‘Empire,’ ‘Self-Government,’ and ‘Religious Conflict’

In The Colors of Violence, an attempt to contribute ‘a depth-psychological dimension to the understanding of religious conflict, especially the tensions between Hindus and Muslims [in India]’, Sudhir Kakar writes¹:

If Hindu-Muslim relations were in better shape in the past, with much less overt violence, it was perhaps also because of the kind of polity in which the two peoples lived. This polity was that of empire, the Mughal empire followed by the British one. An empire…Michael Walzer observes,² is characterized by a mixture of repression for any strivings for independence and tolerance for different cultures, religions and ways of life. The tolerance is not a consequence of any great premodern wisdom but because of the indifference, sometimes bordering on brutal incomprehension, of the imperial bureaucrats to local conflicts of the people they rule. Distant from local life,  they do not generally interfere with everyday life as long as things remain peaceful, though there may be intermittent cruelty to remind the subject peoples of the basis of empire–conquest through force of arms. It is only with self-government, when distance disappears, that the political questions–‘Who among us shall have power here, in these villages, in these towns?’ ‘Will the majority group dominate?’ ‘What will be the new ranking order?’–lead to a heightened awareness of religious-cultural differences. In countries with multireligious populations, independence coincides with tension and conflict–such as we observe today in the wake of the unravelling of the Soviet empire.

This  analysis of religious conflict is not inconsistent with those that see it grounded in economic dispute and class struggle; the political questions noted above have an economic dimension to them as well, for variants of the power being mediated and parceled out and haggled over are very often economic ones; and class struggles may only become more starkly visible when the mediating hand of empire is removed. It is however, in the Indian context, inconsistent with those accounts of Hindu-Muslim conflict, which view the two ‘communities’ as living in a state of peaceful, tolerant amity before being rudely interrupted in their mutually respectful reveries by the heavy hand of the divide and rule colonialist; instead, here, it is the colonial stamp that keeps the incipient clashes at bay.

The empires of the colonialist enterprise displaced questions of power to its centers, away from the margins, and rendered its most central questions in a form that appeared only in highly restricted forms–pertaining to survival, not flourishing–to its subjects. ‘Local conflicts’ of the sort alluded to above remained low-stakes affairs, the spoils accruing to their victors not great enough to warrant the mobilization of a favored group along lines that emphasized social, cultural and religious identity. It is only when the trappings of the immense power associated with governmentality become visible that the group draws in closer and prepares to make an ambitious, even if expensive and bloody, play for power.

Notes:

1. Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence, Penguin Books India, 1995, pp.  241

2. Michael Walzer, ‘Nations and minorities’, in C. Fried, ed., Minorities: Community and Identity, (Berlin: Springer Verlag), pp. 219-27

On ‘Bureaucratic Torture’ – Contd.

Yesterday I wrote about ‘bureaucratic torture.’ I anticipated it and remembered it with little joy. Today, I experienced it.

I showed up on time at the consulate’s office (or rather, the office of the company to whom consular services have been outsourced.) I stood in line, dealt with the usual gruff security guards, was ushered upstairs (on a manually operated elevator straight out of the 1930s.) As I stood in line again, waiting to have my forms checked, I felt my heart sink as I watched the interactions taking place ahead of me: gruff, brusque, rigidly adhering to the template I had described in yesterday’s post: the missing form, signature, documentation; the appeal for flexibility; the brisk denial.

My turn came. I had prepared this set of forms and documents carefully; perhaps all would be well. Soon enough, I was disabused of that fond hope. Some forms were ‘missing’; others were ‘incorrectly filled out’; additional signatures and notarizations were needed. I argued briefly about the confusing and incomplete directions on the website, then shut up and took notes. I left in a rush, hoping that I would be able to return in the afternoon to submit the forms again. First, back to Brooklyn, to my wife’s office to print out forms, obtain her signature and a notarization. Then, to my daughter’s day-care to obtain her thumb impression. (Yes, you read that right; I needed to color her thumb with a marker and then control her squirming while I pressed it down next to her photograph. Apparently a parent’s signature would only work on page 2, not on page 1. ) Lastly, back home to find my wife’s passport and make copies.

Then, back on the train, heading into Manhattan, hoping to make it before the afternoon deadline expired. I was light-headed with hunger, thanks to the lack of breakfast and lunch. I made it on time, and was mercifully allowed to go up without standing in line all over again. Upstairs though, I waited again. Finally when my turn came, I handed in the forms and came the closest to praying that I have in a while.

