The Potential Redemption Of Humanity Through Parental Love

A catastrophe is occurring before our eyes. The media calls it “the population implosion.” However, some important people (Bill Gates, for one) are pleased as punch that the world will be denuded of billions of its inhabitants should this decline continue.

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There is something definitely wrong with these depopulation advocates. They express satisfaction at the prospect of the only known inhabited planet in the universe rolling backward into a new Stone Age! After billions of years of development, after finally reaching the point at which the universe can just now begin to understand itself through human intelligence, we are blowing it for both us and the universe. Why must humanity succumb to an epidemic of leaders who suffer from attachment disorder and who then go on to insist that their psychopathology is normative?

Regarding population implosion, the first thing to say here is that children were never considered an unadulterated blessing, for they bring burdens with them. However, the universe fought back against the abandonment of helpless newborns with evolution-derived tools that made infants more desirable.

Sight, hearing, touch, smell, and even taste gave infants increased survival advantages. Because of this sensory input, affectional reciprocity between parent and child became critical in building gentle attachments.

 Less competent children died out, sometimes at the hands of their mothers and fathers who could not tolerate the presence of another mouth to feed. It would be fair to speculate that cannibalism directed at tasty babies and toddlers was a common response to the loss of large mammals in a given area, but no one has left their diary describing daily life 15,000 years ago.

Today, though, we face a Western population implosion that will leave the West at the mercy of far less developed cultures that lack the Enlightenment values we take for granted, including reciprocal affection between parent and child, something that enhances peaceful dealings within a culture and an absence of which makes a society vulnerable to the most savage behaviors.

In remediating the population implosion, let us explore how Israeli culture has handled affection. Israelis have seen their population grow while other societies are currently failing.

Professor Dan Schueftan of Haifa University in Israel states that he could only be happy living in Israel because its form of government is of a different nature than others. He calls Israel a “Pedocracy,” a society ruled by its children and their needs.

All over the world, it would be fair to say that families are formed precisely for the purpose of supporting children’s welfare. Israel, however, has managed to build support for happiness in unique ways, as described below. This is most immediately demonstrated through a series of musical videos of children and adults interacting, mainly through singing. What follows is a tiny sample of instructive visual experiences. The group singing and the simple melodies are the vehicles for the words and their underlying social values.

In the first musical selection, one sees the core instruction for instilling affection in children throughout their lives. “Amen on the Children” is sung by Hanan Ben Ari, very famous in Israel. The official video was watched more than 34 million times in a country with only 10 million citizens, some of whom were too old or too young to be interested in the link.

This number does not include the number of people who watched videos of the same song sung by artists other than Ben Ari. People watch it multiple times and then sing it among themselves. Thus, they are taught how to raise their own children.

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Hanan Ben Ari appears at the end of the video, interacting with his family, including his newborn. So that you can understand the song, I’ve chosen for your viewing a version with an English translation:

“Take For Yourself” is one of the most important songs in this collection because it puts into words the attitudes and behaviors associated with affection and its power to mold whole lifetimes. It is a mother-daughter singing event (rare in the world) in which evolutionary or revolutionary ideas are being expressed, depending upon your perspective: “The song I sang when you were inside of me,” “The millions of kisses on your body,” “My skin on your skin as I nourished you,” “The warmth of our special hugs,” “Take them for yourself for sustenance for the journey ahead (for the rest of your life).”

Are such singing events common in America? Not very! The public expression of affection can seem so out of place in emotionally attenuated and stilted cultures! I want to believe that if understood by others, this song could be a potential source of deep emotional revitalization:

Lastly, Yahel’s Bar Mitzvah video centers on this coming-of-age youngster. The warmth of the attachment between the family members illustrates the central thesis of this essay. The whole extended family comes out for this child; all ages are given the opportunity to bring a moment of joy that will now last as long as YouTube exists. Yahel, now thirteen, will be able to watch this production even as an octogenarian:

Thinking of affection as a cute occasional nicety is much too simplistic. Cuddling and playfulness during infancy that extend into toddlerhood are evolutionary solutions to survival challenges. An incomplete list of affectional behaviors follows for instructional purposes, but also to overcome self-consciousness about seeing and then using the words:

1. Hugs, not pro forma, but including eye contact

2. Eye contact even without hugs

3. Smiling, a behavior that signals “no threat”

4. Conversation, which means sharing experiences and events

5. Sharing food (commensalism)

6. Kissing, touching, or smiling when arriving in someone’s presence or separating from them

7. No intrusion of sexual innuendo

8. Playing games, singing together, dancing

Brutal barbarism, or, almost as destructive and more common, a simple lack of empathy between people, is the path to individual extinction and societal implosion. Affection is a powerful replacement for either coercion or disinterest, but because we don’t care enough due to our own limitations, we don’t easily recognize its power.

Frankly, without affection, we will all be goners. For those unable to express affection because of early trauma or its paucity in their background, remedial classes might help a few regain a sense of worth – for themselves and, at the same time, for others.

YouTube screen grab.

Note from Andrea: I can’t help contrasting those videos with an older video of a roadside brawl in Saudi Arabia (the video is here, but it’s blocked from being embedded), and a recent video of life for young boys in a madrassa (which you can find here, because it’s also blocked from being embedded. Still, this video, which hasn’t yet been pulled, gives you a taste of childhood in some Islamic countries: