Paper short abstract:

Setting out from theories about the role of rifted, dynamic topography and co-operative child-raising in human evolution, I argue that childcare in modernizing Europe left profound psychosocial and systemic imprints on the modern West – with implications for how we confront environmental crises.

Paper long abstract:

Why is it that the western subject has been exceptionally prone to physical and epistemic violence? I set out from both the complex topography hypothesis which proposes that key hominin evolutionary developments took place in the rugged, geologically dynamic terrain of the East African Rift, and the co-operative breeding paradigm which argues that communally distributed childcare is a definitive characteristic of the genus Homo. Putting these approaches into conversation can help us to see how humans, over evolutionary time, negotiated the challenges of an inherently volatile Earth, though not without the intense demands of lengthy infant dependency and a lifelong struggle for affection and belonging. In short, enduring fault-lines run at once through our home planet and our human subjectivity. But both these fractures have been gouged deeper over the course of western modernity. After several million years of co-operative childcare, urban modernizing Europeans veered in the direction of separating infants from their birth parents and early institutionalized child-raising – which Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and fellow co-operative breeding theorists view as a particularly pathological arrangement. While Western child-care may have moved on, I argue that this phase of child-rearing left profound psychosocial and systemic imprints on the modern West, that have in some ways been exacerbated in the latest phase of global capitalist modernity. Confronting these impacts, I suggest, can help us to understand contemporary global environmental crises and to make sense of our current inability to respond in ways that might gift our descendants with shared and liveable worlds.