To no avail. My wife’s signature on a notarized form apparently did not resemble, to the officer’s satisfaction, the signature on her passport. My form was ‘regretfully’ returned to me. I needed to get it re-signed till the resemblance was adequate. Now, I groveled: Surely the variance in signatures was normal? Surely I had been subjected to enough of a run-around? Again, to no avail. I had hit the dreaded stonewall.

I was beaten. I asked for confirmation, several times, that everything else with the forms was copasetic, received several meaningless assurances, and left. Tomorrow awaits.

My trials and travails are trifling and insignificant compared to the cruel mistreatment of those–like the Palestinians I mentioned in yesterday’s post–for whom such a day is a commonplace in their lives. This fact provides me with some comfort, some opportunity to consider that I still have it better than those whose lives are beaten down on a daily basis by a particularly cruel mix of opaque regulation and intransigent officialdom.

On ‘Bureaucratic Torture’

For the past few days I’ve been racked with a terrible anxiety: I have a visa application appointment tomorrow. At the Indian consulate, to apply for a ten-year tourist visa, so that I may journey back to the land of my birth and former citizenship. I’ve had photographs taken, filled out forms, checked and re-checked them, searched for documents, filled out affidavits for lost passports, had them notarized in duplicate, triplicate and sometimes I’ve wondered whether quadruplicate might not be required too. And on and on, all the while dealing with a poorly designed website, the final insult to injury. I’m in the midst of an experience that I thought I had left behind once I had attained American citizenship more than a dozen years ago: brain-rotting encounters with immigration authorities. (Two years ago, because my American passport had expired, I had gone through the same procedure and submitted the same documents and affidavits.)

A few years ago, I interviewed an Israeli academic for an endowed chair position at Brooklyn College. During the interview, the candidate spoke, with some feeling, about her research on what she termed ‘bureaucratic torture’: the relentless, grinding, subjection of Palestinians to an endless series of checks, verifications, and paperwork-based procedures, all conducted by implacably hostile officials at a variety of venues including, most prominently, road check-points in the Occupied Territories. Over a period of time, these would reduce even the sanest and strongest human to a weak-kneed, anxious paranoiac, one convinced that someone, somewhere, would find out, somehow that something or the other was ‘not in order’. The penalties for that ‘disorder’ would then inevitably follow. The cold eye of the bureaucrat, the official, knew no sympathy and it would hand out none.

I listened to these descriptions with great interest. While I’ve never been unfortunate enough to be subjected to the kind of soul-destroying checks that are a Palestinian’s all-too common fate, I have had–as is evident from my angst-ridden preamble above–my fair share of encounters with hidebound bureaucrats: first in India, and then later in the US, most notably with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. (My Australian friends might find this hard to believe, but the few encounters I had with their Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs were relatively mellow affairs, each encounter mediated by a pleasant enough official who moved my papers along expeditiously.)

In India, because I assisted my mother in her management of a manufacturing unit, I had frequent occasion to encounter the archetypal babu. The classic bureaucratic encounter followed a well-worn and familiar template: the submission of a form–or several–with a stack of paperwork to a bored official, who with great alacrity, found some lacunae or the other, one for which there was no work-around forthcoming, and which necessitated a return to the office at some later date. All too often, I ran into one unblinkingly pedantic officer after another, each one convinced the natural order of the universe would be disrupted were any concession to common sense made.

Those encounters have left their mark; nothing reduces me to a gibbering mess faster than the anticipation of something similarly hidebound. Tonight I’ll calm my nerves with a glass of wine, and will not relax till I have my stamped passport in hand.

William Dalrymple’s Uneven Vision of Modern India

William Dalrymple is a talented writer who can very often turn out gorgeous descriptions of lands, peoples and the built environment. As might be expected, when I encounter writings about places and times with which I consider myself to be intimately familiar, I experience an acute ambivalence. Such is the case with Dalrymple’s work.   This is nowhere better on display than in his work on modern India, where I’ve never found his writing dull, but sometimes disagree with the analysis or judgments offered.

Here are two tiny examples, selected from The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (Penguin India, 1998).

1. In the chapter titled ‘Finger-Lickin’ Bad: Bangalore and the Fast-Food Invaders’, Dalrymple writes:

[A]lthough since 1947 India has had an understandable fondness for protectionist isolationism, the one place you would not expect to find any such introversion was Bangalore, which has long prided itself, with some reason, on being the most cosmopolitan city in India.

