Childhood and Biopolitics

Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures

N. Lee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230252271
• eBook ISBN: 9781137317186
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Will the future be a climate disaster? Will biotechnologies bring huge improvements to lifespan? Predictions vary, but children's status as human embodiments of the future puts them at the centre of attempts to shape the world and the discipline of childhood studies can therefore make a critical and creative contribution to future-making.

1

Children as Human Futures: Children as Life-forms

At least two relationships are regularly formed between children and the ‘future’. From the perspective of parents and other family members, children often represent, among other things, the survival of highly valued characteristics, attributes and traditions beyond individuals’ death. From the perspective of the political and geographical entities know as ‘states’, children represent an opportunity to shape and to secure a future for the populations they govern. By intervening in the health or education of a child, they can hope, for example, to increase the likelihood that, as an adult, she will be a net contributor to state finances.

In these two senses then, children are often understood to be special kinds of human – ‘human futures’ – at once bridging the gap between the present and the future and being the material from which the future will be made. Of course, making connections with futures is not the only form of ‘time-work’ that societies use their young for. As I have already observed, children are sometimes taken to embody characteristics of previous generations. This book however is particularly concerned with the place of children as resources in forms of time-work that are conducted by individuals (including children themselves), states and other organisations that are intended to shape the future from the stance of the present. If ‘shaping futures by using people as resources’ sounds ‘political’, then I am setting the right tone. As I will argue later, such forms of time-work are part of the basic architecture of states. For the most part, the fact that this work takes place at all is buried and obscured in the calmly shared assumptions that compose the official adult world and official versions of childhood. Where these assumptions are breached or challenged however by social or technological change and time-work is brought to the surface, hot controversy can follow. This is how childhood can be at once a matter of consensus and of conflict.

The study of childhood by social scientists has long been based on these relationships between children and futures. Throughout the twentieth century, for example, concern for children’s proper development and socialisation was inspired by their status as bearers of the future. The variously coercive and disciplinary role that child science, in consequence, played in childrens’ lives has been thoroughly examined (Burman 2007). I suggest however that, today, two trends that have very broad implications are changing our relationship both with the future and with children. First, due in part to the issue of climate change (IPCC 2007), the future itself is beginning to look ever less open to and accommodating of human plans. For decades, economic growth, based largely on the use of fossil fuels, has been the goal of governments and has become a measure of good governance around the world (Mahon and McBride 2009). Children of the ‘developed’ or ‘minority world’ countries in particular have, for 50 years or so, been raised in accordance with a pair of assumptions about the future:

• Year on year, natural resources will be used in greater quantity

• Each generation will see greater wealth and well-being than the last.

Today, however, fossil fuel stocks are running low and their costs, both in terms of purchase price and in terms of the expected climate change their use brings, are rising. A similar story can be told about many other resources such as water and agricultural land, where climate change, increasing population densities and economic forces are working together to create shortages. It often seems that our usual means of securing the future are failing and, in some circumstances, are producing new insecurities. If this is the case, then childhoods, considered as a key element of these security strategies, are likely to be affected. A large part of this book examines such security strategies and explores the implications of their functioning and of their failure for children’s place in global bio-politics.

Second, for many years, a certain human quality of ‘plasticity’ (Giddens 1992) was understood to be concentrated in the first two decades of the life-course. The connection between this plasticity and the futurity of the young was proverbial: As the twig is bent, so the tree shall grow (Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1992). Today, developments in the bio-sciences appear to be creating new plasticities and redistributing them throughout the life-course. In some areas, this appears to increase choice about key life events. Pregnancy and life-span, for example, are ever more open to deliberate influence. Further, pharmaceuticals are in development that could increase adults’ and children’s capacities to learn (Office of Science and Technology 2005). Perhaps most fundamentally, techniques are becoming available that can extend ‘plasticity’ to the genetic level, extending the ability to shape the young to points well before their conception. A good deal of academic coverage of these issues currently takes the form of speculation about the ethical quandaries that might face individuals or policy makers if some, as yet impossible or unproven, technology became available. Examples here include Harris (2007) on ‘smart drugs’ and Prout (2005) on human cloning. Explorations of this kind are clearly of value, revealing as they do, ethical commitments that may otherwise go unexamined. I will pay them due attention.

