Thanks to Enonomi for the “earliest memory” meme tag. T_W has made so many posts today, it seemed churlish to make him do this one. (Though that was before I saw that he had insulted my typo-fuelled grammar.:-p) All the ame, I admit I’ve been dodging the responsibility – following the pattern of a lifetime.

This is mainly because my earliest memories are really boring. I was a baby, ffs. There’s only so much you can say about it. It’s a bit like telling people about some great dream you had. You had to be there…

I played in our apartment. I played in the garden and the park. My dad took me riding on the cross-bar of his bike, sometimes to feed sugar cubes to a terrifyingly huge and friendly horse. I can remember the environment in great detail but I can’t remember anyone’s faces. (I was a self-absorbed child)

I got a sister the day after my second birthday. I was pleased, assuming this was like a birthday present, a new doll that did stuff. Disappointingly, the stuff turned out to be crying and sleeping. I got used to ignoring her.

A professional photographer came, when my sister was a few months old. She cried nonstop and tried to crawl under the table. The photographer was sent away. I was ready to kill her. I wanted my picture taken and it seemed unjust to me that her wailing could stop me getting photographed. Even worse, they had made me wear a hideous cardigan that my grandmother had knitted. It seemed doubly unjust that, even though I’d made the massive sacrifice of agreeing to wear the ugly cardigan, I still wasn’t getting photographed. (I was a very vain child.)

A few months after my sister was born, we moved to a house. Joy! The phone was in a spare room, away from adult attention. I spent most of my unobserved time on it, cold-calling random numbers, chatting (expensively) for hours with anyone who answered. Until one woman demanded to speak to my mother and I was banned from the room with the phone.

I was three years and 3 months old. My mother was 7 months pregnant. She was moving a piano and it fell on her. (Aside. A baby grand piano, ffs? Where did it come from? Nobody played it. My mother sometimes claimed she could but she never tried to. Although, a year or so later, she did involve it when she practised kicking her own height -with me standing on the piano stool, holding my hand out at to mark her height and protesting constantly at the embarrassing stupidity of the enterprise. Until she accidentally kicked me in the head. I was knocked to the floor. saw stars. After which, I refused to play any more part in this demented practice.)

Trapped under the piano and forced into labour by its weight, my mother sent me to the phone to call the emergency ambulance. Somehow, I managed it. I can remember being furious at the injustice. “They won’t let me use the phone when I want to, but they expect me to use the phone whenever it suits them!” (As I said, I was a self-absorbed child.)

My father was stuck with two babies for a few weeks, while my mother and newly-emerged brother were in hospital. Every day, my dad felt obliged to come up with some new amusement. He took us to the circus (I loved every second, except for the frighteningly unfunny clowns), to the theatre, to the mountains, to the beach. (It was December.) It was great. Bah, my mother and brother finally came home and everyday life became dull and circus-free again.

My parents arranged for another photographer to take a picture of all 3 kids. But I was really annoyed by the stupid hairstyle I had and there was no way I was willingly getting my picture taken with it. It was worse than the cardigan because it was part of ME. (No one listened to my explanations of why this hairstyle was unacceptable.) I sat in the garden with a pair of scissors and cut the fringe that I wanted. I still remember the random screaming when I was spotted…. Plus my own fury at the injustice of my parents thinking that there could be anything dangerous in me cutting away hair that fell across my eyes. (The unfairness! As if I don’t know what I am doing! They treat me like a baby!)

They were being so irrational. Hair dragged back straight back from the forehead was patently ugly. No one would acknowledge this, despite my best efforts to educate them. I wanted a fringe. Scissors cut hair. Ergo, I had to cut my own hair. That should have been self-evident. If only adults weren’t so irrational….

Even worse, my mother dragged me to a hairdresser’s to get the fringe cut straight. So, although she had had to give way on the fringe, as a result of my direct action, I ended up with a stupid fringe that didn’t fit the image I was aiming for at all. It was actually even worse than having no fringe. It was way too short! It was cut comically straight across. What a stupid thing to do. Were they mad? Were they deliberately making a laughing stock of me? I kicked off so vehemently that the photography session got postponed another couple of years. (Not just vain but self-willed.)

