Discipline

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Introduction to Overthink

0:47Welcome to Overthink. The podcast that disciplines your mind by connecting big ideas to everyday life. I'm Ellie Anderson. And I'm David Peña Guzman. As always, for an ad-free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack. David, discipline gets a pretty bad rep these days. At least this has been the case, I would say, for a number of years, where there's been a lot of attention paid to the toxic elements of hustle culture,

1:17the grind, capitalist productivity, and so on. These have been a lot of the things we've talked about on Overthink over the years. And I think with this increasing attention to those toxic elements of the hustle and the grind, there has also been an implication of discipline as one of the culprits. This idea of discipline as basically policing people's behavior and forcing us into this capitalist mold. And in contrast, there's been a lot of attention recently to rest as an alternative to this hustle culture,

1:50letting go of self-judgment and just like taking a nap or bed rotting as something we're entitled to. From that perspective, right, discipline seems like one of the bad guys.

Parenting and Discipline

2:00I'm thinking, too, about parenting. Parenting has become far more permissive than in the past. We'll come back to that later. People are quiet quitting their jobs. Stereotypes of Gen Z in the workplace also suggest that young adults today can't handle any discipline whatsoever. So like the boomer bosses are like, these Gen Z employees won't even be held accountable in showing up. They're just like ghosting their jobs or showing up late, right, with their Starbucks or whatever.

2:31And I think especially with the pandemic, too, we had to lean into leniency. And that's now sort of where we find ourselves with an embrace of rest, of quitting, of being soft on ourselves, of being vulnerable. And along with that comes an association of discipline with harshness or even toxicity.

Resistance to Discipline

2:52Yeah, so this is from a different context where I see a similar movement happening. But I think we also see a resistance to discipline in the political sphere. We've never had a government that is so undisciplined in its approach to policymaking, in the way in which it communicates with the citizens. We can talk about an impulsive tweet that Trump will send and expecting it to be enforced as law. We can talk about this chaotic enforcement of laws with ICE.

3:23Think about this completely unregulated war of aggression against Iran. So we are seeing a political version of this resistance to discipline that is resulting in a kind of open embrace of the undisciplined with the second Trump administration. And, you know, of course, that's far more nefarious than the things that you were talking about. Maybe taking a nap is kind of fine in comparison to this concern about discipline that we see from politicians.

Parallel Rejection of Discipline

3:54But still, there's a parallelism here happening. And I think it hinges on our suspicion against being disciplined by others. Right. This idea that, as an autonomous being, I should be able to determine what rules I follow. And, in fact, I should be able to not follow any rules if I don't want to. My point here is that the knee-jerk reaction that we sometimes have against discipline, whether it's in our private lives or in our political lives, presupposes that discipline is always the culprit

4:26and always something that we need to be on the lookout for.

Self-Discipline and Rest

4:31This is really interesting. I think in your example of ICE, we see kind of this happening, where it would be very easy for someone to say it is the ICE agent's disciplining of the population that is the problem here. But I think what you're saying, actually, David, is something different and more nuanced, which is that, no, it is the lack of discipline among ICE agents that is wreaking havoc on U.S. populations. And I think a point that would also further your claim is the fact that the populations

5:02that have been most successful in running ICE out of their communities have been the most disciplined in terms of their organizing. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I want to clarify that my point is not, oh, well, we should just give ICE agents a little bit more training and then I'll be OK with ICE as an institution, right? It's not so much about the lack of discipline in the way in which these agents are carrying out their tasks, but it's the lack of discipline that is intentionally being promoted by the very existence of ICE, right?

5:33That is turning public space into this frenzied, anarchic, brutal space where you feel like you're in the Wild West, where people are getting snatched off of the street without due process and you know that their human rights are being violated. But I do think this is part and parcel of the philosophy of the contemporary right, which is to create chaos through the deconstruction of order and administrative stability, which has been like the Steve Bannon basically approach to philosophy, right? That you infiltrate the government and you undiscipline it.

6:06Yeah, and so if we follow your line of thinking that the rejection of discipline that we see on the left has an analog on the right, I think we can say that the first rejection of discipline, the left's leaning into bed rotting, let's say, is a kind of giving up to passivity. Whereas the second rejection, the right's abandonment of principles and leaning into chaos, is a kind of recklessness. And those are like two very different ways of thinking about a rejection of discipline.

6:39Yeah, although I think they're both destructive in their own way. One is passively destructive in the sense that it sits back. The other one is much more actively destructive in that it plays into all kinds of fantasies of violence and revenge and chaos. But I agree with you that both of them are not constructive activity in the end. Yeah, of course. And I think, you know, we're painting with pretty broad strokes here. But I think some of this speaks to why I wanted to do this episode.

Personal Relationships with Discipline

7:06And I want to do this episode because I don't think discipline is necessarily one of the bad guys. And I had this thought actually recently, a few months back when we were doing our episode on illness, and I was reading Javi Carell's book, Illness, for that episode, because she says there that it's actually through self-discipline in the face of serious chronic illness that she's been able to carve out a good life for herself. And that really put pressure on my knee-jerk reaction against discipline, because I think it would also be easy to understand discipline as ableist if we're associating it with capitalist productivity and grind culture.

