state. They show a clear preference for happy faces rather than angry ones. What they dislike most is a blank, unresponsive face. We might not enjoy someone being angry with us or rejecting us, but at least these people are taking notice of us. Nowadays, in conversation ‘blank’ is used as a verb, as in, ‘At the party Susie blanked Jim, and he got back at her by sending her up.’ I am not sure how much of that sentence is Australian slang and how much English, but it means, ‘Susie refused to acknowledge Jim’s presence, and he responded by making fun of her.’ Teachers must make sure that they pay attention to the well-behaved child, otherwise the child might become very badly behaved in order to get some attention. In some of the workshops I used to run, I would ask the participants to imagine they were the sole survivor of a shipwreck. They had just enough strength to paddle their life raft to one of two islands. On one island, the inhabitants would ignore them completely. On the other, the inhabitants would notice them but only to be extremely unpleasant to them. Which island would they choose? The majority of people chose the island where the inhabitants acknowledged their existence, albeit unpleasantly. If, over a period of time, nobody takes any notice of us we start to feel that we have disappeared.

It seems that babies soon discover that, if they respond to an adult in the way the adult wants, the adult rewards them, not just with smiles, but also with saying something in a warm, encouraging tone. By the time they are eight or nine months old infants start to understand and respond to orders. At first, this can seem to be another enjoyable game, but then some of these orders become, in the infant’s way of seeing things, an unwarranted intrusion into what the infant wants to do. Infants learn very quickly how not to comply to unwelcome instructions. To these they respond sometimes with noisy defiance, and sometimes more subtly with a stiffening of the back and the sudden onset of deafness.

In responding in these ways to unwelcome orders, infants show that they understand the dangers inherent in being very obedient. If we comply with an order because, if we had thought of it, we would have done what we are now being asked to do, or because we want to please the person giving the order and fulfilling that order is not difficult, we feel that we are in control of that situation. However, if we believe that we will feel guilty if we disobey an unwelcome order or that in the face of punishment we are being compelled to comply, or that complying means going against the grain of our very being, we are not in control of the situ ation. We want to resist, and, if we do not do so, we despise ourselves. If these last three situations often arise, we soon find that continual compliance threatens to wipe us out as a person. We do not need a language to understand the danger of being annihilated as a person, in the same way as we do not need a language to understand that, if we touch something very hot, we must withdraw our hand immediately.

In her book, Reddy mentions what she calls the ‘disintegration’ of the self following bereavement or shock.⁵ In psychoanalytic literature, such ‘shock’ is referred to as trauma. For the baby this can occur when the ‘good’ mother suddenly turns into the ‘bad’ mother. The smiling mother might suddenly become angry, or distant, or vanish and not return. Whenever we suffer a trauma or a bereavement, we discover that the world is not what we thought it was. Some of our ideas are disconfirmed, and we feel ourselves falling apart. We have to find ways of protecting ourselves from trauma, and, if this happens, ways of holding our sense of self together.

At about nine months babies discover that they can protect themselves by refusing to obey orders. However, adults are more powerful than infants, and they can punish those who disobey. When the refusal to obey fails to protect infants, they have to learn how to lie. But before they can do this, they have to discover the two prerequisites of lying.

To lie you must first know the truth.

The person you wish to lie to must be capable of being deceived.

From the moment newborn babies gaze upon the world they are in the business of discovering what is going on. They want to discover this for themselves, and, as soon as they can point at something, they want to share this information with the people around them. Reddy wrote, ‘From about 12 to 18 months toddlers effortfully, selectively and appropriately inform other people truthfully about reality, often telling people things they don’t appear to know or may “need” to know.’⁶ They offer other people information, and they are capable of selecting among several adults those adults who lack certain information that the other adults already have.

A number of recent studies have found that even fifteen-month-old toddlers seem to be able to detect that other people can have false beliefs about reality. Well before they can tell a lie, infants discover how to deceive. They quickly grasp the principle of ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.’ If your mother does not want you to do something, wait until she is out of the room. The psychologist Judy Dunn has shown that toddlers of no more than sixteen months can discover what would upset or please their mother or their siblings, and then do it.⁷ Such young children fail the Piagetian tests for understanding the general principle that other people can hold false beliefs. However, the people whose minds you need to be able to read early in your life are your nearest and dearest, because they are the people who can easily annihilate you as a person, or give you the kind of affirmation that brings the greatest joy to your heart.

