9th International Symposium on Circumcision, Genital Integrity, and Human Rights
Seattle, Washington August 24, 2006

Delusional Psychologies of Circumcision and Civilization

David B. Chamberlain, Ph.D
Santa Barbara Graduate Institute

Abstract (84 words)
The author brings 48 years of clinical experience--half of it as a pioneer in birth psychology--to a critical analysis of the delusions of pediatricians, parents, and tribal practitioners of male and female genital cutting and the similar delusions of politicians, professionals and parents about creating a “civilization” built on violence. In the end, the author looks to a critical mass of independent and humane parents who create loving families as the only real basis for any future civilization worthy of the name.

Key Words: baby pain, prenatal parenting, delusions, circumcision, civilization

  1. INTRODUCTION

In one way or another, all of us are in the baby business. Of course, the whole human race is in the baby business, but that doesn’t mean we understand babies; we don’t. Although we were all babies once, that doesn’t mean we understand who we were as babies; we really don’t. Nor are we automatically aware of how much we were marked and traumatized at birth and after birth, including--God forbid--some form of genital mutilation. Getting clear about this may be delayed for decades.

The babies we care about are amazing and mysterious beings, and, as we are slowly discovering, the mind of a baby is the most mysterious part. As adults--steeped in the pop scientific culture of the 20th century--we have had to grope our way through a matrix of myths and delusions in psychology and medicine to come anywhere near the truth. In this paper I will name some of those delusional ideas in the hope of liberating ourselves more fully from them.

2. FINDING THE REAL BABY

In virtually all cultures East and West for the last several generations, most of us have suffered from bad ideas about babies, not because of ancient myths and “old wives tales” but because of a new catechism of wrong beliefs spawned (alas!) by professionals dealing with our babies. As a parent and a psychologist, I was part of that scene. In fact, before I knew anything about the mind of a baby, my wife and I had two beautiful boys and followed the advice of our obstetrician to circumcise them. We were totally naïve in believing it was a beneficial procedure and that babies would have no memory of the experience. In retrospect, there were two sets of delusions here: the doctor’s and ours. Fortunately, we had read about Grantly Dick-Read and natural childbirth¹ and did our best to approximate it, but in the 1950s no one warned us about circumcision.

My real education about the mind of a newborn baby came suddenly in 1974 (a full 16 years after graduating with a Ph.D in psychology) when I took a course in the clinical applications of hypnosis and encountered lucid memories of traumas--including birth and circumcision. To put it briefly, I discovered that babies, no matter how immature they were supposed to be, always cared about what was happening to them, were learning who to trust or distrust, and were trying to put meaning to their painful experiences. They were protesting desperately how they were being treated at birth, and were trying to warn doctors about the danger of obstetrical maneuvers being used on them! Eventually, I came to understand they were developing good and bad ideas about themselves, their parents, their doctors and life.

The newborns I encountered in hypnosis had all the senses and emotions you could ask for; they reacted fiercely to violence, usually loved their mothers, and sometimes even knew telepathically what their mothers were thinking and feeling in other parts of the hospital. Their faculties of memory and learning were obviously working but not always the way we would want. They were being hurt, traumatized, and shocked. I found I had to invent new therapeutic methods to help them resolve the host of psychological wounds and insults that were left from their encounters with parents and with modern birth.

It was only a matter of time until I realized that physicians and psychologists were teaching the world about a completely different baby with a primitive brain incapable of accurate perception, memory, or learning, with neither senses nor emotions, and not yet equipped with receptors for pain. I learned that doctors and nurses did many painful things to newborns--even surgery on them without benefit of pain-killing anesthetics--because of deep prejudices they had acquired in medical training.

2.1       Obstetrical Hallucinations and Delusions.

In the United States where nearly everybody is now born in a hospital, we all know that babies are typically born crying, kicking and screaming. Why? This pertinent question is neither raised nor answered by doctors, and the crying goes on and on, decade after decade. How do obstetricians react to crying babies? Typically, they smile and congratulate mothers on what a strong voice their baby has. What are they thinking? My guess is they are thinking that everything is fine! If they would explain this aberration, they would probably say the baby is showing healthy “reflexes,” but not having a personal experience. Baby expressions (whatever they might be) lacked mind and meaning, and therefore were not valid communications. Consequently, there was no point in listening to a baby or trying to interpret their sounds and gestures. There was certainly no reason to make changes in obstetrical protocols!

