Poet and philosopher David Whyte discusses his inner life and the importance of loneliness: "I've always felt that when you do feel loneliness, it's always a kind of inverse measure of what you actually belong to." Part three of The Lonely Hour's mini-series, Inner Lives.
18:46 minutes
#33 How Loneliness Tells You Where to Go, with David Whyte – The Lonely Hour – Podcast – Podtail
How we became
more than 7 billion – humanity’s population explosion, visualised
From our origins in Africa, humans began migrating around the globe
roughly 100,000 years ago. But it was only with the advent of agriculture about
12,000 years ago that our population started to swell to more than a million.
This data visualisation from the American Museum of Natural History beautifully
charts humanity’s stunning – and increasingly alarming – exponential expansion
to our current population of roughly 7.4 billion.
Video by the American Museum of Natural History
Producer: Laura Moustakerski
Animator: Shay Krasinksi
2 December 2016
How we became more than 7 billion – humanity’s population explosion, visualised | Aeon Videos
An elegy and a
celebration of what it really means to find a home
‘The aroma of this house was beautiful. Smell of the earth,
smell of the wood, smell of the smoke … I felt life, a very healthy life, being
led in that space.’
This is how the Japanese architect Yoshihiro Takishita
describes his experience of first entering what would become his home for more
than 50 years. At the time, in 1965, he was still a university student without
any thought of practising architecture. The building he entered was a minka,
a type of traditional farmhouse in Japan. Already about 250 years old then,
the minka was going to be destroyed by the construction of the
Kuzuryu Dam. Instead, with help from his family and along with his American
friend John Roderick, Takishita transported it from Fukui Prefecture to the
forested Tokyo suburb of Kamakura. Rebuilding the house set him on a path of
becoming an architect expert in relocating and reconstructing minka,
always relying on the skills of traditional carpenters and craftsmen. This
first minka was a home he shared with Roderick for the next
four decades.
The US filmmaker Davina Pardo completed the short
documentary Minka in 2008, just after Roderick’s death at 93.
Older than Takishita by 31 years, Roderick was a foreign correspondent for the
Associated Press who spent most of his time in Japan from the late-1950s until
close to the end of his life. The deep relationship between the two men,
formalised through Roderick’s adoption of Takishita as his son, is at the heart
of the film, with the younger man’s words, memories and photographs conjuring a
rich yet elusive sense of the life they shared together. What’s eminently
clear, though, is that the minka in which they lived, a space
they shaped together and on which they left their mark, in turn shaped each of
them.
Takishita invokes this interplay between the minka and
their lives in various ways, and Pardo deepens this dynamic relationship with
her own subtle, but resonant choices. Moving fluidly backward and forward in
time, she allows a few sentences from Takishita or a sequence of photographs or
a peaceful view of a room to evoke rather than define the relationship between
the two men and the minka itself. In a series of images that
perfectly embodies the notion of interconnectedness permeating Takishita’s
understanding of the house, Pardo cuts from a shot of a wood-burning stove to a
steaming teacup to Takishita sighing to a smoking chimney to rain drops,
creating the sense that each element is part of a living, breathing whole.
This sort of visual and sonic poetry ripples throughout the
film, giving us a wonderfully experiential, sensorial immersion into the
relationships between architecture and nature, place and people’s lives. In
another moment, Takishita points out his ‘graveyard’: a pile of beams from
other minka, wood that is now rotting back to earth, surrounded by
trees that themselves could be used to build a home. His sense of a cyclical
rhythm at play imbues his words describing first entering the minka with
a Janus-like perspective on time, the life he felt being lived in that space,
belonging to those who had been there before, and to himself and Roderick in
the years to come.
Written by Kellen Quinn
The number of children
killed by preventable accidents declined in every UK nation between 1980 and 2010. The number of
children killed or seriously injured by a car gets lower by the year; the incidence of severe burns has declined over time across all of Europe and is now very low. Empirically speaking,
children have never been safer.