The invocation of ‘cosmopolitan’ here is interesting for residents of Mumbai, that seething, ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse metropolis–so marvelously evoked in Suketu Mehta‘s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found–might disagree. Where does Dalrymple find Bangalore’s cosmopolitanism? We are told in the next paragraph:

Bangalore, for example, was the one town which never removed the British statues from its parks: to this day Queen Victoria, Empress of India, still gazes out benignly over the melee of rickshaws and Ambassador cars snarled up at the city’s principal roundabout.

I do not think my surprise at finding out that the non-removal of a statue of Queen Victoria in an Indian city is evidence of ‘cosmopolitanism’ marks me as an outlier. And neither will, I think, my puzzlement that such a rich concept has been so narrowly conceived.

2. In the chapter titled ‘Two Bombay Portraits’ Dalrymple, writing of the growth of an Indian pop-music industry and its associated stars, notes:

[Till the eighties] no Indian rock band had really grasped the imagination of the public or had any significant commercial success. The truth was that in the 1970s and eighties India was not yet ready. Even in the thoroughly Westernised commercial capital of Bombay there were no clubs and no pubs: no (open sex), no drugs, and hence no rock’n’roll….But around 1989…a subtle change took place.

And from there Dalrymple is off and running, telling us a well-worn tale of the changes wrought in India by the economic liberalization regimes of successive governments.

No teenager or university student though, who grew up in India in the eighties, will recognize the sober, rock-music-less India Dalrymple tries to depict. The metropolitan university campuses of India played host to many, many rock bands, admittedly mostly confined to playing covers; hash was almost as common a drug on university campuses as was alcohol (and in some circles, more common, because it was cheaper); and of course, Dalrymple ignores the fact that bhang was consumed widely all over the country, and not just in the metropolitan centers.

It didn’t need economic liberalization–and supposedly the new ‘Westernization’ it introduced–to induce in Indians the desire to get high. That inclination is a little more universal and perennial than Dalrymple imagines.

Online Conversational Spaces: The Vocal and the Previously Silenced

Comments on Internet discussion forums have been the subject of much analysis ever since electronic conversational spaces first made their appearance back in the 1970s. Pioneering scholars of ‘computerized conferencing systems’ like Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz–who conducted most of their empirical studies on the Electronic Information Exchange System–noted that several features of these systems made possible not just the rich and vigorous discussion that was their hallmark, but also much of the hostile, aggressive and abusive behavior that was its distressing counterpart.

The ‘anonymity that these systems provided was crucial. The ‘anonymity’ was not just the kind that was engendered by the provision of the ‘Anonymous’ handle for writing online. Rather, the ‘anonymity’ of a computerized conferencing also included the variant created by the simple distancing between two identifiable users; a named participant from Macon, Georgia, is for all practical purposes, anonymous to me. This ‘speaking from keyboard to monitor’ made it possible for users to shirk conventional notions of face-to-face interaction in favor of several variants of verbal confrontation. 

And just as important as the anonymity was the asynchronous nature of the communication: you didn’t have to respond immediately to a point like you had to in face-to-face conversation. You could wait, draft your reply, think it over, polish it, make it as hard-hitting as possible, and then post it; you were not going to get cut-off by your interlocutor and you had the time to compose your thoughts and then offer a response. For every user that was embarrassed by a too-hasty reply, there was one who took the time to compose a devastating rejoinder, composed at leisure, its rhetorical edges sharpened to a cutting point.

Online spaces for conversation removed many of the handicaps of physical discussion spaces; perhaps you were not a confident conversationalist in offline, physical spaces but online you could be a veritable ninja. Your stuttering was no longer a handicap; you could not be out-shouted; the raised eyebrow, the smirk, the grimace, in short, the entire arsenal of off-putting body-language was not available to those who sought to resist your argumentation. What mattered in an online space was, interestingly enough, your writing. Conversely, perhaps you were a bully offline, but online if you didn’t have an argument, you could be taken apart rather easily. An interesting leveling of the field was made visible; indeed, the most salutary effect of the online space was the voices that could now be heard, that used to be swamped offline, but now found a medium suited to them.   

Soon, aggressive, bristling personas who composed wrote intensely forensic arguments and who were not shy of using sarcasm, irony and invective and sundry other rhetorical devices made their appearance in online ‘conferences.’ They were accompanied by those who sought only to abuse, who freed of the fear of the social sanction that was immediately visible in a physical space, lashed out in every manner imaginable.

It is this latter group that invented a new species of online bullying and hectoring and that is now commonly associated with the degradation of online discourse. But it should not be forgotten that the online space also gave voices to many that were previously silenced.

RIP Norman Geras

Norman Geras, prolific blogger and professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manchester has passed away at the age of 70. He had been suffering from prostate cancer. Norm was best known as a political theorist whose oeuvre included books on Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Richard Rorty. (He also served on the editorial boards of the New Left Review and the Socialist Register.)

I chanced upon Norm’s blog after he and I had a short online exchange in response to a minor quasi-theological debate triggered by Yoram Hazony. I had written a post responding to  a piece by Hazony in the New York Times; so did Norm. Corey Robin sent me  Norman’s post, and I emailed or tweeted him, pointing him to mine.

On Norm’s blog, I found out that besides writing on politics, he also wrote on cricket. (As I blog on cricket too, and consider myself a pretty serious fan, I was immediately hooked.) In particular, Norm maintained a section titled ‘Memories of Cricket: a series of recollections of incidents, notable and not so notable, in the history of cricket, with each personal recounting supplemented by descriptions of the same event from books in Norm’s voluminous collection. Shortly thereafter, Norm asked me if I would contribute a memory of my own to the collection. I agreed, and contributed one of an event I had heard and read about for years before I ever saw it on video: David Hookes’ five fours off Tony Grieg in the Centenary Test. As a token of his appreciation, Norm offered to send me signed copies of his two books on the 1997 and 2001 Ashes. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them and am glad they sit on my shelves.

I never met Norm and so, did not know him personally, but did have some email contact with him, and felt like I had established a rapport of sorts. I knew there were some political differences between us. (For instance, our opinions on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and perhaps some of the claims of the Euston Manifesto.) But he always seemed to me to be infected with a deep concern for many of the same political ends that I was sympathetic to. He just had a different conception of the actions required to achieve them. Where I found myself disagreeing with him, I still found his arguments carefully constructed and often quite persuasive.

Because I found his writings thoughtful and provocative it was inevitable that I would respond to him on this blog. I did so a little while ago, with a post on the differences he had with Glenn Greenwald and Terry Eagleton on the question of whether the ‘explanation’ of a heinous act constitutes a ‘justification’ or an apologia of sorts for it. Writing it helped clarify my thoughts on an often  vexing topic.

In his last days, Norm, perhaps sensing the end was near, was on a tear on his blog. If you’ve never looked through its archives, you really should.

RIP Norm. I hardly knew you, but I’m glad we made contact, even if only for a little while.

Groundhog Day: The US Government Shutdown Version

One of the most bizarrely naïve expressions of hope in the aftermath of the 2013 US Government Shutdown Fiasco has been a variant of ‘perhaps the Republican Party’s extremist faction will learn from this crushing public relations defeat–as evinced by opinion polls and the public statements of their fellow party members–and not engage in similar brinkmanship again.’

This is naive because as the 81-18 and 288-144 vote margins in the Senate and House of Representatives reveal, eighteen Senators–supposedly the Wise Old Men of the American Polity[tm]–and, count ’em, one hundred and forty-four Congressfolks, not the supposed Gang of Forty, did not think, even on October 16th, two weeks deep into a cripplingly expensive shutdown of the federal government, that the Senate bill to resolve the standoff was worth signing.

To be sure, they might not have thought their votes were actually going to derail the passing of the bill, and were instead intended as signals to their constituencies that they intend to continue fighting the good fight, but that fact does not provide any reassurance. If their constituents need such mollifying even in the face of overwhelming evidence that their representatives in Washington had engaged in catastrophically irresponsible behavior damaging to the US economy and the practice of legislative politics,  then there is good reason to believe they will need similar coddling the next time budgetary negotiations take place. Which is not a year or even six months away, but right around the corner in the new year.

What seems to have forgotten in the rush to castigate the Gang of Forty and John Boehner–who seems to be early frontrunner for the title of the Most Incompetent and Cowardly Speaker of the Twenty First Century–as reckless extremists is that these folks are merely doing the bidding of those ballot box battlers who believe a Muslim lives in the White House, who consider federal employees parasites, who regard every branch of the government as a force of active oppression, and some of whose members who, at their most ‘intellectual’ moments, proudly proclaim themselves to be infected by an incoherent political philosophy which I will term ‘American libertarianism’. (This ahistorical and intellectually vapid brand of political hogwash, which possesses no discernibly meaningful conception of power as far as I can see, is alarmingly popular in many reaches of American life.)

