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The Problematic Role of the Cultural Transmission of Tradition

On September 12, 2004, I was driving my car and listening, as is my wont, to Public Radio, and by chance, I happened to tune into the program "Speaking of Faith," and though I am not religious and avoid programs with ponderous sermons and weighty deliberations about church issues, faith, and God, I was immediately drawn to an ongoing discussion about the story of Abraham. The moderator, Krista Tippett, was interviewing Bruce Feiler, who had written a book titled Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths. (…)

Yet, according to Feiler, there is no archaeological evidence that Abraham ever existed, and in the stories that were created, Abraham was a man of violence who willingly sacrificed his two sons or was ready to sacrifice his two sons in the name of God or because he heard the voice of God demanding that he do this. (…) How, I asked myself, did a man, who subscribed to infanticide and may never ave even existed, become an exemplary if not the exemplary figure in ree world religions?

I was going to focus on the connection between tradition and infanticide. But even more important, I was puzzled by Feiler’s almost indifferent attitude toward the element of child abuse. How could he praise and treat Abraham with so much reverence and offer him as a symbol of unity and, even worse, of humanity?

When the program ended, I realized that it represented an unusually poignant example of problems involved in the cultural transmission tradition today. It demonstrated vividly how tradition represses (or inadvertently reveals) how we bake and eat our children, or if we keep alive, how we beat stories into them that will make them willing subjects of forces to whom they grant control over their destinies. No matter how one interprets the story, there are some fundamental threads that hold it together, and they are all tied to patriarchal notions: that there is a male God, that believers in this God are bound to obey his every word, and that they must be ready to kill their own sons and daughters in his name.

To my surprise, I discovered that Feiler had also been interviewed earlier by Neil Conan in 2002 on "Talk of the Nation," another Public Radio program. Fortunately, I was able to read the transcript of this program as well, and I came across exchange that struck me as highly significant. Conan opened the line for callers, and the very first one was Mimi from Van Nuys, California, who said:

« I do think that Abraham unifies all three religions and in a very timely way in that he thought God demanded the sacrifice of his son in order for him to prove his love and loyalty to God above all else. And he did not have to sacrifice his son, and I think that we should remember all! three religions need to outgrow this idea that they need to shed blood and sacrifice their sons and daughters in order to prove their loyalty tal their god, the god that they imagine is asking this.

Mr. Feiler: It’s interesting. As you may know, Abraham is on the cover of Time magazine this week. And they lay out all of these portraits of Abraham over the generations, and by far and away, the action from Abraham’s life that’s most frequently depicted in the history of art is this sacrifice.

Mimi: Well, let us look to our children’s eyes for God from now on, instead of to the skies where we imagine he is. And that’s my comment. Thank you.

It is obvious from this conversation that both Feiler and Conan either did not want to engage Mimi in a discussion about child abuse, or that they did not want to reflect on how the Abraham tales further human sacrifice for an imaginary god, bloodshed, and war. They were bent on seeing Abraham as a kind of unifier, whereas Mimi was asking why should we pay homage to a child abuser and an imaginary deity. She referenced Alice Miller’s book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, which is perhaps one of the most significant psychological studies in the twentieth century about the power relations between adults and children and sw adults are disposed to use their power to control if not warp the lives of children. Whereas Mimi wanted to challenge and open the ame in which Feiler and Conan discussed the tradition of Abraham, they quickly and blithely closed it to conceal some bitter truths.

Until the mid-eighteenth century most of the fairy-tale publications were produced for adult audiences. I twas not until the publication of Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749) and Mme. Leprince de Beaumont’s Le Magasin des enfants (1757) that fairy tales began to be published specifically for children.

In some respects I believe that we have been attracted to fairy tale because they are survival stories with hope. They alert us to dangerous situations, instruct us, guide us, give us councel, and reveal what might happen if we take advantage of helpful instruments or agents, or what might happen if we do not.

Whether oral or literary, the tales have sought to uncover truths about the pleasure and pains of existence, to propose possibilities for adaptation and survival, and to reveal the intricacies of our civilizing processes.

The appeal of fairy tales still has a great deal to do with utopian transformation and the desire for a better life. Fairy tales map out possible ways to attain happiness, to expose and resolve moral conflicts that have deep roots in our species.

« Little Red Riding Hood » is a tale about rape and the survival or non-survival of a rape victim. It is a tale about predators and how to deal with them.

« Beauty and Beast » : Should a young girl be marketed by her father just so he can survive ? Should a young girl sacrifice her body to protect her family ?

« Donkey Skin » deals with incest.

Cinderella: The "Cinderella complex", which Colette Dowling in 1981 called "a network of largely repressed attitudes and fears that keeps women in a kind of half-light, retreating from the full use of their minds and creativity. Like Cinderella, women today are still waiting for something external to ’transform their lives.’ But is Cinderella really passive? If we recall, in two of the earliest literary versions of "Cinderella," Giambattista Basile’s "Cat Cinderella" (1634) and Mme. d’Aulnoy’s "Finette Cendron" (1698), she did not hesitate to kill to get what she wanted, and even in the Grimms’ version, she takes an active rôle by provoking her discovery through an ostensive act as does the heroine of many of the "Donkey Skin" tales.

