Ariès/The Fractals

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Gude,

Terrance's detailed description of the "history of childhood" based on the 
work of Philippe Ariès remembered me at a so called "psycho-historician" from 
New York whom I read sometime in the eighties (I've forgotten his name, he 
died at the beginning of the 90's). The title of his book was "Hoert ihr die 
Kinder weinen" (Do you hear the children crying). For Ariès the treatment of 
children since the middle ages is a history of regression, for the 
psycho-historician it was a history of progress. The book contained a lot of 
disgusting examples of the treatment of children in the past, for example the 
"production" of castratos during Roman times: eight or nine-year-old boys 
were set into cooking water and such stuff. The description of Ariès of 
children's treatment in the middle ages sounded for me idyllic and romantic 
in some aspects, and "Do you hear the children crying" was a kind of a 
necessary correction of Ariès' point of view. Sure, the history of childhood 
in the last let's say 300 or 400 years is a history of violence, 
disciplination and exploitation (not only sexual); but I think that Ariès is 
one-sided because if  you read his "history of childhood" (or his "history of 
death" about the attitudes to death in the occidental world) you can the 
conclusion of it "in former times all was better". Of course it was not Ariès 
intention to provoke such a simplification; but there' always a danger that 
he can be read in such a way.
I think you must read both: Ariès  a n d   the psycho-historician. Both are 
right in some way, and both one-sided in some aspects. Both together give an 
impression of the whole "dialectics of enlightment", the ambivalence of the 
occidental culture as a whole.

BTW, I was very amused about the US discussion about "Orchideenfaecher" 
("humanities") and academic unemployment à la americaine. It sounds very 
familiar for an European. The globalized world is a fractalized world, and in 
fractals I just learnt (at the moment I'm working about "fractal factories") 
the problems are not the same, but similar. Quod erat demonstrantum.
kwp