269 - The Presence of Children

The Presence of Children

One basic theme running through the political campaign in the United States this season is children. People seem worried that the quality of care for children in this country has deteriorated and that the future we are bequeathing to them is tenuous. The communal and political structures, the familial and personal resources needed to sustain life from generation to generation have been jeopardized. Those running for political office seem to have noticed this and are competing with each other over who is more competent to deal with the issues.

Difficult problems mount up. Will the environment be habitable into the next generation? Is the day-to-day care we give infants adequate to sustain them in trust and to give them hope in their fragile first years? Will both international and family violence overtake us to such an extent that children by necessity become warriors at age eight? How can the wealthiest land on earth excuse its infant mortality rate? Is there a commitment to education adequate to the needs of the next generation? A complex nest of questions is focused for us by the presence of children and our responsibility to them.

But the presence of children asks questions about us at even deeper levels than the political. Their vulnerability is a clue to our own. The harm that sometimes comes to them through disease and accident can drive us to despair. And the harm we do them ourselves can reveal the tenuousness of our own goodness.

I

One of the more disturbing of the horror stories of the Bible can appropriately be read as a celebration of human wisdom. But from another point of view, it can be read as a story that raises the question of the frailty of our capacities to sustain human life-especially the lives of children. I have in mind the tale in I Kings 3:16-28 of the two mothers who fought over one child.

The two women lived in the same household, and each had a child of her own. Then, one of the babies died in the night. But which of them? The agony is terrifying. The mothers are at each other's throats, one accusing the other of child-stealing, of swapping the living for the dead.

 

270 - The Presence of Children

The dispute is resolved only when the women are brought before the king. Each accuses the other and claims the child as her own-until Solomon calls for the sword. One cries, "it shall be neither yours nor mine; divide it," while the other pleads, "Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it."

The horror is all around. There's horror in the death of the first child: the dying in the night that forms love's worst nightmare. There's horror in the grief and the fear, and in the fighting-in the face of one child's death-for possession of the life still left. There's horror in the threat of' violence it takes to get to the truth of the matter. There's horror in what the mother must do to save her child. Giving up one's own beloved child-even in order that its life may be spared-is as profound a torture as one can imagine.

But perhaps the greatest horror is the blackness we see when grief and fear and loss and anguish move one woman to the point where she'll ask that death be dealt again. When we see this, we absolutely recoil. We cannot bear to see how quickly and thoroughly terror can create despair. The woman who says "divide it" can no longer see or love anything. Even the child is no longer a child to her. It has become a token-"yours or mine. And if it cannot be mine, it is nothing. It has no value. Destroy it."

It is easy to be harsh with the woman who said "divide it," and virtually impossible for us to see ourselves in her place. But this may be a case of what Martha Nussbaum has called, in the apt title of her recent book, "the fragility of goodness." Human beings are vulnerable. Despair can overwhelm us, stealing our very capacities to love. It is not just that our existence is fragile; so, too, is our goodness. And, perhaps, it is this as much as the present condition and future promise of our children's lives that has us worried. The question we may be asking, and should be asking, is whether we have within us-in the face of the tragedy and suffering we see all around and fear may envelope our future-the moral resources to sustain human life.

II

Do we live with too simple a view about what it takes to live a good human life? The Greeks about whom Nussbaum writes in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge University Press, 1986) did not. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, they all knew how difficult it is to live well. They knew what it requires. Among the things required, they thought, are certain "external goods": friendship, others to love, values held in common, established and consistent practices of mutual care and hospitality, purposeful communal activity. We need these things in order to grow up into and to sustain such character as will be capable of goodness and love. And this, therefore, is a key point where politics and morality come together. For the point of politics is to create and preserve social structures and resources through which people in community may provide one another external goods needed to nurture and sustain good

 

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human life. Politics cannot give us all the external goods we need, but it can make some of them available. Even the best politics can never guarantee that the structures and resources will, in fact, be morally effective. Bad politics, however, can make them inaccessible.

In addition to these external goods, a good human life depends as well upon certain "internal goods": the quality and depth of our feelings (indeed, the capacity to have feelings at all), our very appetites for thought and for human communication as well as the content of them. These are more personal and individual dimensions of human goodness, but the Greeks were concerned with their protection and cultivation as well.

While they knew what it takes to sustain the good human life, they knew at the same time how fragile it is. They, like the Hebrews, were quite realistic about the tragic elements of life, about how things we cannot control can fall upon us and ruin us-not only financially and physically, but humanly and morally. They knew that pain and death and loss can have the effect of stripping us of the very goods we need in order to live and love. Sheer circumstance can rob us not only of especially beloved ones, but also of human community altogether. It can go beyond simply affecting our feelings; it can render us entirely unfeeling altogether. The Greeks knew that our character might well not be strong enough to protect against the crumbling of our souls. They knew that "luck," what just happens to people, can destroy them.

The woman who said "divide it" was not safe from luck. The loss of her loved one destroyed her. Tragedy took from her not only her child but her capacity to love, and brought despair in its place. But what about the other woman, the one who said "by no means slay it"? I do not know how Nussbaum would account for her. Perhaps the tragedy had simply been less overwhelming for her, because, indeed, it was not her child who had died in the night. Or, perhaps, her character was stronger, not yet tested to its full extent.

Whatever she might say about this particular woman, the final answer, according to Nussbaum, is that goodness is ultimately fragile. There is nothing, finally, to protect us from tragedy. All we have to depend upon is the web of culture and civilization (nomos is the Greek term) humanity itself has built up through tradition and protected with care over a vast time. But it is as vulnerable as we are. It, too, can be betrayed and destroyed. And when it is, there is nothing that can save us. This, she suggests, is the final Greek answer. And this, she implies, is her own answer as well.

III

It is easy at this point for Christians to jump in, claiming that Christ is the answer and that tragedy is overcome. I believe tragedy is finally overcome in Christ. But I fear we often say it carelessly and without paying the price. Too often, we put Christ forward in such a way that the goodness of the good human things we require to sustain life and love are

 

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denied. The value and beauty-indeed, the necessity-of a moral culture, and of the kinds of political institutions required to nourish one, fragile and penultimate as it may be, are diminished. Protestants, especially, have been far too quick to deny the preciousness of really good earthly things, the mundane things needed to sustain the goodness of a good life. We have been too ready to disparage them for their finitude, to betray them precisely because of their fragility.

The fragility of human goodness is a Christian doctrine as well as Greek. It does not lead, at the end, to the conclusion Nussbaum comes to-that human goodness is the only goodness there is. And Christians see a temptation in human goodness that at least some Greek philosophy seems to miss. We know that our own goodness (as well as human goods) may have corruptive power, tempting us to pride and idolatry. But human goodness, and everything required to nourish and sustain it, are nonetheless goods. They are goods to be thankful for, goods to praise God for, goods to be stewards of.

Children are a sign of this. The people are right-and the politicians are right-to see in children a beckoning toward the profound and difficult tasks of providing the structures and resources we need to sustain this planet physically, sustain our communities socially, and sustain each of our lives morally. Perhaps they sense, beneath the more obvious issues, clues to the preciousness and precariousness of human goodness. The vulnerability of our children can expose the fragility of human goodness. And to Christians, who know that we ourselves are not the source of even that fragile goodness, the presence of children can teach us also how to give thanks and to pray to the God who is.

Craig Dykstra