It took me a while to figure out that what we are looking at here was delusional thinking based on false science. Obstetricians during birth events appear lost in hallucinations about a baby they hold tightly in their imagination, but it is not the baby in the room. The hallucinated baby is the one they have come to believe in and prefer to deal with, but this means they are out of touch with the actual baby they are caring for.

Where is reality here? The babies handled by doctors and nurses, are (from my point of view) definitely unhappy, frustrated, and angry as they are twisted, punctured, pulled, forced, and pressured; they are cold, in pain, and afraid! They are, in fact, protesting with all their might through dramatic body language everyone can plainly see, and through piercing sounds everyone can hear. Through all this clamor and commotion, professionals manage to hold to the belief that what they are seeing is not what it seems to be and what they are offering newborns is “the best care” ever invented for babies.

Historically, I think it is also fair to say that obstetricians had parallel delusions about the mothers in their care. Mothers, they asserted, are ill-equipped to give birth safely and needed constant “management.” Female bodies are not only unreliable but dangerous. After delivery, women could not be trusted with their own babies, so babies were taken from them and cared for by professionals. For half a century, even mother’s milk was under suspicion and hospitals recommended a manufactured product instead.

Where is reality here? Factually, mothers have been equipped for birthing since the beginning of the human era. Similarly, mother’s milk--real miracle that it is--has sustained virtually all human babies in the critical months and years following birth. And, speaking in practical terms, this perfect milk is free, sanitary, alive, comes warm, and is available on demand day and night. Beyond that, however, mothers and babies are physically and emotionally interdependant and derive mutual benefits from being together before, during, and after birth in what can be called an inspired synchrony of timing and hormonal interaction. How did the professions dealing with mothers and babies drift so far into a World of Illusion?

For most of the 20th century, two of the worst delusions shared by medicine and psychology were that babies had no perception of pain and no memory to record their experiences. These delusions spread a pall of unnecessary suffering over babies for most of the 20th century. They deserve special mention here.

2.2       Real Memory

Renowned psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, who had world-wide influence both during and after his lifetime, invented a memory theory called “infantile amnesia” which held that none of us had the brain development necessary for personal memory until around two years of age. This theory, strongly embraced in psychiatry, obstetrics, pediatrics, and surgery caused incalculable harm to babies from 1916 when it was first announced until 1996 when it was thoroughly discredited by experimental research. This long period of time can now be seen as “80 years of scientific amnesia.” In the end, leading scholars declared that Freud’s grande illusion was invented to explain something that did not really exist. The tragedy was that this theory obscured the true nature of infants and dissuaded both parents and professional from giving appropriate care to babies!

In the new millennium, human memory can no longer be described by the physical boundaries made familiar by classes in anatomy and neuroscience. Babies have proved sensitive, aware, and vulnerable at all ages. Time has revealed they accumulate memories and learn from experience in ways we wish they wouldn’t. They remember things that are difficult to explain, yet they learn in all the ways that learning is tested. Above all, they know if they are wanted or not, sense who to trust, and against all the odds, they can report out-of-body and near-death experiences in the womb which had profound consequences in how they lived their lives.

Babies start learning languages in the womb, but a growing literature shows they are already communicating telepathically with mothers and fathers long before language. In fact, the latest information reported by hundreds of parents reveals intense telepathic communication before conception, that is before they have any physical body at all.² All these empirical discoveries completely overflow the boundaries of the “brain matter” paradigm that dominated our thinking through most of the 20th century.

Many of you know of my personal contribution to this paradigm shift in proving experimentally that birth memories were reliable and not fantasies.³  The fuller story of birth memory can be read in The Mind of Your Newborn Baby⁴ (3rd edition) which is presently circulating in twelve languages. Nevertheless, many professionals working with babies still live in the broken paradigm of “infantile amnesia.” In a forthcoming book, Windows on the Womb: Your First Nine Months,⁵ I will complete the case for a larger view of human memory--that it is innate rather than “developmental.” Acceptance of this new psychology of consciousness in babies has the potential to redefine pregnancy and parenthood and to change how professionals work with babies from conception onward.