Most of us are born into families where the parents hold differing views on a great many subjects. It does not take us long to discover that we can get a biscuit from Dad by giving him a cuddle, whereas a biscuit from Mum comes only as a reward for doing something she wants us to do. Once we discover that our parents have very different views on what constitutes clean hands or the very last story before going to sleep, we can elaborate our tactics for deceiving our parents. However, some children are born to parents who decide that they will appear to their children to agree in their views about everything. Not being offered alternative interpretations of events, the child believes that his parents see everything exactly as it is, and are therefore not susceptible to being deceived.

In his biography of his father Philip Gosse, Edmund Gosse described how he had seen his parents in this way, and what a shock it was to him when he discovered that his father could be in error. Philip Gosse was a colleague of Charles Darwin, a painstaking biologist, and a devout Plymouth Brethren, as was his wife. Edmund Gosse wrote,

In consequence of hearing so much about an Omniscient God, a being of supernatural wisdom and penetration who was always with us, who made, in fact, a fourth in our company, I had come to think of Him, not without awe, but with absolute confidence. My Father and Mother, in their serene discipline of me, never argued with one another, never differed; their wills seemed absolutely as one. My Mother always deferred to my Father, and in his absence spoke of him to me, as if he were all-wise. I confused him in some sense with God; in all events I believed that my Father knew everything and saw everything. One morning in my sixth year, my Mother and I were alone in the morning room, when my Father came in and announced some fact to us… I remember turning quickly, in embarrassment, and looking into the fire. The shock was to me as a thunderbolt, for what my Father had said was not true. My Mother and I, who had been present at the trifling incident, were aware that it had not happened exactly as it had been reported to him. My Mother gently told him so, and he accepted the correction. Nothing could have possibly been more trifling to my parents, but to me it was an epoch. Here was an appalling discovery, never suspected before, that my Father was not as God, and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed, omniscient.⁸

Not long after this incident, Edmund chanced upon some tools which workmen had left in the garden near a small rockery built by his father with what Edmund described as ‘a pretty parasol of water’. Edmund wondered whether one of these tools could make a hole in the base of the water pipe to the little fountain. He made the hole, and moved on, thinking about other things. Several days later his father came in to dinner very angry. He turned on the tap to the fountain, and water rushed through the hole. The rockery was ruined. Edmund was ‘frozen with alarm’ and waiting to be blamed. However, his mother pointed out that the plumbers had probably caused the damage, and his father agreed. Edmund was ‘turned to stone within, but outwardly sympathetic and with unchecked appetite’. He wrote,

The emotions which now thronged within me, and led me with an almost unwise alacrity to seek solitude in the back garden, were not moral at all, they were intellectual. I was not ashamed of having successfully – and so surprisingly – deceived my parents by my crafty silence; I looked upon that as a providential escape, and dismissed all further thought of it. I had other things to think of.

In the first place, the theory that my Father was omniscient or infallible was now dead and buried. He probably knew very little; in this case he had not known a fact of such importance that if you did not know that, it could hardly matter what you knew. My Father, as a deity, as a natural force of immense prestige, fell in my eyes to a human level. In future, his statements about things in general need not be accepted implicitly. But of all the thoughts that rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk to one another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended on me, and it is equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast.⁹

The events in childhood that come to define who we are often are events that in themselves are insignificant. What is of immense importance are the conclusions we draw from these experiences. In this successful deception of his parents, Edmund was made aware of both his sense of being a person and the lifelong dialogue between himself and his closest ally, himself. He learned that he could separate himself from what was going on around him. He could take up the position of being an observer, and discuss his observations with himself.

Edmund, an only child, spent considerable time entertaining himself, and so he could conduct long conversations with himself. His parents made it very clear to him that they wanted him to be a godly child, and he tried to conform outwardly to their wishes. However, he knew that he was not a godly child, and he never pretended to himself that he was. Because his parents never inflicted physical punishments, he was not placed in situations where he had to take a stand against their attacks on his sense of being a person. He did not have to defy his parents the way that beaten children do, by claiming that the parents’ assaults did not hurt. He was a loving, respectful son who, somehow, never became the holy person his father wanted. Instead, he became the truthful writer that he wanted to be.

