The Philosophical Baby, page 23
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
HUCK FINN
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll GO to hell”—and tore it up.
9.
Babies and the
Meaning of Life
I love Christmas and have always celebrated it with particular fervor and intensity. Every year, neglecting final exams, faculty meetings, and grant submission deadlines, I decorate a big tree, put swags on the mantelpieces, bake gingerbread houses, roast geese, sing carols, and spend far too much on stocking stuffers—the works. For almost all my life I’ve had children at home and that has made Christmas especially rich, even if it came with the ambivalence of so much parenting. There was great egocentric pleasure in the doing itself, even more pleasure in thinking how much the children liked it, just a little edge of exhaustion at the effort and just a smidgen of doubt about whether the children really appreciated it enough.
I love Christmas so much in spite of the fact that my great-grandfather was a devout and distinguished rabbi, and I was raised as an equally devout atheist. I resolve the apparent contradiction by telling people that I love Christmas because, above all, it’s a holiday that celebrates birth and children—the most moving Christmas carols are both hymns and lullabies. I can’t think of anything more worthy of celebration.
In this book, I’ve argued that thinking about children can help solve some deep and ancient philosophical questions—questions about imagination, truth, and consciousness, and also identity, love, and morality. But beyond even these questions are what we might call the meaning-of-life questions—more broadly philosophical or even spiritual and religious questions that academic philosophers like me rarely tackle. What makes life meaningful, beautiful, and morally significant? Is there something that we care about more than we care about ourselves? What endures beyond death?
For most parents, in day-to-day, simple, ordinary life, there is an obvious answer to these questions—even if it isn’t the only answer. Our children give point and purpose to our lives. They are beautiful (with a small dispensation for chicken pox, scraped knees, and runny noses), and the words and images they create are beautiful too. They are at the root of our deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral triumphs. We care more about our children than we do about ourselves. Our children live on after we are gone, and this gives us a kind of immortality.
Curiously, though these feelings are so pervasive, they’re rarely even considered in philosophy and theology. In fact, it was thinking about immortality that first made me notice the missing children in philosophy. When I was ten, I read Plato for the first time and it changed my life. I still vividly remember the battered Penguin paperback that made me want to become a philosopher. But even in that very first encounter with philosophy there was a catch. The argument in the Penguin Plato that impressed me the most was Socrates’ case for immortality in the Phaedo. Like many ten-year-olds—or fifty-year-olds, for that matter—I was existentially terrified by death and was certainly in the market for a good argument for immortality. Socrates argues that something as complex as the soul can’t appear and vanish out of nowhere, and therefore it must exist, before and after our individual lives, in an abstract Platonic heaven.
What struck me about the argument was that there was no mention anywhere of children. It seemed obvious to me that your soul was created, at least in part, by the genes you inherited and the ideas you acquired from your parents, and that it continued after death in the genes and ideas you passed on to your children. Of course, this idea depended on scientific concepts that weren’t available to Socrates. But even if Socrates didn’t know about genes, he definitely knew about children. I’ll admit that attaining immortality through your children isn’t necessarily the answer to Socrates’ question. But he could have at least mentioned it as a possibility.
Nor did children appear in the 2,500 years of philosophy to come. Many profound questions about human nature can be answered by thinking about children. And thinking about children raises new and profound questions itself. Most parents, and even alloparents, feel that children help give their lives meaning. Yet children have been almost invisible to the deepest thinkers in human history.
There is an obvious historical explanation for this—Socrates was a man, like nearly all the philosophers and theologians who followed him. Children have always been part of women’s realm. Like most other aspects of life that are associated with women, they were not the sort of thing philosophers talked about.
But the problem may run deeper. Perhaps our intuitions about children really are too parochial and personal to be genuinely profound. My children are mine, after all. My feeling for them doesn’t have the universal character that we expect from spiritual intuitions. They seem beautiful to me, but then mothers love even a face that only a mother could love. From an evolutionary point of view, too, those intuitions might just be an illusion. Of course, you feel that your own children are important—it’s just another evolutionary trick that genes use to reproduce themselves. Your genes might make you really want to take care of the children who share those genes. But this doesn’t have anything to do with the meaning of life.