I played complex games with neighbourhood kids – all usually involving homemade and ineffective bows and arrows and twig swords, with a lot of sycamore tree climbing and/or hiding in bushes. Princesses and outlaws and swineherds and pirates and fairies and witches were all involved. I collected bits of wild plants, sometimes looking for ways to synthesise wierd poisons to hide inside apples, sometimes trying to prove the existence of four-leaf clovers and sometimes trying to work out how you could make perfume from flowers. I was always grazing my knees. I got several infected cuts and insect bites, which ended up in frequent visits to the emergency room.

I’ve posted this stuff, despite it being pretty boring to anyone except me, because (a) these really are my earliest memories (up to about four years old) and I somehow feel I should respond honestly to the meme if I agreed to do it and (b) because I think it disputes a lot of (even my) assumptions about toddlers.

There was a fair bit of stuff in the newspapers about research that showed that 6 month olds could tell “nice” and “nasty” apart. Set aside the fact that it doesn’t really show that anyway. It’s been variously puffed as “proof” either that morality is genetically innate or that it comes direct from God.

Research led by Kiley Hamlin, a graduate student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, shows that babies less than a year old can judge the niceness or nastiness of others, even when watching events that don’t directly affect them. The researchers made the discovery using nothing more high-tech than a simple puppet show.
After watching the show, the babies, aged either six months or ten months, instinctively preferred ‘nice’ characters over less helpful ones. This kind of skill may be useful in helping them learn the right values as their social awareness develops later in childhood.(from the report in Nature)

The problem with most of the pop science conclusions from this stuff is that it it often assumes that babies are blank slates. However, by the time a baby is old enough to look at activities and communicate any preference, it’s been studying us intensively for months. It’s learned pretty much how to live in our world. It’s already learned lots of things about us that we don’t acknowledge to ourselves. So, how can anyone draw conclusions about innateness from the responses of socialised beings?

In any case, just because babies prefer people they think won’t harm them, how can you conclude that they will later decide to follow the behaviour of the “nice” ones? As presented in nature, this seems a one-dimensional view of how we develop a moral sense.

Maybe morality is encoded in some part of the human genome. There is some interesting research on this, discussed in New Scientist in August.

It seems we are born with a sense of right and wrong, and that no amount of religious indoctrination will change our most basic moral instincts.(from New Scientist)

The research recently reported in Nature can contribute to this but it doesn’t bear the interpretative weight being heaped upon it.

Looking at my own earliest memories, I can see that they come from a time that I could speak, even though they are mostly non-verbal and triggered by how I felt. I would assume that the developed characteristics of a toddler who can speak probably aren’t much different from a baby who can’t. I can’t imagine any way of testing this idea.

These anecdotes express a “me” that I can recognise as an individual. I would even admit that they express aspects of me that remain pretty well unchanged, for good and ill: rage at perceived injustice, excessive concern with aesthetics – especially the aesthetics of how I appear, the capacity to interpret events mainly in terms of how they affect me, love of stories, even the obsession with using reason to reach conclusions combined with a total failure to understand why everybody else doesn’t always see things the same way.

If a baby sees someone doing something unpleasant, they avoid that person. That makes sense, as the person whom they saw might turn that nastiness on them. This response seems to come from a sense of self-preservation – an evolutionary imperative -rather than being a result of babies making “moral judgements”. (Although, granted, babies’ capacity to scream until their parents want to cut their heads off to stop their mouths making noise contradicts the self-preservation bit.)

Who to tag? This is one of those memes where people might prefer not to get tagged but might feel it’s bad blogtiquette to refuse. At the same time, other bloggers might have really good things to say and might feel slighted at not getting any tags. Apart from these considerations, I am too lazy to pick a few names and check they haven’t already been tagged or actually done it. I prefer to read any blogs that I might tag for pleasure rather than research purposes.

So, I’m going to do what the Exterminator did. He said:

If you haven’t been tagged already, and want to be, either consider yourself so, or send me an email and I’ll make the tag formal for the Atheosphere record books.(from nomorehornets blog)

Plagiarising good ideas is probably the way to go, so I’m just lifting this bit. Replace email with comment and apply it here.

I think I’ll be a bit more specific, as well, though. If you have some interesting first memory, definitely consider yourself tagged. I’ll put a link to any interesting responses I came across (I’ve already mentioned the Exterminator and enonomi. Their posts are good reads.) And if I think of any specific blogs I really want to tag with this and they haven’t already done it, I might add them to this post..