In the Huxley/Wordsworth cage-fight smackdown, I am rooting for Aldous*
I am getting mightily irked at keeping coming across reviews of, or extracts from, that book bewailing the fact that children no longer have contact with NAYCHUR, that healing nurse...
And I'm, like, how many of them, outside your carefully cherry-picked hunter-gatherer cultures (which are not, you know, outside time and historical processes, srsly) ever did have time to roam freely on Mother Nature's Healing Bosom?
Unless, of course, the parents regarded having the occasional offspring eaten by bears or other predators, bitten by a snake, trampled by bad-tempered heavy herbivores, ingesting toxic plant matter, or drowning, as After Nature's Way. Or at the very least coming back covered with bites and stings and the odd broken limb was No Big Deal.
Nature: really not that kind and nurturing, rly.
Plus, maybe it's different in hunter-gatherer economies and maybe the kiddies are not sent out with their own wee digging sticks and carry-sacks, but in trad ag societies the little ones are usually put to work pretty early on, scaring birds from crops, watching the herds, etc etc.
Will concede that this probably required some grasp of NATURE, if only so that they scared away the birds that were after the seeds and not the ones that ate insect parasites, and so they could stop the sheep eating toxic herbs and turning up their hooves, or cows eating smelly herbs that tainted the milk, and so forth.
I'm deeply suspicious of that idea of free-form undisciplined childhood. I think it is in one of Margaret Mead's books, not the Samoa one, possibly the New Guinea one, where she remarks that the tiny tots of the ?Manu people learnt very, very quickly how to not fall into the water from the houses built up on stilts over it and not to mess about in boats.
And let's just not mention the Industrial Revolution.
Maybe it's just me, but I find this kind of nostalgic pastoral bucolic vision deeply suspect, not to mention ahistorical.
I didn't like its nineteenth century manifestations much either, I'm looking at you, William Morris, and News from Nowhere, not that that was a unique phenomenon.
*While there are a lot of problems with Aldous, who does his own whingeing about Evils of Modern Life, mechanisation, etc etc, he did usefully point out ('Wordsworth in the Tropics') that the beneficence of Nature was very dependent upon where you were observing it from.
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