7:43And she's actually saying, no, discipline was essential for me in dealing with my disability, with my debilitating chronic illness. Self-discipline, on her view, is not at odds with self-care, but is actually a crucial expression of it. And so that got me thinking more about like, oh, yeah, you know what? I actually do feel like discipline in my own life is a really important part of self-care as well. And part of, like, even if you don't love the word self-care, part of the good life. No, I agree. And I think we can all identify places in our lives or aspects of our lives that deepen our experience of whatever we're doing when we become disciplined, right?

8:22So, for instance, I experienced graduate school as me becoming much more disciplined in my studies than I had ever been in my undergraduate program. And I reap the benefits. I felt like I became a much better thinker, like I expanded my horizons, so on and so forth. And similarly, I feel like that in sports. I know that I am very disciplined. I don't miss my sports practice. And I like to see the benefits that come from that. And even though we can differentiate between different kinds of discipline, and we'll talk about that,

8:54it nonetheless gets us away from this reductionist and simplistic understanding of discipline as being controlled by others against my will.

Multivalence of Discipline

9:02And I think now we're touching upon a central theme that we're going to thematize in this episode, which is the multivalence of the term discipline. And the term originally comes from the Latin for instruction, training, or knowledge. And you can still see this in the contemporary use of the term discipline to refer to bodies of knowledge, like the discipline of philosophy, the discipline of mathematics, of biology, so on and so forth. But before this contemporary use in the Middle Ages, the term discipline was specifically associated with techniques of punishment.

9:37And I think it's that association of discipline with correction and punishment rather than with instruction, training, and knowledge that gives us the ick, right? When we think about the way in which we are disciplined subjects or even consider the possibility of disciplining ourselves. And as we will see over the course of this episode, we can move between those meanings because discipline is not always about punishment.

Discipline and Children's Development

10:06Today, we are talking about discipline. Is discipline a necessary part of children's development? How does discipline relate to punishment and power? And what is the role of self-discipline in our lives today?

10:29Given that I'm kind of interested in making self-discipline a thing again after reading the Javi Carell book, I want to start by talking about our own relationships with it, David. So you mentioned that you got a lot more disciplined in grad school. Would you say you're self-disciplined at this point? I wouldn't. In fact, I feel like I'm a... Like grad school didn't do a very good job. It didn't stay once. Like I graduated and I didn't have an advisor hovering over me demanding to see drafts of various projects. It died.

10:59No, I actually... This is a thing about my life and my self-interpretation that some people tell me seems right and other people tell me it seems absolutely false about you. And that is that I feel like I'm a very undisciplined person. I feel like I could be more organized with my schedule. I take notes in very different apps and in different parts of my computer and then I never know where they are. I feel like I can be very scattered. I have scatterbrain. And one place where I really feel my aversion to discipline is when I go to the gym and I do reps, like, oh, I need to do 20 reps of a particular exercise.

11:40And I tell myself, you know, it's 20 three times. By the time I get to 18, I'm like, I'm not going to obey my previous self. I'm going to stop at 18 because otherwise I'm being too regimented. And so I, like, intentionally breach the rule that I gave myself. And I feel like I liberate myself in the moment by not working out more. That was me in college when I decided to, like, do laps in the pool as my form of exercise. And I started by saying I was going to do a half hour of laps, which it turns out is, like, a lot of laps.

12:11A lot. And then, yeah, and then I kept doing what you're describing so that ultimately I was basically swimming for, like, one minute. And then I was just like, I need to give this up. You know, I had lowered the bar over and over again so that it wasn't even tenable anymore. You know, as our listeners who've heard our exercise episode know, not a huge fan of it. But that's interesting to hear about you, David. I definitely think you are very disorganized. You are very scattered. That is, like, not one of your strong suits. But I think in grad school you were always really inspirational to me.

12:43And I think this is true today as well in the sense that you can, like, really go into beast mode. And you aren't a procrastinator. You know how to work really hard and apply yourself. And I feel like that's something I've had to get over. I struggle a bit more with actually applying myself when I say I'm going to apply myself. And so I think now, you know, well into my career as an academic, I've just basically figured out the sort of scaffolding of my life that best supports applying myself so that I don't have to kind of get into that cycle of like, oh, my gosh, should I do this right now?

13:23Or should I, you know, scamper off? Yeah, yeah. Should I rebel against it? And so, for instance, like, one thing I do is I just roll out of bed in the morning and I immediately start working before I have time for that, like, questioning self to kick in. I think I probably talked about this elsewhere. And so I would say I feel like I don't have a lot of reliable, intrinsic motivation. I want to come back to that topic in a second. But I do know at this point, like, really how to scaffold my life in such a way that I will be disciplined.

13:54I now imagine you, Ellie, like at 7 a.m., the alarm goes off, you open your eyes, and the first thing you do is start typing on the computer that was already on your lap first thing in the morning before saying hi to anybody, before having coffee, before having breakfast. What I'm hearing you say, though, is that you discipline yourself by scaffolding your life. And, you know, it's funny that you say that because when people ask me about our working relationship, one of the things that I praise you about to other people or in front of other people is that I actually really envy your ability to structure your time in such a way that it's conducive to applying yourself.

