EVIL PARENTING OF YORE (PART 2)

CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES...NOT! PART 2

To summarize PART 1 in a nutshell. "Psycho-genetic Evolution" is a theory that how a mother raises her children effects his/her psyche and can be passed down through generations. In order for society in general to evolve we must raise our children free from abuse, neglect and ignorance. My purpose is to show how the 'nuclear family' we think has always been the norm is anything but. It wasn't until we went against religious dogma and ignorance that chidren finally were raised emotionally 'healthy' and therefore were capable of thinking outside the box which lead to innovation and scientific advancement. You can't think altruistically if you've been raised in an evironment of abuse and neglect, you're main concern is survival.

Since nearly all of the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens has taken place during the past 100,000 years-only about 5,000 generations and since this time span is too short to allow the human gene pool to mutate very much, epigenetic evolution of the psyche,the evolution of the architecture of the brain occurring during development in the womb and during early childhood-must be the central source of cultural change, rather than genetic evolution.

Environmental change cannot explain cultural evolution since culture has often evolved while the ecology has devolved because of soil exhaustion. The point is that the degree of steepness of the environmental ladder doesn't determine whether people chose to climb it you still must want to climb and you must be innovative enough to invent or adopt ways to conquer each rung.

But what is usually overlooked is that genetic evolution only provides the capacity for adult behavioral variations assuming a specific developmental environment. The road from genotype to phenotype is a long one. What trait actually appears in the mature individual depends upon the actual course of epigentic development, beginning in the womb and continuing throughout childhood an extraordinarily complex and variable journey for each individual. The most important environments are the mother's body and behavior, and the most important competition for survival not in the sperm or ovum but at the neural level, in the brain, with the mother acting as the agent of natural selection.

Scientists have prenatally stressed mice, who are as adults found to be more aggressive, and then taken the male mice and mated them with other females and found that their grandsons were also more aggressive than non-stressed males-thus showing how environmental stress can be passed down genetically. Others have shown dramatically how stressed children "change from being victims to being victimizers" because of imbalanced noradrenaline and serotonin levels, which then can be passed down through both genetic and epigenetic changes.

The evolution of the psyche is first of all accomplished by removing terrible abuses of children and their resulting developmental distortions, allowing the psyche to produce historical novelty and achieve its own inherent human growth path. Civilization is not, as everyone including Freud has assumed, a historical taming of the instincts. Nor does the evolution of mankind proceed from bad to worse, with early societies being "indulgent" toward their children and modern societies more often abusive. The reverse is true, that culture evolves through the increase of love and freedom for children, so that when they grow up they can invent more adaptive and happier ways of living. Because we were all children before we were adults, childhood evolution must precede social evolution.

Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.

Children throughout history have arguably been more vital, more gentle, more joyous, more trustful, more curious, more courageous and more innovative than adults. Yet adults throughout history have routinely called little children beasts, sinful, greedy, arrogant, lumps of flesh, vile, polluted, vipers and infant fiends. Although it is extraordinarily difficult to believe, parents until relatively recently have been so frightened of and have so hated their newborn infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely neglectful wetnurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected and beat them so badly that prior to modern times it's hard to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse.

THE MISSING FATHER
The problem with the overly monolithic conception of a "patriarchy" wherein men dominate women both in society and in the family is that while no "matriarchal" society has been found, there is little evidence that until modern times most fathers were absent in historical families. In our promiscuous chimpanzee ancestors, fathers were quite absent in child-rearing, so there are no "families," only grandmothers and mothers moving about with their children. It is also likely that there were no Neandertal families to begin with, since women and children lived in separate areas from the males in caves. Although a "gynocratic state" is slightly approximated in such tribes as the Iroquois, the Navajo, the Ashanti, and the Dahomeans, the families themselves in preliterate cultures are usually run by women, who often live in separate spaces from their husbands. In some, like the Ashanti, they have a visiting husband...in which the husband and wife live with their respective mothers [and] at night the man 'visits' his wife in her house. In others, men spend much of their time in their own cult houses, and women in separate family or menstrual huts, segregating themselves of their own accord. Even when men lived with their wives, females took care of the children, although cross-cultural studies conclude that in the majority of societies mothers are not the principal caretakers or companions of young children...older children and other female family members mainly looking after them. Even when the children are somewhat older, fathers are generally not the ones that teach them skills. Boys learn their bow-and-arrow hunting knowledge and techniques and their tracking skills mainly from other boys not their fathers.