Consistent with my focus on the bio-politics of childhood, however, as I address plasticities, I will have two biases. Rather than focus in great detail on ethical decisions about plasticities, I will tend to place plasticities in a global bio-political context. Thus, from my point of view, the most interesting thing about ‘smart drugs’ in education is not whether they should be banned, regulated or given out for free, but the specific contexts of personal investment and time-work in which taking a pill to make oneself ‘smarter’ may seem a sensible thing to do. Second, many of the plasticities of significance for childhoods do not depend on future technological innovations. When considering such developments, I tend to the view that the future is already here but that it is unevenly distributed. Thus, the recent collaboration of the Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline to make vaccines available to children in developing countries at relatively low cost (see Chapter 5) interests me more than human cloning.

Together, climate change and developments in the life sciences pose a wide range of challenges and opportunities for individuals, families and states. They affect our relationships with the future through the medium of our existence as biological creatures – as eaters of food and drinkers of water who are composed of cells and organs. In this sense a good deal of today’s politics of childhood is ‘bio-politics’. Much of this book is taken up with defining those challenges and examining existing and emergent responses. But, in my view, understanding and responding to these developments poses particular challenges for childhood studies as a field. Over the past decade, a ‘new paradigm’ of social constructionist research (James and Prout 1997) has been very influential. Broadly speaking, this approach has sought to challenge the image of children as human futures. It is based on the view that identifying children with the future has tended unjustly to silence children as present-day members of society and to sanction their use as a resource instead of their inclusion as citizens with views and preferences of their own. The central critical claim of the ‘new paradigm’ is that since childrens’ future as adults has been so important for states, it has tended to outweigh childrens’ present-day lives, experiences and points of view. Thus ‘new paradigm’ work tends to emphasise childrens’ ‘agency’ and childrens’ ‘voice’, insisting, against what it takes to be dominant arrangements and perceptions, that children can act, make decisions and form opinions about their lives and other topics in independence from adults.

For good strategic reasons however, of which more later, this ‘new paradigm’ has tended to downplay children’s existence as biological creatures. I am going to argue that if the two trends of climate change and life science development are together bringing the ‘biology’ back to human futures, and if childhood studies is to help individuals, families and states with the challenges they face, then ways must be found to make the social scientific study of childhood comfortable with seeing children as life-forms. But first I’d like to clarify a few points about childhood and ‘the future’ as they often appear when seen through the lens of today’s fears and hopes.

Children, futures and survival

For many adults, children are an embodiment of hope and of consolation. A child can function as an anchor of meaning in a world of rapid change and unexpected loss. For some parents, having a child can offer consolation for the fact of their mortality. When a child is seen as embodying hope for a better future, this can offer some compensation for adults’ struggles in the present, along with the motivation to keep going. Children also present grounds for the hope that something of ones’ self will last beyond the course of one’s own life. For some, it is the family name and reputation that is taken to survive with the child, for others it is their values, or tenets of their faith. The idea of survival can be projected onto the inheritance of physical or behavioural characteristics – ‘he has his father’s eyes’ – and even onto the portion of genetic ‘make-up’ a child owes to a biological parent.

A view of children as hope and consolation can also be shared by adults who are not themselves parents. Even childless atheists may still have enough ‘biophilia’ (Kellert and Wilson 1995) – love of living things – to see and to value children as highly adaptive and crafty participants in the experiment called ‘life’, just like themselves. These hopeful associations help to motivate a good deal of adult investment in children. It can also make adults quite insistent with children about their beliefs and behaviour, about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Life can be uncomfortable for children who do not live up to the hopes invested in them or whose existence fails to console the adults around them. Grouping them together, we can call these various associations of children with hope and with consolation the ‘survival fantasies’ of adults. In all likelihood these fantasies have a long, and mostly unwritten, history.

In recent years however, in debates on climate change and bio-science, positions have emerged which, if they are accurate, would seem either to destroy these survival fantasies or simply to make them irrelevant. We have, for example, James Lovelock’s (2009) forecast of near-future, dramatic and long-lasting global temperature rise, which would place the survival of the human species (among many others) in question. He argues that global warming (DiMento and Doughman 2007) has already gone beyond the point at which it could be halted or reversed by changes in policy and that the best we can do is prepare for an inevitable decline of human population and fortunes. Lovelock originally gave us the idea of the Earth, its geology, seas, ice caps and life-forms as one self-regulating system which he called ‘Gaia’ (Lovelock 1979), the ancient Greek name for the mother goddess of the Earth. For many years his ‘Gaia’ hypothesis was not taken at all seriously by the scientific community. The facts of global warming have changed that. He now suggests the we, humans, or rather a specific form of human life that is based on burning fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas, are today being ‘regulated’ out of existence as the Earth’s interdependent systems try to adapt to the rapid rise in carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in the atmosphere caused by our daily activities. So there is a clear prospect of death, of an end to children and of an end to survival that is advancing on us and moving quite rapidly.