Such an electoral constituency will have learned no lessons from the disaster that has been temporarily halted last night. Instead, I presume, a fresh batch of half-baked conspiracy theories will be making the rounds, explaining the capitulation by the Republican Party as a strategic and tactical regrouping, an opportunity for the mustering of forces, just in time for the next assaults. Like hostage-takers everywhere, their elected representatives will have appreciated the extensive media coverage and the attention paid to their pathetic rodomontade.

They are, I can assure you, already looking forward to the next showdown, prepared to dig in even deeper, eagerly awaiting that drive off the cliff edge so that they can proceed–and take us all with them–to their version of the inhabited-by-seventy-two-houris-paradise that they think awaits them.

The Seductive Appeal of ‘Education’

In reviewing Jill Lepore‘s Book of Ages: The Life and Opinion’s of Jane Franklin, a ‘biography’ of Benjamin Franklin‘s considerably less distinguished sibling, Susan Dunn writes:

The words “seduction” and “education” in fact share the same Latin root: ducere, to lead. Seduction leads astray (“se-”), while education leads out (“e”)—out of our unformed, primitive selves. Education civilizes us, prepares us for participation in society, in culture, in public service. Education opens the gates of the world. It provides the exit, the one way out. (‘The Other Franklin,’ The New York Review of Books, 24 October 2013)

Like just about any etymology lessons, this one is fascinating. Many–like me–might have noticed the orthographic similarity between ‘seduction’ and ‘education’ without pausing to inquire whether they might share in provenance.

For my present purposes, though, I am less interested in exploring this etymological connection than in inquiring further into the seductive appeal of education itself, one that Dunn elaborates as the primary reason for the wildly dissimilar achievements and lives of the Franklin siblings. At one pole is the phenomenally well-read Benjamin, at the other, the barely literate Jane. (Dunn helpfully provides several samples of her less than inspiring prose.) One sibling travels far and wide, literally and figuratively, acquiring a cosmopolitanism that would be the envy of many and ensuring a place for himself in any history of the times he lived in; the other remains stagnant in a provincial existence, destined for obscurity unless rescued by the attentions of a sympathetic writers committed to the construction of alternative histories. With such wildly disparate fates in store, who would not be convinced of the civilizing and prosperity-inducting effects of education? (Education appears correlated with longer lives too, as public health data seems to confirm.) If a flourishing life is our aim, then education seems the golden road to it.

This optimism though, seems destined to be tempered by the familiar skepticism about whether education–even if of the ‘right’, ‘classical’ variety–can form our ‘unformed’, ‘primitive’ selves in all the right ways, whether education, even as it ‘civilizes’ us, does a good enough job of driving out the uncivilized within us. for instance, here is George Steiner in the preface to Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966:

We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

This skepticism suggests we have conceived of ‘education’ a little too narrowly. Perhaps we have only included bookish and cultural indoctrination of various stripes under that rubric. In the process, we might have excluded the more nebulous ‘moral education’, a process the determination of whose contours still remains oppressively intractable.

Jesse Pinkman and Eklavya: Teacher-Student Relationships Broken Bad

The grand old Indian epic Mahabharata contains, among its thousands of stories, several which unsettle us by their moral ambiguity. One such story is that of Eklavaya. The Wikipedia entry for him notes:

He is a young prince of the Nishadha, a confederation of jungle tribes in Ancient India. Eklavya aspired to study archery in the gurukul of Guru Dronacharya, the greatest known teacher in the use of weaponry and martial knowledge at the time. He was son of Vyatraj Hiranyadhanus, a talented soldier in the army of King of Magadha….Eklavya sincerely sought the mentorship of Drona in weaponry and martial art. Drona discouraged him, and ultimately rejected the boy due to his caste. Out of respect for Drona, Eklavya began a program of self-study, using a clay image of Drona for inspiration. Eventually, Eklavya achieved a level of skill superior to that of Arjun, who was Drona’s favorite and most accomplished student, and part of the royal Pandava family. The Pandavas come across the boy in the forest one day, and Eklavya told them of his self study under the idol of Drona. In a cruel move, the guru demanded that Eklavya cut off his right thumb in obeisance to his guru, a request that could not be refused by a student in a gurukul. Eklavya agreed to the demand without hesitation, severing his right thumb and presenting it to Drona.

The story of Eklavya horrified me when I first heard it, and it continued to exert an unsettling effect on me as time went by: it acquired the stature of a singular betrayal of the student by a teacher, a figure in whom the student had reasonably accorded some faith, trust and hope for ethical treatment. Years later, as a doctoral student who had heard too many stories of horrific dissertation supervisors, I would often recount this story as an archetypal instance of the abuse of the student-teacher relationship.

