DADWAGON

I came across an interesting little tidbit at inCharacter (“the journal of everyday virtues”; I, of course, prefer my virtues to be offered on a sub-weekly basis, like a housekeeper). Entitled “The Death of Embarrassment,” it is an essay on how shame, embarrassment, and scorn have become degraded social values in today’s culture. This, apparently, like all that rap noise and reality television, is something that must be countermanded.

Now I should be fair to the author, Christine Rosen, who goes to some lengths to define herself out of what is, at first glance (and maybe second), a silly position to take:

Many people see the decline of embarrassment as a good thing. “Why shouldn’t I be able to do X?” people often say after having done something outrageous or transgressive. But this misunderstands the distinction between embarrassment — a mild but necessary correction of inappropriate behavior — and shame, which is a stronger emotional response usually involving feelings of guilt about more serious breaches of conduct.

So, embarrassment and shame have been excised from each other, not effectively in my mind, but at least for the purposes of the essay. They aren’t merely ethical gradations on the spectrum of punishment inflicted on individuals for non-normative social behavior—they are two totally different things. Fine, I’ll give her that.

But she loses me when she makes the stock move toward blaming popular culture as the reason for the lack of crimson cheeks:

What used to cause embarrassment now elicits little more than a collective shrug. In our eagerness to broadcast our authentic experiences and have our individuality endorsed, we reject embarrassment as if it were some fusty trapping of a bygone age. But we haven’t eliminated embarrassment; we have only upped the ante. “Your slip is showing” used to be the most embarrassing sartorial faux pas a lady could commit. Now we regularly witness “nip slip” from female celebrities whose shirts mysteriously migrate south during public appearances — or during Super Bowl halftime shows. As the boundary between public and private has dissolved, so too has our ability to distinguish between embarrassing and appropriate public behavior. The result is a society often bewildered by attempts to impose any standards at all.

This is the sort of condemnation that every generation puts forward about itself—radio fried our brains, television shortened our attention span, email killed letters, text killed email, God is dead, the terrorists are winning. Are these things untrue? Probably not. But the instinct to blame “society” for social ills is weak. These are always the worst of times, and people have been savages since man first stuck a bison bone through his nose to worship God.

Rosen then makes the stab at a prescriptive solution—save the babies:

Unlike many other emotions, embarrassment must be learned. Infants know nothing of this emotion, and parents often use the threat of embarrassment to teach young children correct and incorrect behavior: “If you say that in public, you’ll embarrass yourself,” we say to the toddler with a penchant for scatological chitchat. Embarrassment is also a social emotion; its occurrence requires the real or imagined presence of others. Belch at a dinner party and you will likely feel embarrassed; do it while home alone and you’re unlikely to feel abashed. Because it is a learned behavior grounded in social relations, embarrassment is a kind of barometer for a society’s notions of civility.

I don’t know what playgrounds she’s been hanging out in, but the Internet has not lessened this kind of parenting. It remains alive and well, even in the finer schools that won’t be accepting my crotchfruit come this fall.

She then concludes, as will I, with a nod to SCIENCE:

In fact, as the science of embarrassment suggests, it is part of what makes civility possible. In Behavior in Public Spaces, published in 1963, sociologist Erving Goffman described our public actions, from greeting friends on the street to answering questions posed by strangers, as signals of the strength of our commitment to our social communities. “What the individual thinks of as the niceties of social conduct,” Goffman argued, “are in fact rules for guiding him in his attachment to and detachment from social gatherings.” These are what mark us as belonging, or not. “More than to any family or club, more than to any class or sex, more than to any nation, the individual belongs to gatherings, and he had best show that he is a member in good standing.”

Well, if the “science of embarrassment” says it, it must be so.

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has a big feature that all of us who care about how kids think and learn should be reading. It’s called “The Moral Life of Babies,” and it’s about how babies become “civilized beings.” At least, I think that’s what it’s about. Honestly, it’s pretty hard to tell.

Let’s begin with the beginning:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

I don’t know about you, but I had to read that paragraph three times to figure out which puppet was doing what. (Also: What kind of treat? I hope it was hazelnut baby formula.) And I still don’t understand exactly what the upshot is supposed to be. The kid is punishing the naughty puppet, I guess, but are we really sure? For instance, when she turned 1, my Sasha would not have understood a command to take a treat away from one puppet. Sure, she might have taken one, but she also might not have. She might’ve hit the “naughty” puppet, but she might have hit another one. Or hit you. Or me.

I guess the greater point of the article is that babies are smarter, or at least more thoughtful, than we generally think—that they can imagine what other people want or think, and can act accordingly. Which is neat, I admit, but not mega-huge-NYTM-article neat.

Maybe the problem is that the article is, um, poorly written. As my wife, who spent many hours in university biology labs, pointed out, it looks like an lab report reformatted for a major national magazine. It’s confusing and bland, and describes so many lab experiments with such cursory detail that they blend together into meaninglessness. For example:

[W]e tested 8-month-olds by first showing them a character who acted as a helper (for instance, helping a puppet trying to open a box) and then presenting a scene in which this helper was the target of a good action by one puppet and a bad action by another puppet. Then we got the babies to choose between these two puppets. That is, they had to choose between a puppet who rewarded a good guy versus a puppet who punished a good guy. Likewise, we showed them a character who acted as a hinderer (for example, keeping a puppet from opening a box) and then had them choose between a puppet who rewarded the bad guy versus one who punished the bad guy.

The results were striking. When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.

