ORIGINAL SINNERS

Who is the greatest of the Great Seducers?

1. Karl Marx
2. Giacomo Casanova
3. Plato
4. Mick Jagger
5. All of the above rolled up into a single 18th century seducer

The answer is 5. If you role up Marx, Casanova, Plato and Jagger into one 18th century writer and womanizer and philosopher and (con)artist you get the greatest of the Great Seducers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) of Geneva, the author of Discourses on the Arts and Sciences (1750), Les Confessions (1770), The Social Contract (1762)  and, most importantly, Emile (1762)

Rousseau came up with the most seductive sentence in the whole dirty history of Western utopian thought. It occurs at the beginning of his political treatise, The Social Contract:

MAN WAS BORN FREE BUT EVERYWHERE HE IS IN CHAINS

In ten words, Jean-Jacques Rousseau bore the modern idea of childhood. Till then, children were considered little adults, miniature sinners, junior versions of their corrupt elders. But with Rousseau’s seductive ten words, childhood and children acquired the halo of innocence. Thus the centrality of Emile, Rousseau’s enormously influential “educational” treatise, on how to maintain the inner-innocence in the adolescent.

Rousseau’s idea is very simple. Man was born good and society corrupts him. Rousseau turned the Aristotelian veneration of experience and old-age on its ancient head. Human nature is good and society bad. Original sin was replaced with original virtue. Wisdom and goodness was now located in the child or the primitive human, the so-called “noble savage.”

Rousseau-for-idiots: Adults don’t get it; kids do.

Sounds familiar? Rousseau’s cult of the innocent child climaxed for the first time in the countercultural explosion of the Sixties when a generation of children all-too-innocently announced their intention to remake the world in their virtuous image. Today, this ideal of the innocence, the embedded virtue, the original purity of the child has returned wrapped in the cloak of digital idealism. Let’s tag it “Climax 2.0” in honor of those Silicon Valley teleologists who can only think in zeros and ones.

I thought of Rousseau today while reading an ABC news piece by Michael S. Malone entitled “The Leet Guide for Noobs and Nubs”. Implicit in Malone’s argument is that the  online words and symbols of teenagers, words like "leet" and "noob" and "nub" invented by kids to communicate with other kids, represents a linguistic purity that eludes adults. Online kids know how to talk to one another. The adolescent language of instant-messaging and texting has become the new thing-in-itself.

This seductive ideal of youth  is even more explicit in the work now done by Danah Boyd, a Web 2.0 utopian, by about the morality of the My Space generation. Boyd describes her work as follows:

“I study emergent social technologies that incorporate social networks, identity representation, sharing and performance (Friendster, blogging, IM...). I focus heavily on youth culture.”

In her sociological research, Boyd digitalizes Rousseau’s innocent child:

"Youth are not creating digital publics to scare parents - they are doing so because they need youth space, a place to gather and see and be seen by peers. Publics are critical to the coming-of-age narrative because they provide the framework for building cultural knowledge. Restricting youth to controlled spaces typically results in rebellion and the destruction of trust. Of course, for a parent, letting go and allowing youth to navigate risks is terrifying. Unfortunately, it's necessary for youth to mature."

Boyd-for-idiots: Analog parents don’t get it; digital kids do.

But what happens, however, if this “coming of age narrative” (ie: Climax 2.0) on an online youth community like My Space involves teenage pornography and voyeurism. What happens when, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the kids are into spanking and swinging and where Playboy Enterprises Inc. has launched a casting call for a "Girls of MySpace" nude pictorial.

Perhaps, then, the adolescent members of the My Space community are not quite as innocent as we are led to believe by the digital utopians of Silicon Valley. Perhaps we should revert to the pre Rousseau vision of the child as the flawed little adult, the original sinner. Then the crude behaviour of today’s online children becomes more troubling. Perhaps, then, we should be spanking our kids, rather than allowing them to spank each other.

Comments

[William]

Please, back up some of your arguements. You are not convincing me of anything. You love to quote people like Plato, and Aristotle, and Rousseau, but you never engage in a proper philosophical discussion. You don't even bother with rhetoric. You're just spewing out rage.

Tell me why pornography is bad. Tell me why voyeurism is bad. What are they going to do to end civilization as we know it? What is wrong with the questioning of power and of established morals? Is that not the essence of a philosophical endeavor?

All that you seem to be calling for is censorship. You are against the freedom of information, yet your voice is enabled from that very same freedom.

You, my idiot rambling friend, are far from the Aristotelian veneration of wisdom. You embody nothing more than empty rhetoric and those schoolboy opinions that you despise so much.

You embody the counterpoint to your own arguement, in more ways than one.

[Marcelo]

William, my too-gauche-for-my-own-good commenter, have made Andrew's point for him.

To be asked to bother to explain why child/teenage porn is bad, and voyeurism of such is reprehensible, is in an of itself, reprehensible. No one said porno is going to "destroy civilization as we know it", please point us PRECISELY where Andrew said so.

Someone done you wrong, William. Someone gave you the goods, but forgot to tell you they were rotten. The point isn't whether you should or shouldn't have freedom of speech, which you should. The point is, so, now that you've got it, what in the hell are you going to do with it ?
Do some good with it ? Fine, show us. Show us that it actually moves the gene pool forward. Demonstrate that it does ANY of those philanthropical pursuits that the Web 2.0 "gotta get my voice out there" mentality espouses. Oh, you say it doesn't HAVE to ? You know what ? That proves Andrew's point.

Anyone can TALK a good game, let's see you PLAY a good game. Same thing with Web 2.0, you can blog a good amount of wind. Let's see what substance any of it has.

Stop peddling your kindergarten playground pedantic jibber-jabber, William. You were already out-classed before you put your fingers on the keys to type in such a hyperbole-ridden post.

[Claude]

I agree that Rousseau is a seducer -- in the sense that he takes advantage of childish thinking people. Not sure, however, if he is such a "great" seducer. I think he's a failed seducer like all utopians. Sad guy too. Very unhappy. Nobody would want to be Rousseau

[Joycean]

great piece. All your online critics are simply examples of the rabble that are undermining high culture. Keep up the great work!

[CGilbert]

Reminds me of Alan Bloom in The Closing of the Amer. Mind: "So persuasive was Rousseau that he destroyed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment at the moment of its triumph." (p. 168)