The historical family is in fact a gynarchy, composed of the grandmother, mother, aunts, unmarried daughters, female servants, midwives, neighbors called "gossips" who acted as substitute mothers, plus the children. Fathers in traditional families may sometimes eat and sleep within the gynarchy, but they do not determine its emotional atmosphere, nor do they in any way attempt to raise the children. To avoid experiencing their own domination and abuse during childhood by females, men throughout history have instead set up androcentric political and religious spheres for male-only group-fantasy activities, contributing to the family gynarchy only some sustenance, periodic temped children lived shut away from men. They rarely showed themselves in public but stayed in apartments men did not enter; they rarely ate with their husbands...they never spent their days together. In Greece women had a special place. Larger houses at any rate had a room or suite of rooms in which women worked and otherwise spent much of their day, the women's apartments, the gynaikonitis, which Xenophon says was "separated from the men's quarters by a bolted door. In two-story houses, the gynaikonitis would usually be upstairs. The men's dining-room, the andron, was located downstairs near the entrance, guarding the women's quarters: Here men in the family dined and entertained male guests. Vase-paintings do not depict Greek couples eating together. This mainly vertical organization of most homes lasted well into the eighteenth century, when a new "structure of intimacy" began to be built, with rooms connected to each other on the same level.

Thus Herodotus could assume his reader would easily recognize families where "a boy is not seen by his father before he is five years old, but lives with the women,and Aristotle could assume his readers' assent that "no male creatures take trouble over their young." Ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish men had all-male eating clubs where women and children were not welcome. Plato has Socrates suggest a possibly better home arrangement, with dinners at which citizens will feast in the company of their children....In general, however, children ate with their mothers, not their fathers...Eating and drinking, far from offering the whole family an opportunity for communal activity, tended to express and reinforce cleavages within it. Boys tended to remain in the gynarchy of their own or others' homes until their middle teens.

The family in Egyptwas matriarchal. The most important person in the family was not the father, but the mother. The Egyptian wife was called the Ruler of the House. There is no corresponding term for the husband. In rural Greek villages even today the mother owns the house, passes it on to her daughter as dowry, and continues to rule the house when her daughter has children. Indeed, the husband was rarely with his family in antiquity, legislators sometimes suggest that in order to prevent population decline it would be a good idea for husbands to visit their wives occasionally and not just have sex with boys. Plutarch puts it "Love has no connection whatsoever with the women's quarters; it is reserved for pederastic relations with boys." When Socrates asks, "Are there any people you talk to less than you do to your wife?" his answer was, "Possibly. But if so, very few indeed." Men stayed in the thiasos, the men's club, with other men, and had little to do with their children. Greek boys stayed in the gynarchy of their own home until they at the age of about ten were forced to be eromenos, sexual objects, in the andron of a much older man's home. Greek girls stayed in the gynarchy until they were about twelve, when they too were raped by a much older man, a stranger chosen for them by their family to be their husband. The father might try to enforce an occasional dominance of the gynarchy by beating the women and children, but usually it was the women of the household who wielded the family whip on their children.

The gynarchy ruled supreme in early homes. In Byzantium, women had separate spheres with strict exclusion of men from the family, where "men live in light and brightness, the palaestra; women live in the gynaecaeum, enclosed, secluded." This was even true of supposedly patriarchal Chinese families. The Chinese gynarchy was described by visitors as living in women's apartments behind the high walls of their husbands' compounds, dominated by women who are reputed to terrorize the men of their households and their neighbors with their fierce tempers, searing tongues, and indomitable wills. When father and son do work together, they have nothing to say, and even at home they speak only when there is business to discuss. [Otherwise] they mutually avoid each other. Indonesian fathers are simply not present very much, the woman has more authority, influence and responsibility than her husband.

