Courtesy the leftie “Guardian…”

No hugging: are we living through a crisis of touch?

The fashionable freakouts over Bad Touching has led to an understandable withdrawal away from touching other human beings. Experts seem to agree that this is not only damaging to society and the psyches of adults, but it also seems to be causing *physical* damage to children.

In the UK, doctors were warned last month to avoid comforting patients with hugs lest they provoke legal action, and a government report found that foster carers were frightened to hug children in their care for the same reason. In the US the girl scouts caused a furore last December when it admonished parents for telling their daughters to hug relatives because “she doesn’t owe anyone a hug”. Teachers hesitate to touch pupils. And in the UK, in a loneliness epidemic, half a million older people go at least five days a week without seeing or touching a soul.

I hear tell that physical contact is common among humans, or at least it is so in societies that haven’t been frightened into insularity by the threat of legal action if you touch someone innocently but they don’t like it. A need for physical touch is biologically wired into the DNA not just of humans but other mammals; this was adequately and rather cruelly shown through experiments a few generations ago where baby Rhesus monkeys were taken from their mothers and given two choices: a metal wire “mother” that provided milk, and a soft cloth “mother” that did not.

Because the results of those experiments were a bit disturbing, click  to see the rest of the post and associated photos.

The baby monkeys chose the one that felt closer to right, rather than the one that actually gave them needed nutrition.

You know, I suppose that was good and important science and all, but, come on. When the subject of your experiments winds up looking like this…

… maybe it’s time to wrap it up. I mean, come on. Dude. Dude. Go on and read the Wiki entry on Harry Harlow if’n yer interested in some deeply unethical experimentation on baby monkey. Again, it’s science that has taught us a lot, but I gotta imagine that it produced not only a bunch of messed-up monkeys but also a bunch of messed-up humans. Not only some of the researchers, but Harlow’s work help inspire the modern “animal liberation” movement, which is filled with some of the most messed-up humans you can imagine.

Of course, what was done to these monkeys sixty years ago is not unique. A much larger, rather more disturbing experiment was run, quite unintentionally, on Romanian orphans at the end of the Communist era, with such fun results as:

This is a child on collectivism, where the people in power neglect them and give them AIDS because, you know, why not.

And modern collectivists are doing something similar to society as a whole by ramping up hysteria over every possible perceived slight that people are afraid to touch each other or even their own children.

Good job.