Book Review: Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney

See also the preview for this review.

Teaching Children to Care, by Ruth Sidney Charney, is a book I would recommend to some people. I think for what it is it is a good book, but where it fails to be, or where some other book fails to make up for it, there is a serious problem. I could recommend it to anyone who works with children (like parents or teachers). It may have some practical value to them. Also, the spirit of it is good and sometimes a teacher communicates more of what is value through their spirit even than the good advice they give. (Another book that is like that is The Reentry Team by Neal Pirolo.)

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Teaching Children to Care notes

I read this book through without taking notes. That may not have been the best idea, since now I am tempted to simply say my impressions without giving references, and I don't feel like reading through the book carefully, and feel like simply quitting [rather than re-reading].

I am feeling tired of writing at this point, like I'm losing interest in the subject matter. What will happen next? Will I "love Big Brother"? There was someone in my life who steadily and systematically undermined my devotion to my beliefs and my writing. They used skillful means in an all-out attempt to gain my trust and reshape me according to their will. Their expectation was that I would quit one day (then, perhaps, I would have to validate their point of view). They had a choice, to join me in my path of life, or to try to shut me down. Because they tried to shut me down, they broke me. I can imagine them reading this, and them feeling all kinds of emotions, but their iron certainty that I will give up my writing someday does not go away. It is their expectation, and, I am fairly certain, their deep personal preference.

If my writing is correct, then they are an instrument of Satan. This may sound crazy or harsh, but it's the logical truth.

[I wrote that some days ago in a state of turmoil, but I affirm it now in a state of peace.]

So what can I do? If I can't write, how can I be true to my beliefs? No one seems to want to share them with me. By writing, I enter a world where at least I believe what I believe. The text I write and I enter a relationship and share the beliefs that we create, and the beliefs that previous texts created with me as I wrote them.

But now, if I quit writing, how can I stay true to my beliefs? I will lose that last community. But then will I have to share some kind of community? All the communities that exist are not New Wine communities. If I really share "community" (being "one-with-together" with others?), how can I possibly hold divergent beliefs from those I am "in community with"? So I will (at least seemingly) inevitably come to agree with and approve of everyone else around me. I will have no choice but to see things as my community sees things, to participate. My choices of communities are all based in lies, and they all spit in the face of God, whether through hostility to God or through fake love of God. But I must be brought to be a social person, responsive to my community, brought into tune with it.

[Similarly, although I wrote this in a state of turmoil, I think it is still factually correct when I am at peace. I still see the danger, and the lies, rejection of God, hostility, and fakeness.]

I have written that people should come into tune with God, but who and what is God? Is "God" the loving creator of the universe, who holds us to the highest standards, a person who loves and dies for us? Or is "God" community, the set of all people around us? Between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (or the Speaker and Legitimacy), and community, which is more omnipotent? Who do I fear more? God seems to be shackled by community, or by the way that community's members collectively construct how they will trust -- what the definition of "crazy" is, what images of God are socially acceptable to believe in, how hard to try to know the truth.

Defining morality as prosociality simply sets up the community as God. But if there is a real God, a person who loves us more than community can, who is the truth, then prosociality is a dangerous thing, a seductive lie.

So these are the stakes with which a person should approach a book like Teaching Children to Care, which is a book about getting children to behave, to like each other, and so on, apart from any mention of God. If Ruth Sidney Charney, the author, believes in God, she can't show it in a public school classroom. Instead, she has to deal with the behavioral issues right in front of her, or the classroom will not be a place of learning and work. So she instills in her students a responsiveness to each other and to her, and teaches them the Golden Rule -- do to other people what you would have them do to you. No mention has been made, or can be made, of Jesus, who spoke that rule. She mentions how morality is bigger than us, not something we create -- is she talking about God when she says "morality"? Or is morality really just "I want to please my teacher because I'm a child and it's a human instinct, and whatever she says, I want to do"? The teacher creates morality but doesn't teach children to love God. She doesn't explain where morality comes from, because, perhaps, if she tried, it would undermine morality. She speaks with implications rather than straight out, asks leading questions rather than baldly stating, so that children internalize what she says, and so that they can't fight back. They don't have the mental development to construct alternate systems of their own, but perhaps they could see through hers intuitively, or have the kind of powerful skepticism of those who don't understand a set of explanations, if she offered explicit explanations. But she doesn't. Implications are more psychologically effective, and she's convinced that the ends justify the means.

