FEAR
AND TREMBLING…
When I
was a child there was a widespread moral campaign against comic books,
prominent in the United States and vigorously endorsed by various child
psychologists especially by Dr Frederick Werth (satirised as ‘Werthless’ by Mad
Magazine). Comics were said to undermine the mental and moral health of
America’s children, though of course children (and many adults) continued to
read them. Perhaps we would have turned out better if we hadn’t, but there’s no
way of proving that now. Comics were especially feared because – unlike the
movies with their elaborate codes of viewing-age – comics consumption was
impossible to control. Though my wife remembers that as a small girl she and
others of her age stood outside any cinema showing what we now call a PG,
approaching adults about to go in and asking if they could go in with them. My
wife recalls that adults so approached were always obliging, if one had one’s
own ticket money. Goodness knows what today’s moral guardians would imagine if
it was still common practice for children to ‘solicit’ outside cinemas!
Obviously something that didn’t cross the minds of those on the British Board
of Film Censors. In any event, comic
books are now collected with something like reverence having also become
transmogrified first by Roy Lichtenstein’s massively telling panel blow-ups for
the art gallery, and latterly into the art-form of the graphic novel.
With television in the ascendant we
had more moral campaigners fearful of its dire effects on ‘young minds’: one
recalls (in the UK) Mrs Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners
Association whom TV executives and the BBC ignored at their peril. And so we
had the ‘nine o’clock watershed’ which is still more or less intact though I
doubt if it had much effect after many children acquired their own bedroom TVs.
But it was useful for parents to be able to take a stand when wanting their
offspring out of their hair by nine o’clock. The TV moral panic came and went,
with the world and its children much the same as before, except for a steep
decline in the viewing by older children at least of TV-as-such what with so
many alternatives becoming abundantly available.
It’s easy to poke fun at these moral
crusaders of yesteryear: the ‘threat’ they were attacking just came and went.
Perhaps children’s problems had less to do with the media they were imbibing
and more with matters closer to home. But with these moral crusades there may
have been other things going on.
Just as English revolutionaries of the
1640s wrapped biblical expressions around their social and political dissent
because the Bible was the common currency of 17th-century
Protestants, so moral campaigners of our time may have used the language of
child psychologists to vent a more profound social unease by focussing
rhetorically upon the ‘corruption’ of children. For where did this putative
‘corruption’ come from? The children didn’t make it up themselves; it issued
from forces out of the reach of popular control, as represented by the comic-book
publishers and distributors, and the film and (later) television corporations,
public and privately-owned. Did this indicate something much more mysterious
and sinister?
Socialists would call these
manifestations of capitalism, the all-controlling and out-of-reach control
‘system’ not effectively beholden to democratic governance. And so to the
simple equation: capitalism + children = manipulation, through tempting and
addictive fads and crazes. And beyond the control of parents, educators and youth
workers.
The use in moral panics of the emotive
and sensitive phenomena ‘children’ was also the most provocative and
fear-making: ‘children’ here would seem to be the surrogates for the
helplessness of us all in the face of menacingly anonymous and powerful forces
of control and manipulation, and a word with an immediate populist appeal. The
only problem in this case is and was that ‘children’ have never by themselves
been an easily-identifiable socio-economic category. There are all kinds and
ages of children, children from differing backgrounds, educations and social
classes, children – in addition – as comprising humans in various phases of
transition, physically and mentally, emotionally and sexually. ‘Human nature’ is another such non- category:
what, exactly, is ‘human nature’, and
how can such a vague expression be in any way useful when theorising on society
and trying to put theories into practice?
And ‘women’ in all their many
manifestations are a problematic for identity politics, though advances in
consciousness and belatedly in practice have been made through a sharper focus
on sexual and economic exploitation of women in general.
Meanwhile, children may be diverse but
they all have to breathe. Surely we should making it a priority to get the air
cleaned up and at least lessening pollution to the extent that we can actually deal with presently rising levels of
childhood asthma? Why are people seemingly more concerned with children’s morals
than over whether their breathing is
a danger to them or not?
A newer moral panic has arisen over
the exploitation of children on the internet. There are differences of concern
between the current panic and previous ones, though the moral tone is much the
same. The reason is that the newer media have something that comic books, films
and TV (not to speak of radio) never had: they are interactive. If one chooses
to, one may interact with TV and radio personalities in shows emphasising
audience participation. But social media are
interaction, and once children enter into it they are open to what can be,
for them, distressing exposure. Like the rest of us children’s natural social range is limited to those
they integrate with personally in the same space; when they find themselves potentially
interacting with the entire world this is something many will find bewildering
and frightening as these ‘relationships’ progress. It is the interactivity that
allows for the toxicity of social media, but basically they are still
uncontrollable.
For another feature of the newer media
is that whatever controls are eventually introduced they will only be effective
for a time before other controls have to be brought in, and then others still.
The war between those who create systems and those who subvert them is forever
escalating. There is no end to it. Important crime is cyber crime, as with
industrial espionage and war. Everything is potentially hackable, or soon will
be. It is the whole principle of the medium that this be possible. Children appear
to learn how to evade blocking, but blocking as such may turn out to be
impossible, and for a plausible reason:
Potential mega-rich investors might
rub their hands, but I find the following truly frightening:
“Whoever
gets the quantum computer first will have access to that unlimited power that
will nullify classic cryptography,” says Colin Wilmott, a quantum computing
expert at Nottingham Trent University. “Classic computers would be under
extreme strain with quantum computing. Whether it is secure web browsing or
digital signatures, they need to be aware that there is a tech out there that
could put all this at risk.” In short, the online world as we know it would be
transformed. (‘Tech giants battling to make the quantum leap’, by Natasha
Bernal, Daily Telegraph Business 8 October 2018.)
The
‘giants’ referred to here include Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and IBM. I would
hesitate before calling all this wishful thinking: it is already in hand as a
real project backed up by vast resources in turn backed up by the limitless
craving for lots more profit. Something that, as the article concludes, could
‘possibly put supercomputers out of business’.
Of course such tech would not become
immediately affordable – down to the likes of children. But give it time.
And what is rarely mentioned if we
return to the environment we are in along with our children, is that the more
sophisticated and complex systems become, the more energy-hungry. Our
smartphones of today use up huge amounts of energy, far more than the old
mobiles; miniaturisation only increases the rate of their consumption. Where is
all the energy for all the hoped-for endless and global ‘quantum’ expansion, on
top of the energy we are already using (and wastefully) supposed to come from? There may come a time when we will have more
to preoccupy us than the moral security of children. But I believe that the
moral concern shown so far is – as in earlier times – a means of unconsciously
obscuring very much bigger anxieties, anxieties which are all too plausible.
My hope is that a democratic, global
socialism will have us harnessing the new powers in the interests of the
planet, not in the interests of profit, and this – though people are strangely
slow to realise it – is in the interest of us all.
Meanwhile, if you worry about children
on the games front, I would indulge in the one generalisation that children of
all ages usually get bored in time with any current novelty and move on, for
better or for worse! And if children find themselves in thrall to strangers on
the Web, I suggest (1) that we stop being their adult role-models in this
respect, and (2) coach children towards a fuller life away from screens
altogether. One step (utopian?) would be clearing neighbourhood streets of cars.
I did most of my playing and mooching with the gang in the street, as had
countless generations before me. All
this tempered with discipline: as Silicon Valley executives deny their children easy and constant access,
we have been warned!