Moreover, one could also argue that, though the father figure in Cinderella tales up to the present does not physically harm his daughter, he does contribute to her suffering through benign neglect and abandonment. Generally speaking, he does nothing to help her or to protect her. If anything he enables the stepmother and sisters to exploit Cinderella and to degrade her. In other words, contributes to the abuse by absenting himself from his daughter’s side. Clearly, though one may interpret "Cinderella" in other ways, its primary theme concerns child abandonment and abuse.

The picture books, despite apparent differences, have more or less the same outline: a widower remarries after his wife dies. He recedes into the background or vanishes after the marriage and permits his only daughter to be maltreated by her stepmother and stepsisters. The soiled girl, often given a degrading nickname, lacks love, protection, and guidance. She seeks help from another powerful female figure (perhaps her dead mother) who provides her with the resources to regain her self-respect and establish her true identity through marriage to a wealthy prince. She can find love and become a beloved object. What is striking about most of these lovely or humorous illustrated children’s books is that the stepmothers and stepdaughters or sisters are depicted as wicked and terrifying. The fathers are mostly well intentioned and disappear from the story. The key agent of power lies with a magical female who intervenes to assist the downtrodden girl and make her feel loved.

« Hansel and Gretel » deals with the hunger, abandonment, and survival of two small children. Two abandoned children, who lack both spiritual and material nourishment. Their story is about survival. They are aware of why their father had to abandon them and return to him not with a material treasure, but with survival skills. Baba Yaga & the Ogre : the frightening experience of childhood abuse by a stranger. It has never been a children’s story and never will be, despite efforts by publishers, writers, and illustrators to dumb it down and encase it with categories.This is a tale that has always crossed boundaries – age and cultural boundaries. It is never-ending because the problems raised by the discourse in this tale have not been resolved in reality : poverty, conflict with parents, the trauma of abandonment, child abuse, and male domination.

Without dealing with the past we cannot move forward. (…) Both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, who believed that the past weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.

Clearly the dead are never quite dead enough, but a nightmare, of course, wakes the sleeper up. Freud would say, it wakes the dreamer up with something from the past, the representation of which—the language of which—the dreamer cannot bear. He needs to return to so-called reality in order not to be overwhelmed himself; in order not to die. For Freud, in a sense, as for Marx, the past is both a nightmare from which we must awaken, but it is also our only resource. It is literally where we get our language from, where we learn it. To learn a language is to learn history, and to acquire a medium from the past in which to reconstruct the past. (Adam Philips, Promises, Promises)

The tradition of sacrifîcing children is deeply oriented in most cultures and religions. For this reason it is also tolerated, and indeed commended, in our western civilization. Naturally, we no longer sacrifice our sons and daughters on the altar of God, as in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. But at birth and throughout their later upbringing, we instill in them the necessity to love, honor, and respect us, to do their best for us, to satisfy our ambitions — in short to give us everything our parents denied us. We call this decency and morality. Children rarely hâve any choice in the matter. Ail their lives, they will force themselves to offer parents something that they neither possess nor hâve any knowl-edge of, quite simply because they hâve never been given it: genuine, unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the récipient. (Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies)

It is not necessarily capitalism that fosters such a tenuous, if not ruthless, relationship between father and son. If we recall, Cronos, the great Greek god, devoured his children and had to be forced to regurgitate them. Abraham was no better. Though he did not eat his sons, he banished Ismael to the desert and was prepared to kill Isaac to prove his loyalty to God. Some stories even relate that Abraham did indeed kill both Ismael and Isaac, and other narratives about the origins of the world involve bitter conflicts between a stern authoritarian father who refuses to have his power and laws questioned, and his children, who are compelled to obey him or face death or banishment. More to the point, folklore is filled with tales of fathers, giants, ogres, monsters, sorcerers, cannibals, bogeymen, fiends, and devils who eat or beat young children. And men are not the only danger for children. There is also a fair share of mothers, grannies, witches, ogresses, sorceresses, and female demons who lust after children, punish them, and destroy them. Even those allegedly good fairies who have absolute control over children can be wicked. But they generally don’t eat their own. Human beings are the ones projected as monsters who eat and destroy their own. Why?

There is no one exclusive reason for the unsavory and uncontrollable appetite of adults, often represented metaphorically as monsters, who abuse their power over children. The causes are numerous: famine, starvation, disobedience of the young, fear of losing power, jealousy, sensual pleasure, and so on.

« In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse », (Robert Wright, The Moral Animal)

Perhaps we must discuss the choices and responsabilities of storytellers and how traditions can be « reutilized » to reconstitute a deeper awareness of their meanings and their impact on our lives.

How we foster a tale-telling tradition that does not involve devouring children is not a question to be taken lightly, for it concerns the transformation of child-rearing practices, education, and the treatment of our young. It involves the preservation of the imaginative vision. If we do not question and undo dominant traditional storytelling, we risk not only losing the imaginative vision, but we also place our children at risk, as we already have. Their survival depends on our continual engagement with cultural traditions, opening them up, and opening ourselves in the process.

Extracts from ZIPES Jack :

éd. Routledge, New York, 2006, 332 p.