Filicide:
To support this disturbing thesis, Milburn re-examines a number of the most dominant myths of the Western world--Oedipus, Abraham, Jesus, Hamlet, Faust, and Frankenstein--from the child's point-of-view. Such a perspective yields astonishing results, turning received interpretations of the old stories on their heads. As final proof of the extent to which the filicidal past is not merely still with us but is controlling our behavior in dangerous, unexamined ways, Milburn re-reads more recent narratives of contemporary mythology as embodied in the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Myra Breckinridge. Just one of several paradoxical conclusions: "Before George Washington was, Myra Breckinridge is." A book that challenges ideologies across the board from theology to science, from psychology to politics, Filicide offers hope for readers willing to re-examine some of our most fundamental assumptions in this increasingly unquestioning, theocratic age. Paperback, 178 pp.
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FILICIDE
Violence is interference; interference, violence. In the strictest sense, we cannot exist without being violent. We inhabit a continuum of physical violence--from the most basic and minimal of interferences such as breathing and occupying physical space, through the more obviously violent acts of assault, rape, and murder, to the ultimate, sometimes planetary, violence known as war. We also inhabit a continuum of behavioral violence, that being interference with another person in some suasive, manipulative way. Words form our most common means of behavioral violence. Money is a highly effective weapon of behavioral violence. But our most potent method of behavioral violence lies in the exemplary force of our lives as we live them. The nature and quality of our lives reflect and advertise our conscious and unconscious decisions in a highly convincing, highly visible manner. The behavioral ideal of "nonviolence" is thus a nonexistent category, describing as it does a state which we cannot achieve this side of death. The nonviolent person is understood to be one who will neither use nor resist physical violence. Few would deny that that is a noble and possibly even valuable behavior for a human being to aspire to. The doctrine of nonviolence is based on the attractive but dangerously naive assumption that all violence is physical, that is, bloody. While we in this century can certainly qualify as experts on bloodshed with our hundred million war deaths, we also qualify equally well as experts on the techniques of behavioral violence with our rapid and continuing development of the various kinds of propaganda--commercial, political, artistic, scientific, educational, and religious. Our choice then is not between violence and nonviolence. The choice is far subtler, and is one we all make whether we are aware of it or not; namely, at what level of violence we will exist, what level of violence we find acceptable. We make the choice as individuals and then, cumulatively, as cultures. We learn, in other words, the discrimination of violences. In making that choice, a further discrimination occurs. Again whether we are aware of it or not, we discriminate between natural violence and contrived violence. Natural violence consists of those acts of interference which we cannot avoid--breathing, occupying space, and so on. Contrived violence consists of all other acts of interference. The quality of life which an individual or a society enjoys is largely a result of the kinds of contrived violence perceived as acceptable. One American age finds its values and its frustrations best represented by baseball--later age obtains satisfaction from football. The positive side of historical progress consists of our increasing sensitivity to and refinement of the discrimination of violences. As that process occurs we find that those forms of violence which we think of, unconsciously or consciously, as natural diminish in number. We come to perceive that various kinds of violence which we once thought inevitable ("human nature") are in fact contrived. We become aware that we have gentler choices in vast areas of our behavior where we once thought we either had no choices at all or only the choice between different kinds of more or less brutal violence. It is possible that the American experience in Vietnam represents an extension of the semantic discrimination of violences into the world of physical behavior. After a prolonged internal struggle, American civilization realized it could no longer accept the validity of certain ancient justifications concerning the unavoidability, the naturalness if you will, of international violence, A similar growth in the discrimination of violences may be seen throughout history in the area of human rights. One by one, the old arguments in support of the political, legal, religious, and sexist exploitation of groups and individuals fall as we become more aware of the extent to which we can determine and act on acceptable limits to our violence. Now we come to speak of children and their role in the system of contrived violence. We have long assumed that the violence we perpetrate on children is either natural (unavoidable) or necessary (We're doing this for your own good). Growing awareness of cultural relativism has undercut that assumption to some extent. The most basic part of the pedagogical assumption, namely that the child is the property of and is totally given to the power of the parents or their legal surrogates, remains in full force throughout the planet, in societies of every political stripe. Massive, maximum interference in the child's development and growth is still the order of the day in even the most enlightened societies--however one may choose to define enlightened. Children, the only true mirrors available to us, remain the true slave class, as they have been from the beginning of history. Progress in the area of children's rights has not been entirely lacking. Infanticide, once common to societies in all parts of the world, is now illegal in the more civilized countries. Many nations now have laws designed to protect the child from the more extreme forms of physical abuse; but note that we continue to define child abuse rather narrowly. Child beating in the form of paddling, spanking, or whipping continues to be a generally accepted, indeed popular, form of pedagogy in both homes and schools throughout the world. Only recently have we begun studying the history of childhood. A very large part of that study must be the long and bloody record of the child as physically abused slave. Of the behavioral violence to which we subject children we have hardly begun to speak at all. Modern ideological and quasi-religious movements have made some attempt to analyze our behavioral violence toward children; but the insights generated by, for example, Marxism on the one hand or psychoanalysis on the other are very much adult-oriented, aimed primarily at the solution of adult problems, with the problems of children receiving attention mostly to the extent that they contribute to adult difficulties. The whole process of acculturation--to which every child is subjected--is an act of contrived violence. For a very long time we have believed, to the extent that we thought about the process at all, that it was either natural (child as property) or necessary (Honor thy father and thy mother). As we have begun to question the "naturalness" of masculinity and femininity, we also begin to question the naturalness of childhood as we have experienced it for thousands of years. If sex roles--the foundations of our adult, civilized personalities--are mutable, then we conclude that those roles as we know then, as we are them, are imposed on us as children. The "natural" violence of traditional masculinity and femininity is revealed as the contrived violence of humanity, perpetrated--innocently perhaps but no less violent for being innocently done--on every generation of children. Back to Filicide Contents Page
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If "interference is violence; and violence, interference,"
then it follows that the acculturation of children, in Douglas Milburn's startling
analysis of the mythic reality of childhood, is the most pervasive and violent of
civilized acts. So limiting to our seemingly infinite potential is the act of
child-rearing that Milburn sees it as a kind of filicide: the psychic murder of children,
carried out, tragically, with the best of intentions, Milburn argues that, whatever its
long-ago survival value, this process of acculturation now only sows the seeds of
continuing violence, both psychic and physical. As adults we then spend much of our lives
trying to find a way out of the small cultural prison in which we've been placed.
