How we learn to care
February newsletter
Lire cette lettre en français:
That violence is learned is one of the central contributions of the social sciences to our understanding of human behaviour. We know, by now, that aggressive and dominating attitudes are progressively acquired through a number of social models, rather than primarily the product of an innate drive.1 We know there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between cultural, structural and interpersonal violence2, that becoming numb to one type of violence makes one more likely to engage in others – the way a slaughterhouse opening in a town drives up the local prevalence of domestic abuse.3
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici recounts how French Jesuit missionaries sought out to dictate to the Montagnais-Naskapi, an Indigenous nation of mid-17th century Canada, how to govern themselves:
“[The French] were scandalised by their ‘lack of morals’; they saw that the Nasapki had no conception (...) of authority, of male superiority, and they even refused to punish their children.” (...) A missionary recalled in his diary an exchange he had with a Nasapki man: “I told him it was not honourable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou has no sense. You French people love only your children; but we love all the children of our tribe.’ I began to laugh seeing that he philosophised in horse and mule fashion.”4
The Jesuits eventually succeeded in persuading the Nasapki to whip their children by conditioning their fur trade agreements to such practices. We know, in other words, that violence is taught and continuously enforced, and not the spontaneous manifestation of our state of nature.
By contrast, we know a lot less about how care is learned. We infer it, to an extent, as the mirror image of the apprenticeship of violence – but the symmetry only goes so far. Only relatively recently have we begun to research care as a practice, with principles, which can be done well or badly, and therefore taught. Western philosophical traditions inquired at length into the nature of the self and our moral obligations to one another; yet their proponents rarely connected these questions to the everyday reality of those who cared for them, and how well – unsurprisingly, mostly how badly – they cared back. Domestic work and dependency care were of the realm of the mundane, the practical, unfit for philosophical reflection. They just… happened.
Even the idea that caregiving can be learned at all is a relatively new one. Attention to others, the capacity to nurture, reassure, comfort, were long considered innate qualities that come with being born female. Yet contradictorily, they were also thought to be fragile forms of knowledge that could be lost if one learned other things. The gradual opening of university examinations to women in 1870s England led to heated debates between proponents of ‘educational assimilation’ and those of ‘educational pluralism’, who preferred to keep boys’ schools and curricula separate from those of girls. Their central claim was that giving girls a “boys’ education”, with subjects such as physics and history, would result in the loss of their ‘natural sensuality’ and in “the creation of a new race of puny, sedentary and unfeminine students”. This would “destroy the grace and charm of social life, [and] disqualify women from their true vocation, the nurture of the coming race and the governance of well-ordered, healthy and happy homes.”5 One doctor even claimed that after a period of higher education, “flat-chested girls” would be “unable to suckle infants.”6
This marginalisation and long-lived misleading beliefs about the nature of care mean that unlike violence, we don’t have good mental models of what ‘structural care’ or ‘cultural care’ look like, or how they trickle down into interpersonal care. As a result, much of the way we structure caregiving in society is not, in fact, done with any deep understanding of how care works. France’s 2015 paternity leave reform, which I wrote about last July, is a good example of this: it failed to provoke any significant uptake among new fathers because it did not factor in that the ability to take care of a child is developed over time, rather than simply turned on and off.
As aelle wisely pointed out, learning to care – in the broadest possible sense, of how we maintain our world and each other, how we build strong webs of interdependence without losing our unique selves – is mostly not an information problem. You do not learn it the way you would the date of a famous battle. You see it modelled all around you. At home, where you learn who does what kind of care, how much it is acknowledged and valued; whether it is an expansive force that spills out to all who pass through or an exclusive rarity, granted with conditions. At school, where you internalise authoritarian cultures that center punishment and hierarchy, or on the contrary, where healthy relationality to others and to nature is intentionally embedded in the curriculum.
None of these sites of learning operate in isolation. Cultural narratives, artistic representation, linguistic changes, our webs of weak and strong ties to the people in our lives – all of those shape our perception of how important care is and who is responsible for it. A child can be taught non-violent communication at their forest school yet see domination modelled at home every day. Teenage boys can be given anti-misogyny classes, but those are unlikely to mean much if they receive constant messaging that paints women as lesser humans.7
This is why care systems are such a central focus of our work at the Fifth Wave Institute: they are the overarching structures that either support or suppress our learning of care. They have the power to keep vulnerability alien, dependency shameful, respect a sign of weakness, and hierarchy natural – but they also have the power to make them something else entirely. They can be built to make interdependence an utterly basic part of our social fabric, such that care flows with much fewer barriers.
