That feeling when you’re in your little corner reading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in the early morning for the eleventy-millionth time and a whole new part of it that has never got to you before makes you cry?
I have been reading this fucking poem since I was 17 years old. There are big swathes of it permanently embedded in my memory, and it never stops slaying me dead.
‘Don’t try to be an author. You cannot control that. Instead, try to be a writer. And to do that, you must write. That’s it. It’s very simple. Why don’t people understand that?’
One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.
It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.
Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of “how can this be stopped, and prevented” instead of “you’re going to regret this!”
Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”
How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?
Please.
OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented” instead of “you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]
Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you’re saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you’re an idiot and you should be punished, probably”
contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them
and if you don’t think you should have to worry about that: why not?
I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:
When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.
And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.
Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.
Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.
Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)
If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.
I just want to add that this is just…so obviously true. I teach 4-year-olds English. That means that at the beginning of the year I get 13 little monkeys who don’t speak English at all, and without using their mother tongue, I teach them English. Truly, it is like a magic trick, and even I am surprised at how they unbelievably fast they learn. By midyear we are fully having conversations.
When I started, I used to try to strongarm them into doing what I wanted in the classroom and had ‘consequences’ for 'misbehavior’ like time-outs and telling their parents they were naughty. But actually, you know, it was never that they were naughty, it’s that they were 4, and new to classrooms, and maybe not quite ready to be there, and 'consequences’ absolutely did not work at all, and mostly only revealed to them the limits of my authority. Punishing and cajoling them weakened my ability to manage my classroom, and it did not make them any more likely to engage with me or my planned agenda.
But here’s the thing: 4-year-olds want to please you. They want to communicate with you! They are absolutely dying for you to love and approve of them. It’s their biggest motivation in life to please and engage with you. Praising and encouraging them, laughing at their jokes and making them feel like they please you? That fucking works. That is what gets them to go along with me and engage with my plans. There are no punishments in my class, only a recognition of the fact that they are who they are, and they are fucking babies. I convince them to join me responsively, and it works. Every year my classes get better and more successful because I no longer fight or punish them.
Like, I’m not a scientist or a psychologist, but… Punishment is a tool of hierarchy and a sign of weakness.
Full grown adult, poet, teacher, obsessive enthusiast. This blog is an unapologetically theme-less magpie zone.
AKA @wellofdean, the sideblob where I obsess about Dean Winchester & Supernatural like it's a full-time job.
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