This is part of the deeper question that haunts all scientists who think about spirituality. Human beings have characteristic emotions of awe and wonder, moral worth and aesthetic profundity. They have a sense of meaning and purpose, and an intuition that there is something larger than themselves. But do these emotions and intuitions capture something real about the world? From a scientific perspective, these emotions and beliefs, like all emotions and beliefs, are the result of activity in our brains and have an evolutionary history. Often this is taken to mean that they are illusory—or at least that they don’t have the significance they appear to have.
In fact, my brain is designed to tell me the truth, at least most of the time. When I look at the desk in front of me, my belief that the desk is there is entirely due to activity in my brain—activity that has a long evolutionary history. But there really is a desk there and my brain activity accurately tells me about it. I can use that information as a guide to real actions in the real world—I can put my teacup down there without spilling it. When I look down from the edge of a cliff, I feel fear. I can tell you how my evolutionary history and the activity in my brain generate that feeling, but that doesn’t mean the feeling is just an illusion. On the contrary, I should feel fear—my brain is telling me something terribly important about the world and my relation to it. The fact that a belief is the result of evolutionary processes that shaped my brain makes it more likely to be true, not less so. Evolution tracks the real world.
On the other hand, there are perceptions, emotions, and beliefs that really are just bits of faulty wiring, mind bugs. When the moon looks larger at the horizon than at the apex of the sky, or seems to be following my car, or appears to have a face, those really are illusions. We know something about how the brain creates those illusions. When I see a harmless garter snake and recoil in horror, that really is a mistake left over from my evolutionary past. So the great question isn’t whether spiritual intuitions are in our brains—of course they are. The question is whether they’re simply a bit of deceptive brain wiring or whether they tell us something important, valuable, and true about the world and ourselves. Are they like seeing the man in the moon or seeing the teacup on the desk?
I don’t know about the spiritual intuitions that accompany mystical experiences or religious ceremonies. But I do think that the sense of significance that accompanies the experience of raising children isn’t just an evolutionarily determined illusion, like the man in the moon or the terrifying garter snake. Children really do put us in touch with important, real, and universal aspects of the human condition.
AWE
Like most scientists, I doubt that there is some ultimate, transcendent, foundational purpose to our lives, or to the universe, whether we interpret this in terms of a personal God or a mystical metaphysics. But certainly we can point to sources of real meaning in our actual human lives as we live them.
One classic kind of spiritual intuition is awe: our sense of the richness and complexity of the universe outside our own immediate concerns. It’s the experience of standing outside on a dark night and gazing up at the infinite multitude of stars. This kind of awe is the scientific emotion par excellence. Many scientists who are otherwise atheists point to it as a profound, deep, and significant reward of their work. Scientists are certainly subject to ambition, the lust for fame, the desire for power, and other dubious motivations. Still, I think all scientists, even the most domineering Harvard silverbacks, are also moved by this kind of pure amazement at how much there is to learn about the world.
I’ve argued that babies and young children experience this kind of feeling, this lantern consciousness, all the time. They may feel this way gazing up at a Mickey Mouse mobile instead of at the Milky Way, but the experience is very much the same. And it’s more than just a feeling for both the scientists and the children. The universe at every level, from Mickey Mouse to the Milky Way and beyond, is indeed wonderfully rich and complex and, well, just awesome. And our capacity to appreciate this richness is entirely genuine. Not everybody engages in science or even cares about it—but almost everybody shares in the learning of young children.
MAGIC
A second and rather different kind of spiritual intuition, what we might call our sense of magic, is our feeling that there are also possible worlds beyond the world we know. There are worlds of the imagination, worlds that are quite different from ours, magic, unreal worlds. The earliest recorded human stories are myths and legends, wild tales of faraway counterfactuals. Grey-eyed Athena, Pele the volcano goddess, and Thor the thunder hurler are as unlikely as Dunzer or Charlie Ravioli or Gawkin the Dinosaur. The restrained and realistic imaginary creatures of novels are relatively modern creations.
These stories—expressions of magic, myth, and metaphor—have always been closely connected to a different kind of spiritual sense, a different intuition that the world is wider than we are. Explicitly religious writers such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien link religion and magic. They point to the wonder and richness of the fairy tales we tell children, and children tell us. And, of course, both Lewis and Tolkien wrote stories that captured that sense of possibility, that sense that an alternate universe might lurk in every wardrobe. Those stories were aimed at children, but they speak equally to adults. In their pretend play, young children explore the magic of human possibility in a particularly wide-ranging and creative way. Their liberation from mundane cares lets them move into the world of the possible with particular ease.