2.3       Real Pain

Medical doctors went through a long period of denying the significance of baby pain, even after discovery of ether anesthesia in 1846.⁶ As medical historian Martin Pernick has pointed out, babies were not counted among those who needed anesthesia, so baby surgeries were done without painkillers. As late as 1989, a professor of pediatrics in a major US medical college wrote in a Journal article on neonatal pain that “we know virtually nothing about whether there is memory of infant pain.”⁷ At that time, probably most pediatricians and obstetricians comforted themselves with the delusion that pain was not a factor in their work with prenates and newborns. Indeed, in many locations in the world, pediatric surgeons had operated on babies without anesthesia over a period of 140 years (from 1846 to 1986) because they believed anesthetics were unnecessary and dangerous. Denial of infant pain was one of the biggest mistakes in the history of medicine.

This dark, long, and mostly secret era of medicine began to end in 1986 because of two developments, one public and the other scientific. Parents who had lost their neonates to surgery without anesthesia went public with their story and attracted media attention for a protracted period of public debate.⁸ Eventually, public opinion won out and medical guilds promised to give babies the same consideration in regard to anesthetics for surgery as they give to other patients.

The scientific revolution was initiated by pivotal research on infant pain in Ph.D research at Oxford University in England by Indian physician  K.J. Anand.⁹ Anand’s research proved that baby surgery with anesthesia was definitely beneficial compared to the same surgery done without anesthesia which he showed was harmful and sometimes fatal. In the twenty years since his Oxford research, Dr. Anand has continued to lead the world toward a fuller scientific understanding of the many dimensions of infant pain and the necessity of changing the way infant pain is treated. To review his extraordinary contributions, one need only do a search in Pub Med for “K.J. Anand” and 50 research reports will tell you how far we have come in smashing the tightly held delusions of medical practitioners that infants had no pain.

Nevertheless, a recent probe in 2006¹⁰ reveals how medical protocols continue to overlook the significance of infant pain. In this study utilizing sophisticated brain-scanning, researchers focused on premature babies before, during, and after they underwent routine blood tests using a heel lance. Maria Fitzgerald and colleagues in England used near-infrared spectroscopy to measure the blood supply and oxygenation in the brain of babies between 25 and 45 weeks conceptual age. They demonstrated that surges of blood and oxygen were reaching the somatosensory cortex, an area that has been linked to pain sensation in adults, and concluded that these very young babies were experiencing true pain, not just reflex reactions. In closing their report, the team noted that in neonatal intensive care units today, babies typically receive an average of 14 procedures per day, “many of which are considered by clinical staff to be painful.”

Contemplate for a moment, the potential consequences of all the unacknowledged--and routinely inflicted--pain in neonatal intensive care units in the 40 years since 1967 when the first of thousands of units in the US and the world opened for business at Yale University. This intrinsically painful mode of treatment continues today as the standard approach to saving and healing our most immature and fragile babies.

3. THE CIRCUMCISION CRUSADE

In the light of all the above facts about how professionals engaged in a delusional shrinking of babies in the 20th century--effectively robbing them of their smiles, cries, emotions, pains, memories, and what they were learning--let us turn attention to the practice of male and female circumcision. Here we confront compounded delusions originating in ancient tribal practices in the Middle East and Africa dating back for thousands of years. Tragically, these rituals which ran free and unchecked in pre-scientific cultures driven by fear, prejudice, and orthodoxy continue in vogue in certain countries today, driven by the same fear, prejudice and orthodoxy. Circumcision today perpetuates and institutionalizes a righteousness that permitted authorities of earlier times to dictate tribal markings and sexual mutilations and to force parents to comply. It is only recently in human history that genital cutting has been identified as “sexual abuse.”

In the United States, it is especially ironic that in the 19th and 20th Century, the rapid rise of circumcision was led by physicians who claimed the mantle of science with backing from formal medical education, textbooks, official journals, and membership in a guild. In those days, women were denied access to medical education and male physicians despised and opposed the ancient role of midwives at birth. Medicine became the new orthodoxy in the field of health, gained status in the public eye, and won the favor of legislative bodies passing out rights and privileges. Doctors were ranting about masturbation in the 1860s and declared that foreskin was detrimental to health.

Circumcising physicians, themselves moralistic and dogmatic, found a willing ally in the maverick millionaire John Harvey Kellogg whose tract, Plain Facts for Old and Young (1888)¹¹ was a household item praising the virtues of circumcision. Mr. Kellogg seized upon circumcision as a way of stopping what he called “the evil of masturbation.” (Now there is a serious problem!) With no real evidence that it was actually evil or had evil effects, Mr. Kellogg continued on his passionate crusade with the hearty support of physicians who had even more elaborate “scientific” delusions about circumcision as a means of preventing or curing a growing list of diseases!

