Dorothy Rowe

Why aren't Australian parents besieging John Howard, demanding that he make the future safe for their children?

 Feeding the Rhino

By 2050 human influences on the climate will have surpassed all natural influences. In other words, there will be no more climatic 'acts of God', only human-made climate disasters.

Tim Flannery The Weather Makers.

The Western Plains Zoo offers visitors two rare treats. They can stay overnight in a tent (a remarkably comfortable tent) and early the next morning they can go on a tour of the zoo and feed some of the animals. When I was on the tour the first animals we fed were the giraffes, gentle animals which gravely inspected the human being who was holding up a carrot and then lowered their heads over the wire fence enclosure. Out came a long, sinuous grey tongue that neatly wound itself around the carrot, drawing it deftly into its mouth. The children in our group, in varying degrees of fearful enthusiasm, held up carrots which were taken by the giraffes. As I fed the giraffes I was aware that behind me was much clicking of cameras, but it wasn't until we moved on to feed the rhino that I became aware of the ritual of the parents photographing their children.

The rhino was behind an extremely sturdy fence. To be fed with a leafy branch he could put his mouth close to the lowest rung or the middle rung of the fence, but the keeper warned us that we should offer him a branch only when his mouth was above the middle rung. If he took a branch offered at the lower level he could bring his head up sharply and his thick, fierce horn might then injure an outstretched arm. We should wait until his head was above the middle rung and then offer the branch by placing it across his mouth. In this position he could take the middle of the branch into his mouth, chomp on it, and finally draw the extremes of the branch into his mouth by chewing vigorously. A careless hand might also be chomped if it strayed too close.

It was an extraordinary experience to be so near to such a wild animal. I assumed that each of the children would have been awed by the experience as I was, but I was wrong. The children ranged in age from about six to thirteen. In turn, they accepted a branch from the keeper, offered it to the rhino in more or less the position that the keeper had demonstrated, but, instead of watching the rhino take the branch and chew it with such serious intent, each child turned aside to face his parent and smiled for the camera. The click of the camera was the aim and the end of the event. The children didn't turn to look at the rhino again but walked away with their back to the beast. Feeding the rhino was a photo opportunity, not an extraordinary event to be experienced with intense awareness. The parents behaved just as the children had done, only this time it was the children who took the pictures.

Photographs have many purposes. These photographs were of the 'Look at me' variety - look at me feeding a rhino, standing in front of some scenic view, eating an ice cream, and so on. Whatever the activity, it was merely an adjunct to the person being photographed. The vital meaning was that the person was being observed. First the photographer and the camera do the observing, and then there are the people who look at the photograph - parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, friends, and the person himself who can examine the photograph in the hope that its existence confirms his own existence. 'Others see me and so I exist.'

The gaze of others does confirm our own existence. We all need other people to hold us in their sight. Whether we are young or old, being ignored can evoke the fear of non-existence. Our fear of being annihilated as a person is much greater than our fear of death. We can believe that when we die an important part of us will continue on, be it our soul or spirit, our children, our work, or other people's memories of us. Being annihilated as a person means that we disappear like a raindrop into the ocean, never to have existed. Hence we need other people to acknowledge us as being a person in our own right. However, we place ourselves in a perilous position if we decide that our existence depends solely on the gaze of others. Those whose gaze best confirms our existence can die or desert us, or their gaze become hostile or indifferent. Yet many people do place themselves in this perilous position. Some people cannot tolerate being on their own because they fear that isolation, however brief, means annihilation. Some people believe that they are incapable of judging the worth of what they do and who they are. They look to others to give their existence a value. Living like this, it is impossible to be happy. It is essential that we have within ourselves a means of confirming our own existence. Parents can help their children discover how to confirm their own existence but, alas, many parents fail to do this.

We have the ability to reflect upon our experience and then use these reflections to change how we live our life. However, we can use our self-reflections to divide ourselves in two, so that we become, in effect, a child-like, fearful self and a questioning, critical, often punitive observer. We acquire this way of existing when we're small children and learning to be good in the way our parents define good. Our parents teach us to self-reflect by concentrating on the message that we are, in essence, bad and have to work hard to be good. To please our parents we become good. If our parents want us to smile at the camera instead of paying attention to the rhino, we learn to smile at the camera. Our attempts to please our parents often fail, and, in the effort to improve, we take inside ourselves the critical parent who has the power to reward and punish. Our image of our parent becomes our internal observer and critic. We are now both the child who needs the parent's love but who can be rebellious and naughty, and the parent who praises and punishes. From then on we're constantly concerned with whether we deserve to be punished or rewarded. We cannot simply live.