Again, I’m having a hard time following this, and it’s only after going through it several times that I’m able to sort out the action. And then I think: 8-month-olds?!? How are they “choosing” anything? A lot of infant behavioral psychology rests on “the look”—the idea that babies indicate their level of interest by how long they look at something. I’m willing to buy that, but is that the case here? Are the babies “choosing” by looking, or by actually grabbing puppets? If it’s the latter, I’m slightly less inclined to see the results as meaningful. After all, in my experience, an 8-month-old will grab whatever’s in front of her. Or maybe she won’t. There’s a randomness there that seems elided by this article.

Another thing missing from it is the sample size. Are these scientists testing a dozen, 100, 1,000 kids? If a statistically significant number of 8-month-olds consistently chose punishing puppets, that might convince me there’s something meaningful here. As it is, all we have are poorly described experiments, a lack of hard data, and ambiguous conclusions.

It pains me a little to say this, but what I want here is Malcolm Gladwell. For all his faults, he’s skilled at making goofy-sounding psych experiments like this come to life. He’d choose a single one to lead with, describe it in vivid detail, put it in context by sketching developments in infant psychology, and then he’d use it to tell us not just something about baby morality but about how our own notions of adult morality are thrown into question by what we learn about babies.

Plus, he has that kooky hair! Almost looks like a puppet, you know…

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, to mark the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’ve done something different. Today, we welcome a brief memoir from the author himself, exclusive to Dadwagon. Take it away, Will Leitch.)

One motif I’ve noticed from all the terrific pieces this week is that, in a lot of ways, the participation in sports and the observance of them are linked in people’s minds, and perhaps they shouldn’t be. I was a defiantly mediocre baseball player growing up in rural Illinois, a serviceable backup catcher for the high school team, used mostly for warming up guys in the bullpen and calculating the star players’ batting averages. If I were the same kind of fan as I was a player, you’d want me in your fantasy baseball league, because I’d trade you Alex Rodriguez for anybody I thought had a funny name. (Jarrod Saltalamacchia!)

My father was better than I was as a high-school athlete, but not by much. I suspect, raising me, he hoped I’d be a slight uptick in talent rather than a slight downtick. This makes him like most fathers, I’m sure. I’m not a father, but I’m getting married in a month, and the plan is for kids not too much longer after that. That’s part of the reason I wanted to write about baseball and fatherhood now. No offense to the current fathers of the world, but I do think that the experience is such a breathtaking, life-changing one that I’m not sure I always trust the narrator. A good friend of mine, a writer, when his wife was pregnant for the first time, boasted how he was “not gonna be one of those writers” who talked about their kids all the time. The first four pieces of his I read after his daughter’s birth were about her, and the experience. I do not begrudge this, and I have no doubt I will do the same thing.

Obviously, the connection between fatherhood and baseball has been written about before, but, from what I can tell, rarely from the son’s perspective, unless the father was an alcoholic, an abusive lout, a former pro baseball player, or all three. (My dad, I’m happy and lucky to say, is a pretty nice guy.) Often, then, you get something like Mike Lupica’s book about fatherhood, which is essentially a whitewashing of the messiness of family, and baseball, so that his young perfect beautiful boy doesn’t have to grow up too soon. There is a place for that, but I didn’t want to write it, and if I know myself I probably will, should I have a son. Maybe I’ll look back at this book when I’m a father and be embarrassed about what I didn’t know. In fact, I kind of hope so.

Anyway: playing sports versus watching them. I remember the first time my father looked old to me. I mean, he always looked “old”; he was my father, I was a kid, and as far as I knew he had been on Earth forever. I was 11 years old, and we were walking from our hotel in St. Louis to the old Busch Stadium before a Cardinals game.

I was just growing old enough to start realizing my limitations. I was telling my father that I wanted to be a baseball broadcaster, like my hero Jack Buck.

My dad: “Most kids want to be professional baseball players. You want to talk about people playing baseball?”

Now, if I were to eventually make it to the big leagues, I’d certainly need to be the best player in Mattoon, Illinois, even at the age of 11, and I was a far cry from that. This seemed obvious to me, and I was surprised it didn’t seem obvious to my dad.

“Dad, let’s face it,” I said, trying to sound knowing and world-wise, like the adults talked when they were in the other room drinking margaritas while we kids were playing Nintendo and pretending we couldn’t hear them. “I’m never going to be a major leaguer. It’s just realistic.”

My father, then just 37 years old, a little older than I am now, looked a lot like Grandpa right then: Tired, slower, a little vacant of all of a sudden. We didn’t say anything else until we reached the stadium and, now that I think about it, it seems like we played a lot less catch after that, a lot less than we used to.

But that didn’t stop us from watching baseball. I still call my dad after almost every Cardinals game. Well, that’s not true anymore. Now I text him. It’s easier and quicker and strange. My father’s embrace of texting is convenient, but it still makes me uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be difficult to communicate with your father; it’s not supposed to be convenient. Though he has yet to LOL, which is a relief.

This year, give the mother of your children a special gift—the gift of blame. Yes, how she treats the kids may (or may not!) screw them up for life. That’s according to the results coming out of USA Today Laboratories:

With Mother’s Day around the corner, new research is shedding some light on what happens when a parent — particularly the mother — gives more time or attention or privileges to one of the children. Past studies have found that less-favored siblings may suffer emotionally, with decreased self-esteem and behavioral problems in childhood, while adult children who were even slightly favored report higher well-being.

Clearly, this is groundbreaking science, and combined with last week’s revelation of the keys to good (and bad) fatherhood, it should provide great insight into how to fuck up our kids in new and interesting ways.