With new-age machines, parental control weakens

The apprehension that the world is fast becoming a colony of machines has been in the offing for at least a couple of centuries. By now, our world is so saturated with machines that we have stopped thinking about it.

We are resigned to ‘living with’ machines and, if we are smart enough, to ‘adjust to them’. Four decades ago, when I was learning to drive, I used to wonder what this ‘training’ was doing to me. Slowly I realised that I was learning to adjust myself to the machine. In course of time, I learned the important truth: no machine adjusts to us. We adjust to them.

It took me years still to realise that by virtue of adjusting myself to machines, I incurred the risk of becoming machine-like. This worried me, especially because I knew from a nodding acquaintance with the works of the French Philosopher Henri Bergson, that the greatest insult to human dignity was approximating oneself to machines. Or, the organic reinventing itself as the mechanical. I came across several instances of this in the novels of Dickens.

Along the eventful journey of our species on the highway of progress, we fell in love with machines. I have vague memories of almost the whole of my village flocking to see the first automobile that entered it. Several years later, the railway tracks were laid and, one day, a smoke-bellowing, shrilly whistling, earth-shaking monster thundered in, sending a cold shiver up my spine. It tore through something deep within and left an impression that still sparkles in the twilight of my distant memories.

In the past 20 years or so, we have had several episodes of affluent children driving inebriated and mowing down pedestrians and pavement dwellers in their obscenely expensive, monstrously powerful cars (I still do not know, why almost all of them had to be BMWs), leaving behind mangled bodies and broken limbs.

Of late, we have been hearing of licence-less, under-age children being allowed, even encouraged, by their fathers to drive on public thoroughfares in a fizz of neo-rich vanity and, some of these criminal adventures resulting in fatal accidents. It is difficult to believe that parents in these instances were unaware of the terrible consequences of what they were allowing or encouraging. For them, a sliver of personal vanity mattered more than the life of fellow human beings.

That is, perhaps, understandable, even if unacceptable. What is simply incomprehensible is the indifference of parents to what such things entail for their children and for themselves. In the recent decades, two trends have progressed side by side. First, children’s toys have become increasingly mechanised and automated. As a part of it, even sophisticated devices like iPads and iPhones have become toys in the hands of children upwards of the middle class. Second, parental control over children has weakened and, significantly, the age at which children become ‘autonomous’ from their parents has come down.

It is high time we asked, “Why do parents lose the ‘war of will’ with their children so early and so utterly?” What is the role they play in ensuring their own painful defeat? Most parents are keen to be indulgent, but unwilling to be wise. Wisdom demands that we think long-term, and mind the implications, immediate and distant, of the steps we take. By exposing children to a host of mechanised toys – by “peopling” their world with machines in the guise of toys – parents are, unwittingly, inducing their children to become machine-like.
 
Wise parenting

The hallmark of a machine is that it is insensitive to humans and incapable of social sense. We can adjust to machines, but not expect any machine to adjust to us. The “inflexibility” of children that break parental hearts in due course is what parents themselves foster – albeit unawares and unwittingly – in their children. The difference between tools and machines is crucial for wise parenting today. Tools remain servants of man. Man will always remain servant, not master, of machines.
If you ride a horse, you can control it with bit-and-bridle. To ride a horse properly, you have to know your horse; but you don’t have to be horse-like. When you drive an old, ponderous, rickety Ambassador car, you are still in some control. But when you get into a BMW or a swanky sports car or a monstrously powerful gas guzzler, the equation changes at once.
You are no longer driving a car; you are driving a BMW. You abandon yourself to the machine. You become that splendid machine. The distinction between the man and the machine ceases to matter. The only relevant thing about a machine is that it performs! So, performance becomes the end-in-itself. Performance becomes the purpose. This settles the old priority debate between ‘means and ends’ in favour, firmly, of ‘means’.
Now comes the sting in the tail.  This autonomy of ‘means,’ shapes human outlook. For a young boy or girl, brought up in such a way, parents are no more than ‘means,’ or tools. It is intrinsic to tools in use that they suffer ‘wear and tear’. As a rule, worn out tools are put away without a thought. When it happens to a human being, it hurts deep. But, by the time the hurt begins to be felt, it is already too late.  
But it had begun years ago, when you stuffed your child with state-of-the-art toys or thrust a swanky car into his impetuous hands; when you, with the best of intentions, surrounded your child with machines and chose to raise him machine-like.
Describing the contemporary human predicament, T S Eliot writes, “The human engine, like a taxi, throbbing, waiting...”  The human taxi begins to throb, alas, a trifle too late. By the time it does so, the dilapidated taxi is already at the gate of an old age home.
(The writer was principal, St Stephen’s College, Delhi)