So children are indoctrinated to be deeply moral (or that is the attempt), and yet to find God peripheral or nonexistent. Morality, which I think is difficult to ground in anything other than God, is simply not grounded and becomes a free-floating force in people's mind. Not to be thought about explicitly -- if we did so we would either become nihilists or truly committed to morality (and thus out of tune with society). But instead this unspeakable force. I wonder if secular people who are moral realists are convinced that morality must be "out there" simply by the psychological force of having been taught to be moral when they were young, apart from rationality. And perhaps morality is, practically speaking, not seen as something that needs rational grounding, because it has been ingrained in us so much. This kind of moral education may explain both moral realism and moral anti-realism among secular people.

This may make it sound like I didn't like Charney, but I think she makes, or made, the kind of teacher I would have liked. She is a passionate teacher. I can recommend her book as a way to understand passion, something I think is essential. While her emphasis on passion could lead someone to God, her emphasis on prosocial, arational morality threatens to lead people away from God. So she is a mixed phenomenon.

Part of how I am feeling now comes from bipolar disorder, I can tell. No matter what I have going on my life, when I feel low, I feel low. This is the content of my low thinking, given what I have lived so far. When I am not blinded by the depression, I can understand fully how it is that I can keep going. But for now, I can rest a bit, knowing that I have written some of my thoughts on the book I read. I think, maybe, I won't read it again to look for the supporting quotes to what I said above. But I can recommend reading the book, for its passion, if you want to check my work.

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One additional thing I remember thinking as I read was about how, given how beautiful and effective Charney's methods sound, why could they not be used on the elites of the world, so that, perhaps, they could bring the countries of the world in harmony with each other? I thought, maybe because the way she talks to children is something that wouldn't work on adults. It's too artificial, too skillful. Adults want the skillfulness of a poker player, to affirm their adulthood, but not the skillfulness of a professional mom.

It made me wonder, how do we make this strange creature called adult? What is this being? No child is really bad, we say, but some children grow up to become bad adults. A child can hardly set himself or herself up against his or her family. But the leader of a nation can. They can shape themselves into their own being, and shut down every human feeling, can listen to other people speak and know that they will never agree with them, and go on with their agenda. They can decide who they want to be and then be it, taking the responsibility for it, suffering for it, and still continuing to choose it, despite what other people think. Children try to say "no", but adults sometimes can actually succeed in saying "no".

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(later)

One thing Charney talks about is how she isn't trying to punish children, simply have them see the consequences to their actions.

What if adults were shown the consequences of their actions? So often, the natural consequences of people's actions fall due not in their own lives, but in others. What if some teacher could help adults see the effects of what they do?

Adults think that being shown the moral way, having someone say "you should know better" is a thing of youth. Now that they are older, they are past that. Adults can no longer do wrong.

Now, there are certain things that an adult can do wrong. Everyone knows what those things are. We all agree on that. But the things that we don't all agree are wrong, are not to be enforced, and not even to be called wrong, so we don't have to think of them as wrong, so, in our heads, they are not wrong.

Adulthood as a collective can't be taught. It knows. A reshaping of adult values by being shown the consequences of adult behavior can't be done, it seems. So maybe the moral thing to do is to fit into the constructed adult reality, be good at being one of the tribe of adults?

But, the consequences don't go away... how will we take into account the real effects of what we do (and don't do) if we don't listen to the truth?

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I wouldn't mind my life so much if it weren't for the bipolar disorder. Writing isn't so bad, and when I'm euthymic, I feel fine. I can hear some imaginary (or real) readers being solicitous for me when hearing about my bipolar disorder. They seem to (or really do) care about me so much and wish that I would take care of myself. But if they care about a person's well-being, I have a great opportunity for them. They can save up $5,000, donate to Against Malaria Foundation, and thereby save someone in the developing world from a painful death from malaria, which would have orphaned their children and widowed their spouse, and diminished their extended family and weakened the national economy. (It's even worth donating $50.) Or, this imaginary or real person who is moved by my bipolar disorder is a Christian and thinks that the second death is worse than the first (which, basically I agree with, although I do give money to global development), they can give a much smaller amount of money -- apparently, $1 -- to Doulos Partners and that should cause [or allow] one person to start to become a disciple of Jesus. Do you think that these charities might not be the best ones to donate to? You can look for better ones. You could even just give money directly to people who are worse off than you, if you can't find any trustworthy charities.

If you have time but not money, you can think of some way to use your time to help people. If nothing else, you can seek to make one new friend, and be a good friend to them.

But you may not have any time or money to spare. Some people don't. Then at least adopt the identity of a "person who cares", who would donate your time and money if you could, so that when someone enters your life who is more deeply involved in caring, you can offer them the welcome of your validation of what they are into, instead of passive-aggressive or blatant hostility, or indifference.

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The title of the book I read is Teaching Children to Care. To me, I thought of "caring" as "feeling and acting strongly", more as "exerting effort to do good, work on a good-making project". But the book mostly emphasizes "seeing other people as people" and the Golden Rule. A way to reconcile these two meanings is to think of God, who is personally blessed by large-scale altruistic efforts, in the way that if you share your lunch with someone, they are personally blessed by your personal thoughtfulness and the consequence of their hunger being alleviated.

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One thing that makes adults resistant to new morality is that they have reached the developmental stage where they are their own person and they have their own boundaries, and they are secure in themselves. Or, that they have not reached that stage yet, and are vulnerable to being hacked by other people (or demons) and thus are resistant to attempts to change them. A secure person is not threatened by morality and so does not change, while an insecure person is threatened and so shuts it down.

Somehow it is possible for a secure person to take into account morality -- maybe through a discipline of fearing being trapped by your own security. Both a secure and an insecure person can find their rest in caring, in the interrelationship of all things to each other and to them, as opposed to, in the secure person's case, their own stability and boundaries. Presumably the insecure person, on some deep level, has no place to rest.

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[Response:]

I thought I should go into more detail about moral realism.

[Secular moral realists may have a strong intuition that morality is "out there" and this intuition is the basis of their sense that morality is real, despite whatever difficulties in grounding it rationally (or lack of having tried to do so). They would deny the intuition that people have that God exists as being valid, but they do trust and honor the intuition that morality exists.]

[Secular moral anti-realists may have no qualms, and little difficulty, in "being good people". "You know, C. denies that morality even exists. But he's a good guy." They can, in unreflective moments, feel that morality is real. They can even get mad at injustice. They can devote their lives to doing good. But then they go back to the study of their minds (like Hume's study where he can be skeptical) and say "but none of it's real!".]

[Morality is an area where we seem to have agreed to be irrational, to not try to connect all the dots or demand that all the dots be connected, even beyond the background level of irrationality that attends most human endeavors. ("This thing makes you change what you do. You spend hours and hours, thousands of dollars to comply with this thing. It's not just how you feel -- it's something you have to obey. You just know that you have to obey it, no person or other visible force or situation makes you obey it. And you can't explain what it is, how it fits into the rest of reality -- or, you even say it's an illusion?") And, perhaps that acceptance of irrationality is because we have had morality ingrained in us in a subtextual way, or the instinctualness of morality is encouraged, but not accompanied by reason, when we attend secular public schools (or even religious ones that don't make God real to students sufficiently), or have parents who are helpless in explaining a rational grounding to moral realism to us when we are young.]

[Maybe we can at least explain where moral instincts come from -- evolution? (Why should we trust how we have evolved? Evolution helped us to survive in early environments?) Or we can say that they are heuristics for survival. (Why should we survive?) But then, if we are the "1%", why redistribute wealth? The 1% could probably maximize its survival best by not redistributing wealth. Or, a related question: does promoting animal welfare really lead to human survival? Often it is orthogonal to human survival. I think morality could come from evolution but does not necessarily serve the purpose of human survival. Maybe some people have genes that make them ethically oriented? Then why not shut them off? Does morality really have value? To answer that question, I think we need a moral realism.]

[Maybe morality is just maximization of value, by definition of "morality" and "value". Then, can we explain that voice that says, for each valuable thing X, "X is valuable"? Or is that also irrational, just a random "monkey on your back"?]

[I don't think I'm being fair to secular moral realists. I should at least explain why I think moral realism is hard to ground in anything other than God. Secular moral realists may be able to come up with a satisfying account of how moral realism is grounded.]

[How would they do that? Do we start with "these are our moral intuitions, now we have to find some metaphysical belief that lets us keep them"? But what if there's something wrong with our moral intuitions? One of the main points of having a grounding for moral realism is to know what particular things are moral, now that we know where morality comes from. I am generally relatively more of a thinker and writer than a reader. So I tend to work with first principles (or personal experience). But I did read The Feeling of Value by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette and remember that I had mixed feelings about it. I thought that it probably was successful in showing that some kind of experiential states can be known to be bad, just because they feel like badness, and some can be known to be good, just because they feel like goodness. I'm not sure I would be so charitable now. At least, without going back and looking to see the details there, I think "why should our perceptions of good and bad be transcendentally valid?".]

[A moral realism needs to be usefully thick, if we are going to guide our lives by it. You can always posit something like the (unfortunately named) "morons", "moral particles", and I can say, "fine, now we know where morality comes from, some kind of ontologically real substance of morality". Now what? We need to know something about these moral particles in order to know what is actually moral to do and be.]

