Last week, I posted about the Calvinist notion of rebelliousness as the gravest of sins, quoting both Richard Mouw and Augustine of Hippo. Mouw and Augustine excoriated themselves for childish destructiveness, not so much because of the damage they did to the objects they attacked but because of their sheer glee in defying authority.
My mother, a retired professor of philosophy, now in her seventies and an atheist since her teens, wrote to me with a different insight about the meaning of rebellion:
I don’t know if I ever told you this story. It is my earliest clear memory; I was only two and a half years old. It was Christmas Eve 1939, and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving to Grandfather Roeding’s for dinner. I think I had a slight cold. For some reason I had no shoes on but I did have socks and I started to take my socks off. My mother told me not to, but as I continued to remove them, I had this sudden enormous sense of myself as a self. I could take my socks off If I wanted to! I was a separate person. I was genuinely — if only briefly — aware of my own separate consciousness. I’ve certainly never thought of it as a sin. I disobeyed in the revelation that I could disobey: A deliberate act of free will. I’m sure I had done quite a few naughty things before that but this was an act of independence rather than of malice.
Do you know the medieval theory that there can be no true love in marriage? True love involved giving freely and nothing in marriage can be giving freely since everything, according to medieval doctrine, is already owed. Similarly, in our childhood there is a sense that everything good and well behaved is already required of us. We disobey not because we are depraved but because in the tiny sphere of our capacities, only disobedience is free, only disobedience is an expression of our autonomy. I have never forgotten that moment of realization that I could choose not to obey.
The bold emphases are mine.
I am truly, in so many ways, my mother’s son! And though my mother and I disagree about a great many things, I think she’s absolutely right about the essentially healthy, life-affirming function of the kind of childish disobedience she describes here. I am not a philosopher like my parents or Richard Mouw (though I did suffer through a lot of graduate work on medieval English scholasticism). What I do believe is that we must distinguish healthy rebellion from wanton destructiveness. My mother’s defiant removal of her socks, in the face of her own mother’s stated warnings, is evidence of a desire for healthy autonomy; Mouw’s smashing of his grandparents’ plants is less positive because it is the expression of autonomy through the willfull destruction of life (however feeble and unsentient that life may have been). Rebellion for the sake of establishing independence is, in other words, only sinful when it involves deliberate harm to that which is created, good, and valuable. There are different kinds of rebellion.
I am quite confident that my grandmother was cross, and rightly so, with my disobedient mother. I am sure that one way or another, socks ended up back on Mama’s feet before the clan arrived at my great-grandfather’s house for Christmas dinner! But of course, my mother’s point wasn’t a self-destructive refusal to cover her bare feet on a cold night. It was, as she says, a moment of recognition that she had free will. Her delight was not in defying her mother but in asserting her own separate identity. To the extent that our deliberate disobedience of societal rules is not clearly destructive to creation, then such displays — however exasperating to parents — are not sinful, but rather vitally important expressions of individual personhood.
Parents and teachers ought to provide consequences for disobedience, but those consequences need to be commensurate to the actual harm done. When a child hurts another child, or an animal, or engages in potentially self-injurious behavior, we ought to stop the child. Punishment may be necessary. But what we ought to punish is not the disobedience itself, because disobedience is never, in and of itself, sinful or wrong. What we punish is the disregard for the safety and well-being of other living things as well as the self. Of course, this is a nearly impossible distinction to make to a three year-old. But it is not a difficult one to make to a ten year-old, and far too many parents treat their older children as they did their toddlers.
For most small children, our first word is “No.” It’s a wonderful single syllable, a small encapsulation of defiance against a frequently well-meaning world that seeks to deny agency and freedom to the small and the vulnerable. “No”, says the little one, struggling to get his shoes on, “Let me do it myself.” Such assertions of individuality, as infuriating and exasperating as they no doubt are to parents, are vital — and they are, I am convinced, pleasing to the God who made us. We cannot love God by compulsion; true love is only that which is given freely, and it can only be given freely when we have a conscious choice to do otherwise. God is worthy of our choosing Him. And before we can freely choose, we must, must, must, must disobey both Him and His selected agents, our parents.
But what we ought to punish is not the disobedience itself, because disobedience is never, in and of itself, sinful or wrong.
Such a simple and obvious distinction that yet remains completely lost on (if not anathema to) the James Dobson school of parenting. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; if you can make a career out of conspicuously ignoring the entire scientific community, tossing out common sense probably isn’t too difficult.
