I Was Still a Child

 

“I was still a child.”

The black girl in the red dress was singing for coins in front of the Dollarama. Beside her was a hand-drawn whiteboard giving her name, Keira, and an explanation. “I am suffering from depression and anxiety. All I have left is my voice.” 

And I knew it was true. I could hear it in her voice. She sang so sweet, so high and yet so deep. 

You need to suffer for a voice like that.

She deserved those coins more than any banker or store manager or dentist in the mall.

“I was still a child.”

That is the original tragedy of life: we are raised by humans. Every parent fails us, some maliciously, some with good intentions. As children, we cannot understand this. We believe, and we trust. We accept as right and normal whatever upbringing we are given. 

If we are told we are vermin, we believe it forever. If we are told we have no right to live, we believe it. If we are told we live only to give pleasure to the parent, we believe it. If we are not loved, we conclude we are unlovable.

The tragedy of black America is not the aftereffects of slavery 160 years ago. That’s absurd. Neither is it the aftereffects of Jim Crow three generations ago. It is the failure of the black family. It is kids raised with no father, heedless parents, or some predatory male boyfriend in place of a father; or kids given no moral guidance.

The tragedy of Canadian Indians is not residential schools two generations ago. It is not the loss of some imaginary culture in which you could talk to animals and trees. It is the failure, aided and abetted by welfare dependency, of the indigenous family. It is teenage girls desperate to escape their home situation, who too often die in the attempt; it is bands of kids on isolated reserves planning to commit suicide because they see no escape from “adult bullying.”

These subcultures have failed in parenting. 

But not they alone; it also happens in the best of families.

I used to know a couple of schizophrenics who mostly lived on the street and were in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I cannot tell you their last names, because almost anyone in Canada would recognize them. 

I knew a family up the hill in Westmount, then the poshest address in Canada, one of whose adolescent sons locked himself in a closet and set himself on fire.

Another kid I knew, from one of the best families in town, broke into a doctor’s office, and swallowed every pill he could find.

The “great families” are often as abusive to children as the poorest ones. The problem is not caused by poverty, but by parental sin. Great families regularly devour at least one child a generation, as if a ritual sacrifice. Think of Rosemary Kennedy. Think of the Emperor Claudius and the family of Caesar Augustus. 

Worse are the children raised not to be abused, to become scapegoats, but raised to abuse. Every dysfunctional family, unless there is only one child, seems to have both. It is these latter who pass on the original sin unto the next generation; the little Cains. They are groomed to believe that they are special, and deserve to get whatever they want. They will go on to abuse the next generation. And so the tragedy is repeated, generation to generation.

“Whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My name welcomes Me.

6But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

7Woe to the world for the causes of sin. These stumbling blocks must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!”

There has been a black girl singing in front of Dollarama for all of human history. No doubt there will be, until the Second Coming.

Family Values and Original Sin

We often talk about maternal instinct. But there is a far more powerful instinct that we never talk about. Filial instinct. When have you ever even heard the term?

A mother, or a father, are naturally attached to their children. But the natural instinct of attachment is far stronger in a child to their parents.

We often marvel at some animal nursing young of another species. We never think to marvel at the young accepting succor from another species. That we rightly take as spontaneous.

We honour and make much of maternal instinct, therefore, precisely because it is sometimes absent. That makes it noticeable, and worthy of celebration when seen. By contrast, we can simply assume filial instinct in all cases. So it goes unnoticed and unremarked.

Think about it. In the early, vulnerable infancy of any higher species, the parent is everything. Evolution and the imperatives of survival will imprint a deep need for closeness to the parent. Closeness, trust, obedience.

So baby ducks line up spontaneously to follow their mother wherever she goes. If the mother is absent, they will line up to follow whatever else is available. So with the young of almost any species, up to and including the higher primates. A motherless baby chimpanzee can be consoled with a hot water bottle. A baby human is soothed by a plastic nipple.

This is instinct; it has no moral dimension. Yet it is so powerful we want to hold it sacred: we talk of “family values” and “filial piety” as though these were religious duties. Indeed, much of Chinese folk religion can be summed up in the phrase “ancestor worship.”

This simply makes us feel good about ourselves, because we are going to do it anyway. There is a moral debt owed to parents for their material and emotional support in our childhood; we have a duty to similarly support them in their age. But that is all.

In fact, the vital moral issue cuts the other way. To idolize a parent, a mere human, is just that: an idolatry. The average parent is necessarily only average, not better or worse. Some parents will be very good people; some parents will be very bad people.

To adhere too closely to “family values” is just like adhering too closely to tribal values: to believing that your nation, or your race, is inherently superior to all others. We know where that leads, and we call it racism. The worst evils in history, we commonly hold, are done because of racism. “Familyism” is in principle the same thing.

Morality, therefore, requires cutting through the instinctive tie to viewing our parents objectively. Doing so is almost the essential act of morality: not doing so is leaving yourself in the state of original sin—the sin one inherits from one’s ancestors.