[I don't know if there are any better secular moral realisms than Rawlette's, but at least hers is usefully thick. Hedonism (what she advocates for) is a somewhat useful guide to life. (Maybe that is what is so seductive and dangerous about it, that it's easily agreed-on for "practical purposes" while not really being in tune with reality.)]

[My approach to moral realism, as of now, is to say, "An ontologically real substance of morality exists. Everything that, practically speaking, exists, is conscious. (Only consciousness can interact with consciousness.) This means that the ontologically real substance of morality is conscious. Morality is about a standard which applies. For something to exist, it must ought to exist. It must live up to that standard. That things exist proves that morality exists and is being satisfied. The way that conscious beings metaphysically contact other beings is for their consciousnesses to overlap, for them to experience exactly the same experience. Morality metaphysically contacts everything that exists in order to validate it so that it can exist. So morality experiences exactly what we do, and finds the 'qualia of goodness or ought-to-be-ness' ('pleasure') good, at least on a first-order level, and similarly with the 'qualia of badness or ought-not-to-be-ness' ('pain'). This validates a lot of Rawlette's account.]

["But we know a few things more about morality. For instance, morality has to be self-consistent. Like us, it has to put morality first. So it has to put itself first. But it has to put itself first as an other, as a law it submits to. Thinking of morality as having two aspects, the enforcer of the standard and the standard itself, allows us to see that morality has to be willing to put aside everything, including its own existence, for the sake of its standard. If it ceases to be willing to do that, it is not self-consistent and it ceases to be valid, destroying everything by being invalid (no longer moral, and thus unable to validate anything).]

["Part of morality's self-consistency is that it must have the same values as itself. Everything that exists has value, it ought to be, either temporarily or permanently. (What is bad must someday cease to exist.) Morality must be on the side of value, and must value everything that is of value for what it is. Morality values persons in that they are persons, this personal valuing being called love. Morality must love in order to be self-consistent and thus valid. It loves that humans are in tune with it so that they can exist permanently. To love a person fully involves understanding the person's being fully, and that full understanding can only come from kinship. So morality is a person (a person who is also kin to animals).]

["Everything is the expression of a will, either that of morality, or of a free-willed being whose will is willed by morality. To be is to will. So impersonal beings are parts of personal beings and don't have independent reality. They are valued as parts of personal beings, and with those beings morality has kinship, not with their parts taken separately.]

["Morality has to be willing to bear the burden of what it imposes on others. If it's worth it for a human to pay a certain cost for morality's sake, it's worth it for morality to pay it as well, if possible. Morality already experiences every burden that is part of our experienced lives, by being conscious of what we are conscious of, but there is a further burden that each of us experiences, which is to experience only our own lives and deaths, without the comfort of knowing the bigger picture. How can morality bear that burden? Morality is composed of multiple persons, one of whom experiences everything, another, who does not and can live a finite life (the first maintains the moral universe through his/her validation of everything during the time the second lives a finite life)."]

[As you might have guessed already, "morality" in the above could be considered "God".]

[If we accept the above (or perhaps a better-argued version of it...), we have a concept of morality that largely supersedes hedonism. It incorporates hedonism and its recommendations, at least insofar as it validates the first-order goodness/badness of pleasure/pain (if pleasure has baked into it the perception that it ought to be, and pain, the perception that it ought not to be), as well as answering why it is that care for hedonic states is transcendentally valid. Further, we are recommended to be willing to give up everything for what is right, and thus to risk ourselves for that when it is called for. And we are to bear the burdens of those we rule over, as much as we can. It might be possible be able to come up with other ways to thicken the very concept of moral legitimacy, so that we know more about what morality must be, and thus what we must do or be in order to be moral. This thickness is a useful guide. And, if we think that this person or persons who are morality exist, they may have acted in history, and we may try to find evidence of where they might have spoken, allowing us to thicken our concept even further, although with less certainty.]

[To defend my earlier statement, I think that it's hard for me to imagine a successful secular / atheistic moral realism, because what I see as the way to ground moral realism involves the existence of God, and the (perhaps unrepresentatively few) secular moral realisms I've seen are not satisfying to me intellectually. Maybe if I want to strengthen what I say further, putting it briefly, I would say that if morality exists, it must love fully, and that kind of love is something that persons do. So then, morality is a person, and the word for a person like that is "God".]

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22 September 2023:

When I wrote this post I thought that bipolar disorder was my big problem. However, now that I am more over the ways people have traumatized me and programmed me with the ways they wanted me to think, I see that those are a much bigger deal than my bipolar disorder. My bipolar symptoms, without those traumatized and programmed thoughts, are fairly mild.