But this doesn’t seem
to have yielded a generation that feels safe. Instead, we have one that feels so unsafe they
want to use political process to make things better. That, at least, seems to
be the upshot of a new HEPI poll which revealed that (along with broad and
rising support for censorship, trigger warnings, and firing problematic
professors) 79% of undergraduates think students’ demands for “safety” should
always be met. And a look at the factors driving this seismic change suggests a
startling conclusion: that we should take “woke”
claims of “trauma” much more seriously — but also wholly disregard “woke”
claims about their origin.
For it’s
not the universities encouraging young people to make “safety” a political
demand. Rather, such calls seem to originate with students themselves. In the
recent persecution of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University,
for example, administrators may have supported or at least failed to halt her
harassment. But protests were led by undergraduate activists. One placard said “we
were meant to be safe here”.
Nor do
such demands start at university, but erupt in schools as well. In May, a
British sixth-former was hounded
out of her school for questioning consensus views on trans rights, and
instead of defending her, the school apologised to other pupils for not
maintaining a “safe space”.
I asked Andrew, head of sixth form at an
independent girls’ school, what he thought was driving the hunger to be safe.
He told me that some of it is grounded in reality: in his observation many of
his pupils are “genuinely apprehensive about the future”. Their worries vary
from the abstract, such as climate change, to more concrete fears about
economics, the job market and declining prospects for home ownership — worries
that are objectively far from groundless.
In the view of sociologist Matthew Goodwin, a key driver
of the new safety-oriented intolerance is the internet. The deputy head at one
London state school, James, backs this up: in his view, social media makes it
“much easier” to “isolate oneself from opposing (and discomforting) arguments”.
His view resonates with Andrew’s observations of how his pupils behave: “Those
who are most concerned about safety”, Andrew says, “are the ones who are very
‘online’.”
And
indeed, a defining feature of online sociality is filter
bubbles, where we come to think everyone shares our opinions because
algorithms filter out content from anyone who doesn’t. One pupil, Andrew tells
me, goes even beyond the algorithmic hygiene of her filter bubble to create her
own, proactively: she routinely checks an author’s biography for politically
disagreeable views and discards “books written by anyone with whom she
disagrees politically or philosophically”.
It makes sense, too, that a cohort accustomed
to resolving conflict by muting, unfollowing or blocking disagreeable voices
might struggle in real-world conflict. In the view of Anne, an American
professor, “a big part of it is conflict aversion”, which means “any emotional
discomfort they feel from disagreement (whether a peer or a text) is
interpreted as a personal attack and ‘unsafe’”. In response to this poverty of
interpersonal skills, she says, there’s an expectation that “professors are
responsible to create conflict-free and tension-free environments”.
This tallies with a
recent report on American campuses, where Title IX protections
intended to shield women against sex discrimination have become an expansive
means of refereeing interpersonal disputes, one Title IX coordinator tells the author
“she sometimes thought of her job as running ‘The Break Up Office’”. In other
words: instead of resolving an unhappy break-up among themselves, students seek
redress via official sex-discrimination policies.
Another
factor that might contribute to such conflict aversion is well-meaning school
policies designed to protect schoolchildren. My own daughter isn’t a university
student at the other end of her educational journey; and yet her (lovely,
attentive, empathetic) primary-school teachers regularly drum home the message
that intractable conflict is best resolved by telling a teacher. It’s often struck
me that if widespread, over time such policies might well result in more adults
whose first response to interpersonal conflict would be seeking resolution via
an authority figure.
And perhaps this starts before schools, too.
Free Range Kids, a project and book by
American mum Lenore Skenazy, argues that in the name of “safety”, over-protective
parenting — or, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put
it in 2018, “coddling” — is undermining young people’s agency,
confidence and resilience.
And it’s difficult to
dispute that a fixation on “safety” pervades both products and services aimed
at children and also behavioural norms. This inevitably shapes children’s
experience, even in family cultures that aren’t especially anxious about
safety. I realised how deep this reaches when my own daughter became agitated
because I started the car moving, slowly, on our driveway, before she’d
finished fastening her seatbelt.
This still doesn’t feel
like the root of it though. One of the first student eruptions of this nature
to make the news took place at Yale in 2015, where two faculty members,
Nicholas and Erika Christakis, wrote to students encouraging them to tolerate
even offensive Halloween costumes. In the ensuing uproar one young woman told Christakis that the
college “is no longer a safe space”.
