Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> 'Laws' that apply to a more public
> and/or collective realm become transformed in the nuclear family
> (including one-parent families). And incidentally there is also a
> difference between "slaps" (particularly the public, institutionalized
> slaps you describe but also even slaps [say in anger] and formal
> corporal punishment, more or less in cold blood -- on principle rather
> than on impulse.
This is the distinction between shame and guilt, or as Piers put it, between socially mediated id control in which the person responds to correction by the collective voice of the community (usually a small, more or less pre-modern one), and the more modern type of socially mediated id control in which the person responds to the personality of the internalized parent. Or, to paraphrase Piers further, this is the distinction between the person submitting to the ego ideal and the person submitting to the superego -- shame as opposed to guilt. The public slap is a token of putting the person to shame for a transgression. The " slaps [say in anger] and formal corporal punishment, more or less in cold blood," (Carrol is quite wonderfully eloquent here.), are practically calculated to generate a harsh, punishing, authoritarian superego.
Hence,
>
> The latter kind do I suspect contribute to the punitive atmosphere which
> permeates U.S. life; it naturalizes as it were the idea that if
> something is wrong, punish someone for it, like dropping all those bombs
> on Serbia for excample, or starving a few million Iraqi.
>
> No direct causation is claimed here, but just the total framework within
> which all evils are individualized. In this country public punishment of
> a child is usually not really in response to the child's act but in
> response to the expectations of others: the need to keep up face as a
> parent.
>
This " need to keep up face as a parent" is another key issue. The development of the political economy over the past century has changed parenthood away from the late bourgeois ideal of the nineteenth century, and weakened it in ways that all kinds of political and cultural movements respond to. (One of Horkheimer's best essays is about this, at the stage it had reached in Germany seventy years ago.).
Among of the responses are the efforts to address problems of child abuse. I am the first to criticize many aspects of the way they function. Some are sentimental evocations of the innocence of childhood, for example, which echo a bourgeois theme. And the child protective system is clumsy and often unthinking. A sounder approach would involve more systematic parent education with much more extensive social welfare support for the individual child and adult, as exists in the more universalistic welfare states. Even so, the child protective system is better than nothing.
This is indeed the problem with legitimizing corporal punishment.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema