There are two major groups of baby birds: altricial and precocial. Precocial birds, like many domestic fowl, hatch and walk off, looking for “someone” to follow — hopefully a parent rather than a passing cow, though attaching to humans is always amusing.
All songbirds are altricial, meaning they are hairless, noisy, and scream for food, rather like humans. They have larger brains in order to compose music, a precursor of language.
The variation in mammals comes basically from the necessity of nursing with milk and physical care like cleaning. Some babies can set off on foot right away but sticking close to mom; others need to stay in the nest, though it may be a psychological one embodied by the arms of the caretaker. Babies who do not attach to their caretakers will perish.
During the first three past-womb years, they learn to walk and talk. Inside their heads they are forming a tangle as filamental, opportunistic and wedged together as a twig-type nest, but it is made of neurons, the axons of nerve cells plugging together to form a map of their world. This tells them what to pursue and gobble and what they should run from. In shorthand, it is the genome building the connectome from sensing the environment.
When they can move themselves, babies learn to “run for your life” in two-fold ways (run to caregiver for safety or escape for safety). If the caretaker or the escape route are not safe or are missing, that might mean death. We’ve seen the toddlers who venture away from their moms, then panic and rush back to mom. We’ve seen vids of fox cubs who see danger and bolt down the burrow. These behaviors are instinctive and built into mammals. The related adventures design the connectome.
“The Politics of Attachment: Lines of Flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari” is about these stories. You can find it on Academia.edu if you wish the fine-tuned version with a political slant, which is that some will argue this means mothers should stay home and raise children: this material is ammunition. My political angle is different: pointing out the destruction and distortion of children wrenched from their caretakers, esp. mothers with the biological and genetic connection of birth.
I’m not just talking about the atrocity of seizing children in order to deter immigrants, but also about the many modern forces that remove the mother and destroy the nest. I include the upending of families governed by fertility ethics; drugs including alcohol that smash behavior; monetary pressure that requires moms to work and housing to be unreliable; and the media distractions like TV, the Internet, and pocket communicators.
All of these factors destroy and distort attachment. Damaged attachment function (biological as well as psychological) creates a sort of person who can’t see reality, who has few resources and limited energy, who can’t think of options or be creative.
One set of thinkers identifies four “kinds of attachment.”
- secure.
- anxious-preoccupied.
- dismissive-avoidant.
- fearful-avoidant.
Some identify a fifth category that might be called “intermittent” or “disorganized/disoriented.”
We idealize the “secure” attachment children as becoming confident adults who are effective in the world. This was ideal when most people lived by agriculture or in small towns. Certainly the most secure babies are those in cultures where they are carried on their mother’s backs. But there are cultures where this is dangerous.
Bob Scriver used to say that when one was driving and suddenly came upon “white” children, they would stay in a group. You either avoided them all or hit all of them. But “indian” children would scatter. Most would survive or maybe one or two could not be avoided. One can see this in younglings in wildlife movies.
If you pull into a yard with children who are not secure, you may not see any children because they will be watching you from the brush. Flight away from danger has been learned. Secure children will run to the intruder to see who they are.
The nature of the citizenry will depend upon the majority attachment styles learned according to the social stratus of their group, the economic and crime status of the neighborhood, and the capacity of the progenitors. The result will not be theoretical, but actual — really happening. A remapping of the genome/connectome.
Some families will sort children, allowing some of them steady attachment and protection — either boys treated as primary or girls accepted as motherly or glamorous —which has consequences. Birth order matters. Twins matter. Prettiness matters. Extended family support matters. All this is the material for biography or maybe autobiography, which are about individuals.
But when there are aggregates of styles or circumstances of attachment in great enough numbers as in war or depression or famine, these become the material of culture and culture change. Wise polities take these into account when developing child care systems, and look out for the interest of those with hostile caregivers. Deleuze calls the result “living forms” arising from within the people.
Guattari says something similar about the adolescent who must now add sex to attachment. These thinkers are almost unbearably multisyllabic, for instance: “to liberate a new abstract machine that will be manifested in the most diverse registers: redirection of perceptive codes, folding of the self and/or poetic, cosmic, social exteriorization, etc. But this release mechanism in reality has nothing unilateral about it because other “external” semiotic components could accelerate, inhibit or re-orient the effects of the biological and seminotic components of puberty.”
It’s enough to make anyone go hide in their mother’s basement (burrow). But D and G are always looking at the big picture and the possibility that some exterior force — war, climate change, earthquake, tsunami — may not allow the possibility of flight to anywhere because the whole landscape is changed to much to find either the anchor person or place. Survival offers only risk and death. Pandemic is one of those exterior forces.
This passage deserves to be high-lighted: “You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it.”
The thinkers are speaking to healers, saviors, leaders. But some circumstances will remove all of them. Then what? We can only draw on what has gone before and how it has already shaped us. We need to do that now.
I want to end on a positive note. When the Big Flood came through the rez and killed many, a huge cottonwood on Merle Magee’s river bottom ranch was uprooted and crashed sideways into his floating house. A nest of robins went with it. After the storm the sturdy nest had survived on its branch. The parents had also survived and continued to bring food to the babies who grew to maturity as always.
Did you note the little owl who attached to the Christmas tree? The one named for a millionaire?
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