The examples can easily be extended around the world and into the Middle Ages:

The female world was highly structured, like a little monarchy-that monarchy wielded by the master's wife, the 'lady' who dominated the other women in the house. This monarchy was often tyrannical. The chronicles of French families at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century paint a picture of shrews reigning brutally over servants whom they terrorized, and over their sons' wives whom they tormented. Indeed, a female power existed which rivaled that of men. Men were afraid of women, especially their own wives, afraid of being incapable of satisfying a being who was seen both as a devourer and as a bearer of death. Men are shown as being excluded from the traditional "gynaeceum" the nursery, the kitchen, the work bees, even the laundry. While husbands are hopefully told in moralist's instruction manuals about the "Duties of a Husband" to instruct their wives, the sections on the "Duties of a Father" to care for their children are nowhere to be found until modern times. Most fathers agreed with Abelard, who, after he got Heloise pregnant, sent her away, admitting, "Who can bear the screams of children...Who can tolerate the unclean and continuous soilings of babies?" As Buchan wrote, "Men generally keep at such a distance from even the smallest acquaintance with the affairs of the nursery [and] is not ashamed to give directions concerning the management of his dogs or horses, yet would blush were he surprised in performing the same office for [his] heir..." Since children of the upper classes were sent out to wetnurse and then to school, many adults could agree with Talleyrand when he stated that he "had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother." Fathers were so distant that most could agree with Vandermonde, who said, "One blushes to think of loving one's children." When their children died, most fathers, like William Byrd, revealed no signs of grief, writing in their diaries the night of the death only that they had "good thoughts and good humor."

By the nineteenth century, some fathers began to relate to their children with some empathy, yet even they were seen as rare, as when Grigorii Belynskii was described as "the only father in the city who understood that in raising children it is not necessary to treat them like cattle." Even those who began at this time to criticize "paternal neglect," like John Abbott, said it was the father's sole task "to teach his children to obey their mother." It wasn't actually until late socializing mode fathers came along that they actually began some caretaking, pushing prams and otherwise trying to live up to the New Fatherhood proclamations of the twentieth century. Yet even though there are some fathers today who are helping mode parents and who spend equal time with their wives caring for their children, various time surveys in America still show that working fathers spend only about 12 to 18 minutes per day with their young children, without even counting the one-third of all babies who are born to unmarried women. The gynarchy, it appears, still reigns supreme, and fathers around the world have yet to seriously embrace the tasks and joys of fatherhood.

GIRLS HAD WORSE CHILDHOODS THAN BOYS
The problem with having only women raising children is that parenting is an emotionally demanding task, requiring considerable maturity, and throughout history girls have grown up universally despised. When a girl was born, said the Hebrews, "the walls wept." Japanese lullabies sang, "If it's a girl, stamp on her." In medieval Muslim cultures "a grave used to be prepared, even before delivery, beside the woman's resting place [and] if the new-born was a female she was immediately thrown by her mother into the grave." "Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter" was a popular Italian proverb that was meant quite literally. Girls from birth have everywhere been considered full of dangerous pollution-the projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more often killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys. Girls in traditional societies spent most of their growing up years trying to avoid being raped by their neighbors or employers and thereby being forced into a lives of prostitution. To expect horribly abused girls to magically become mature, loving caretakers when as teenagers they go to live as virtual slaves in a strange family simply goes against the conclusions of every clinical study we have showing the disastrous effects of trauma upon the ability to mother.

Mothers earlier in history mainly saw their children as their own screaming, needy, dominating mothers, forming a "hypersymbiotic relationship" wherein the child is expected to make up for all the love missing in the mother's own life, cure her post-partum depression and restore her vitality. The need to shut up the mother's angry voice in babies lead to their being tied up, neglected and beaten. Tiny infants were experienced as being so destructive that, according to Augustine, "If left to do what he wants, there is no crime he will not plunge into." In fact, infants were felt to be so full of badness that when they died they were often buried under rain gutters so the water would wash off their inborn pollution. The baby in the past must not need anything, but must just give love solely to the emotionally-deprived mother.

CHILD SACRIFICE AS PUNISHMENT FOR SUCCESS
The act of having a child is, says Rheingold, "the most forbidden act of self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable offense," and brings with it inevitable fears of maternal retribution for one's success and individuation. Mothers in antiquity hallucinated female demons-Lamia, Gorgo, Striga, Empusa, so jealous of their having babies that they sucked out their blood and otherwise murdered them. Even today peasant villages fear the outbreak of "angry, malevolent, dangerous" hallucinations that surround the newborn and threaten the mother and even keep the nursery room boarded up with the door barred to prevent the intrusion of dangerous spirits. All early societies invented sacrificial rituals wherein babies were tortured and killed to honor maternal goddesses, from Anit to Kali, vowing that, "although Mommy wants to kill me for having sex and making a baby, if I kill the baby instead [usually the first-born was sacrificed], I can then go on having sex and other babies with less fear of retribution."

