Call the Midwife

 

I’ve been enjoying the British TV series, “Call the Midwife.” It is, at least in its first two seasons, autobiographical, and so an authentic portrait of life in postwar East End London. It is, no doubt inadvertently, a sobering corrective to the claim of some inherited “white privilege.” Poor whites, only a generation or so ago, had it worse than most North American “non-whites” today. Leaving aside the working class Cockneys, consider all the European immigrants who arrived in North America with almost nothing, the DPs, or “displaced persons,” following the war. Consider the Jews, who had just lost most of their families to the gas chambers. And consider those already here, the Okies and the West Virginia miners, who had just lived though, first service and mass death in the Great War, then starvation in the Great Depression, then World War II and mass death again. 

Privileged?

Not compared to most immigrants to Canada today coming from “Third World” countries. Because of Canada’s points system, they are almost always from the wealthy upper classes in their homelands. And nobody is quite so rich and privileged as those with lots of money in a place where everyone else is very poor. These are your Canadian “non-whites” today. It may be somewhat different in the US or UK, with mass illegal immigration.

Beyond this useful corrective to the social narrative, the British series is touching; what could be a more important subject than the coming of new life? With each new child born, the world is born anew. We value this far too little in these days of mass abortion and feminist scorn of child care.

Nor is everyone in the series beautiful; a standard flaw in North American drama. I had to stop watching one recent Canadian series, midway through the first episode, set in a remote nineteenth-century mining town. All the miners’ wives were young, well-spoken, immaculately dressed, and gorgeous. Immediately killed my suspension of disbelief.

On the other hand, to its detriment, the British series sadly suffers from the Hallmark affliction: every character in it is well-intentioned. Any wrong they do is based on a misunderstanding; it is always pointed out to them by the end of the episode; and they apologize humbly.

Such a circumstance might be common in the next life; but not in this one. And spreading the idea that it is, is sinister and dangerous. It leaves too many sheep vulnerable to wolves.

In this world, most people have their own interests primarily at heart. Most will sacrifice the well-being of others to varying degrees. Most people, caught doing wrong, or even simply making some mistake, will react with anger, attack the messenger, or the victim, and double down. 

Bruno Bettelheim, psychiatrist, wrote a famous treatise on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, in which, among other things, he criticized the traditional stories as always portraying characters in black and white, as either entirely good or entirely evil. This, he argued, was not the psychological reality.

And in recent years, no doubt largely under his influence, there has been a concrete effort to rewrite fairy tales to show that the villain was really in the right all along and only misunderstood.

Bettelheim was falsifying the fairy tales. They never show a character as entirely good. The hero or heroine always does something wrong. Snow White keeps buying trinkets from pedlars, although warned not to, out of vanity. Cinderella lies to her sisters, and stays too long at the ball. Psyche doubts her husband and violates her promise to him; then she break her promise to Venus by, vainly, opening Persephone’s box and taking for herself immortal beauty. Beauty breaks her promise to Beast to return in two weeks, almost killing him. And so on.

Bettelheim’s real problem is that there are, indeed, entirely bad characters in fairy tales: witches and ogres and giants and stepmothers and wolves and the like are purely bad. 

The difference is that good characters, at some point, realize their fault and show regret. The bad characters never do, but double down.

This is the real world; and this is the real difference between good and bad people.

Bettelheim does not want to acknowledge this distinction, because he was himself, in the end, an unrepentant bad man. According to Wikipedia, he “routinely embellished or inflated aspects of his own biography.” He falsified his academic credentials; he had no formal qualifications in psychiatry. He is accused of plagiarism in his famous book, and by many sources of abusing his colleagues, students, and young patients.

And this is generally the case for those who prefer the Hallmark perspective, that everyone is good deep down, only misunderstood. It is a denial of their own guilt.

For the rest of us, it is a red flag.