ARC Research Links
Mary Harrington on soul and singularity; Louise Perry on child care; Erica Komisar on same; Colin Brazier on the value of siblings
Mary Harrington points to her essay for ARC Research. I had never heard of this organization before. It seems to have on board all the usual suspects of right-leaning public intellectuals. I’m guessing it is funded by investment banker types who long to convert their wealth into cultural power. Probably harmless. Here, I excerpt a few research papers from this list.
A central powerhouse for the multi-billion-dollar digital economy that emerges from this ferment of online self-creation is the capture and technologisation of thumos, the yearning for recognition. This arises from the way the digital revolution de-materialises our social identities. For in practice, it is not enough to just say I am something; to feel real and true, my claim requires the assent of those around me. In the bodiless world of the internet, this feels relatively easy to achieve. As it becomes easier to create such virtual identities, based supposedly on pure “identification”, so too it becomes easier to curate an online social group based not on accommodation with those in my physical proximity, such as family or neighbours, but rather with those selected based on interests or affinities. In other words, I can “find my people” anywhere in the world, and associate exclusively with them, while dismissing those in my immediate environment as secondary. I can then receive the recognition I crave, for the dematerialised “identity” I have crafted myself, from a de-materialised social group that has no reason not to grant that recognition.
In the intimate world of our friends, family, and co-workers, we are recognized by others in a stable way. In the remote world that we experience on screens, recognition is evanescent and variable. Having multiple personalities, which is abnormal in the intimate world, can be perfectly reasonable on line.
She argues that we have deadened our souls, losing our true desires and our true selves. With artificial intelligence, will we lose our capacity to think?
Dead sexuality parasitises on reproductivity: phenomena such as pornography and hookup culture map onto falling rates of family formation. Dead identity politics parasitises on our capacity to form ourselves in relationship with (and service to) those around us, crippling our capacity to function as polities and social groups. And following a similar logic, we can predict that dead thinking—that is to say, the kind of probabilistic calculation based on datasets, weightings, and prompts—will parasitise on our capacity to comprehend our own world, and beyond this, to understand what distinguishes mechanical pattern recognition and the human capacity for comprehension.
She says that our salvation can come from
our willingness to insist on a conceptual distinction between that something—the soul—and those soul simulacra we are able to engineer.
Louise Perry, Fiona Mackenzie, and Ellen Pasternack write,
In many OECD countries, children below school age now typically have some degree of official entitlement to publicly funded formal childcare, either for free or at a significantly below-market price. Typically, these schemes are described as a way to enable mothers of small children to return to their jobs, and also to provide educational benefits to children. However, there is typically little or no support for informal childcare arrangements, or for parents looking after their own children. Though policymakers recognise the impossibility of parents being in two places at once, they do not extend this recognition to the value that parents provide by raising and caring for their children.
Parents can choose how much to outsource care for their children. The authors argue that government policy is too heavily tilted toward subsidizing outsourcing.
I am not sure that this is clearly the case, if you take the income tax into account. Suppose as a parent you earn $60,000 and pay $30,000 for child care services. If you pay $15,000 in income tax, then on net you only get $15,000 from working rather than staying home to care for your children.
I think that the reason that child care seems like such a burden is that modern society has broken up the traditional support system. As the authors write,
as nations have modernised, the structures that once made up a “village” of caregivers have dissolved. As birth rates decline, people have fewer relatives. Increased mobility as people move to study and work means that not only do people live further away from family members, but they also have less of a sense of rootedness where they live. Our neighbourhoods are no longer a permanent community, but rather a temporary stopping place. And in the fast-paced modern lifestyle, people have little time and flexibility to be part of these networks of care that are still so important.
Not to mention that we have many more single-parent households.
I do not believe that there was ever a time when children typically had the full-time attention of their parents all day long. You put the littlest ones in playpens, until they were agile enough to escape. Older ones played with the neighbors’ kids.
Until quite recently, household chores took a lot of time. Mothers who could afford servants to cook and clean also handed over child care duties to hired help, which to me says that they preferred other activities to child care.
I think that parents enjoy time with their children only up to a point. Historically, there were other people around to help.
As I have mentioned before, in our neighborhood, almost every household had children. Older children in the neighborhood would babysit. Other parents helped with carpools. When one of our kids needed to go to the doctor, a neighbor could watch our other kids. The informal support in that kind of neighborhood used to be common. Today it is rare.
The first three years of life are the critical period for right brain development. During this crucial period, the environment—meaning the family, but particularly the mother or primary caregiver/attachment figure—plays an essential and irreplaceable role. John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, defines a primary attachment figure as the person who is with that child the majority of the day and soothes them from moment to moment, buffering them from stress. This attachment figure is ideally the mother, but can be the father, grandparents, or others with strong kinship bonds. A person outside the family can also be a primary attachment figure, as long as they are a constant and consistent presence during this time. The primary attachment figure’s sensitive and empathic presence, both physically and emotionally, is necessary for the right brain to develop in a healthy way.
Again, I think she is exaggerating. Historically, I think that children have typically enjoyed a stable emotional environment, but I would not make it sound like mommy was focused on Junior all day.
The number of single-child families has almost doubled in a generation. In the European Union, 49% of families with children have one child. In Canada, the figure stands at 45%, while in the United Kingdom, 40% of married couples have only one child.
He cites research that indicates that siblings help children develop social skills.
In January 2013, the journal Science published a study which sought to show that China’s one-child policy was backfiring by producing a generation of under-socialised children. These sibling-free children grew up to be adults who were, as the press release announcing the findings put it, “Significantly less trustng, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic and less conscientious…
One of the most widely known came from Ohio State University at the turn of the Millennium. It assessed the impact of sibship on 20,000 children, and did so by collating information related to them as well as speaking with their teachers and parents. The authors of the study claimed to have established: “…a compelling case for the position that children hone social and interpersonal skills through sibling interactions at home, and that these skills then become useful outside the home.”
I was an only child. After I was born, my mother was precluded from having more children. I definitely had major social deficits, but I don’t think that younger siblings would have helped. An older brother or sister could have helped me a great deal with navigating high school and beyond.
substacks referenced above: @
Your analysis of historical childcare patterns offers a refreshing corrective to our often romanticised view of the past. When examining traditional child-rearing practices, it becomes clear that the "full-time parent" model was never the predominant reality. Rather, children developed within rich social ecosystems that naturally distributed care responsibilities across extended families, neighbours, and communities.
I particularly value your observation about how modern debates around childcare subsidies often miss this historical context. The challenge we face isn't necessarily about choosing between parental and professional care, but rather about the dissolution of those organic support networks that once made childcare more manageable and enriching for all involved.
Your personal reflection as an only child also adds meaningful nuance to the discussion about siblings and socialisation. While research suggests certain advantages to having siblings, your point about the potential impact of an older sibling highlights how the timing and quality of social interactions might matter more than simply having brothers or sisters. Perhaps what we should focus on is creating environments that foster meaningful peer relationships, regardless of family size.
Regarding Harrington's concerns about digital identity fragmentation, your measured scepticism seems warranted. Humans have always maintained different social personas across various contexts. The distinctive feature of our digital age isn't necessarily the multiplicity of identities, but rather their unprecedented scale and disconnection from geographic constraints.
The most compelling aspect of your analysis is how it shifts our attention from idealising past arrangements to understanding their practical functions. This suggests that rather than attempting to recreate historical family structures exactly, we might better serve contemporary families by finding modern ways to rebuild the community connections and support systems that made traditional arrangements effective.
For anyone else wondering, ARC is Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.