The severely immature parents of the past felt under such constant threat for success by malevolent forces that their own children were constantly being used as poison containers for their disowned feelings. As one informant in a contemporary rural Greek community put it, "When you're angry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a child for instance, will the bad leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted." A typical child sacrifice for parental success can be seen in Carthage, where archeologists have found a child cemetery called The Tophet that is filled with over 20,000 urns containing bones of children sacrificed by the parents, who would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a favor,for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port. They placed their children alive in the arms of a bronze statue of "the lady Tanit...the hands of the statue extended over a brazier into which the child fell once the flames had caused its limbs to contract and its mouth to open...the child was alive and conscious when burned...Philo specified that the sacrificed child was best-loved."

Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions, depicted in myths as absolutely necessary to save the world from "chaos," that is, from terrible inner annihilation anxiety as punishment for success. The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, portrays the entire history of religion as dramas featuring a vengeful, bloodthirsty Sacred Executioner, demonstrating that the role of children, from Isaac to Christ, was to act as sacrifices for the sins of the parents. Behind even male gods demanding sacrifice are Avenging Terrible Mothers of Death, Inanna, Tiamat, Ishtar, Astarte, Lilith, Hathor-Sekhmet, Izanami, Chicomecoatl, all demanding revenge for the hubris of daring to be a parent.The wealthier the family, the more children had to be sacrificed to the goddess, representing the infant's furious grandmother.

Child sacrifices have been found from the beginning of human history: decapitated skeletons of early hominid children have been found, with evidence of cannibalism, as their parents ate them on behalf of the spirits of their life-devouring grandmothers; young children were buried with their skulls split by an ax at Woodhenge/Stonehenge; decapitated infant sacrifices to the Great Goddess were found at Jericho; early Arabians sacrificed their daughters to "the mothers;" the serpent goddess of the Aztecs demanded skull and heart sacrifice of children, including the eating of the children's bodies and covering themselves with their blood; Mayan and Incan sacrificed children are still being discovered in the South American mountains, along with children who have been killed by drug dealers to ward off revenge for their successful cocaine runs. The need to sacrifice children to ward off fears of success was so powerful that right through medieval times, when people built new buildings, walls or bridges, little children were sealed in them alive as "foundation sacrifices" to ward off the angry, avenging spirits, of parents who felt envious of the accomplishments of their children.

Over and over again death wishes are revealed in the historical sources, breaking out when interacting with children. Epictetus admitted, "What harm is there if you whisper to yourself, at the very moment you are kissing your child, and say 'Tomorrow you will die?'" Another recalled his mother tucking him into bed nightly with the words, "Soon my son you will exchange the bed for the grave, and your clothes for a winding sheet." The deaths of children were rarely mourned: mothers were commonly reported to have "regarded the death of various daughters at school with great equanimity" and fathers to "cheerfully remark when two of his fifteen children died that he still had left a baker's dozen."

As we will see in the sections that follow on infanticide, mutilation and abandonment, parents are the child's most lethal enemy.

INFANTICIDE AS CHILD SACRIFICE
Mothers who feel like killing their newborn children today are clinically found to be deeply depressed and lonely, because, according to Rheingold's study of 350 filicidal mothers, "It is only the fear of being a woman that can create the infanticidal impulse...having a child is the most forbidden act of self-realization...punishment is inescapable and punishment means annihilation...To appease the mother she must destroy the child, but the child is a love object too. To preserve the child she must renounce mother... She is trapped in a desperate conflict: kill mother and preserve the baby or kill the baby and preserve the mother." Mothers in the past routinely chose killing the baby, by the billions, driven to it by her devil alter (her own destructive mother image in her head).

It is likely that overall infanticide rates of both sexes exceeded 30 percent in antiquity and only slowly declined to the very small rate in advanced societies today. Multiplying these infanticide rates by the 80 billion human births in the past 100,000 years, a weighted average infanticide rate for the entire 80 billion births was likely at the very least 15 percent, or 12 billion children killed by their parents.