Delusions are surely an amazing phenomenon. As a psychologist, when I first met the term “delusion,” it was a highly specialized disorder, discreet from other derangements, and rare. To find one, you had to go to a lunatic asylum. Now, it seems, delusional thinking is everywhere you look. It struts and poses without apology, has high status, wears uniforms, claims divine inspiration, and spreads like the flu.  

In the 1890s doctors asserted that the uncircumcised penis was associated with a garden variety of “nervous conditions,” tuberculosis, and dozens of other human afflictions. Thus began a surgical stampede to circumcise urban males in America, with a new aura of science covering the same old crime--willful injury and robbery of functional sexual body parts of babies and children by tribal elders.

The perverse extension and resilience of this long-lasting movement is remarkably illustrated in Frederick Hodges’ A Short History of Circumcision in North America: In the Physicians’ Own Words (1996).¹² Hodges’chart begins in 1860 when only .001% of the urban male population was circumcised. Twenty eight years later the percentage had risen to 15% and forty years later (1900) to 25%. With unceasing claims of benefit, the percentage reached 50% in 1920 and came to a peak fifty years later in 1971 when 90% of urban males were being circumcised.

From 1900 to 1935, doctors claimed in medical publications that circumcision would increase sexual power and control, prevent syphilis, dyspepsia and diarrhea, convulsions, epilepsy, prolapse of the rectum, dropsy, crying in infants, and, yes, hydrocephalus. Circumcision could prevent adolescent rapes and promiscuity, marital separations and divorce caused by “unnatural passion”, and penile cancer due to chronic irritation of foreskin. In 1949, doctors in medical journals made sweeping assumption that Negroes were more promiscuous and had more venereal diseases because less of them were circumcised. Similar authoritative statements were published that cancer of the prostate, cervix, and penis occurred in groups with low circumcision rates. Claims in the 1980s proclaimed that circumcision decreases urinary tract infections, and could protect from AIDS.

These extravagant claims--none of which finally survived empirical scrutiny--fueled the delusional mania for circumcision for over 100 years until 1971 when credibility finally began to crumble. A medical textbook used at that time reminded medical students that most sensible parents would welcome circumcision “as a way to avert masturbation.” But it was too late. Twenty-five years later--with a lot of help from NOCIRC--the percentage of urban males being circumcised had fallen from 90% to 60%.  

3.1 Injury and Harm to Females and Males

Genital cutting of males and females has been international in scope for millennia. In the 20th century, remnants of female cutting have been recorded in the United States as late as 1977 when Blue Cross/Blue Shield still paid for clitoridectomies. The reality of this era is personalized in the autobiographical book The Rape of Innocence (2006)¹³
by Patricia Robinette. In the United States a law against female genital mutilation went into effect on March 30, 1997.

According to UNICEF at least 100 million women, largely in Africa, have been genitally disfigured in childhood. A WHO study group led by Emily Banks from Australia National University (2006)¹⁴ has shown that women with female genital mutilation (FGM) are more likely than other women to suffer a stillbirth or early neonatal death. The group studied the obstetrical outcome of 28,393 women who attended one of 28 obstetrical centers in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. They used a WHO rating system to evaluate severity of mutilation. FMG-I is removal of the prepuce or clitoris or both; FMG-II is removal of clitoris and labia minora; and FMG-III is removal of part or all of the external genitalia with stitching or narrowing of the vaginal opening. Risks tend to rise with more extensive mutilation.

The team found that women with FGM were more likely to lose their baby during the perinatal period than women without FGM. Other adverse obstetrical outcomes included cesarean section, hemorrhage, episiotomy, and an extended hospital stay. They concluded that adverse obstetrical and perinatal outcomes can be added to the known harmful immediate and long-term effects of FGM. Considering that the purpose of FGM is to maximize the value of the girls as brides, the actual outcome of FGM (stillbirth and early neonatal death) was actually the kiss of death.

A study in Egypt (2007)¹⁵ looked at the impact of genital cutting on the health of newly married women. In a random group of 264 newly married, they compared circumcised and non-circumcised women regarding long-time health problems. In Benhe City, Egypt the circumcision group was 76% of the sample. All lived in an urban area. Circumcised women had significantly more dysmenorrhea, marital and sexual problems, obstetrical complications, anxieties, and phobias. The authors concluded, “Grave problems of circumcision may last throughout life…” and were particularly disruptive at the time of consummation of marriage and the time of childbirth. The consequences were opposite from what the families were expecting.

The outcome for males in those cultures where circumcision is commonly imposed on newborns or children are also contrary to the many advantages promised by doctors. The paper by Boyle, Goldman, Svoboda, and Fernandez (2003)¹⁶ Male Circumcision: Pain, Trauma, and Psychosexual Sequelae provides a realistic and thorough analysis of the consequences of male circumcision, beginning with the immediate tissue loss caused by cutting around the penis to amputate part or all of the foreskin. And this is only the first irreversible damage to body and psyche. (For the full story of the harm wrought by circumcision, please study this article.)

Although perhaps 85% of the world’s adult males remain genitally intact, an estimated 650 million males alive today have been circumcised. In the US over a million baby boys are added to this group every year. The excruciating pain of this surgery has been measured in every conceivable way leaving no doubt about the intense shock and suffering the baby endures. The purpose of the event may vary in different cultural groups, but in the United States, the physicians who promoted and popularized the practice intended to make a deep impression on the newborn, weaken the penis, and repress sexual feelings and interests. In contemporary language, this was a flagrant violation of human rights, abusing children in no position to defend themselves or to give consent.

Up until the year 2000, most babies were circumcised without benefit of pain killing anesthetic while they were restrained and helpless. Although many doctors in those days still believed babies could not truly feel pain, interpret its meaning, or remember and learn from the experience, we know today beyond doubt the experience was and is a traumatic ordeal physically, emotionally, and mentally. Research since that time has shown that circumcision trauma permanently lowers the pain threshold for subsequent experiences of pain. Clinical work with babies, children, and adults often reveals long-lasting post-traumatic stress disorders, anxieties, and phobias created by brutal early experiences of surgery and circumcision. In addition to personal suffering, therapists have realized devastating breeches of trust and bonding failures between babies and their mothers and fathers. Trauma distorts behavior, personality, self-esteem, and the wounded penis will be carried into all future sexual relationships.

We can thank NOCIRC for designing research that directly challenges the pretensions and delusions of circumcision advocates who promised better sex and freedom from a cornucopia of diseases by removing foreskin. Long in the planning stage, this elegantly simple research completed by a team of seven doctors and nurses may go a long way toward taking the hoax out of circumcision. The title is “Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis” (2007).¹⁷  The objective was to map the fine-touch thresholds of the adult penis in circumcised and uncircumcised men and compare the two populations. 

One hundred sixty three subjects were enrolled. The fine-touch sensitivity of 19 locations on the penis was measured using Semmes-Weinstein monofilament touch-test sensory evaluators to create a map of penile sensitivity. Results show that the most sensitive regions of the uncircumcised penis are exactly those removed by circumcision. When compared with the most sensitive area of the circumcised penis, several locations on the uncircumcised penis (missing from the circumcised penis) were significantly more sensitive. The glans in the circumcised male is less sensitive to fine-touch pressure than the glans of the uncircumcised male. The most sensitive location on the circumcised penis is the circumcision scar on the ventral surface. Five locations on the uncircumcised penis were more sensitive than the most sensitive location on the circumcised penis.

Despite the controversy over the long-term impact of male circumcision, no thorough, objective, quantitative studies measuring the long-term sensory consequences of infant circumcision have hitherto been reported. The present study provides the first extensive mapping of the fine-touch pressure thresholds of the adult penis. The many partial attempts to extend our knowledge in this area are expertly analyzed in this paper. In conclusion, circumcision removes the most sensitive parts of the penis and decreases the fine-touch pressure sensitivity of glans penis. The most sensitive regions in the uncircumcised penis are those parts ablated by circumcision.

These clear facts challenge both doctors and parents. How are we to understand a medical system that claims to offer miraculous benefits while doing permanent damage to newborn boys? On the other hand, how are we to understand the delusions that drive otherwise normal parents to hire doctors to perform miracles that are a hoax?