What
shook the world about the 2016 Yale video, and remains startling about the many subsequent similar scenarios at schools, universities and the
wider world is how
radically dysregulated many politically-engaged young people genuinely
seem to be. They actually are that
upset. For many proponents of “wokeness”, political issues genuinely seem to
cause dramatic
emotional highs and lows — so much so in fact that the phrase
“literally shaking and crying” is widely used to parody this kind of
high-pitched activist tone.
But while the fragility in question often
seems to be channeled into political activism, what if it doesn’t originate
there? A 2020 Pew study reported that
the combination of progressivism and youth strongly correlates with mental
health difficulties, a finding gleefully
seized upon to claim that progressivism drives people crazy. But it’s
possible that this has the causality backwards, and it’s more that unhappy
people seize upon what Jason Manning has
called “Victimhood Culture” to justify an already-endemic state of
maladjustment.
Consider this
short article, published by an Australian university, which describes
“coping with a meltdown”. Symptoms of a “meltdown” reportedly include shaking,
terror, poor decision-making, and destructive self-soothing, and overwhelming
emotions such as helplessness, anger and fear. According to the article, we all
experience “meltdowns”. Except actually no, we don’t.
And the “meltdowns”, the emotional
dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic
of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of
pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by
children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.
The child development
theorist Erik Erickson characterised the first stage of infancy as where we
develop a foundational confidence that a caregiver will be there when we need
them. And where this is interrupted by traumatic experiences, the sense of
chronic threat can last forever. As psychotherapist Dorothy Scotten argues, pre-verbal experience of abuse or neglect then
means “the infant loses the sense of safety and begins her/his life in a state
of psychological mistrust and instability”. Long-term effects of such trauma
can then include “a feeling of helplessness, residual fear and lack of safety”
along with self-destructive behaviours such as substance abuse, difficulty
forming relationships, and overwhelming emotions such as “infantile rage”. Not
a million miles, in other words, from the supposed symptoms of “meltdown”.
Another paper describes
a traumatised child who expressed “feelings of being unsafe and inadequately
protected by caregivers and an intense behavioural regression to an infantile
level at home”. This included acting out; the child “would camp outside his
mother’s bedroom door pretending to be a ‘lost puppy’ wanting to be taken in”.
The longing this expresses for a place of absolute safety is echoed in
Christakis’ confrontation with the Yale student body. Here several tearful
young women berate Christakis about how Yale was a “home” for them — but now,
as one puts it: “Somehow this home is broken.”
It seems unlikely that every single one of
these young people has been profoundly physically abused. What about neglected,
though? In the Seventies, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth documented the way
young children form a strong attachment to a single caregiver. They concluded
that attachment took three broad forms: secure, ambivalent or disordered.
Most attachments styles
fell within secure or ambivalent patterns, they found. Children with secure
attachment were confident that their caregivers would respond in an attuned
way; those with an ambivalent attachment pattern could either be anxious and
clingy or avoidant. And disordered attachment was found in neglectful,
frightened or frightening caregiving situations such as addiction or violent
homes.
Are we
looking at a mass outbreak of disordered attachment? Perhaps; for the other
generational change that swept across the West around the same time as the
internet was increased uptake of institutional childcare. In 1980, the year
after I was born, it was estimated that around a third of mothers had jobs. By
2011, though, a UCL study reported that
among the middle class, stay-at-home mums of young children were increasingly a
rarity concentrated among the richest and poorest, while in the middle class
nearly 70% had jobs before their child was one year old.
A great deal of research has been done on the
effect of childcare on attachment. Results vary considerably by geography and
the age of children, but a review of results concluded that there’s likely to be some effect. And, importantly,
especially where care is poor-quality and infants are very young, long
hours in childcare pose a significant risk factor for disordered attachment.
