All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

 

Charlotte and Uncle

Charlotte’s Web is a fable. Whenever you have animals talking and acting like humans, you are reading a fable. 

Okay, or maybe a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Why talking animals? 

Because animals can swiftly and unambiguously illustrate human character traits and types: ants industry, wolves malice, foxes cleverness, and so on.

And this is to teach a moral, some broad general advice about life. Be like the ant; don’t be like the fox.

Charlotte’s Web plays with this convention. Rats are selfish, and Templeton is selfish. Geese are silly, and the geese in Zuckerman’s farm are silly. Pigs are supposed to be slothful and greedy; Uncle, one pig in the story, is slothful and greedy. But then Wilbur breaks the mold. He is greedy enough about his slops. He enjoys lying in manure. But he also does improbable backflips, and is eager to try spinning a web. Spiders are controlling and devouring; bloodthirsty. Charlotte is bloodthirsty, and she also schemes; but in a good way.

White more or less openly explains his point in Charlotte’s farewell soliloquy:

"After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that."

The message is that we are all horribly flawed, all animals; we all eat bacon, and slaughter. And yet we can redeem ourselves, by good works: which is to say, by gratuitous acts of friendship--and by art. Charlotte is a writer: “a true friend and a good writer” serves in the book as her epitaph. Wilbur cannot weave words as she can; but his art is his backflips. His art is the dance, and this makes him “radiant.”

Trying not to prompt or lead them, I asked a class of Chinese students what they thought the moral of the fable was. They identified friendship; but when I asked for the book’s argument in favour of friendship, their response was, “if you do something for a friend, they will do something for you.”

This is an interpretation the book itself rules out. Wilbur is keenly aware that when Charlotte decided to save his life, he had done nothing for her; and was obviously unlikely to be able to. When she takes her great care building her egg sac, giving it her entire life force, she is doing something for children she will never meet, who will therefore never be able to do anything for her in return. When Wilbur brings the egg sac back to the barn, and nurses it, he is doing nothing for Charlotte in return for her kindness, but for other spiders she will never see and he does not know.

But the quid pro quo notion of morality that my Chinese students exhibit is exactly the argument for morality given by Xenophon in his parable, “The Choice of Hercules.” 

“If you would gain the favor of the gods, you must be at the pains of worshiping them: if the friendship of good men, you must study to oblige them: if you would be honored by your country, you must take care to serve it.”

This was the classic ancient argument for moral behavior. It is obviously wrong from a Christian perspective. If you are doing good only in return for an expected reward, to Christians, you are not doing good at all.

Yet it seems to me this is the inevitable view of morality among pagans and atheists. Without God, there is no transcendent right and wrong; morality is just a business transaction. 

And there is nothing intrinsically wrong, in the first place, with being a lazy swine or a bloodsucking spider.