4. CIVILIZATION: DREAMS AND DELUSIONS

A news reporter once asked Albert Einstein what he thought of Western Civilization? His quick reply was, “I think it would be a good idea.” I too think civilization would be a good idea, but I am beginning to see that our fantasies, delusions, and other false beliefs may prevent us from getting there. In approaching the larger subject of civilization, I think there are things we can learn from the debacle of the circumcision crusade in America--particularly because babies are so deeply involved in each venture. Note, for example, the truths that emerge from the following declarations relating to familiar old delusional ideas about circumcision.
1. Injuring a normal penis does not improve its function, but in fact degrades it. Common wisdom about “improving” a penis would be to just leave it alone!
2. Inflicting any form of severe pain on newborns does not make them more joyful, confident people. To the contrary, shock, brutality, and torture of babies actually makes them anxious, fearful, and vengeful. The big question to ask is, What strategies would help to create joyful, confident babies, children, and adults?
3. Complicity of parents in causing the wounds of circumcision cannot be hidden from victims because the unconscious memory still holds them, and will erode the foundations of trust. Important priority: We must learn how to establish trust.  
4. Robbing babies of healthy body parts is a violation of human rights and will not improve character or increase family solidarity. The challenging question is: What would improve or increase family bonding?
5. Being victimized by a surgery performed without your consent is not an experience of democracy or an exercise in positive psychology. If this is what we want, we could have it by just omitting the surgery.

Consider what can be learned from de facto experiments of much larger scope that effect not only individual persons but whole societies. In the 20th century, huge public health “experiments” were conducted without any measurements, controls, evaluations or debates. Not scientific in any sense, the suffering involved was pointless and inhumane. Circumcision was only one such “experiment.” Others included these: feeding babies manufactured “formula” instead of mothers’ milk and replacing breasts with bottles; the cascading of vaccinations against numerous diseases; pollution of drinking water, land, and air with pesticides; the mass production of automobiles and the reorientation of communities around vehicles burning fossil fuels; the general use of toxic mercury fillings in dental offices; cluttering the oceans of the world with durable plastic trash; radiant fallout from nuclear power plants and waste piles; and, of course, one of the biggest possible problems, global warming. The list goes on, affecting not only neighborhoods but continents, and capable of degrading the whole planet. Such problems can nullify all efforts to achieve “civilization.”  (“A nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day!”)

Such problems are sobering and force us to rethink the very nature of civilization and the strategies appropriate to getting there. What is civilization, after all? More paved streets, more cars, higher buildings, or a thousand Walmarts in China? We might have difficulty arriving at an agreement about civilization as a place, or what would make it civilized. Once upon a time, the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was considered “the cradle of civilization” but that place has changed. It might be more helpful to focus on civilization as “civility,” a quality of life, relationships, freedom, sharing and cooperation? Or civility as a principle of using all resources for the common good? All this sounds good to me as a psychologist interested in wellness, human growth, altruism, and realizing that the human race is all one family. But I am thinking, if this is where we are headed, we will very much need to apply what we have learned in prenatal psychology about real babies. Babies are bound to play a critical role in both family life and planetary life. (“Womb ecology becomes world ecology.”)

4.1 Who are the Gatekeepers?

If ultimately, the quality of a civilization depends upon the quality of the people participating in it, we will at least need a critical mass of people with the skills, attitudes, and virtues needed to hold together the increasingly large Global Family of Man. Personally, I am not sure about institutional structures as the gatekeepers of civilization, despite their inclinations to assume they are. My own view is that the institutions themselves--whether they are governments, schools, media networks, scientific and professional guilds, churches, libraries, or charities--inevitably depend on the wisdom and maturity of the people who make up these institutions at any given time.

One of the glaring signs of institutional failure during the 20th century is the delusion that violence solves all problems. The record is appalling, decade by decade, including the first and second World Wars, Nazi expansionism and the Holocaust, Stalinism, civil terror in Communist China and a genocide in Tibet, brutal dictatorships in South America, the cruelty of apartheid in South Africa, wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East (where circumcising cultures chronically clash), Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the new brand of terrorists, women and children suicide bombers.¹⁸

In all this frantic activity, there were never enough people in the right places and at the right times to find solutions to the problems and make the wars unnecessary. Wars are still waiting to be understood. Meanwhile, as the actor Peter Ustinov puts it, “Terrorism is the war of the poor and war is the terrorism of the rich.” In the US we name bombs “The Peacemaker” and are proud of “shock and awe.”

Delusions aside, someone has suggested that war is not problem-solving but a manic-depressive illness of society. The manic phase is seen in recruiting, training, shipping soldiers around the world, then shooting babies, raping mothers, enlisting children to shoot others--all of which is very exciting and savage! The depressive phase is paying billions to rebuild the enemy’s infrastructure: restoring water, electricity, transportation, and communications, then facing and paying off the massive loans that financed the war effort. Who can step in and save us from our collective folly? 