There are, to my
knowledge, no studies on whether any correlations exist between an
institutionalised early infancy and an unhappy young-adult preoccupation with
“safety”. But if there is a correlation, it might also explain the greater
American prevalence and intensity of this type of dysregulated youth politics:
American women have no right to maternity leave, and one in four American mothers is back
at work within two weeks. That’s a lot of tiny babies in institutional childcare.
Something
as seismic as the change in sensibility we’re seeing is unlikely to have a
single cause. But the step change in childcare uptake happened just long enough
ago for those kids to be arriving in adulthood now. It’s possible that genuine
worries for the future, internet filter bubbles, and a culture of safetyism
have landed, for some, on psyches that were fragile almost from birth.
And it’s possible that this subset was
predisposed to fragility, by an early infancy spent in “care” settings long on
stimulation, and short on attuned caregiving and cuddles — a setting inimical
to forming the kind of secure or even ambivalent attachment patterns needed for
healthy functioning as an adult. If this is so, it’s also possible that much of
contemporary student activism isn’t really about race, gender, climate or
whatever so much as it is about young adults desperately trying to elicit the
care from a new institution, that they missed out on in a different
institutional setting long before they even formed conscious memories.
If this so, we should
take student claims of distress and trauma more seriously – even as we dispute
their origins. And we should also be cautious about taking such individuals’
political demands at face value. For it may be that some of our angriest
activists have simply seized upon the opportunity offered by “Victim Culture”
to make a renewed plea for something they craved as a baby, and didn’t receive:
a reliable sense of being held, and loved, and safe.
Fragile
students just need a hug - UnHerd
Our third child was a quirky girl, into gymnastics, baking, music. She
liked things requiring new outfits. She was keen on Disney princesses. She had
some particular passions — fluffy clothing for a while, a collection of
handbags, cast off heeled shoes, models of movie characters.
She had always found it difficult to make close friends, often feeling
left on the side-lines when she was at primary school. Being studious and
rather too demanding of devotion put some potential friends off. And starting
secondary school was tough. The other girls were often unkind and our daughter
increasingly found that her personality, appearance and preferences all fell
short of their expectations. Girls seem to live in a phone-shaped goldfish bowl
these days. There was a lot of mockery.
Along came puberty, with its painful and chaotic periods and unwelcome
male interest in developing breasts. One boy who became a close friend for a
while, and a bit of a crush. But he was handsome and sporty and popular
— and had his pick of the girls. Our child was not a competitor. Then the
self-harming began.
I was told by the school about the cutting — a senior teacher called me
at work — handing over the problem rather than offering any solutions. The
alarm had been raised by other pupils, although efforts were being made to hide
it from adults. I would find blood on hidden pieces of fabric, and she would
wear loose, long sleeved clothing even on hot days. We asked our daughter
gently about what was troubling her but encountered only defiance and hostility
in response. I tried to hide sharp things that I found in her room, but a house
has plenty of objects that can be adapted for the purpose, even cut up drinks
cans.
I repeatedly tried to get help. I rang our GP and we visited one evening
with a doctor kindly staying late for us. I was left outside the consulting
room. I don’t know what was discussed, but there was something conspiratorial
in the air when she came out. We engaged with a kind but unprepared
school counsellor. She encouraged me to contact CAMHS — the NHS child health
service. We were triaged through a written form and a brief telephone call, and
eventually informed that we did not make the grade to be seen, given the strain
on services. I tried several private therapists but my daughter rejected them
one by one after the first appointment. They were, I think, trying to present a
bit of challenge to the narrative in a way that was not acceptable to our
child.
During this time Covid struck, along with its successive lockdowns. For long
periods, pretty much all healthy interaction, exercise, productive busyness
went out of the window. We managed some outdoor activity together for a while.
But for the most part, children were forced to live online for school,
extra-curricular activities, social interaction and entertainment. It is
hard to stay on top of what your children are viewing online. They know clever
tricks about switching screens to homework when a parent enters the room. They
run rings around adults. Sure, I used the internet service provider’s system to
block some websites, but many have a mixture of acceptable and unacceptable
content and it was hard to make any impact.
Then, in one of the brief gaps between confinements, we visited friends.