14:37Because you're right, I can go into beast mode easily, but because I don't do that, I don't go into that mode as much as I sometimes would want to. And I do think your life is more, scaffolding is the right term, actually. It's more scaffolded than mine, your professional life, in comparison to mine. No, I appreciate you saying that. I should clarify, I don't start working the moment I wake up. It's the moment I get out of bed. I spend like 45 minutes in the morning scrolling on my phone, but like with my phone inches from my face before I even put my contacts in or my glasses on.

15:11So that scaffold has a huge hole in it. I love that's part of the scaffolding. But I think for me, the rigorous approach that I take to scaffolding my life really emerged during the pandemic. And it also emerged in the context of a really significant romantic relationship with a writer who, unlike most writers, just does the thing. Like a lot of writers have a complex relationship with their own writing and they're like, you know, more often not writing and stressing out about not writing than they are actually writing.

15:43And like this boyfriend that I had just literally wrote every single day as much as he possibly could. And that had a really, really significant impact on me. Again, also maybe something I've talked about before. Sorry if I'm just like repeating myself now. But I think also that kind of like inspiration showed me that there's a way to go about things that's not just about muscling your way through about willpower. And I know if I get to the point at which I have to muscle my way into doing something, it is just not going to go well.

16:15And I can activate like hypervigilant sort of OCV tendencies in myself. I can end up becoming really rebellious. This actually happened to me during our comprehensive exams in grad school when we had to write what was it like 160 pages within the span of two weeks. That activated such intense procrastinating tendencies in me that were related to rumination that I was literally sitting at my house watching Arrested Development when I should have been writing my Nietzsche paper. Really? That's so funny. I still pass my comprehensive exams, but it was just not a good situation.

16:48It was not the right scaffolding. You see, because for me that worked out really well when I did my comprehensive exams. I was like, oh, it's time to go into beast mode. And so I would wake up at six in the morning and type until like 10 p.m. at night with like one hour break for lunch and 30 minute break for dinner. And I didn't even stress out all that much. And so that worked for me because of this ability to go in. But what I'm hearing you say also is that you have to create a little bit of distance between two versions of yourself, right?

17:18Like there is the self of you that has certain desires in the moment and then maybe like your super ego self. Yeah. And you create a distance between them and you navigate that distance by introducing rules that give more power to the super ego where it's like, look, I don't want to negotiate with myself. I am the kind of person that will just follow the rules that I've agreed to follow in order not to have to think about what I'm going to do on the spot in the morning, in the afternoon. My schedule is set and that allows you to like flourish and to carry out the projects that you want to do.

17:53I think that's fair. And I also think that an important part of that is that I'm able to follow those rules and kind of bypass my desire to do something else in the moment because those are rules that I reflectively endorse. And so I think, you know, we have the luxury of being in careers where we do have a lot of agency over our own time and we also have now built up the kind of self-knowledge that allows us to see what's going to work for us. And so I think we already see a couple of things emerging about self-discipline.

18:24One is that it works best in the context of self-knowledge and a reflective endorsement of values, right? It's very different for me to say, oh, I'm going to write even though I don't necessarily feel like it than it is to say I'm going to do this thing that I don't necessarily feel like doing, but that I also don't really think is worthwhile. And so I think that speaks to also some of the stuff we'll get to later with like situations in which we are disciplined and basically forced to do things that either we don't want in a kind of broader evaluative sense rather than just like hedonistically want in the moment.

19:03You know, it's basically a question of autonomy and heteronomy at the end of the day. And the way that psychology would think about this might be in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So I want to talk a little bit about that here. And I'm curious how you think it relates to what we've been saying so far. So intrinsic motivation is the internal drive towards action that is based on personal fulfillment, enjoyment, interest, curiosity. And it's generally more powerful long-term than extrinsic motivation.

19:35So I think extrinsic, we often think of the like motivation that comes from the outside, you know, the X versus the N. But it's a little bit more nuanced than that. The extrinsic motivation is a drive towards action that is based on external rewards and or benefits or a drive towards action to avoid punishments. And that is actually generally more sustainable short-term. But it turns out that extrinsic motivation isn't just your parents saying you must do your homework. It also is and can be internalized, right?

20:08So when I feel as a third grader, the motivation to do my homework, even though I really, really don't want to on any level, that's still extrinsic motivation. Whereas like my desire to fill out a coloring book when I'm in third grade is intrinsic motivation. Yeah, so the way I think about the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic is that extrinsic motivation is about rewards and punishments, right? You do things because you will get something else that is good or because you want to avoid a negative consequence.

20:38And so we do our homework when we're kids because we don't want to upset our parents. We don't want to get a bad note in school. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is when you derive so much joy and pleasure from an activity that you're willing to spend a lot of energy. Actually, it's it can be metabolically costly and you're willing to perform a lot of labor in order to continue doing that thing. Right. So like key examples of intrinsic motivation are things like play.

21:09Children play for the sake of play, not because they want to get a good note or because they don't want to upset their parents. And so when we make decisions about how to organize our time, we constantly have to navigate this distinction between what are the things that I enjoy for their own sake versus things that I enjoy for the sake of some third term, whether positive or negative. Yeah. And I mean, do you think that maps on to the distinction that I was mentioning earlier or not?

