NPO: What Does Newtown Teach Us About Fatherhood? Last Year's Lesson Re-Learned

Good article, worth reading.

Re the elephants analogy, I think it's pretty apt. The effects of a lack of the bull elephants in a group of female and non-adult elephants has been observed and the they are starting and scary indeed. It's hard to mind-read any creature, least of all humans or other substantially intelligent beings such as elephants, dolphins, non-human primates, etc, but behaviors are observable.

I don't know but suspect that with both elephants and humans, the effects of fatherlessness on the non-adults are two-fold, principally, with each being really bad. First is insecurity: for right or wrong, many species, incl. humans and elephants, have an innate expectation that adult males will act as protectors both from internal and external threats of harm, discipliners/punishers to those doing things threatening or socially unacceptable to others within or outside the social group (and without group sanction), and as guides to the dangers of things outside the 'home'. I wish this were not the case; if this was just learned expectation as feminists and others assert, we could simply unlearn it. But time and again, I see this tendency to remain. I believe it comes from hard-wiring in our (and the elephants') brains that has resulted from countless millenia of experience in our species and the species from which humans evolved. Humans have lived w/ expedient gender roles for far longer than modernity has allowed us to forego them. So our choices and POVs are different today, but our emotional and subconscious systems remain largely unaltered by the mere few thousand years of modernity and the even shorter 100-150 years of feminist activism.

A lack of adult males in a population, then, leads predictably to a sense of insecurity in non-adults and later, in the adults they become. It may or may not manifest explicitly as feelings of chronic or intermittent anxiety but possibly also as low self-esteem, etc. Or, it may be contributory to these along with other things. But it's hard to deny it's a real phenomenon. Feelings of anxiety, conscious or not, often lead to attempts to alleviate or compensate for them. Humans may choose a lot of unconstructive or self- or other-damaging ways to pursue these attempts to alleviate such feelings (e.g.: drug/alcohol abuse, anti-social behaviors meant to generate a sense of personal power or to dispel anxiety or be desensitized from it somehow, etc). No reason to think elephants are any different if they are as intelligent as they are and if like us, they've been around a long time. So add the lack of discipline the bulls would supply to the calves via example and punishment for the elephant calf version of naughtiness (translation: "moral guidance") before they reach adolescence to the anxiety the calves have due to the absence of the bulls to the onset of strong sexual urges the male adolescent elephants get, and it's a recipe for disaster.

But I speculate that the bulls don't just keep the calves and adolescent males "in line" from a disciplinary POV; they also chase away the anxiety any child (calf) naturally feels about the ominousness of the world. Toward showing some further evidence of hard-wired anxiety-provoking fears in children, consider the common nightmares reported by parents that their kids have. Many involve animals, particularly wolves, trying to "get" them. All one need do to trigger such nightmares in many kids is to let the child know such an animal exists; no zoo visit required. Just say it's not unlike the family dog, but it lives out in forests, may be bigger than the dog, etc. and hunts for food, like other animals. Nothing further need be said. The child is naturally scared of this creature and arguably, that's a good thing. (Both kids and adults need to be able to feel fear to steer them from dangerous situations. Fear is only a problem if it's "irrational", i.e., is not serving that purpose well.) Note the vast majority of kids have no fear from day 1 of the family dog or cat. Learning about other carnivores also triggers no nightmares. Bears, for instance, seem far more intimidating, but kids usually have no nightmares involving them. Humans and wolves however have represented a very significant mutual threat for many 10s of 1,000s of years. Wolves immediately act with hostility when they spot a human, and humans are immediately on "red alert" when they see wolves. But other wild animals? Oftentimes, not. There's a reason for this and I think it's to save both humans and wolves the trouble, we've both evolved to immediately see one another as dangerous, to be afraid of one another, and to act like it. While dogs are descendents of wolves, they are not wolves, and humans and dogs have likewise been together for so long that it's a truism that a new baby's first friend after leaving the hospital will be the family dog. And the dog will know two things right away: what this small new creature is and to look out for it at all costs. That can't be taught; it's wired in.

As for cats? Well, humans and cats haven't been together nearly as long but when they were domesticated just a few thousand years ago, one of the principle domesticating civilizations (Egypt) eventually had them made for gods. Cats seem somehow never to have forgotten this and by the way many of us accommodate their insistence upon sleeping in the dead center of our beds, neither have we.