They live in a city with undisputed liberal credentials, unlike our small-town
backwater. Their daughter of a similar age was also troubled. They were going
through a torrid period of domestic violence and a broken relationship. Always
combative, the other girl was aggressively disruptive this time, and wore low
cut tops and a short skirt that were troubling to see on someone of 13. The two
girls spent time closeted together, whispering, discussing and sharing online
material. For a while after that visit, our child made an attempt at glamour,
which involved wearing provocative underwear and engaging in self-conscious
preening. She drifted further away, leaving us facing a closed bedroom door,
aggressive swearing and refusal to engage.
When I saw her phone and computer, I occasionally glimpsed online
threads of kids who were identifying as trans. A lot of them were boys or young
men. These were full of self-congratulatory stories of so many months on
cross-sex hormones along with sexualised selfies. She showed me videos uploaded
by adult trans people. They explained their personal journeys as
straightforward, beautiful, attractive.
It seems that a trans identity is offered to kids these days as a way
out of their confusion and misery. All of us, or at least everyone that I have
been close to, can remember our adolescence as difficult years. Feeling
unacceptable, substandard, not cool enough. We struggled, were unhappy, but
eventually found our way through. In my case it was through academic success,
for my sister, sport. A close friend turned to music. What we did not
have were people whispering to us in our bedrooms that our gender identity was
the problem and changing it the solution.
For our child, not being a girl had never been a possibility. All that
dressing up and dancing around, the playing with make up and the hilarious
results — she enjoyed it all.
But after several months of following influencers and other distressed
kids online, a formal statement of a trans identity came in the form of a
nicely put-together document sent by email, complete with illustrations. She
placed herself somewhere between the middle and the boy end of a continuous
line. The language was not hers. It was full of Americanised terminology, and
was clearly copied across from materials helpfully provided by someone else.
The mother of the girl we had visited in the city told me that her daughter was
doing the same thing – apparently she was literally now a boy. I spoke to the
younger members of my family and a few close friends. All were puzzled and
didn’t know what to say. The general “be kind” approach prevalent in our
society was there, but mixed with a kind of silent bafflement.
I tried explaining to my child that I had a different point of view,
that I believe in both biological reality and women’s sex-based rights, and
just didn’t see how all this had appeared pretty much from nowhere. It did not
go well. We as parents were classed as “cis transphobes” whose views were
irrelevant, outdated and just wrong.
I did not want to go along with it, but we were in a dark place then.
Instead of procuring the sexy push-up bras, I was buying expensive breast
binders from a US company. Only clothing from the boys’ or men’s sections could
be worn – the baggier the better. I still cannot explain the move from being
sexy to denial of being female at all, expect perhaps as an admission of defeat
as an attractive teen girl.
She was still cutting herself and we were desperate for it to stop. At
that point, we didn’t care what clothes she wore or what hairstyle she wanted,
and would risk the potential back problems and ribcage damage caused by the binders.
But the more I looked into the trans issue the more worried I became.
I contacted organisations that profess expertise on the subject. But the
trouble is, they nearly all point in one direction. You find Mermaids, the UK
trans charity, on the first search. I called them to discuss binders and
whether they were safe. That conversation was all about affirming my daughter’s
decision and advising that the potential harm of not doing so was much greater
than any drawbacks in doing so. They suggested getting on the waiting list for
NHS gender services straight away “as there is a long waiting list”.
Inevitably, I started to question myself: had my instincts about my
happy girl been completely wrong, and had she somehow buried a desire not to be
female for all of those years? I looked back through childhood photographs.
There she was smiling, dancing, laughing, trying new outfits, dressing up. Not
always happy, of course, but never in the slightest bit a boy. So I did some
more research, and the more I looked into it, the less coherent and responsible
it seemed.
The school is not much help. In fact, the school is part of the problem.
If my daughter is self-harming or tells them she is very low, they will call me
and tell me to access the community mental health services or A&E. They
pass the buck. They’re not keen to dive any deeper even though, if anything,
they have encouraged the trans identification, whether through fear, or
well-meaning and sincere belief. Some staff have used the “born in the wrong
body” phrase, which in the context of troubled teenagers is rather like playing
with matches in a parched field. They had me in for a meeting, two against one,
and essentially informed me that the name and pronouns would be changed across
the school by edict. It was all very smiley, but my views on whether this was a
good idea were not sought.
