Sins of the Fathers

"The condition of mass disintegration seemingly intensifies human guilt. One way in which it does this is by depriving people of traditional and accepted patterns of life. Established wisdom and forms have lost much of their authority. In many matters once regulated by prescription there is no received way of acting. One is left to design and create his own life.

This means freedom and an opportunity for originality; but the strain and disorganization which it involves are necessarily very great, and many are bound to commit wrongs from which they would have been saved by a firmer and more commanding order of society.

An example of this situation is the raising of children in America. Customary forms of child-training have been partially discredited by an optimistic, permissive psychology, and the result is that American parents are not for the most part conscious of there being a particular way in which children are best disciplined and taught. Often parents are left only with a few notions vaguely based upon the hypotheses of unknown, and frequently philosophically ignorant, psychologists.

This of course constitutes an opportunity for a very creative kind of parenthood. But to have to train children and, in addition, to determine the final ends and the methods of such training is about as difficult a responsibility as a human being could assume. Parents who accept this responsibility are required, implicitly, to choose among competing philosophies of man, the world, and civilization; furthermore, they have to do this when they are young and inexperienced and must, on the validity of their choices, stake in some measure the lives and happiness of their children.

Never can it have been more true than today that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children."

― Glenn Tinder, "The Crisis of Political Imagination" (1964)

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Dear Kate,

What would your children, future generations, say about you?

If they are to have reasons to topple whatever you are building for them today, what would the reasons be?  Imagine with me.

This should not be hard, but not easy either.

It isn't hard because we should have seen by now such toppling is not only a nagging possibility but a historical certainty.  The repetition is necessary, which should be an insight into human nature obvious enough.

But here comes the hard part: it is not obvious to us how we could possibly be toppled, as obvious as it is to us that everything and everyone went before us should meet this common fate.  This, too, is an insight into human nature.

Morally outraged we are after the remains of 215 children were discovered last week in an unmarked burial site at a former residential school in Kamloops.  How can we not be?  Yet what I couldn't find in the news is why our ancestors, men and women likely more visionary than you and me, loving their families and life probably just as much, would think such oppressive system a good idea.

To ask this is to inquire: What were their assumptions, understanding, about human nature, race relation?  What was their worldview?  How did they see themselves in the playing out of human history?  What was the cosmic canvas on which they painted, their vision of human flourishing?  Can we learn from both their mistakes and achievements, while we question, also, our own way of life that, just as they were convinced about theirs, we find valid and noble?

When we are morally outraged--and merely that, we see no need to ask such questions.  To us these people are cardboard monsters, and there is only one thing to do to them: to knock their heads off.  The more civilized ones among us would apologize, make amends on their behalf.  To humanize the victims we must dehumanize the victimizers, conspicuously missing the irony that human destiny in its final analysis offers no such false dichotomy.  We don't want to listen to the fuller story because we have something to say, something that is finally right after all these years of wrongs committed by our fathers and mothers, wrongs that, if given the chance to have lived their life, we couldn't see ourselves commit personally.

If I am asking you to have sympathy for the devil, it's only because, selfishly speaking, one day we might find ourselves in need of some.

Our society is disintegrating under our watch, our children buried alive in all sorts of human crises within and without, their moral confusion a legacy of ours, inheriting a planet used and disposed of with our very hands.  Look at how we behave on social media: We go from being morally outraged to outrageously narcissistic and back and don't even blink.  The commercials we feed on between headlines of moral indignation are to answer to our many addictions and idolatries, always a new one to discover and engage our family in.  Last night's news I watched was bookended by the residential school story and the reopening of Las Vegas.

Tell me, why should anything else be done to our heads by the future generations other than having them knocked off?

Yours, Alex