On the other hand, we have the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey (De Grey and Rae 2008). He argues that scientific progress in the understanding and prevention of ageing is such a strong trend that, with the right strategy and resources, individuals born today could live for 1,000 years. The trick is to use whatever available rejuvenation techniques one can to stay alive long enough for the next bio-medical leap forward, and then to catch that wave soon enough to make it to the next. For now, restrict your calorie intake, take exercise, don’t smoke or drink alcohol. Then, when you are in your 70s, stem cell research (Panno 2006) or nano-technology (Jones 2007) will provide something to keep you going till 100. By then, a further set of as yet unimagined techniques will be available. De Grey envisages a 1,000-year life rather than an eternal life because of the statistics of fatal accidents. Live long enough and a traffic accident will probably carry you off. Nevertheless, if there is no death, at least not for absolutely ages, there would be need for children and the second-hand survival that they offer.

Lovelock (2009) does not rule out the possibility that some humans may survive. If the right steps are taken, a percentage of the existing population may cling on in climate change ‘lifeboats’, such as Northern Europe, where a temperate climate persists. Similarly De Grey and Rae (2008) do not suggest the end of death entirely. But these visions trade in the same terms (death, life, continuity, termination) as do survival fantasies. They come to us from the brightly lit realm of scientific debate, disturbing our dreams of continuity and harmony between the generations. If there is no future, how can children ‘be’ the future? If the future involves 500-year-old people, or indeed cloned humans, will there be space for or need for children as we currently understand them? These visions share an emphasis on the fact that humans are biological creatures and that we are in a relationship of mutual dependency with other life-forms. Further, today we are such creatures that we can intervene in life processes at both the global and molecular levels. Thus, one commentator even argues that we now can and should ‘enhance’ our own evolution (Harris 2007) designing ourselves and future generations as we see fit.

The question of what can and should be made of children is hardly new (Lee 2001), but together, climate change and the life sciences raise the stakes and increase the latitude of that question. This book explores and illustrates a few of the issues that lie between the speculative extremes defined by Lovelock and De Grey. It addresses young people’s cognitive powers, vaccines to prolong life and health and climate change. Further, it develops the tools to understand these issues so that childhood studies is prepared to play its part in shaping human futures.

What does ‘bio-politics’ mean?

So far, I have suggested that a good deal of thought and feeling about childhood is structured by what I have called adult ‘survival fantasies’. I have further suggested that these fantasies, though important, are not adequate to the task of understanding childhood in a world where climate change and bio-science foreground our existence as biological creatures. In one sense, then, real-life bio-politics are the issues of climate change and sustainability, medicine and well-being that lie between the extremes marked out by Lovelock and De Grey. A set of ideas is available, however, that is designed precisely to understand the social and political significance of our existence as bodily human creatures. Chapter 2 sets these ideas out with greater clarity and explores some of the tensions between them, but for now I need further to explain the term ‘bio-politics’ that I have chosen to pair with ‘childhood’ in my title.

The historian and political philosopher Michel Foucault (2007) coined the term ‘bio-politics’ in a series of lectures he gave in the late 1970s. For him, bio-politics is the special field of politics, of argument, strategy and bids for control (successful or otherwise), which became available in the eighteenth century with the realisation that, apart from anything else, humans are also a ‘species’. For humans to be a species means that they are biological creatures like any other, with their own needs, abilities and behavioural tendencies. This may seem obvious to us now, but Foucault (2007) carefully shows that it has not always been so. For many years, after all, the primary European frame for understanding humanity concerned God, sin and redemption. He describes the emergence among the governments and policy makers of European states of a bio-political way of thinking about and governing populations through the eighteenth century. The bio-political relation between governments and populations has since developed and spread till today and it is taken for granted by many in power. Let me sketch out Foucault’s account of the bio-political.