Learning to be good requires us to focus on ourselves. We worry constantly about whether we're good enough in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. This way of living prevents us from enjoying the kind of experience which does confirm our own existence. In this experience we lose every trace of self-consciousness as we focus on something there in front of us in the present moment. These are the moments when we gaze upon the world in all its majesty and beauty and are consumed by awe and wonder. All self-consciousness with its concerns about the past and the future drops away, and we absorbed into the world around us. For a few moments feeding the rhino and the rhino feeding become our whole existence.

Children have no difficulty in creating this kind of experience. Indeed, they have to be taught to do otherwise. A newborn baby looks at the world with an intensity that absorbs his whole being. He has yet to learn where his body ends and the world begins. Toddlers focus on what the world offers them, examining it, exploring it. Babies and toddlers think, feel and act as one total experience. They experience themselves and the world but they don't know how to reflect upon that experience. Some parents teach their child self-reflection solely or mainly in terms of learning to be good: some parents teach self-reflection in terms of discovering and enlarging the meaning an experience had for the child.

As the child develops language parents can ask their child, 'What do you think of that?' By the time the child is old enough to feed a rhino the parents' questions can be quite detailed. Thus the parents can let the child be totally absorbed in the experience and later, when the child is ready to talk about the event, the parents can ask about the child's thoughts and feelings. They can ask, 'Did your curiosity overcome your fear?', or, 'How is it that we can become fascinated with an animal which is supremely ugly?' The parents can ask about what the child thinks the rhino was thinking. This discussion would probably begin with attributions of human awareness to the beast as the child assumes that the rhino saw him in the way that he saw the rhino. Through this discussion the parents can introduce the question of what animals actually see. Our perspectives on other people, usually from looking up at them or face to face, are quite different from that of the giraffe which looks down at us. Seen from above we appear quite different from the image we see in the mirror. We might be face to face with the rhino but he lacks the binocular vision which we enjoy. His eyes are on either side of him head and his big horn separates them further. When the rhino came close to the fence what did he actually see? Perhaps for the rhino it was not how people look that is important but how they smell. What must it be like to live in a world where you recognise things by their smell? In this way the children are able to discover that how extremely diverse the perceptions by individuals, both human and animal, actually are. Discovering this encourages children to reflect not only on their own experiences but on the experiences of others. They would discover that other people see things differently from us, not because they're mad or bad, but because their circumstances differ from ours. Not understanding this is the root cause of all our failures of communication and all our conflicts, be they conflicts between individuals or between groups of people. Had George Bush understood this he would not have expected that the Iraqis would welcome the American forces who came to occupy their country.

It is only when we experience the world with that intense sense of oneness with the world that the feeling of wonder and awe is engendered. It is an experience complete in itself. Nothing else is required. Many people do not understand this. They fear that such an experience will annihilate their fragile sense of self, and so they defend themselves against the emotions created by the experience by thanking their God for having made the world, or by considering how this event could be used for their personal gain. For those who know how important it is to be at one with the world, the fact that the world exists is enough. Alas, in learning to be good, many children are robbed of their capacity for wonder and awe, or, even if the capacity remains, they see it as a weakness. As adults they cannot understand why those of for whom the existence of the world is enough are so incensed that those who see the world only in terms of profit and loss are engaged in destroying it.

Our tragedy is that the parents who taught their children that they must turn away from the rhino and face the camera did not intend to deprive their children of the ability to understand themselves and others, nor of their sense of wonder. The parents taught their children to turn and face the camera, that is, look for confirmation of yourself as a good person in the eyes of others, because that is what their parents had taught them, and so on back through the generations. Thus the understanding of why we must preserve the conditions on this planet without which our species cannot survive was lost in the struggle to be seen as good in the eyes of others. However, it is possible for us to change. We can order our priorities and decided which is the more important, being confirmed as a good parent in other people's eyes or trying to create for our children a long, happy and secure life. The time to achieve the second is fast running out.

Dorothy Rowe

Sydney February 3, 2007.

Dorothy Rowe's latest book My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: The Making and Breaking of Sibling Bonds is published by Routledge and distributed in Australia by Palgrave Macmillan.