eight - Reclaiming the future: alternative visions

Summary

In this book we have aimed to trouble current policy and practice orthodoxies through an interrogation of the evidence and the politics of early years intervention. We have highlighted how misrepresentation and misinterpretation of neuroscience, along with political expediency and vested interests, drive a contemporary fixation with parenting and child development. In particular we have shown how ‘evidence-based’ rhetoric has been used to conceal the deeply political nature of decisions about what is best for children and families. In this concluding chapter we change tack to explore potential future policy directions, contrasting the dystopian vision that flows from current interventionist logics with more collectivist ideals of family support, social harm reduction and the immediate, humane social good.

The brave new world of prevention science

The attraction of early intervention, as we have shown, lies in its promise to optimise and regulate human behaviour. Replete with optimistic interventionist logic, the aim is to protect and enhance infant brain development, transforming the world through improved parenting. Soft hereditary principles of neurogenesis (the generation of neurons in the brain) and epigenetics (modifications to gene expression) have captivated the imaginations of policy makers to the extent that the complexities, contradictions and uncertainties characterising scientific progress are erased to accommodate simple narratives of cause and effect. The ends are viewed as justifying the means. Targeting pre- and post-natal development, we are told by early intervention proponents, is the progressive way to minimise individual and societal risk while enhancing equality of opportunity and social mobility. Far from pioneering new ground though, contemporary efforts to harness and manipulate biological traits tread worryingly familiar territory. The same ambitions propelled the British establishment, from Victorian-era social Darwinism to the 20th-century biological determinism of the Eugenics Society.

An historically grounded perspective demonstrates how a broad and deep consensus on what the problem is and how to deal with it, can obscure fundamental moral and ethical questions. In the last century state-sanctioned eugenic programmes were embraced widely as a benevolent method of augmenting biological development for the sake of the national good. While eugenics broadly is rejected today as unprincipled, the same objectives and justifications now circulate in different guises. And, more significantly, contemporary technocratic visions of a biologically optimised world invoke remarkably similar configurations of domination and oppression.