If I have children, I always struggle with the idea of how I’m going to raise them. I absolutely, 100% do not want to teach my children obedience. After reading things like Miligram Experiment, I want my children to know the difference between doing things because they are the right things to do (such as helping others, and not hurting others) and because “I said so”. I want them to learn disobedience.
“Rebellion for the sake of establishing independence is, in other words, only sinful when it involves deliberate harm to that which is created, good, and valuable. There are different kinds of rebellion.”
Then doesn’t sin consist in deliberate harmfulness, and not in disobedience at all? Deliberate harmfulness is a sin when it is disobedient, but it is equally sinful when it is obedient (Eichmann, etc.). The sin is deliberate harmfulness. … I think a case can be made that (except occasionally and in small children) obedience is always destructive. … BTW, I loved your mother’s comment. She is wise beyond her years, even considering that she has plenty of years.
Lester and Antigone, I agree — save that I think sometimes the deliberate desire to harm can be an expression of hostility towards nature and, simultaneously, a desire to express autonomy. Think of little boys smashing their toys — or kicking the cat — when they get angry with their parents.
We disobey not because we are depraved but because in the tiny sphere of our capacities, only disobedience is free, only disobedience is an expression of our autonomy
Your mother is completely off-base here. In the tiny sphere of our capacities, to (freely) obey or disobey are equal expressions of autonomy. Valorizing disobedience as the only “true” expression of autonomy is simply perverse.
The free choice to do good - and doing good is always an expression of obedience to God - is the highest aim of Christian morality, a willing return to the arms of a loving God. Disobedience to secular power, even to parental love (which, being human, can also be in error) is often justifiable, or even a positive good, but disobedience to the perfection that God calls us to is never good, regardless of how well it might mesh with 20th century psychologizing.
Yes and no, Robert. Disobedience to parents and culture is a precondition to right choices and right action. We only pursue the Good — the true Good which is service to God’s Creation — when we have conscious knowledge of the difference between serving Him and merely being obedient to our parents and our culture. Until we separate from our parents, until we express our disobedience, we have not achieved autonomy. Autonomy comes through the experience of the conscious decision to do other than what is asked or demanded.
In Matthew 10:34-37, Jesus makes the case that we must choose God over our own families. How can we be certain that God, rather than our family, is our highest priority? Only, only, only when we are forced to choose and we make the conscious choice to obey God (or our sovereign conscience) and reject our nearest and dearest.
Differentiation from family, expressed through rebellion of one form or another, seems to me to be an essential prerequisite for authentic relationship with God.
Hugo,
I am hoping that you will write about this story.
Bruce Ware’s Complementarian Reading of Genesis where some women are staging a 60’s style sit-in to protest this man’s teaching. Over 800 comments so far.
Here is the story.
Browse my own website for further references to this teaching.
Thanks
Sue
When I was in college–not so much since, among grown-ups–the urge to disobey was strong among the “hippy kids, “The Kids,” “the Movement”, when everybody was trying to be an individualist like everybody else.
Problem is, many rules really do lead to getting along with things like, oh, the laws of physics, or the patience of sorely-tried administrators. To demonstrate their freedom, they needed to disobey in ways which were counterproductive to their well-being (aka “stupid”), pissy and juvenile, and did not do much, if anything, to punch up their moral courage to do the real disobedience which might mean something.
Shoes were a big deal. The U wanted kids to wear shoes in classroom buildings. The Kids figured that was the hill they wanted to die on–it being so important–and so the fight was on.
I had a friend, now a feminist and administrator at a midwestern university, who was doing the barefoot thing. We were in a three-hour class together, plenty of time for the famous midwestern “front” to come through. I lent her my socks to go home in, which were duly returned clean.
I know we’re forty years older, but I can’t stop calculating her judgment today without thinking of the fierce determination to piss off the suits back then when it meant absolutely nothing and she and her colleagues thought it meant so much.
So if you’re going to show me disobedience so I can be impressed with your independence, show me some judgment and some seriousness. Even when you are/were twenty.
Children go through developmental phases. They do not start out as “little adults”. At first, a child is completely self-willed and has no sense of consequences of their actions. So you have to “baby-proof” everything and constantly monitor them. As they get older, you expose them to more and more interesting, yet more dangerous, activities. But the younger child is not aware of the possible consequences of their disobedience to your limits on their behavior. Even when you explain the possible consequence, they may not agree with you that it could happen. So you have to teach them to be obedient.
So you let your child play in the yard that is next to a semi-busy road. But you have to teach them obedience.
“Stay away from the road”, you say while standing close to your child.
“But I want to play there”, they say.
