All Social Construct and No Play

... make Jack and Jill dull citizens.

Fun & Games, another of David Warren's excellent essays, is about Alison Gopnik's latest book -- The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. He writes for the Ottawa Citizen.

Can't add a thing.

FTA

Gopnik's [book] may not be the best for the purpose, but is nevertheless among the most accessible books that show how recent empirical research into the behaviour of the littlest human folk has utterly demolished the assumptions and "theories" of such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget.

Both of those old shysters, and all the hag armies in their train (feminists, behaviourists, etc.), have held that the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, reality from imagination, moral good from bad, is for all practical purposes socially imposed. Only in adolescence, they suppose, are the pegs driven home to support the tent of civilization -- and then, to be quite obtusely Freudian, only under the pressure of a budding sexuality.

... and aver that this is at the root of Stalinism, and all other species of leftism; of psychologizing in every form and kind. What these all have in common is the belief that humans are a "social construct," that they can be changed through social engineering, that reality itself can be "reformed." There is nothing, for instance, in Barack Obama's comprehensive proposals for audacity, and change, that does not presuppose this false account of human nature. (And therefore nothing in it that can possibly work.)