4.2 The Real Power of Loving Families

My best guess about where to look for the people who might actually know how to build a real civilization is in loving families. This is surely oversimplified and too idealistic to be taken seriously, but frankly, these families may be our only hope. Considering the collective weaknesses and shortcomings of the world’s parents, this may be the scariest theory of civilization ever brought forward. Parents could very well let us down. Some families are notoriously dysfunctional and miserable, others are a breeding ground for violence, sickness, and depression. Granted, the odds are not good that these families will produce the inspired, healthy, and creative people that are needed in a civilized world--although some real life stories do prove they can sometimes beat all the odds. When a child succeeds under tough circumstances like that, I tend to think that the explanation doesn’t lie in the shortcomings of the parents but in the extraordinary character of the child. 

But, let’s take a closer look at the “odds.” What would be the odds of producing healthy, happy and friendly children in a society where 100% of the girls suffered genital mutilation and 100% of the boys were robbed of their foreskins? Would you expect an improvement in this imaginary society if only 50% of the girls and 50% of the boys were mutilated? Finally, what would you think of the odds if none of the girls and none of the boys were circumcised at all? This illustrates what odds really mean, and this brings me back to the power that resides in the loving family: loving makes a huge difference!

If babies have taught us anything, it is that they are little sponges soaking up the environment of the mother and father; they are constantly involved, constantly learning and very impressionable. While they are having these learning experiences, they are  literally forming their brains, their emotions, and their ideas about themselves and establishing what might be called their default “factory settings” for life. Another way to speak about this process is that the parents are in a real sense the architects of the brain that is growing in the child because the parents are controlling most of the input including the fuel needed for growth. The truth is this: in a loving family the input is basically loving, while in a hostile and crazy family the input is mostly hostile and crazy. We are talking about the quality of the environment here including all the important elements like nutrition, affection, sound, language, other higher levels of communication including intention and purpose, modeling and all other types of learning and “vibes.”

Out of this interactive milieu will emerge sexual orientation, behavioral tendencies, and personality traits, one of which will have especially profound implications for civilized behavior; it is called your “dispositional signature.” Disposition accounts for stable and recognizable aspects of individuality, the style of a person’s adjustment to and engagement with the social world including how a person does things, typically thinks, and usually feels. It tends to be a robust predictor of important life outcomes like work performance and occupational success, quality of social relationships, psychological well-being, and even longevity.¹⁹  What the world needs is lots more people with a disposition to be friendly, cooperative, and helpful--people who are disposed to be peaceful and civil rather than angry, prejudiced, critical and troublesome. A good disposition is shaped in a loving family.

On the other hand, there is risk of developing a violent disposition. Violence is home-grown, and turns into one of the worst problems we face in today’s fragile world. Violence is learned from experience, especially from watching, hearing, or experiencing it up close from parents. Later, television violence spreads the confusion far and wide and makes it seem normal, but long before television, babies have sensitive radar for violence whether it happens at conception, during pregnancy, at birth, or any other time. They memorize it, sense it, try it out, and react to it by becoming afraid or aggressive. Violence grows with practice; the more you act violent, the more violent you become until you are better at it than anyone else. Domestic violence becomes public violence, and public violence can multiply itself, a phenomenon often seen on the evening news.

Something else super important to civilization and is home-grown is your “primal health system”--the system that protects your health for the rest of your life. Experts are now telling us that this system is constructed in the period between conception and your first birthday. The diseases you are likely to develop in life and may die from can often be predicted knowing the conditions you faced during this critical time period. Therefore, your quality of life--and the health of your society--depends on the quality of your primal health system.²⁰

The bottom line is that civilization requires a critical mass of peaceful, intelligent, healthy, sociable, good-humored people to make it happen. The babies that come into families are the future population of the world and those surrounded with love will likely be the harbingers of a great society.²¹ I can’t think of any other place where civilized people could come from.²²

4.3 Warnings and Conclusions

Violence and pain are not a secret back door entrance to civilization.
Cutting off foreskins and mutilating erotic organs is violence, not a health policy.
Delusions of parents and birth professionals will not advance human rights or human life.
Civilization is not a place, institution, army, or shopping mall; it’s a way of being human.
Basic skills, values, and principles of civilization are learned in loving families.
It may be the scariest theory yet, but without loving parents, we may never achieve a true civilization.