How little savages learn to be citizens

I HAVE done terrible things. I have gloried in physical violence, though not much, because I was no good at it. More often, I have used verbal cruelty, trying with cunning and unforgivable persistence to destroy another person's spirit, to humiliate and break them down so that they never recovered. It was disgusting behaviour, shameful. But I don't think about it much now; for all that stuff happened, of course, when I was just a small boy.

The people I bullied and who bullied me may not even remember the names or details of the boys they fought with at school. It was all pretty routine. It is also widespread, wherever adults are not much about and boys are. A few of the luckless victims - smaller, or the wrong shape, or speaking with a funny accent - may carry inside them a residual self-hatred as grown men, a radical lack of confidence undermining their relationships or careers. But most boys, bullies and victims, survived. Sooner or later something good started happening to them. It was called repression.

Slowly, in fits and starts, I and my fellow inmates (for much of this dirty work took place in boarding schools) had our natural competitive violence checked, ameliorated and repressed by adults. As we grew older, violence - except in one ritualised and semi-controlled form involving the worship of a leather melon - sharply decreased. I don't say, or think, that this repression was always done gently or even done well. But it was done.

We learnt the social rules, which mostly come down to the familiar one about doing unto others. Perhaps we didn't perceive intellectually how evil behaviour destroys social relationships. But some of us learnt this danger, as it were, by rote. Others noticed that better behaviour paid higher dividends, and shrewdly adapted. And that kept us going, perhaps, until our imaginations caught up. As Auden noted in his great poem September 1, 1939: 'I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.' Learn, mind, not know.

The process is justly call repression, not the more anodyne education. The word comes from the Latin and means to press or push back. It is exactly what happened as our uncivilised instincts were shoved back into whatever dark neurological slime they came from.

These instincts were no doubt particularly useful in earlier ages, when a prime function of boyhood- manhood was to throttle sabre- toothed tigers or go to war with the French. But they always had to be repressed and unbottled at the appropriate times. And we are now that historic rarity, a society which does not send a large proportion of its men off to slaughter and be slaughtered, which has few armed forces, and which aspires to channel male aggression into work and sport. So for us, repression, which involves a clear-eyed understanding of what boyhood can become, is especially valuable and important.

Yet repression has had a bad press. It has been distorted to mean prim, sour; not trained, but damaged. Behind this distortion lies what I'd call the Rousseau heresy, which is that we are born noble and corrupted by society. The precise opposite of what really happens, the Rousseau heresy is now close to established doctrine. It is a seductive, flattering heresy, pandering to our self-pity: 'deep inside, you are a little angel, shamefully ill-treated by society . . .' As I say, speaking personally, I started out with horns.

But if you follow Rousseau, you have to think that boys, left alone, would tend to be kind and sharing. You think they're intrinsically good, God's little Communists. They are 'innocents' in the sentimental sense, rather than the religious one, which merely signifies a blank sheet, a pre-moral being. And you are a fool. It is curious that this sentimental view of childish goodness should survive so tenaciously in the world of the grown-ups, given that there are so many millions of pieces of evidence running about its feet which daily rebut it.

In fact, society remains ambivalent about childhood, as can be seen in the contrast between the words childlike and childish, which you might have expected to mean roughly the same thing. Acts of great evil tend, however, to produce a sentimental response. How much more comfortable to label particular boys 'pure evil' and draw no wider conclusion, to separate them from the 'innocent' mass. But to do that is to scurry off for your mental teddy bear, when what is needed is realism. There is a dark side to boyish behaviour that can be ameliorated, turned and finally repressed by adult contact and teaching.

Back to basics? Reactionary dogma? I am not talking about reimposing some sort of humourless control-freak order on children, but about the need for adult presence - warm, generous, involved. Some repression is the essence of liberalism, since without common rules commonly learnt and insisted on, we slide back into illiberal behaviour, all the way from rudeness to murder. Is the unsupervised playground a haven of tolerance? Is the wasteground where fatherless boys stalk a liberal place? Is the kingdom of the truants a democracy?

These are not good places to learn, nor are they places where boyish self-expression, freed from the adult world, is attractive. Societies of a kind form there, but not our liberal society. That needs to defend itself always, with what you might call tough liberalism. We aren't doing a very good job of it at the moment. I haven't got round to mentioning the events that provoke this column, but you know what I mean. It wasn't just the story of two extraordinary boys in 1993, but of millions of ordinary ones, too, tomorrow's men. Remember how Auden described the huddled American drinkers awaiting the start of World War, in the poem mentioned earlier: 'Lost in a haunted wood/Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good.'