“You need to stay away from the road because you might be hit by a car and get hurt.”
“I won’t get hurt, and I am going to play in the road right now!”
“No, you are not! Either get away from the road or we are going back inside.” (this is using the old “because I said so” argument)
I leave for Boy Scout summer camp in a few days to ride herd on quite a few 11 to 17 year old boys. I have heard things like:
“Okay everyone, before going down this fifty foot cliff, you need to put on you safety harness.
“I don’t need a safety harness for only a fifty foot cliff.”
“You need to wear your harness in case you fall.”
“I have done this dozens of time and I have never fallen.”
“You will wear your safety harness or will not be allowed to rappel down this cliff.”
You can say, say, say the word as many times as you like, but that doesn’t modify its truth value (what are you, a Heinlein Turing-compatible AI?).
It is perfectly possible to be autonomous, that is, to be making one’s own decisions and not simply responding to conditioning, without first choosing disobedience. You are in essence arguing that everything in creation which is obedient to God’s will is enslaved to Him; Someone else made that argument earlier, as I recall.
Autonomy comes through the experience of the conscious decision to do other than what is asked or demanded.
Again, this is simply perverse. Does fidelity come only through the experience of the conscious decision to be unfaithful? Your argument valorizes failure over perfection and predicates the existence of good on the overcoming of evil, placing Satan in the role of the universe’s creative force.
Autonomy comes from the individual will and the individual choice. That choice does not need to follow the particular pattern that you valorize; a choice for good is every bit as autonomous as a choice for evil. The rejection of human authority may well be a precondition for a true acceptance of the divine authority, but that is only because we experience human authority in an articulatable way before we are capable of comprehending the divine. The world gets its hook in early, and we do have to choose to remove it.
But the world wasn’t here first.
I agree that the choice for good can be every bit as autonomous as the choice for evil. And of course, you and I both want folks to choose good. But developmentally, in order to understand they have a choice, they must experience choosing as individuals — and that requires that we exercise choice from a position of at least limited autonomy. And as you say, the world gets its hook in early, so our rebellion against the world is the first and indispensable phase in becoming a successful Chooser of the good.
Yes, you have to have the choice of meaningful good or meaningful evil, in order for the choice to be meaningful. But that isn’t the core of your mother’s argument, which was “only disobedience is free”. That is simply wrong.
At age two or three, only disobedience is indeed free. It is our first experience of freedom. Which is why, of course, the word “No” almost always precedes the word “Yes” for children.
“Differentiation from family………(is a) prerequisite for an authentic relationship with (G-d)”
Doesn’t that depend on how close the family you’re differentiating from is to G-d in the first place?
To me, saying “Don’t play in the road or you are going to come inside” is not the equivelent of “because I said so”. It is the equivelent of stating consequences: if you do A, X will happen. We already explained to you why A is unsafe, and we have a responsibility to keep you safe.
Demonstrating to your children that actions have consequences (even external consequences) is not teaching them obedience. If there was an unjust law, and I choose not to obey it, I’m still going to jail (as is right and proper) and then fight it out from there.
In the case of the child, consequences do teach them that there are external limits on their behavior. Hopefully, if I am an effective parent, I can teach them that sometimes that one needs to do what is right, regardless of the consequences, and sometimes you need to decide “what hill you want to die on”, like in terms of the barefoot to class thing. Is the action truly important? What decision are you making by disobeying this action? But, still with not teaching them obedience, I want them to ask for actions they DO follow, why are you doing this action? Is it safe/right/healthy? Is this a good thing to follow? What are the consequences for obedience?
Antigone,
When a child does not understand or agrees with the real reason to be obedient to a parent’s rule (stay away from the road because you might be hit by a car), then you have to use the “because I said so” reason. There are always spoken or unspoken consequences for not being obedient to the “because I said so” rule. The “because I said so” is usually implied, and not spoken.
“Because I said so, get away from the road; or because I said so, we are going back inside.”
Younger children often act like there is some kind of magic in speaking a command. Like when I once told my oldest son when he was a toddler to go to his room, he replied, “No Daddy! you go to your room!” Both my wife and I could tell that he actually expected me to go to my room because “he said so.”
As the child develops you switch to teaching from teaching the child to being obedient to having discipline. Discipline allows the child to fight an unjust law, and choose not to obey it. It allows them to do what is right, regardless of the consequences. Obedience is an external driven action, and discipline is an internal driven frame of mind.
Obedience can be taught, but not discipline. You can role model discipline, you can provide opportunities to develop it, but you can not teach it. Obedience is mostly used early in child rearing and as the child demonstrates more and more discipline, you rely less and less on obedience.