Edmund Gosse’s story stands in stark contrast to the work of Paul Newton who studied the lies told by two- and three-year-old children. These children told a wide variety of lies, but there were no white lies. The children knew a good deal about the adults closest to them, but they had not yet perceived that some people wanted to be protected from the truth.

Many of these children told bravado lies. All bravado lies are aimed at bolstering the sense of being a person when it is under attack. We all resort to, ‘No, I wasn’t frightened’, or, ‘No, I wasn’t upset’, rather than admit weakness. However, it is children, more than adults, who receive physical punishment.

‘It didn’t hurt’ is a lie commonly associated with school-age children, but in Newton’s study Reddy recorded that ‘there were some heart-rending reports of “Don’t hurt” bravado’. She quoted one report concerned with a little girl of three years six months. The mother of the child said,

You can smack her legs until they’re red raw, and if she’s in one of her wilful moods she’ll go: ‘Didn’t hurt!’ On a couple of occasions when she’s been threatened with a good hiding for misbehaviour she’s even dropped her trousers for you. The other day she did this and then said, ‘It dudn’t hurt!’¹⁰

All parents of small children sometimes administer a punishment of some kind far greater than the misdemeanour warranted. Some of these parents, when they calm down, realize that they have overstepped the mark and regret it. Wise parents acknowledge this to the child, and apologize without blaming the child for forcing them to go to such an extreme. Clearly this mother felt she was justified in inflicting such pain on her child. It seems that she preferred her child to fear and obey her than to love her. Did she not know that fear drives out love? Even if we manage to retain some love for the person we fear, our fear and guilt prevent us from expressing fully and openly the love that we feel.

With this mother and child, the daughter will always fear her mother because her mother has threatened her with the greatest peril, that of being damaged or broken by such a close encounter with being annihilated as a person.

This little girl would not then, and perhaps never will, be able to take that step back so she could see and describe what exactly happened to her during those beatings. The Hungarian writer Imre Kertész was older than she was when he, just fifteen, was sent to Auschwitz. Years later he wrote a fictionalized memoir of his time in Auschwitz. He called the central character Gyuri.

One of the most onerous tasks inflicted on the prisoners was the loading of bags of cement. When Gyuri dropped a bag which then split open and spilled its contents, the guard knocked him to the ground, rubbed his face in the dirt and swore that he would never drop a bag again. Kertész wrote,

From then on, he personally loaded each bag on to my shoulders each time it was my turn, bothering himself with me alone; I was his sole concern, it was me exclusively he kept his eye on, following me all the way to the truck and back, and whom he picked to go first, even if, by rights, there were others still ahead of me in the queue. In the end, there was almost an understanding between us, we had got the measure of one another, and I noticed that his face bore what was almost a smile of satisfaction, encouragement, even, dare I say, a pride of sorts, and from a certain perspective, I had to acknowledge, with good reason, for indeed, tottering, stooping though I might have been, my eyes seeing black spots, I did manage to hold out, coming and going, all without dropping a single further bag, and that, when it comes to it, proved him right. On the other hand, by the end of the day I felt that something within me had broken down irreparably; from then on every morning I believed that would be the last morning I would get up; with every step I took, that I could not possibly take another; with every movement I made, I would be incapable of making another; and yet, for the time being, I still managed to accomplish it each and every time.¹¹

By carrying out the task of loading the bags of cement Gyuri was trying to demonstrate to the guard the equivalent of ‘It didn’t hurt’, and thus preserve his sense of being a person. However, when we protect ourselves against a massive assault, we use up many of the strengths we have to defend ourselves. If the assaults are infrequent, we have time to replenish our strengths, but, if the assault is particularly brutal, or, if the assaults occur frequently as they do from parents who use physical punishments as the prime form of discipline, we might not be able to restore our sense of being a person to its former strength and cohesion. Like Gyuri, we can lose our ability to view our future hopefully. From then on, each day cannot be enjoyed but has to be endured. Alternatively, we can adopt a position of constant defiance, and each day, whatever the situation, every authority however benign has to be defied and fought. These two outcomes are found in the long-term studies of children whose parents used physical punishment. Some of these children, mostly girls, go on to become depressed, while others, mostly boys, become too wild and aggressive to be contained within society.¹²