21:44Yeah. So here's an example. I finished my lunch and I don't want to get back to my desk. I just want to go out and go see a movie. I know that I can go see that movie this weekend when I'm not scheduled to work. And I also know that if I sit down at my desk and get some work done on my writing, then I'll be in a better position for next week. It'll be easier for me to reach a deadline. I will have the edification of a project that I actually really care about and want to complete as soon as I can.

22:17And I also know that when I sit down at that desk, it's not that I'm going to be in misery the whole time. It's just going to require a form of intellectual engagement that is more challenging than the enjoyment I would derive from going to see a movie. Would you say in that case that if I do sit down at my desk and get back to work, that's a form of extrinsic motivation or intrinsic motivation? Because it is myself who has set the goal of finishing the writing project. Yeah. But it's like a different self than the self that wants to go see the movie. Yeah. So ultimately, I actually think the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can break if we define intrinsic motivation exclusively in terms of like pleasure.

22:54Right. Like I only do things that are pleasurable in and of themselves, because I think there are certain things that we value other than pleasure. Right. So we value learning. We value growth. We value complexity. We value enhancing our capacities, like as Kant says, like developing our talents. And so in those cases, it might be that you need to do something intermediary in order to get to the intrinsically rewarding thing that you want in the end. And so it seems like you not going to the movies and rather doing work is pursuing something that is intrinsically valuable to you, but that we need to theorize in terms more expensive than just like pleasure.

23:36Yeah. Right. Like there are these other values. And so, yeah, if in that expanded sense of intrinsic motivation, I think that's perfectly fine. Yeah. So in the sense that intrinsic motivation is sometimes based on personal fulfillment, not just like enjoyment or those other things, maybe that would count. But I think it just feels a little complicated to me because in that moment, sitting at my desk and writing doesn't feel like the personal fulfillment. It feels like I'm driven by the external reward, which is the desire to have finished the writing project. And that is personally fulfilling to me, but it's personally fulfilling more in terms of the end than in terms of the activity.

24:11And so I think it just raises challenging questions. I mean, you mentioned earlier one way of thinking about this relation as that between the ego and the superego. But I think in the background of this, for me, is the question, like, how is it possible to discipline the self, given that the self is sort of both one and many? And to what extent is this different from punishment? Because it doesn't seem fair to say that I'm punishing myself by going back to my desk instead of watching the movie. But I could see how one might think that it is, like this sort of self-flagellation or even masochism.

24:46Yeah, no, I think self-flagellation is the right term here because I think that speaks to this association that we mentioned earlier, that we associate discipline with punishment, maybe following the medieval use of the term. And because of that, we have this ick reaction, this knee-jerk reaction against it. And it seems even worse when it's self-done, when it's something that I do to myself. So in some cases, we can say, well, I was disciplined by others and I had no control over it. I'm a victim of the situation.

25:17But when we are disciplining ourselves and we associate discipline with punishment, it almost seems like there's a perverse personality structure behind that behavior, right? Like, and maybe we can call it masochistic. And I think we need to resist that conclusion because there are models of self-discipline that need not be rooted in that castigation of the flesh or that punishment of the self or that shame of the ego before the superego.

25:49And one place where we can start thinking about this is Foucault's writings about antiquity, where he writes about the notion of self-discipline and how subjects throughout history have carried out different projects that require very serious training and commitment and strenuous forms of self-exertion in order to discipline their minds and bodies. But Foucault says we would make a mistake if we think that this is just the self-hating on itself.

26:20And this comes out especially in Foucault's History of Sexuality. We recently did a Closer Look episode devoted to Volume 1 of the History of Sexuality. But in Volumes 2, 3, and 4 of that history, Foucault turns to the Ancients, to the Greeks, the Romans, and then the Christians to talk about the ways in which they all were committed to practices of self-discipline for self-enriching purposes. So he talks about the high value that all these cultures placed on things like dieting, which can be a very rigid form of self-discipline, abstention from sex, techniques of forced memorization, like students memorizing information just like through rote repetition for the sake of expanding their minds.

27:09He talks about writing exercises, physical training, think about the culture of the gymnasium in ancient Athens, and also other practices like what we today would call journaling, right? Like waking up and writing your diary, not because you want to, but because it's a rule that you give yourself for some other goal. And all these practices that he finds scattered throughout antiquity, he uses the Greek term eschesis to refer to them.

27:40And an eschesis for the Greeks was basically an exercise or a mode of training that would allow the self to give form to their subjectivity through the application of a certain kind of force, right? Like I do these things and I force myself to do them because I want to curate a certain subjectivity. And so the idea here is that we all are always forming the subjects that we are through the self-directed forms of discipline that, yes, they include force, they include training, but it's very different than that maybe medieval, high medieval notion of like discipline as punishment and the self getting crushed under it.

28:20In fact, this is a creative form of self-discipline where the self is not crushed, the self is created. Do you think in this case that what Foucault was describing should be considered, A, a form of intrinsic motivation, but that may sometimes appear to be extrinsic motivation because it is pertaining to that force that you're talking about? Or B, actually a breakdown of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation that should leave us with questions for psychology about the validity of that distinction to begin with?

28:53Yeah, I think the latter, the kind of subject that I want to become through the molding of my mind and body and spirit is inseparable from the kind of subject that my society deems respectable and something worth yearning for. And so the intrinsic versus extrinsic does break down a little bit, although I would add that maybe we want to retain the notion of intrinsic motivation, even as I just said that it breaks down.

