Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ It is not just scientists who do this.

      The question of whether newborn babies can imitate is important because, as Reddy said, ‘You cannot imitate that which in some sense you don’t understand.’⁴ To imitate you have to have some sense of self and to see something similar in the person you imitate. When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788 there followed a meeting between two groups of people whose paths had diverged some sixty thousand years before. When the first groups of homo sapiens left Africa, the distant ancestors of the officers, soldiers and convicts had settled in Europe while the distant ancestors of the Aborigines had set off on a long journey that eventually brought them to Australia. The two groups developed vastly different languages and cultures. Thus, when some of their number met on the shores of Sydney Harbour they could communicate only by facial expressions and gesture. What disconcerted the whites was the way the Aborigines could imitate them. The Aborigines could echo back to the English words and phrases that the white men had used. The Aborigines had no knowledge of what were appropriate manners in eighteenth-century England, but they could understand, say, how one man might display his power by the way he moved and gesticulated, and another his vanity. However, despite this and much other evidence that the Aborigines were the same species as the whites, the whites had to maintain their pride by insisting that the Aborigines were not just ignor ant savages but less than human. This belief has not entirely vanished from the minds of many white Australians today. Whoever you are, if you are treated as inferior by those who have power over you, you suffer. Children suffer when the adults around them treat them as their inferiors, as many adults do. Yet it is now quite clear that newborns do not merely imitate, they are able to distinguish human beings from objects, and understand wordlessly that people have intentions but objects do not, and that other people can confirm your existence but objects do not.

      It seems that we are born with the ability to be a person but that this ability requires interaction with other people in order for it to manifest itself. In the company of attentive faces, the many and various facets of being a person begin to show themselves. In her book How Infants Know Minds Vasudevi Reddy gives an account of all of these, but here I want to look at the aspects of being a person that relate to truth and lies.

      Infants perceive and respond to another person’s emotional state. They show a clear preference for happy faces rather than angry ones. What they dislike most is a blank, unresponsive face. We might not enjoy someone being angry with us or rejecting us, but at least these people are taking notice of us. Nowadays, in conversation ‘blank’ is used as a verb, as in, ‘At the party Susie blanked Jim, and he got back at her by sending her up.’ I am not sure how much of that sentence is Australian slang and how much English, but it means, ‘Susie refused to acknowledge Jim’s presence, and he responded by making fun of her.’ Teachers must make sure that they pay attention to the well-behaved child, otherwise the child might become very badly behaved in order to get some attention. In some of the workshops I used to run, I would ask the participants to imagine they were the sole survivor of a shipwreck. They had just enough strength to paddle their life raft to one of two islands. On one island, the inhabitants would ignore them completely. On the other, the inhabitants would notice them but only to be extremely unpleasant to them. Which island would they choose? The majority of people chose the island where the inhabitants acknowledged their existence, albeit unpleasantly. If, over a period of time, nobody takes any notice of us we start to feel that we have disappeared.

      It seems that babies soon discover that, if they respond to an adult in the way the adult wants, the adult rewards them, not just with smiles, but also with saying something in a warm, encouraging tone. By the time they are eight or nine months old infants start to understand and respond to orders. At first, this can seem to be another enjoyable game, but then some of these orders become, in the infant’s way of seeing things, an unwarranted intrusion into what the infant wants to do. Infants learn very quickly how not to comply to unwelcome instructions. To these they respond sometimes with noisy defiance, and sometimes more subtly with a stiffening of the back and the sudden onset of deafness.

      In responding in these ways to unwelcome orders, infants show that they understand the dangers inherent in being very obedient. If we comply with an order because, if we had thought of it, we would have done what we are now being asked to do, or because we want to please the person giving the order and fulfilling that order is not difficult, we feel that we are in control of that situation. However, if we believe that we will feel guilty if we disobey an unwelcome order or that in the face of punishment we are being compelled to comply, or that complying means going against the grain of our very being, we are not in control of the situ ation. We want to resist, and, if we do not do so, we despise ourselves. If these last three situations often arise, we soon find that continual compliance threatens to wipe us out as a person. We do not need a language to understand the danger of being annihilated as a person, in the same way as we do not need a language to understand that, if we touch something very hot, we must withdraw our hand immediately.

      In her book, Reddy mentions what she calls the ‘disintegration’ of the self following bereavement or shock.⁵ In psychoanalytic literature, such ‘shock’ is referred to as trauma. For the baby this can occur when the ‘good’ mother suddenly turns into the ‘bad’ mother. The smiling mother might suddenly become angry, or distant, or vanish and not return. Whenever we suffer a trauma or a bereavement, we discover that the world is not what we thought it was. Some of our ideas are disconfirmed, and we feel ourselves falling apart. We have to find ways of protecting ourselves from trauma, and, if this happens, ways of holding our sense of self together.

      At about nine months babies discover that they can protect themselves by refusing to obey orders. However, adults are more powerful than infants, and they can punish those who disobey. When the refusal to obey fails to protect infants, they have to learn how to lie. But before they can do this, they have to discover the two prerequisites of lying.

      To lie you must first know the truth.

      The person you wish to lie to must be capable of being deceived.

      From the moment newborn babies gaze upon the world they are in the business of discovering what is going on. They want to discover this for themselves, and, as soon as they can point at something, they want to share this information with the people around them. Reddy wrote, ‘From about 12 to 18 months toddlers effortfully, selectively and appropriately inform other people truthfully about reality, often telling people things they don’t appear to know or may “need” to know.’⁶ They offer other people information, and they are capable of selecting among several adults those adults who lack certain information that the other adults already have.

      A number of recent studies have found that even fifteen-month-old toddlers seem to be able to detect that other people can have false beliefs about reality. Well before they can tell a lie, infants discover how to deceive. They quickly grasp the principle of ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.’ If your mother does not want you to do something, wait until she is out of the room. The psychologist Judy Dunn has shown that toddlers of no more than sixteen months can discover what would upset or please their mother or their siblings, and then do it.⁷ Such young children fail the Piagetian tests for understanding the general principle that other people can hold false beliefs. However, the people whose minds you need to be able to read early in your life are your nearest and dearest, because they are the people who can easily annihilate you as a person, or give you the kind of affirmation that brings the greatest joy to your heart.

      Most of us are born into families where the parents hold differing views on a great many subjects. It does not take us long to discover that we can get a biscuit from Dad by giving him a cuddle, whereas a biscuit from Mum comes only as a reward for doing something she wants us to do. Once we discover that our parents have very different СКАЧАТЬ