One thing rulers have long done, and still do today, is say what the ruled must not do, by defining what is against the law. Foucault calls this form of power ‘juridical’. The definition of some forms of killing as murder and the provision of punishments for murders is a good example here. Another thing rulers can do is say what the ruled must do, and exactly how and when they should do it if they want to become ‘good’ people. This is the form of power that Foucault calls ‘discipline’. It is still widespread today. For example, if unemployed, a person in the United Kingdom must take steps to show authorities that they are actively seeking work and prove that they are taking the right steps at the right time so that they qualify for state assistance. Alternatively, you might think of a doctor giving a child or parent advice on healthy eating, or the gym instructor designing an exercise programme for a client.

For Foucault, ‘bio-power’ is quite distinct from juridical and disciplinary forms of power, even though it may use these other forms of power to reach its ends. Rather than starting with an idea of what is wrong or right for individuals to do, bio-power starts with a goal, say the reduction of rates of a certain disease amongst a certain group of people, and then tries to understand how the needs, abilities, proclivities and susceptibilities of a population may be harnessed to reach this goal. For Foucault (2008), by the late twentieth century this field of ‘bio-politics’ had come to focus on the goal of providing populations with economic security and had helped create strong links between the practice of government and particular economic theories forging ‘neo-liberal’ forms of rule. We will return to that later in the book. For the moment, however, we need to note that others inspired by Foucault have expanded on this concept of ‘bio-politics’ to include issues of the framing of relationships between life processes and lifestyles (Agamben 1998; Rose 2007). These issues, covered in greater detail in Chapter 2, become quite important as my arguments develop across the book.

A new environment for childhood studies

Together Foucault and those he has inspired offer us clues about how students of childhood might respond to the new environment that childhood studies finds itself in. This environment, as my introduction suggested, is defined by two major tendencies. The first tendency is the increasing recognition that human societies, lifestyles and identities are inseparably bound to the wider life of the planet. If we exclude the colonisation of other planets as at present impractical, we have no choice in the fundamental matter of this relationship. Even though the wealthier among us are still able to afford lifestyles that seem separate from wider flows of resource, in small eddies, as it were, of plentiful water and abundant oil, it is now clear that this separability (Lee 2005) cannot last forever and that it maximises costs to the poor. The second tendency is the growing desire that both shapes and is shaped by bio-science, to intervene in human life processes so as to prevent disease, prolong life or enhance our capabilities. The achievements and promise of such fields as genetic medicine (Wright and Hastie 2007) and neuroscience (Blakemore and Frith 2005) are considerable and exciting. With one or two exceptions (Prout 1999, 2005) childhood studies has so far given very little attention to these issues. In the next section, I will offer an account of why that is. It will also become clear why I think this new bio-political environment requires that childhood studies adjust some of its guiding assumptions and broaden its range of concerns.

Throughout this book, I will examine the events and relationships that are forming today’s childhoods and shaping children’s lives as the consequences of our two key trends develop. But I will also be searching for and developing new ways of thinking that can help today’s students of childhood make a contribution to human futures. The first step on the journey is to clarify the challenge that exists for students of childhood, as I see it, if they wish to engage with climate change and bio-science.

Childhood studies: The story so far

Since its formation in the late twentieth century, the social scientific field of childhood studies has given relatively little attention to the fact that children are biological creatures. It has instead emphasised the social aspects of childhood covering the historical, social and cultural diversity of childhoods (Corsaro 2004; James and Prout 1997), children’s relationship to democratic participation, rights and voice (Alderson 2000) and their levels of social and cultural competence (Hutchby and Moran Ellis 1998) among other topics. The reasons for this apparent oversight lie in the arguments and struggles that initially gave rise to childhood studies. As I will suggest, these arguments of the late twentieth century were about the degree to which childhood can and should be standardised. In what follows I will further suggest that, for strategic reasons connected with debates over a standard childhood, childhood studies of the last two decades has tended to treat the ‘natural’, the ‘biological’ and the creaturely aspects of childhood as its enemy. I will then argue that conditions have changed to such a degree that this strategy and many of the assumptions that have built up around it must now also change.

Childhood, considered as a period of social, moral, intellectual and practical preparation, has long been of central importance to industrialised societies, among others (Donzelot 1979; Lee 2001). The twentiet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Children as Human Futures: Children as Life-forms
• 2. Childhood and Bio-politics: Life, Voice, Resource
• 3. Childhood and Bio-social Imaginations
• 4. Childhood and Mental Capital
• 5. Childhood, Vaccination and Philanthrocapitalism
• 6. Childhood, Climate Change and Human Agency
• 7. Children’s Roles in Responses to Climate Change
• 8. Conclusion
• References
• Index