The school brings in organisations to talk about trans identities in a
positive way, but notably offers no differing points of view. I have tried to
express concern about the approach but have gained little traction. In reality,
the school seems to contain other perspectives, with some staff clearly not on
board with the full agenda, although apparently afraid to say so.
Where are we now? I do not use the new name and pronouns myself, but I
cannot use the old ones on pain of threats of self-harm or worse. The child
herself seems to be happier, adopting a gender non-conforming style of dress –
more Artful Dodger than Arnie. She is far from masculine though, spending most
of her free time with other girls, on what would widely be considered feminine
interests — such as trying new recipes, drawing, and watching or reading teen
romances. The earlier attempts at ostentatious belching and man-spreading seem
to have subsided. I get asked about outfit choices (this baggy hoody or that
one) and what to say to a boy who is a bit too keen to meet up outside school.
What is particularly baffling is why a mental difficulty that suddenly
arises in adolescence is treated as a newly revealed truth, rather than a
problem to be worked through and overcome. Many of these girls are struggling
mentally, and indeed some are diagnosed with autism. If my child had an eating
disorder, I do not think I would be encouraged to order diet books and seek
gastric surgery. Youth has always found ways to challenge the aged. Is this,
perhaps, a young-versus-old frontier, and a new way to challenge sex-based
roles and expectations? And yet it has taken on a certain kind of holiness.
Many are building their careers on this issue, both in the medical
profession and in the burgeoning diversity industry. But for those of us who
are not paying attention, it is time to wake up. For those involved from
schools, clinics, support service I ask that, before diving in with
affirmation, social transition and medical intervention, you just consider
asking parents whether the questioning child has ever in the past shown
discomfort with their sex. Ask them if the child was troubled and unhappy
beforehand. Ask them if the child has been deep in an online rabbit-hole.
School-leaders, ask yourselves why you have an annual month of
excitement about the sex and gender diversity alphabet and precious little else
the rest of the year on other issues like physical and mental
disability. For those making and implementing policy, ask yourselves
whether you are being told the full story by the diversity industry, and why
the voices of concerned parents and detransitioners are being widely
ignored. For parents with young children, especially girls, do not assume
that your child will not be affected.
If all of this turns into generally non-conforming quirky behaviour in
adulthood, then I will be highly relieved and move on. But there is the
widespread promotion out there of hormonal treatment, mastectomies,
sterilisation and “bottom surgery” to gender questioning teens as aspirational
next steps. Some parents clearly feel that this is right for their child. But
for those of us who don’t, the prospect is a frightening one. Early on in this
journey our daughter made some glib statements about top surgery (she is, in
fact, horrified by a visit to the dentist). Now, we don’t discuss any of this.
I admit that I avoid the whole subject to avoid any more harmful rows. I think
I have made clear that I love her, but that I disagree with the analysis and
don’t support the solution
I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties. We knew as girls that life was
tough but that it was our biology that kept us down, and while we were striving
to change that, we knew it would be a long fight. I knew that being raped at 16
was entirely down to my biology as a transiently useful vagina-haver, lacking
the strength and confidence to fight back. I knew that the handicapping of my
professional career in my 30s was due to my biology as a uterus-haver and
chest-feeder. I was aware that the lasting damage to my pelvic floor from a
forceps delivery was tied to the biological role of birthing parent. I know
that my current invisibility is due to my biology as a woman in menopause.
For now, I am putting one foot in front of the other, avoiding certain
teachers, firefighting arguments at home, trying to demonstrate love while
clinging on to my own sanity and understanding of the world. But my daughter’s
identity struggle has reawakened my interest in feminism, quietly folded away
at the end of the 20th century. It seems now that some of those uncompromising
voices from the “second wave” still need to be heard. How I would love for my
child, and many other young girls and women caught up in the same way, to
remember the feminism their mothers and grandmothers fought for and thought
that they had won.
***
Names have been changed.
Why
did my daughter become trans? - UnHerd