Thanks to Breaking Bad, and the sorry story of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, we now have yet another such demonstration of the flagrant disregard of the moral parameters of the teacher-student relationship.

Jesse is not Walter’s student in school anymore, of course, but he does function as a junior understudy, one mentored and taught by Walter. In his continuing references to ‘Mr. White’, in his awkwardness around Walter’s family and in his home, it is clear a certain impression of Walter White has not been erased from Jesse’s mind. The old teacher-student relationship has now been replaced by a new one; the classrooms and homeworks are admittedly different, but it is evident that a basic, familiar template still persists. It is thus all too easy for Walter and Jesse to fall back or rely on the behavioral patterns and expectations prescribed by it.

For Jesse, this is a persistently abusive relationship. From the very beginning, from the time that Walter threatens to betray him to the DEA, through the twists and turns of his tortured partnership with Walter, one marked by hectoring, verbal expressions of contempt, overt and covert manipulations, and almost right up to the end, Walter takes advantage–among other things–of whatever psychological and emotional edges might have been afforded him by Jesse’s memory of him as his teacher in high-school.  Walter White was always keen to draw upon any weapons available to him when he waged his battles; his drawing on the status he had once enjoyed in Jesse’s life was, for him, a foregone conclusion. If Jesse is deferential to Walter, it is only to the latter’s benefit.

Many of us cheered Jesse on when he punched Walter senseless during their fisticuffs in the fourth season; I suspect some of our anger at Walter was driven by the sense that he had betrayed an implicit trust that Jesse had in him, one that would, hopefully, protect him from the kind of abuse Walter subjected him to.

By saving Jesse from the purgatory of a life as a meth-manufacturing slave, Walter White partially redeemed himself. But his actions before that fateful night had already become established in the annals of moral failures in teacher-student relationships.

Babies, Personalities, and Power Dynamics

One of the central, and most familiar, ironies of the parent-baby relationship is that despite the seeming imbalance of visible physical power, its actual contours are quite clearly regulated and determined by the child. Indeed, the very ‘weakness’ of the child, its utter and total vulnerability and dependence on the parent  grants it this power. The result is an entanglement with a human being where conventional notions of relational dynamics get upended quite spectacularly.  Only a pathological human being would attempt to assert their unbridled will and exert the fantastical control over the baby that is actually possible; the rest of us do the baby’s bidding. It is the recognition of the baby’s weakness that lets us allow it to assume that power. Our helplessness in the face of its demands is a function of our recognition of its own helplessness, its dependence on us. (Mark Twain’s toast to General Baby is a witty recognition of these facts.)

Many years ago, a friend made some rather interesting remarks about the parent-child relationship, describing his son and himself as a closely coupled system of sorts. One of its components, the parent, had commenced operations with very particular, preconceived notions of how matters were to proceed: inputs were to be to sent to the  child; it would respond accordingly; and slowly, over a period of time, it would evolve in a manner, shape and fashion determined by the parent. A half-duplex communication channel or transaction if you will. Instead, like all tightly coupled systems the relationship of the two components quickly became a co-determining one: the parent’s interactions with the child were determined by the child’s responses to the inputs sent its way; slowly, over a period of time, the parent was also changing in response to the child’s interactions with it. And those changes in turn regulated how it interacted with the child and how it responded. And so on, as these feedback loops iterated endlessly.

The child then, is not a junior partner in the relationship the parent forges with it; it is an equal in many interesting ways. We feel ourselves change as it ‘commands’ us to do its bidding; we sense its resistance, we retreat to safer ground and rethink strategy; at every step of the way, despite its physical and linguistic incapacities the child asserts its will with startling clarity. Again, only an unhinged human being–sometimes a parent unwound comprehensively by lack of sleep, sometimes, less excusably, a plain old misanthrope– would respond with angry or violent defiance.

As my daughter moves into the fourth quarter of her first year, I have been surprised at how early her assertiveness and wilfulness has manifested herself; perhaps I had entertained some charmingly naive notions of how much later in her development these would emerge. There is a personality of sorts on display; a rich repertoire of expressions, both verbal and physical; demonstrations of clear preferences. All of this overlaid, of course, on an increasingly sophisticated physical interaction with the surrounding world and its affordances.

My relationship with her is fraught with much uncertainty, but its one I welcome.