29:25Because one important observation from Foucault about a lot of these practices is that sometimes we come to desire them and to take pleasure in them, even as the distinction between pain and pleasure, which is so important for thinking about motivation, breaks down. Sometimes we take pleasure in like very difficult, painful physical exercise, sometimes we take a certain kind of pleasure in intense forms of dieting, or there can be a certain kind of pleasure from abstention from sex.

29:59My point here is that two different categories actually break down or two different distinctions. Intrinsic versus extrinsic breaks down, but also the polarity of pain and pleasure gets muddled because we come to desire and enjoy as pleasurable things that maybe in another context we would have very good reason to describe as painful. Yeah, although I think we need to keep in mind that even if we're just talking about intrinsic motivation, pleasure is not the only driving factor. It may also be personal fulfillment or something else, right?

30:30But I think maybe then the point there would be that our personal fulfillment is not separable, existing, you know, in a different domain or in a more interior level than what society wants for us. As I lean into my post-tenure era, I'm trying to think about classic, cool professor looks for inside the classroom and out. But it's perhaps unsurprising to our listeners that Quince has been my go-to because the fabrics feel elevated, the fits are flattering, and their lovely tops start at just $30.

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History of Corporal Punishment

32:53Throughout history, children have been disciplined both at home and at school through brute violence. I recently finished reading this book, Ellie, that is about the history of books and the history of education, where the author talks about this old Egyptian text that says, the ear of a student is on their back. They only hear when beaten. Oh, my God. Yeah. And so, I mean, basically, this is... Oh, wow. They were not playing around. No, it was rough.

33:23And it has to do with the fact that students learning to read and write hieroglyphics could be punished very severely for disobeying their teachers. And the logic, at least in ancient Egypt, is that it's so hard to learn all the hieroglyphics. And when you actually learn them, you become a highly ranked scribe. They only wanted the absolute best, most disciplined minds to be able to get all the way to the end. And so, there was this logic of punishment rooted in the fact that people's ears are on their backs.

33:57And you see this kind of logic in other cultures. It's also there in ancient Greece. The historian Herodotus talks about teachers using an instrument for disciplining their students that was made out of an oxtail. And they would use it to whip students in the classroom. So, it's just like hazing. It's like, if you can take this corporal punishment, your mind will get whipped into shape as well. Yeah, and this kind of brutality was normal in part because children were considered property.

34:28They're the property of the father, much like wives were legally considered property of their husbands. There's, you know, a long and complex history of how children were treated in different times and places. But I think, you know, not to overly simplify far too much, but I think in the system of patriarchy, fathers and by extension teachers could treat children in any way they deemed fit. But being whipped with an oxtail sounds especially rough. Yeah, and I think it's very easy for us to imagine that this corporal punishment logic is a thing of the past.

35:01But it's very much a part of our culture's understanding of what it means to receive an education. In Spanish, in fact, there is an idiom that's very, very popular that you say to kids when they complain about how difficult it is to go to school. And the saying is, in Spanish, la letra con sangre entra. And so it rhymes, but it translates to the letter goes in with blood. Oof! Okay, Kafka. Yeah, like very visceral image, right?

35:34Of like becoming literate through the body being ripped open. So you see that not only in these idioms, for example, but also in the fact that corporal punishment is still allowed in many places and has been for centuries, right? And it's only in the second half of the 19th century, with the rise of the children's rights movement in Europe and North America, that things begin to change. And we start moving away from this idea that children are either the property of their parents or an extension of the political body of the father.

36:05And one of the first laws that protected children from extreme brutal violence was the law of reasonable force. And this law resulted from a case in Canada in 1860, when this young boy's father basically granted permission to the teacher to forcefully beat the child if the child misbehaved. And then one day the teacher took the kid outside and beat him to death with a stick. Oh, my gosh.

36:37Like ending in the child's death. And that situation resulted in a new law that made a physical punishment not illegal, but legal and justified if it was within reason. And so it added some protection, but it didn't really get rid of it. It only made sure that there is no room for excessive or serious injury. Okay, so you can have sangre, but not muerto. Well, Canada, as we know, is usually light years ahead of the U.S. on progressive policies and social issues.

37:13And so in the U.S., corporal punishment in schools has actually never been officially banned at the federal level. The issue has been left to the states. And so the first state to ban it was New Jersey in 1867. But as of today, even paddling and spanking is still legal in 17 states. Yeah, not California, though. So, Ellie, sadly, you and I cannot beat our students for using ChatGPT. Not that we would or that we want to. But, you know, California has been at least on the right side of that split.

37:45But I want to add that it's not just that it hasn't been banned everywhere. It's that actually the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it constitutional. In a case from the 1970s, it's a case from 1977, Ingram v. Wright. And so basically in this decision, the highest court in the land decided that corporal punishment is not cruel and unusual because the intent of the Eighth Amendment, where you have that clause, was to protect prisoners and not actually children.

38:18So they didn't say, look, it's not cruel and it's not unusual. They just said that protection is for prisoners, not for kids. They said clearly unusual punishment is OK for you all. Wow. That is wild that they would get this protection if they were prisoners as adults, but not as children. Not that prisoners shouldn't have that protection, but, like, it's strange that we also don't extend it to children, right? This case notwithstanding, however, there is a shift in the late 19th and early 20th century away from punishment.