We generally gave our kids choices, with consequences, and let them choose.
Seems to have worked.
I disagree that you cannot teach discipline. Obedience is no more instinctual than discipline, both have to be taught.
And again, I still don’t want to teach obedience. If obedience is learned, than it will be the general reaction when told to do something. I want any children I have to be able to avoid doing that, whether it’s from their peers, or a person abusing their authority, or from a scientist telling them to shock someone in the other room.
Like most things there is a balance to be struck here. There is often great value in obedience. I think of some monks and nuns that take a lifetime vow of obedience. For more than a few of them, that choice - to sacrifice their will, and their autonomy - buys them a liberty that can be achieved no other way.
The other circumstance where I think obedience has some value is in recovery. The people I know that have managed to achieve long-term sobriety all agree on one thing: the only way to get there is to give up your autonomy for a time, and follow the guidance of those who have gone there before. Early in recovery, any belief in yourself, and any yearning for “autonomy” is a trap.
We don’t - even as adults - always know what is in our best interests.
I got to thinking about the other side of this coin after Hugo’s original post: if you have to disobey to understand your own autonomy, is destruction the way by which children come to understand their agency (by which I mean the ability to “make a difference” in the world)? When you’re a toddler, it’s much easier to smash a teacup than it is to make one or buy one; and when you have smashed it, you’ve done something beyond the power of even grownups to undo.
Your mother seems so cool and interesting - let me know if she starts blogging! :)
How exactly do you “teach” disobedience? I have 4 kids, and we have done all we can to help them think independently and make their own choices, trying to help them recognize consequences, and make choices accordingly. I cannot for the life of me see how, in the real world, you can “teach” disobedience, unless that is an oversimplification of helping them learn to be independent thinkers.
A good friend of my wife decided she did not want to unduly influence her childrens learning processes. She decided that they needed to learn from their own experiences, rather than some predetermined way their mother viewed the world. She almost exclusively told them yes and let them discover for themselves what right and wrong is. They learned “disobedience” very well. I cannot begin to list the problems these 5 children have. In their minds, right and wrong consisted of what they could get away with without getting in trouble from other sources in the world. As long as they could avoid getting arrested, it was ok to do what they wanted to. This resulted in several unwanted pregnancies, one when one daughter was 14, and drug issues and, and, and.
I think Sweating through Fog has it right. There needs to be some semblence of moderation. We can learn much from watching animals care for their young. Depending of course on species, they largely watch over them, protecting them initially, the helping them learn to protect themselves, from the most dangerous predators, but soon enough turning them out on their own, and allowing their instincts to be their guides. Left alone, the young of most species represent an easy meal to a predator. Our young are even more vulnerable, and need our protection and teaching even more so in their formative years.
I am very wary of making a specific effort to teach disobedience. This seems to be something that kids learn and excel at, at some point in their lives, all on their own.
Chad, my parents were very lenient, and I didn’t have a drink of alcohol until I was a sophomore in college, and didn’t have sex until a year after graduation. Some kids thrive on it; maybe some don’t, or maybe there were other issues with the 5 kids and not just lenient parental philosophy to blame.
I tend to agree with Sweating Through Fog that balance is key. Self-discipline is important for achieving goals. I meet a lot of people who seem to lack either self-discipline or balance. Children need boundaries and guidance and I think that can be achieved without stifling their creativity and sense of identity, although I tend to see far more examples of dependence and destructiveness rather than interdependence and autonomy. One of the saddest stories I’ve heard was about a girl of 8 or 9 who ignored her parent’s constant warnings of not playing in the street. The driver of a garbage truck didn’t see her in his rear-view mirror and hit her. She died from her injuries. Teaching age-appropriate obedience and consequence of actions is an important self-protection and social learning tool that i wouldn’t underestimate.
Nav, this went beyond leniency, this bordered on total negligence. One example…her oldest child, at 14, asked for the keys to the car. She told him “you know where they are”. He then took the car to drive his friends to the mall. He was involved in an accident, sideswiping several vehicles down a residential street because he did not know how to drive. He came back home with a terribly damaged vehicle, having fled the scene before anyone could respond. She told him “well, that kind of thing happens” and when we asked if she were going to call the police she said “if he gets caught, he will understand the mistake he made, but it is not my place to turn him in, he will only learn from the natural consequences of his actions”.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. But in my mind, that is what sticks out when earlier someone mentioned teaching disobedience. These children learned disobedience very very well.
Again, I think balance is the key. I think Karen hit the nail squarely on the head.