From birth to puberty is the period in which parents and society can exercise the maximum damage on the minds of individuals.
From puberty to mature adulthood is the period in which individuals can exercise the maximum damage to parents and society.
But note that the children whose minds are damaged tend not to be the ones who damage society during their immediate post-puberty years. They tend to end up as the underclass or in prison.
Several in-depth expert analyses of terrorists, from those of 9/11, Palestinian suicide bombers, and so on, all show that, predominantly, it is middle-class children who become persuaded of a cause sufficient to take extreme action and capable of pulling it off. Nothing is known yet of three of the four 'home-grown' suiciders who bombed the London Undergound on Thursday last but a little is known of one of them so far. He had a university degree and his father is a small, but successful, businessman.
And, of course, it is nearly always middle-class children who become poets, composers, writers, reformists, politicians, media pundits, business tiros, research scientists and innovators -- that is, those who break the existing mould, or try to. Mavericks are not always destructive.
The answer is now fairly obvious, though the full import of the matter will probably not be taken on board for another 30 years -- because that's the minimum time it takes for new knowledge and ideas to become absorbed into the wider culture. As John Maynard Keynes once said, it is the ideas of dead economists that influence current politicians.
Why so? Thirty years ago it was realised that a very high proportion of the brain cells in the rear cortex of a new-born baby dies between birth and puberty. Those neurons that are not exercised during that period are automatically culled and the skills that individuals might have learned are never recoverable thereafter. This discovery is only now being translated into educational policy and practice. The more intelligent part of the population in the developed countries are now falling over themselves to get their children into nursery education because they know that by the time children enter primary schools at five years of age, gaps in intelligence and educability are already in place according to the experience of their pre-five age years.
Far more recently -- only about three years ago -- came the further revolutionary discovery that new brain cells grow abundantly in the frontal lobes of the cortex between puberty and mature adulthood at about the age of 30. It is in this period that the skills already acquired in childhood, and surcharged with sexual hormones, become fully developed in order for the individual to take his or her place in the adult world. This is the period in which teenagers start detaching themselves from the parents and tutors of their childhood and turn to other voices. This is the age group that make up the major part of street demonstrations, whether after a night of drinking at nightclubs or for worthier motives.
Most often, teenagers turn to their peers or to other teachers who are comfortable in the existing culture and become sufficiently rounded to understand how the system works. They are absorbed, marry and have children in their turn. Sometimes, however, the more curious minds turn elsewhere. In the West in the last few decades, such teenagers have been particularly susceptible to curious cults such as the Moonies or the Scientologists or following some Indian guru who promises them nirvana. In England some of the current cults include druidic- and meditative-type 'New Age' religions. Currently in America it is towards a revival of fundamentalist Christianity.
In the Islamic countries, the more energetic and curious teenagers who are frustrated by life opportunities have tended to turn to the only available alternative to the existing authorities -- that is, to a fundamentalist form of their own religion. And, as noted above, this tends to attract the more well-educated, intelligent and curious of the young -- the middle class -- not the less gifted. Osama bin Laden was such a product. Mohammad Atta, the capable young man who organised 9/11 was another. The two principal actors in the Iraqi scene -- though on opposite sides -- al-Zarqawi and al-Sadr are not products of working class families either.
In the countries of Europe which have absorbed millions of Muslims -- many of them happily and constructively -- there will also be that small minority of intelligent and more vigorous youths who turn to a fundamentalist and distorted form of their parents' religion. We will probably find that all four of the London bombers were of this type rather than 'ordinary' working class youths. The secret services in this country have long suspected that the more fruitful hunting grounds for recruitment have been in the universities, not in the poorly educated youths who mill around the streets.
It has taken 30 years for the "culling" (rear cortex) discovery of neuroscience to work its way through into the consciousness of parents and educationists and to serious endeavours to institute nursery education much more widely. It will probably take another 30 years for the "developmental" (frontal cortex) discovery of neuroscience also to work its way through into the minds of those who seek to guide the economies and job structures of their cultures. Until there are more open opportunities for the more energetic and curious among teenagers so they can be safely absorbed in normal society (or make constructive innovations) then it is very possible that the London bombings of last Thursday will become entrenched among a small minority for another generation to come. And it need not be confined to Muslims either. The same frustrations and alternative behaviours can apply to youths from any parental culture.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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