Shift Away from Punishment

38:49And this is what is known as the Age of Abolition. And what was abolished was the assumption that punishment should be the default way we discipline children at home and at school. And this, of course, led to an important question. If not through punishment, how should we discipline children? Yeah. And, you know, that's a question that suddenly starts speaking to lawyers, to pedagogues and also to psychologists, right? How should we discipline children in order to protect them even as we instruct them?

39:23And one of the first answers that we get in the 20th century about how we ought to educate children comes from behaviorist psychology, where the idea is that you discipline children by making their bad behavior increasingly more costly. So when a kid misbehaves, you give them a bad consequence. And then if they do it again, you give them a slightly worse consequence and then a worse one after that if the behavior continues. And this is what is known in child psychology as the triad of consequences.

39:57The first step is you give them a warning. The second step is you give them a timeout. And then if neither of those two things work, you then give them a spanking. But the idea is that this is at least better because it gives the children a chance, basically, to reform themselves before they have to face corporal punishment. Yeah, I mean, this definitely reminds me of some of the ways that I was disciplined as a child. And I suspect that a lot of parents and teachers still discipline in this way, although maybe not the third step in California.

40:31What I find it consistent about this behaviorist approach, though, is that it's still a kind of punishment, even if less brutal than straight up beating your child senseless. And this approach also assumes that children need to adapt to their learning environment. They have to do what the educator says. And so it seems reliant on this model of just like docility and obedience that we might raise questions about. And this is very different from another school, which is the constructivist school of discipline pioneered by Jean Piaget.

41:06This encourages adults to adapt themselves to children rather than forcing children to adapt to adults. And so on a constructivist philosophy, adults shouldn't view children's behavior as bad or naughty, but rather view it as curiosity or an indicator of the child's level of understanding. And so really meeting kids where they are. Yeah. And you said that the behaviorist approach reminded you of your own upbringing. The constructivist approach actually, I think, reflects my mother's philosophy of parenting.

41:41That's how I was raised. Maybe I am an indictment of that philosophy. This is what happens when you have that more lenient, Piaget-driven approach. You turned out pretty good. But like, for example, my mother, and this is, you know, in rural Mexico in the 1980s, my mother never spanked me. Like, I never was hit once. And I was never given timeouts. She really foregrounded in her relationship with me, explaining to me the reasons why she was trying to correct my behavior

42:13so that I would understand where she was coming from rather than applying her parental authority top down. And in fact, she was severely criticized for this parenting approach, both by her siblings, my uncles and aunts, and also by my grandparents who thought that she was just too lenient with her child. And they wanted, maybe they wanted a return all the way back to the 19th century. You know, la letra con sangre entra. But they worried that I would turn out to be a brat.

42:43That was their worry. I told you, maybe. I mean, I think you turned out pretty good, but we'll see. No, I think, though, do you think she had a good sense of how to meet you where you were, though? Because I think sometimes what people might worry about with this kind of approach is that it's hard to gauge a child's level of understanding unless you have, like, I don't know, a master's degree in childhood education. And so obviously your mom, like, knew you really well and probably was very attuned to you for all I know. Maybe she also has a master's in childhood education.

43:14I haven't heard you mention that, but it's possible. But I think reasoning with a child in the way that I would reason with you as an adult, of course, like, isn't really going to work, especially that child's small. Yeah, no, so I don't think it has to do with levels of formal education. I think it has to do with a commitment to developing a relationship with your kid that breaks pre-existing patterns. And my mom was like a bohemian when she was young. She was a single mother. She had already broken sort of social expectations in many ways.

43:44And she was committed to not replicating with me the way in which she was parented. The thing that I think makes more of a difference here, and it's something that I've talked about with her, is that she has said to me, actually, in the past, that her philosophy of parenting worked really easily with me because of my personality already when I was a little kid. I was a really obedient, like, not a troublemaker. I was always a brown noser trying to make everybody happy. I was calm. Highly rational.

44:15You know, like, maybe not rational, but I wonder whether differences in temperament, which sometimes you can observe already from a very early age, are more conducive, right? Like, some kids respond to some parenting styles more than others. And so she said to me, I actually think I got very lucky in that regard. And my younger brother, I don't think, received exactly the same parenting approach. Hmm. So where you were obedient and a good child, you're saying maybe your brother differed a little

44:46bit. I should clarify, too, on the rationality point. I think kids from a very young age exhibit what we would call, in a capacious sense, rationality. I'm, like, very influenced by Alison Goffnick's incredible book, The Philosophical Baby, on this. Even, like, a kid hitting a block on a wood surface versus a carpet is already exhibiting reason. So I think about it in a very broad sense. So I don't want to say, like, that you can't reason with a kid. Just want to say, like, you can't reason with them in the way that you would reason with an adult. And when it comes to the constructivist school, one of their core principles was that discipline respects

45:21the child's dignity. And so any disciplinary action you undertake should involve a respect for their dignity. And it should also foster the child's participation. And so rather than being a sort of top-down, you-need-to-do-this-because-I-said-so kind of approach, you engage the child, and it sounds like that's what's happening with your mom. Like, there was a kind of collaboration that was going on. And that, I wonder whether, might foster intrinsic motivation better than, say, the behaviorist school, which is really going to teach a reward- and punishment-based discipline.

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46:27Our biggest philosophy nerd listeners might be surprised that there's one text we haven't talked

Foucault's Discipline and Punish

46:32about yet in the episode. But don't worry, we're doing it now. This is Michelle Foucault's Discipline and Punish. David, you mentioned some of Foucault's other work earlier, but the most famous text in entire history of philosophy on the topic of discipline is definitely the text Discipline and Punish, which in French is Surveiller et Punir, so it actually doesn't have the word discipline in the title. But the reason that it's translated as Discipline and Punish in English is because discipline is a key, key component of it. Now, we have talked about this text in a few

47:07different episodes, perhaps most notably in our surveillance episode, but we would be remiss not to talk about it here. Because the intertwinement of discipline and punishment that we tend to have, you know, just in our sort of common sense understandings of discipline really emerge in compelling, philosophically nuanced fashions in Foucault's genealogy. Yeah, Foucault is unquestionably the philosopher of discipline. In the text that we're about to discuss,

47:37he talks about how we are disciplined by others, by those in a position of power. Whereas in the text that we mentioned earlier, The History of Sexuality, that's where he talks about how we discipline ourselves. So he covers the whole range of discipline from external to self-directed. Yeah, but I think one of the key ideas in Foucault is actually that discipline involves an internalization of power. In this text, Foucault describes a trajectory from a historical pattern

48:07of punishment that is associated with vengeance and retribution towards discipline, associated more with the modern criminal justice system in which deterrence is aimed for. And so while previously, the sovereign had the right to decide who lived or died, once what he calls disciplinary power comes onto the scene, the question is actually rather about managing life and exerting a positive influence on life. And so it seems at first, once disciplinary power emerges historically, that this is a

48:44kind of more humane form of treating people. The criminal justice system that's aimed at deterrence was seen as more lenient than a system of torture, corporal punishment, and retribution. Instead of a public execution, we have a prison that aims at rehabilitation. But Foucault encourages questioning this idea that disciplinary power is so humane. And he provides an account that suggests that disciplinary power is at least in part about adopting a form of self-surveillance in which one might

49:20constantly be viewed constantly be viewed by the authority figure and therefore comes to have what we called earlier, maybe even like a masochistic relationship to the self. And so by moving the site of authority from a sort of top-down sovereign to a more distributed form of power that includes, very importantly, mechanisms of internalized self-surveillance, Foucault is drawing a more complex picture of the relationship between this previous system of torture and the modern system of criminal justice.

49:55Yeah. So you've given us a really good summary here of sovereign power versus disciplinary power. I'll just add that this is a switch that happens for Foucault in the 1700s. It's an 18th century phenomenon, really. And the transition can be summarized in terms of the difference between a power that used to be, as Foucault says, majestic, like it would make these massive displays of its ability to destroy the body, to a new form of power that operates through the correct training of

50:27behavior, right? Through getting people to change the way their body reacts and what their habits are and their mode of operation. And Foucault says, yeah, although this looks like it's more humane, it's more humane to be put in a prison than to be tortured. The rationale is not humane at all, because the transition from sovereign power to disciplinary power was not so that we could punish less. It was so that we could punish more, more people for longer periods of time reaching into every aspect of their existence. And so in a sense, disciplinary power, yes, it's less

51:02brutal, but it's more insidious. And it's also harder to spot. And I really like one metaphor that Foucault uses to talk about this transition. He uses the metaphor of stones. He says you can use stones to build walls, and those walls can serve a function of sovereign power or of disciplinary power. And this is where he gives us two images of the kind of institution that you can build with stones. You can build a fortress, you know, like around a castle. And what's the reason for building

51:34a fortress? It's so that you can stand on that wall and look outside to see if there are enemies coming over the horizon. So you're observing the exterior world. Or you can use those stones to build something like a prison where you put people inside, and then you stand inside the prison and you observe not the external world, but you observe the movements, the reactions, the behavior of all the prisoners who are inside. And so it's a difference between observing outward and observing

52:08inward. And you see this switch from the fortress to the prison, of course, in literal prisons, but you also see it in other social institutions that start exercising this form of power, like the military camp, the school, the hospital, the factory. And what all of these institutions have in common is that they all apply the same logics of hierarchical observation of the people who are inside, normalizing judgments, you know, forcing people to follow what is considered normal,

52:42and constantly examining them in order to get them to perform according to expectations. And so that architectural example is both literal and metaphorical, because it speaks to the internalized mechanisms of disciplinary power. And I think one of the most powerful claims that Foucault makes is that disciplinary power shapes the subject, the self, in fact, maybe even creates it through a process that he calls assujettissement, which is subjectivation. The subject for Foucault is an

53:14effect of power slash knowledge, such that our identity is actually shaped through techniques of violence. And he has the beautiful phrase, the microphysics of power, where it's not just about the actual buildings that are being constructed, but about the way that power is working on this micro level. And he says that, you know, it's not that the soul is an illusion or just an ideological effect. It exists, but it exists through being produced within the body by a functioning of a power that is exercised

53:51on the punished. And so I think it's also important to note that although Foucault says that we're moving in a way from punishment to discipline through disciplinary power, I also think that he really still is limited to understanding discipline as punitive. And I don't know, maybe you have a different take on that. But I think it's just like it's a microphysics of punitive power rather than it is a way from punishment. And to that extent, I think he might be a bit limited, like relatives of some of the stuff we were saying earlier about how we think we can disentangle discipline from punishment.