This sense of possibility isn’t an illusion. The human world really is rich with magical potential in a very concrete and realistic way. I can watch Beauty and the Beast, the quintessentially magical Jean Cocteau fairy tale, on my computer, Skyping with my distant son at the same time. As Beauty looks into the magic mirror that sends her visions of her loved ones, I can stare into the real images in the real magic mirror of my laptop, images that once existed only in the minds of imaginative geeks.
Stories can also create new ways for human beings to live, as well as new worlds for them to live in. Religious stories do this, in particular, whether they are parables or koans, tales of Valhalla or Chelm. By imagining alternative minds, alternative ways that people might think and act, human beings can transform themselves and their communities. The sense of magical possibility that is so vivid in children is also at the root of much that is real and important about our lives. And the space of human imaginative possibilities really is much wider than any individual mind can capture.
LOVE
Children can also tell us, more than anything else, about the spiritual intuitions that we might call love. Our love for our children, and our children’s love for us, has a special quality. I said before that the particularity of our feelings about children might make them seem spiritually dubious. But the love we feel for children, not just mother love but the father love of social monogamy and the babysitter/sibling/grandmother/next-door-neighbor love of the alloparent, has a special quality of both particularity and universality. It is a powerful model for the love that underpins religious and moral intuitions.
One of the everyday but astonishing facts of life is that while we choose our friends and our mates, we don’t choose our children. When we give birth to a baby, and even when, as an alloparent, we take on the care of a baby we haven’t borne, we have no idea what that baby will be like. I may hope that my baby combines the best features of myself and my mate, while I fear that he actually combines the worst ones. Still, given the genetic lottery of human mating, and the contingencies of human nurturing, the most likely outcome is that the jumbled-up genes of each individual will come out looking like nothing else on earth. Even the most basic features of what a baby is like are beyond our control, a situation that becomes vivid for the parents of children with disabilities.
And yet, with some tragic exceptions, caregivers love the babies they care for. Sometimes they love the neediest babies, the babies with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis, most of all. And even more oddly, when we care for a child we love that child, not some arbitrary notion of children in general. We love our children just for the particular characteristics that we couldn’t possibly have anticipated—my oldest son’s intensity, talent, and straight-backed confidence; my middle son’s brown curls, wit, and intelligence; my youngest’s luminous smile, warm blue eyes, and sensitivity. In fact, these lists don’t capture it either—I just love them, not even because they are my children, but just because they are Alexei, Nicholas, and Andres.
Even more paradoxically, yet even more profoundly, our love for our children is inversely related to the benefits they provide us. Even with mates, and certainly with friends, we expect a certain reciprocity—I’ll take care of your neuroses if you’ll tolerate mine. The neediest of our intimates gives us something in return. But every child is needier than the most intolerably demanding friend or lover.
Imagine a novel in which a woman took in a stranger who was unable to walk or talk or even eat by himself. She fell completely in love with him at first sight, fed and clothed and washed him, gradually helped him to become competent and independent, spent more than half her income on him, nursed him through sickness, and thought about him more than about anything else. And after twenty years of this she helped him find a young wife and move far away. You couldn’t bear the sappiness of it. But that, quite simply, is just about every mother’s story. And it’s also the story of every human community—every constellation of mothers and fathers and socially monagomous mates, every group of siblings and babysitters and alloparents. It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them as that we love them because we care for them.
These moral intuitions about childrearing aren’t captured in most philosophical traditions. The classic philosophical moral views—utilitarian or Kantian, libertarian or socialist—are rooted in intuitions about good and harm, autonomy and reciprocity, individuality and universality. Each individual person deserves to pursue happiness and avert harm, and by cooperating reciprocally we can maximize the good of everyone—the basic idea of the social contract. But individualist, universalist, and contractual moral systems just don’t seem to capture our intuitions about raising kids.
On the other hand, this combination of particularity and selflessness is much like the love and concern that are part of our spiritual intuitions. We capture it in stories of saints and bodhisattvas and tzaddikim. They are supposed to feel that combination of singular, transparent, particular affection and selfless concern for everybody. No real human can do that. And, of course, there are many ways to approach that ideal and to care for others—ways that don’t involve children. Still, caring for children is an awfully fast and efficient way to experience at least a little saintliness.
