Well, not the last refuge, given that our entire society, and most specifically economy, is liberally greased with the stuff, as a look at any advert (1) will show you. After all, we live in a society where the amount of money you stand to make would seem to be inversely proportional to the actual need society might have for your services (2). We live in a mediocracy of middlemen.

 

But my current gripe is to do with books written to help parents of newborn babies. Now, as some people will know, I’ve recently begot, and thereby come into possession of a progeny, but I’m not going to clutter this blog with lots of baby stuff. Other peoples’ baby photos and stories were never recommended reading for me, and so I won’t foist mine on others, but…

 

This is about writing, of a type, and therefore on-message.

 

There are a lot of books out there for the starter parent, and they tend to get a section to themselves, so it’s not immediately apparent that they are self-help books. Now, from my casual experience of them, the “self” in the term “self-help” generally refers to the author, and the way they are helping themselves is getting needy and desperate people to pay for their books full of pseudoscientific babble. A sociology degree is a terrible thing to go to waste, or maybe there is no reasonable way to actually make use of one other than quacksalving, but apparently it qualifies people to churn out densely turgid and/or entirely opaque prose on any subject they decide to proclaim themselves an expert on (5).

But… babies, that’s medical, surely. Surely books on bringing up babies must be imparting decades of carefully calibrated research on this most essentially human activity. Surely, one might think, we’ve got it down now.

 

Hah, you’d think. But buy any two books, and get two opinions, opinions which only share two common pieces of ground:

(a)    – They are mutually contradictory

(b)   – They are passed on to the reader with a cast-iron ex cathedra certainty.

 

For example, and this is just one of innumerable examples, on the subject of what to do with a baby that cries when it’s supposed to be sleeping (7):

(a)    You should always go to your baby and pick it up, reassure it, talk to it, or it will be needier later on, cry more, and generally make you miserable.

(b)   You should leave your baby to cry itself out and go to sleep so that it observes a routine, or it will be needier later on, cry more, and generally make you miserable.

 

From the above, it’s clear that the writers are aiming their books very much at the parents’ concern for their own comfort, rather than what is actually better for the child, but both authors will apparently fight to the death on the basis that their beliefs are God’s Own Truth, and all others are a heresy to be exterminated by inquisition and the stake. The reader is left looking at these two opposing camps and thinking, “Don’t they know?” After all, this is a scientific question in the 21st century, not some matter of orthodoxy during the Thirty Years War, but no, apparently, we do not, or at least, if one of the baby gurus does, then there’s no way of distinguishing the savant from the idiots.

 

I give you another example. Colic. Colic, for those who are fortunate, oh so truly fortunate, not to know, is something that makes babies cry “inconsolably” for long periods of time, over a long period of time – over 20% of babies crying from 3–24 hours a day over a span of 3 weeks to 3 months. This must have wrecked a few lives in its time, I’d have thought, fathered a few psychoses. Surely we know, if not how to alleviate colic, at least what causes it?

We don’t. Can you believe that? We don’t actually know what causes this blight on humanity. One book happily tells me that colic may or may not be caused by sensory overload, overfeeding, smoky environments, parental tension (8), underdeveloped digestive system, underfeeding or Saturn being in the fifth House in trine. Okay, so I made that last one up, but aside from that, it’s all there. How can we not know?

 

But the answer is simple, really. Of course we don’t know. We do not live, we have never lived, in a society where one experiments freely on babies. There aren’t the spare babies to go about bringing them up in varying ways and chucking them out if you get it wrong. A scientific experiment must be conducted with as large a pool of subjects as possible in rigorous conditions, with a control group that, one assumes, are just left to fend for themselves or be brought up by wolves. Wolves, of course, need no self-help books. Knowing how to bring up children seems to be something we lost with the tail and the all-over body hair. We know more about what the Romans ate than about the post-natal development of our own offspring.

 

So we don’t know, nor are we ever liable to find out, unless the Nazis (9) get in, or some other totalitarian régime with a bent for science and no care at all for human life. One might as well follow the principles of "Psycho-babycraft" set out in Sellar and Yeatman's And Now All This ("Hushabye baby (hush quite a lot) / Bad babies get rabies (and have to be shot)"). 

I can reconcile myself to the appalling ignorance that our species wallows in on the subject. What gets me is that there are people out there claiming that they have knowledge, in the same way that some lunatic cult-leader will promise you salvation if you live a life of poverty and send all your money to his millionaire’s mansion. Snake oil, promising to cure your ills, delivering absolutely nothing except, perhaps, baffling you with pseudoscience for such a time until your child, entirely of its own natural accord, sorts its life out. Meanwhile, the baby gurus drive their expensive cars and look out of their tinted windscreens on the world with the inexpressible benevolence of people who have “helped”.

 

(1)   Except for the advertising for my book, which will be absolutely true, unless it’s unflattering.

(2)   Similarly, save for authors of fantasy fiction, whose work is a lot more necessary than you might think. Just between you and me, if we stopped writing, the whole universe would cease to exist. It’s like the old mediaeval idea about the world being constantly imagined and maintained by the mind of God, only cadres of fantasy authors take it in turns to keep things moving. I swear to you, only last year Stephen Donaldson suffered a momentary lapse of concentration and one of the US states was completely erased from the timeline (3).

(3)   That’s right, that’s why there are only 50 now. (4)

(4)   They joke about Americans having a poor grasp of the geography of the rest of world, but to make this joke work I did have to double-check how many of the damn things there actually were.

(5)   Caveat: I have a psychology degree, which I would defend against the world as something entirely different to a sociology degree, much as the bonobo in the zoo would sneer at the lowly chimp. There is a strict hierarchy of contempt in the social sciences, and psychology gets bragging rights over sociology every time (6).

(6)   Or at least psychologists will tell you so.

(7)   Supposed to be sleeping in the point of view of the parents. The baby obviously has different ideas.

(8)   Frankly, this suggestion is, pardon my language, just taking the piss. If it were true it would engender such a positive feedback loop that the baby would eventually explode.

(9)   As well as capitalising “Gandalf” (see previous entry) Microsoft Word also insists on an upper-case ‘N’ for Nazi, which whilst entirely correct, feels very Orwellian. I’d change it back to lower case out of spite, save that I have an uneasy suspicion my computer would report the action to Bill Gates.