Even this astonishing figure is not the whole story of infanticide. Every study of infant death rates among children sent out to wetnurses and abandoned in foundling homes shows much higher death rates, running to over 70 per cent and higher, even in modern times. Doctors of every age agreed that "the most profound cause of the terrific waste of infant life [is] neglect...neglected by their own mothers and neglected by the nurses to whom they were abandoned..." Since parents who sent their children to wetnurse and foundling homes knew quite well they would likely not see them again, some were sent to so-called "killing wetnurses" with a small sum of money under the tacit assumption that they would not be returned. These "delayed infanticide" acts must be added to the estimated rate of child killing, increasing it by at the very least a third, or a total of 16 billion children killed by parental acts over the entire historical span. No wonder people in the past so often said that everywhere in their areas "you could hear coming out of the bottom of latrines and ponds and rivers the groanings of the children that one had thrown there."

Although poverty played some part in this holocaust of children, it is doubtful if it was the main cause of child deaths. In the first place, the cost of bringing up a girl is no more than the cost of bringing up a boy, so the differential infanticide rates are certainly parental choices. When, for instance, Arabs dug a grave next to the birthing place of every new mother so "if the newborn child was a female she could be immediately thrown by her mother into the grave," it was likely hatred of girls, not poverty, that was the motive. Secondly, if scarce resources were the main cause, then wealthy parents should kill less than poor. But the historical record shows exactly the opposite: historical boy/girl ratios are higher among wealthy parents, where economic necessity is no problem at all. Even in early modern England, the infant mortality rates for wealthy children were higher than the same rates for ordinary farmers, day laborers and craftsman. Thirdly, many wealthy high civilizations such as Greece, Rome, China, India, Hawaii and Tahiti are very infanticidal, especially among their elite classes. As one visitor to Hawaii reported, there probably wasn't a single mother who didn't throw one or more of her children to the sharks. There were even societies where virtually all newborn were killed to satisfy their overwhemling infanticidal needs, and infants had to be imported from adjoining groups to continue the society. Finally, many nations-like in Japan until recently-kill their children selectively in order to balance out an equal number of boys and girls, a practice called mabiki, or "thinning out" the less promising ones, again revealing a quite different motive than the purely economic. It is most certainly not economics that causes so many depressed women on the delivery tables even today to implore their mothers not to kill them after they have given birth. Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really" belonged to God, and that "the child was a gift that God had every right to reclaim." When killing her child, therefore, the mother was simply acting as her own mother's avenger.

Usually it was the mother or one of the other women of the gynarchy who did the killing, usually violently, smashing in the baby's head, crushing it between her knees, asphyxiating it against her breasts, sitting on it, or throwing it alive into the privy, with the mother sometimes earning the nickname of "child-stabber" or "child-crusher." It helped to have gynecological writings like Soranus's on "How to Recognize the Newborn That Is Worth Rearing" to rationalize the infanticide. It helped to share the blame for the murder with your children, who were often made to help the mother kill their newborn siblings, and who would then be more likely to restage the murder upon their own newborn.

Opposition by society to infanticide was negligible until modern times. Jews considered any child who died within thirty days after birth, even by violence, to have been a "miscarriage." Most ancient societies openly approved of infanticide, and although Roman law, in response to Christianity, made infanticide a capital offense in 374 C.E., no cases have been found punishing it. Anglo-Saxons actually considered infanticide a virtue, not a crime, saying, "A child cries when he comes into the world, for he anticipates its wretchedness. It is well for him that he should die...he was placed on a slanting roof [and] if he laughed, he was reared, but if he was frightened and cried, he was thrust out to perish." Prosecutions for infanticide before the modern period were rare. Even medieval penitentials excused mothers who killed their newborn before feeding them. By Puritan times, a few mothers began being hanged for infanticide. But even in the nineteenth century it was still "not an uncommon spectacle to see the corpses of infants lying in the streets or on the dunghills of London and other large cities. The English at the end of the century had over seven million children enrolled in "burial insurance societies;" with the infant mortality rate at 50 percent, parents could easily collect the insurance by killing their child. As one doctor said, "sudden death in infants is too common a circumstance to be brought before the attention of the coroner." Free medical care for children was refused...'No, thank you, he is in two burial clubs' was a frequent reply to offers of medical assistance for a sick child.

Century after century, the children in traditional societies who survived remembered the cries of their murdered brothers and sisters, feared their murderous parents, believed themselves unworthy of living, irredeemably bad, and grew up to inflict the killings on their own children.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3