One of the
more interesting deviations from the norm in child development is that of
children that have been raised by animals.
These children are called feral or wild children, and they are children
who have been lost or abandoned by their parents and somehow adopted by animals
who raise them and help them to survive.
Actually, not all feral children are adopted by animals and some are
simply deprived of human bonding as a result of abandonment or confinement by
their parents. However, for the purposes
of this article, we will focus on the feral children who have been adopted by
animals. Some of these children have
been known to have been snatched by wild animals, when their parents weren’t
looking. The animals known to have
adopted children include wolves, wild dogs, apes, monkeys and even in one case,
ostriches. It is true that many of the
stories about feral children and animals have proved to be hoaxes. But for many others of these stories, there
is definite evidence.
Children
that have been adopted very young by animals become animalized. They make the sounds of their animal, crawl
like their animal and later have difficulty learning to talk and walk when they
are among humans again. Mentally they
tend to live more in a world of imperfectly differentiated figures that are
partly submerged in a field of grounding, much the way the natural world actually
is. In other words, the children have
not been stimulated by a lot of defined discrete stimuli like words to think in
clearly defined cognitive concepts. They pull themselves out of the
undifferentiation of their blurry grounded mental base through the shock stimuli
of sharp instinctive reactions to impinging external figures that seem
threatening to them. But most of the
time, these children live in a state of immediate feeling connectedness to
their living environment without the reflexive awareness that would distance
them from their environment and help to define them as fully human.
But isn’t
it true that many wild animals have a much more developed sense of smell and a
much more developed sense of hearing than humans? Shouldn’t this lead to differentiation of the
sensory realms of figures in areas where humans are normally limited? First of all, smells tend to have much more
blurry boundaries than visual phenomena and tend to be filled with continual
stimuli that don’t stimulate clear cognitive thinking. Sounds tend to have more discrete stimuli
than smells, but are not enough by themselves to stimulate the evolution of
clear cognitive thinking in non-human animals.
And anyway, a human who becomes feral is not going to develop smell or
hearing on the level of the animals that have adopted him.
At any
rate, children that have been adopted young by animals miss the critical
windows of opportunity in their development for being stimulated by other
humans to develop uniquely human cognitive traits.
When we
hear about stories of feral children adopted by animals, we are stimulated to
feel great sympathy and compassion for them.
The idea of a child being abandoned or lost and then being raised by
creatures lower down on the evolutionary scale is a very threatening idea to
us. In effect, the child is being denied
the opportunity to become fully human.
Part of the human condition is a long period of dependence in childhood
during which the child is stimulated to become more fully human through his
interaction with his parents and other more mature human beings. Through mirroring and modeling and later
through education, the child evolves out of his natural human
incompleteness. Of course, this can’t
and doesn’t happen in the case of feral children adopted by animals.
Most of us
are very protective and wouldn’t allow the opportunity to occur for our children
to become feral children. And in modern
technological society, we assume that we are giving our children enough
protective advantages that there would be no opportunity for them to grow up in
a negative state of abandonment.
Wild
animals are one kind of significant complex behavioral entity. Not as complex as humans, but complex enough
to draw a child into a relationship of mirroring and modeling and to guide a
child both directly and indirectly along his path of growth and
development. Of course, as I have
pointed out, wild animals do influence human behavior in certain more
controlled situations for certain groups of people. I am talking about the totemic relationships
with certain animals which were established in traditional ancient societies
and which have been established in preliterate societies. These are highly symbolic relationships that
are significantly activated in certain ceremonial situations. I discussed previously how the only
equivalent that we have today is our relationship to our complex consumer
technology. I am talking about our
televisions, video games, computers and smartphones among other devices, and in
particular, the different types and brands among which we can choose. Our loyalty to Apple or to PC in computers and to iPhone or Blackberry or
Android in smartphones. A type or brand
of a particular consumer technology device as well as the consumer device
itself as a generic category can be the source of a kind of tribal identity.
However,
the influence of consumer technology devices can be very pervasive and
enveloping at ages before strong brand loyalty is consciously made. The relationship to a consumer technology
device is not simply a formal symbolic relationship based on living in the
midst of but apart from this entity as is the case of a totemic relationship
with a wild animal. And a relationship
with a consumer technology device impinges on the consciousness of an
individual much more, in most situations, than the relationship with a pet or a
farm animal.
As parents
abandon their children for longer and longer periods to modern consumer
technology devices, the best analogy I can think of is that of a feral child to
the animal or animals that adopt him.
And just as a feral child is mentally transformed as a result of his
sustained interaction with the adopting animal or animals, so a child today is
mentally transformed as a result of his sustained interaction with the consumer
technology devices with which he spends so much time.
The
behavioral world of a modern consumer technology device is just the opposite of
the mental world of a wild animal.
Whereas the wild animal perceives the world in terms of partly
differentiated figures in an enveloping ground environment, the virtual world
of a consumer technology device is a vacuum filled with vacuumized figures that
are entirely lacking in grounded material substance. To the extent that modern humans spend a lot
of time in this virtual world, it spills over into the primary experience world
in which their physical bodies live.
Everything that modern children experience in the primary experience world
begins to have the vacuumized qualities of the figure entities in the virtual
world. It is hard to bond with
vacuumized entities floating in a vacuum.
On one level, lacking corporeal substance, these vacuumized figures just
don’t seem to be fully real. And then even
other real entities including people start lacking reality. And because other people don’t appear to be
fully real, one can manipulate them and
even hurt them without feeling pangs of guilt.
One can turn off the TV show or delete the computer e-mail or program in
one’s mind, before one has to feel accountable for anything one has been doing
to a real human being.
Very
simply, it is very difficult for humans to establish meaningful bonding without
the template of some real grounding in the primary experience world. But a child can become so transformed by
sustained interaction with consumer technology devices that he becomes
incapable of fully connecting to physical grounding even if it is present. And he becomes incapable of forming
deep-bonded relationships with the people around him. This explains the scene of a group of
children sitting together, each of whom is talking to someone on his smartphone
who is not present. And the meaningful
connection is with the smartphone, not with the person at the other end of the
smartphone connection. This situation
has significant ramifications for the future maintenance of the organic human
family and the organic human community as we know them. Somehow, we are arriving at a point in our
evolution where what we have defined as appropriate human relationships may no
longer continue to exist, unless we are able to do something to reverse or, at
least, slow down the present trend in people, namely, connecting more and more
to machines.
It gets
down to this. We all know that we would
never voluntarily allow our children to be raised by wolves, wild dogs,
monkeys, apes or ostriches. We want our
children to be fully human. Then why
would we allow our children to be raised by televisions, video games, computers
or smartphones? Why would we do
something like that?
© 2013 Laurence Mesirow
