vael:

I’m really happy that Crate went back to blogging.

thegreatcrate:

Last night I finished reading Island by Aldous Huxley, and all I have to say is wow. The first three-fourths of the book were a bit of a struggle to get through, but the final fourth of the book was so delightful to read I want to go back and read the whole thing again. The very last chapter left me speechless. I haven’t felt that kind of an effect from reading a book in a long, long time (or ever?). The entire book feels like it builds up until the very final word on the very last page, which is a perfect summary of what this book is about.

[………..]

I think what made this novel such a joy to read were the ideas Huxley presented that are so simple, yet vastly superior to anything in the modern industrialized world. One example is having children be raised by many families at once in what he calls a MAC (mutual adoption club), so instead of having one mother and one father a child of Pala might have twenty-two mothers and twenty-two fathers. The benefits of this would be astounding; no more parents brainwashing their children with their own twisted beliefs. If a parent is being unruly to a child or the child needs a break from their home, they need only go live with one of their other parents for a change of environment. It creates a sense of community where everyone only wants what is best for everyone else.

I used to think, with my nice growing-up-teenager brain, about the community raising of a child. I’m hoping/assuming Demi can chime in with some psychology guidance, but from what I know, children need very tight bonds to their parents. Perhaps that’s because of social conditioning, but I swear I’ve read somewhere as a criticism to Brave New World that “community raising” was one of the worst things you could do for a child because they have no defined role model, and the lack of stable environment that doesn’t offer independence will basically make them dependent on others.

Nearly every solution I have to a problem these days is to simply not live in an industrial society, so I won’t give any suggestion beyond that.

Well, if I must… Attachment is kind of a complicated thing to get into, and it seems some of the older research may have been flawed, but it’s pretty fair to say that parental bonds are very important. I say it that way because I might turn out to be wrong some day, and I’m acknowledging that, but evidence seems to suggest… There’s a lot of argument about how much parents have an influence on their children in the long run, and so on, but let’s not get into that.

        Harry Harlow’s awful, awful experiment with rhesus monkeys showed that children need more from their parents than just food. Physical comfort actually mattered more to them than survival! Unsurprisingly, without proper parenting, the monkeys had a lot of problems. Some of them were allowed to have children, and those babies probably fared worse than the original batch. Unfed at best, or flat out murdered by their parents… After being isolated, they just didn’t understand basic social concepts.

        It may seem like I’m rambling, because isolation is different from having two dozen parents. Isolation, being the worst case scenario, shows what happens without any parental attachment. Without dedicated parent(s), that they’d spend enough time with to form solid social bonds and to act as good role models, they might end up with any number of problems. I’d sooner teach good parenting than crowdsource it. Why rely on good parents to balance out the bad, when you could eliminate bad parents entirely?

        Granted, it’s a lot harder to do that for seven billion people than a few thousand or however many live on this island utopia. I just don’t think there are that many benefits to sharing a child and leaving them without a real family - and having a family certainly doesn’t exclude the possibility of being a part of the community. So I don’t see what, if any, benefits there would truly be compared to actual good parenting.