54:24OK, so I think that's a fair criticism that it's still punishment, although I think the punishment is different enough that it requires a new mode of analysis. And that has to do with what you just mentioned, which is the assujettissement, the idea that here punishment is not created in order to produce suffering or to destroy the body of the accused. Punishment is done for the sake of what Foucault calls corrective training. You punish people in such a way that you fix their behavior to fit a norm. So the pupil in school has to be corrected to become a good student, the factory worker

55:00to be a productive worker, the prisoner to be an obedient prisoner. And maybe we can use a concrete example to illustrate exactly how this microphysics of power works. Foucault says that really the model of disciplinary power is the military camp where you create a space, you put a bunch of people in it, and then you regulate their behavior. And he uses the École Militaire, the military school in Paris, Paris, as an example of this logic being put into action.

55:30When I studied abroad in Paris, one of my friends lived off of the École Militaire metro stop. It's kind of near the Eiffel Tower, right? It's right next. Yeah, it's right behind the Eiffel Tower. It's like in the 7th arrondissement, which is kind of rich. It's a rich neighborhood and they have the military school there. It's kind of weird. We would like always have to get off at that stop. And then it was a really long walk to their apartment afterward. And so we would just like be trudging, you know, at 19 years old through the Parisian cold, cold, dark fall nights. Yeah. Well, so École Militaire is both a metro stop in Paris, but it's also an institution there

56:02where they used to train cadets. I looked it up. They still do some operations, although nowadays cadets are mostly trained somewhere else, like in other places in France. But either way, the École Militaire was organized architecturally, politically, and socially in such a way that they would produce this new subject identity, which is the cadet. So for example, all the cadets would stay in private rooms where the door was half a window

56:32so that somebody outside could always look inside. So you never had privacy inside of your room. Even the bathrooms were intentionally created to be stalls so that you know how in the stalls in the bathroom, you can see the feet. Yeah. And then you can see the head of the person. It never goes from the ceiling all the way to the ground. Oh my God. Apparently, this was pioneered in the École Militaire so that trainers and like military generals could see where people are at all times, even in the bathroom. The school desks where they

57:05would do their homework were also put at such an angle that the teacher could always see what was written on their page. We need that now in Church of BTU. Yeah. And also, the thing about these places is that they regulate the most recundite aspects of your existence, including everything that the traditional legal system leaves completely unregulated, right? That's what disciplinary power is. It's reaching further in. So in a military school or in a prison or in a school,

57:36suddenly there are rules about things that normally there shouldn't be rules for. How you stand, how you greet superiors, what time you wake up and go to bed, how you speak to people with positions of power, when you can take a break from your tasks and obligations. And in all these cases, when there is a deviation from expected behavior, and this goes back now to the point that you raised, Ellie, because you said, well, this is still punishment. Foucault says, yes, it's punishment,

58:07but it's a new kind of punishment. Because how is the cadet punished? They're not punished with physical violence. They're punished with an exercise that is symbolic, repetitive, and tied to the rule that they violated. So if a cadet, let's say, didn't do their bed properly in the morning, their punishment is not going to be spanking. Their punishment is going to be, you have to do everybody's bed in the morning for two weeks, right? It reminds me of that scene in the opening sequence of The Simpsons, where Bart Simpson has to write like the same sentence over and over again

58:42on the board. That is the art of corrective training in education. And their punishment is going to be, you have to do everybody's bed in the morning for two weeks, right? It reminds me of that scene in the opening sequence of The Simpsons, where Bart Simpson has to write like the same sentence over and over again on the board. That is the art of corrective training in education. And Foucault points out that once you enter into this space, everything about you becomes disciplined by the space itself and

59:18its logic of power, the microphysics of power, everything from your health, to your morality, to your knowledge, all the way to your political beliefs. And this is precisely why the story can't be as simple as, oh, wow, we've become so much more humane over the course of human history. Because starting in the 1700s, we started to rely less on public executions and more on these penitentiary systems. Because I think it's not at all clear that this second form is less damaging, punitive, whatever we might say. I mean, for one,

59:54it's kind of building subjects from the ground up. I will say story for another time, but I really disagree with Foucault on that one. As anyone who knows my work on subjectivity might know, I think there's a bit of an overstatement there. But there's no doubt that this punitive system is shaping our sense of self, our sense of relation to the world. That I definitely agree with. And I also think the kind of distributed nature of this, the fact that you could be punishing yourself internally at any time, in addition to being potentially punished by another person at any

1:00:27time who's watching you, is very different from the more extreme forms of punishment that we get with the system of torture, but where there was a clearer demarcation between when you were being punished and when you were just like, kind of able to have your own private space and do your own thing. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And for further discussion, bringing this into connection with present day gender norms, catch us in the Substack bonus segment where we're going to be discussing the philosopher Sandra Bartke's work on Foucault. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our Substack for extended

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