Following Serval Appreciation Day, I ethically question humanity

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

When he was rescued Felix pointed to the moon, which he was seeing for the first time, and said: “Is that God up there?”

- "Dungeon Children Speak Animal Language

When the focus of my collegiate studies (which shifted much too often, unfortunately) was Abnormal Psychology, I took a particularly interest in the concept of "feral children," or children who (for various reasons) have limited or minimal human contact in the first years of their lives. The actual amount of feral children "raised by wolves" or other animals is slim to none, but there have been plenty of cases involving abused/neglected children who were confined for long periods, sometimes decades, and never taught to speak or interact.

The most famous "wild child" in recent history, prior to this absolutely horrifying Austrian sex slave debacle, was a young girl rescued in the 70's, referred to in studies as "Genie." She spent the first 13 years of her life chained either to a bed or to a potty chair in a room with the windows covered. There was nothing in her surroundings to engage her mind, facilitate creative thinking, or give any indication to a world outside of it. Although many people were captivated by her and attempted in every way they knew to help her adapt, Genie never learned to communicate beyond a toddler's level, at least by our modern standards of grammar.

What fascinated me the most about Genie's story was the way she seemed to ooze a secret, pure humanity that other people responded to naturally and without prompting. If "wild children" in general raise the question of what truly makes us human, I would go one step further and say that Genie's "power" over others proved that much of the pure magic of humanity is lost in the unnatural convenience of our modern society. That's not to say (obviously) that I condone isolation or abuse in any way, only that it seems evident that, underneath all of the developmental and psychological ramifications of her abuse, Genie possessed a "magic" of sorts that other human beings seemed not to. Strangers saw her and, without knowing her background or interacting with her, were compelled to touch her, love her, give her presents and show her affection.

"There was a time that she passed a father and a little boy who were coming out of a shop, and the little boy was carrying a toy fire engine. And they just passed, and then they turned around and came back, and the boy, without a word, handed the fire engine to Genie. She never asked for it. She never said a word. She did that kind of thing, somehow, to people." -James Kent, Genie's primary psychologist

"One particularly striking memory of those early months was an absolutely wonderful man who was a butcher, and he never asked her name, he never asked anything about her. They just connected and communicated somehow. And every time we came in he would slide open the little window and hand her something that wasn't wrapped, a bone of some sort, some meat, fish, whatever. And he would allow her to do her thing with it, to explore it tactilely, to put it up against her lips and feel it with her lips and touch it." -Susan Curtiss, Genie's psycholinguist

It could be argued that this phenomenon speaks to that same latent "humanity" I mentioned earlier, but proves that it's contained inside *all* people. However, that would be the same "humanity" that tied Genie to a chair and kept her in diapers for 13 years. It's a dichotomy that I very badly wanted to be able to explain. What DOES make us human? Do certain people living within our society possess more or less humanity than others? Is unimaginable cruelty itself as human as compassion? What was Genie's true "power" over other human beings? Have we lost, through centuries upon centuries of "civilization," our ability to communicate our "souls" (or what have you) to one another without the use of words?

It reminds me of a favorite poem of mine, "Buried" by Michael Ondjaate.

What we lost:

The interior love poem
the deeper levels of the self
landscapes of daily life

dates when the abandonment
of certain principles occurred.

The rule of courtesy - how to enter
a temple or forest, how to touch
a master’s feet before lesson or performance.

The art of the drum. The art of eye-painting.
How to cut an arrow. Gestures between lovers.
The pattern of her teeth marks on his skin
drawn by a monk from memory.

The limits of betrayal. The five ways
a lover could mock an ex-lover.

Nine finger and eye gestures
to signal key emotions.

The small boats of solitude.

Lyrics that rose
from love
back into the air
naked with guile
and praise.

Our works and days.

We knew how monsoons
(south-west, north-east)
would govern behavior
and when to discover
the knowledge of the dead
hidden in clouds,
in rivers, in unbroken rock.

All this we burned or traded for power and wealth
from the eight compass points of vengeance

from the two levels of envy."

As I said earlier, I in no way condone abuse or neglect and wouldn't even go so far as to say that a human life with it's primitive powers still intact is better or worse than our own. I only think it's interesting to think about what being human really AMOUNTS to, because I feel like "humanity" as we know it in the modern world is mostly learned as opposed to inherently felt. M. Gira (of the Swans/Angels of Light) once said, "We're in a new age, for sure. The only reality for us now is pain or orgasm. Everything else is on the news. But it's also a sort of heaven - at least our ancestors might have thought so." Do so called "feral children," having been deprived of a life inside our man-made "heaven," retain a magical sort of frail humanity that can only come from a yearning for such a "heaven?"

The capacity for these children to learn how to live in "society" as we know it is dire and virtually nil. If they're not, in a sense, taught to be "civilized" in the first years of life, it's generally accepted by psychologists that they are incapable of ever becoming so. Reinforcing my feeling that modern humanity is taught, the same can be said of language- children who aren't taught a language in the first years of life lose the ability to ever fully learn the concepts behind any language.

Are we looking at it all backwards, though, or at least missing the blunt peek at our own beginnings which are contained within these terrible tragedies? Is society in general, like our languages and technology, convenient to such a degree that it's slowly evolved to replace major aspects of our primary humanity? If a group of "wild children" were brought up in a space where no concurrent physical or psychological abuse occurred, would we see them as developmentally delayed (Genie was labeled as "retarded" by the world at large, in spite of the fact that her brain was completely healthy and she had no existing genetic disorders) or would they have things to teach US about who we really are, as human animals?

This recent case in Austria is different in many ways from Genie's, and much about it is still unclear. The children's mother, though described as "intensely disturbed" and generally unable to communicate herself, was exposed to modern society for the first 18 years of her life. What she was able to teach her children in the 24 years following her captivity, if anything, is not yet known. The children apparently also had a television set, but still seem completely befuddled by the "outside world." Felix, who is 5 years old, can walk but prefers to crawl. The siblings communicate with each other using a series of grunts and growls that vaguely resemble words. Whether or not they'll ever be able to truly "function" by our modern standards within our redefined definitions of humanity is unclear.

An Austrian professor had this to say about the children: “They may have created their own illusory world. However, a normal life could be possible for them.”

Normal by whose standards? Should we really expect them to "acclimate" to our mortal heaven simply because we can't imagine life any other way? What is the solution? No one in their right mind would ever suggest that their life in captivity was in ANY way normal or ideal, but the differences between these children and other's raised modernly can't be ignored if we're going to be humane (there's that word again). Should an alternate environment be created for them, particularly the oldest children who are 18 and 19? I don't have the answers, and maybe no one ever will. I only hope that they'll continue to know love.