They could mean every city center has somewhere people can come to with those they care for, so that a man who cares full-time for his wife with Alzheimer’s can get a few hours of rest and some warm conversation. They could make it possible to take a ‘care day’ off to support a sibling with their new baby; make alloparenting so banal that prenatal classes are almost superfluous; they could make dying at home, surrounded by relatives, a much more normal end to a person’s life. Once we stop accepting the systems we have today as the best we can get, a world of alternatives opens up.
These systems are costly and difficult to build; they require grit and imagination. Rita Thapa, who I interviewed in November, had to push through the skepticism of many a foreign donor and government official to transform Nepal’s primary care system and put mothers at its core. Cambodian Children’s Trust, whose pioneer ‘Village Hive’ model Bethany Hansel analysed last month, will have to mitigate the effects of corruption and antiquated charity structures to make it the country’s default child protection system. In a forthcoming piece, Bethany explores the challenges faced by New Zealand in scaling its national ‘pedagogy of care’ rooted in Māori principles. In another, Genevieve Schweitzer delves into the relational shift in French sex education, which received (and still faces) intense backlash from conservative and religious groups.
Despite these obstacles, these systems exist, and more of them are emerging. The ‘institutional paradox of care’ I wrote about in September, which seems to make rigid policy structures or profit-making companies incompatible with good care provision, can be overcome. Our mission over the next few decades will be to help design institutions with care built in – that make care so supported, so obviously central to all of our lives that learning it simply becomes a normal part of being human.
In other news
Last week, The Fifth Wave Institute and the Themis Foundation launched a nationwide consultation of French town halls regarding women’s health and caregiving support. In partnership with the mayor of Orgeval, Hervé Charnallet, we designed a survey asking France’s 35.000 town halls about their policies regarding women’s health, perinatal care, support for children and parents, intergenerational spaces, and care-friendly urban design. Collected data will form the basis of a ‘state of affairs’ synthesis report and an action guide, which themselves will be the starting point of a mayors’ working group in partnership with the Association of French Mayors.
We also recently joined the MenEngage Alliance, the world’s largest collective of organisations working to bring men and boys into the fight for gender justice; and the Global Alliance for Care, a community of civil society organisations, governments, trade unions, philanthropic and academic institutions working to bring about the care society. Created in 2021 by the Government of Mexico and UN Women, the GAC seeks to strengthen and structure our collective efforts to recognise care “as a need, as work, and as a right”.
The very existence of such an alliance, as well as the impressive diversity of its members (both geographical and institutional), show that things are changing around care. Latin American countries in particular – as I wrote about here – are leading the effort to transform our economies and social structures, taking what many still see as a feminist utopia and making it a concrete reality. The Institute is the first France-based organisation to join, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to play a part in what I believe will be the defining movement of the next century.
Jeongsuk Kim, Bora Lee, Naomi B. Farber, ‘Where do they learn violence? The roles of three forms of violent socialization in childhood.’ Children and Youth Services Review, Volume 107, 2019, 104494, ISSN 0190-7409, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.104494.
Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural Violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291-305. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343390027003005.
Fitzgerald, A. J., Kalof, L., & Dietz, T. (2009). ‘Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From “The Jungle” Into the Surrounding Community’. Organization & Environment, 22(2), 158-184. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026609338164.
Passages from Leacock, Eleanor Burke (1981). Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally, cited in Federici, Silvia (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.
J. Fitch, ‘Women and the Universities’, Contemporary Review, August 1890, p.252. Cited in Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Women, Penguin Books, 1976.
H. Spencer, ‘Principles of Biology’, Lancet, no. 2, 1886, p.315. Cited in Ibid. [Note the contemporary obsession with eugenics and breeding capacities in the wake of the Darwinian revolution.] The author also remarks that this debate of course only concerned itself with upper-class girls: no one who repeatedly spoke of the rest needed during menstruation appeared to worry that girls and women who worked as servants and factory-hands would be harmed in their reproductive capacities by their extremely physically taxing jobs.
Tellingly, a recent report submitted to France’s minister of justice warns that “responsibility workshops” given to convicted domestic abusers as part of their probation often turn into sites of mutual reinforcement of these men’s misogynistic attitudes: put in a room together, their collective commitment to patriarchal masculinity and refusal to admit to any wrongdoing reveals itself a much stronger influence than two days’ worth of Powerpoint slides about sexism.
Further reading:
“aggressive and dominating attitudes are progressively acquired through a number of social models, rather than the product of an innate drive” - are you sure you’re not overstating the conclusion of the paper you are citing?
I have only looked at the abstract but what it seems to show is that various social factors affect attitudes to violence, which still leaves room for an innate drive. It doesn’t have to be 100% one or the other.
Mélina, this is such an important and thought provoking piece. Thank you for sharing it.