the red herring of relativism
- July 08, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In morality, My kids, Parenting
15
Last week I watched from our front porch as my five-year-old daughter Delaney received a moral lesson on a subject that has fascinated philosophers for centuries: ant squishing. Her brother Connor — eleven years old and pro-life in the deeply literal sense — found Laney busily stomping her way into ant mythology on the front sidewalk.
“Laney!!” he screamed. “Stop it!”
“What for?” she asked without pausing. “There are lots of others.”
He spluttered a bit — then a classic grin spread across his face. He raised his foot and aimed the sole at her. “Well there are lots of other little girls, too!!”
She screamed and ran. The ants huzzahed, and Monkey-Who-Pointed-Foot-at-Other-Monkey-And-Saved-Many entered the colony lore.
My boy had applied a great critical thinking technique by using the faulty logic of his opponent to generate a ridiculous counter-example. I wondered from the sidelines if it would stick.
A few days later, as I loaded the last of the boxes for our move, I got my answer. Laney walked with her head hung low, doing the aimless, foot-scraping walk of the bored child in midsummer, then announced her intention to “go squish some ants.”
“Hm,” I said.
She stopped walking. “What?”
“Well, I dunno. Does that seem like a good thing to do, or no?”
She shrugged.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You think about it for a minute and let me know what you decide.”
“Okay.” She took a little walk around the yard and thought.
A person of a certain perspective will see in that moment the spectre of moral relativism. Such a silly person will claim that instead of informing Delaney of the right answer, I gave her permission to pick and choose her morality at random — to declare ant squishing good or bad on the toss of a coin.
That’s a red herring.*
A red herring is an argument used to distract attention from the real question at hand. I hate red herrings but love the origin of the term. British foxhunters kept a stinky smoked red herring in their saddlebags with a long string tied around the tail. When the sun was setting and the hunt was done, one rider would get ahead of the hounds and drag the fish across the fox’s trail so the dogs would be thrown off and retire for the day. I hope that’s a true story.
To prevent secular parents from pursuing the moral instruction of their children without religion, religious advocates often drag the stinking red herring of relativism across the trail. The invocation of moral chaos is so unsettling that many parents sign their kids up for Sunday School…you know, just in case. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that there’s something between stone tablets and coin-flipping — between Thou shalt not and Whatever makes your weenie wiggle.
It’s called moral judgment.
I knew that Delaney knew the answer. Everyone knows the answer. Like most basic moral questions, knowing what’s right is not the hard part when your foot is raised above the skittering dots on the sidewalk. The challenge is to do what we already know is right. And the best foundation for that right action is the ability to say why something is right.
Not knowing right from wrong is so rare that it is a complete felony defense. Think about that. You are rightly considered barking mad if you fail to recognize the distinction. It’s so thunderously rare that the defense rarely succeeds. So why do we continue to pretend that our children’s moral development is best served by merely dictating lists of rules? Why could Representative Bob Barr (R-GA) say, with a straight face, that the Columbine shootings would have been prevented had the Ten Commandments been posted at the entrance? How can our understanding of moral development be so pit-scratchingly inept?
Instead of simply listing “thou shalt nots,” we ought to encourage our kids to discover and articulate what they already know is right, then ask them why it’s right. This, not the passive intake of rules, leads to the development of moral judgment, something that will allow them to think and act morally when we aren’t in the room with them.
Delaney came back after two minutes. “I’m not gonna squish ants anymore,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s what you decided?”
“Yep.”
“Why did you decide that?”
“Because they should get to have a life, too,” she said. “Like me.” That old reciprocity principle. You can’t beat it.
Next time someone drags out that old red herring of “moral relativism,” nod and smile, knowing that you’re giving your kids something much richer than commandments — the ability to think morally.
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*Critical thinking nitpickers (like me) will protest that this is really a straw man argument, not a red herring. I counter that the straw man is a type of red herring argument, and the Fallacy Files agree with me. So there. Plus I wanted to tell the story of the origin of the term. Plus “straw man of relativism” makes me yawn, whereas “red herring of relativism” — zing!
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Oh, still reading, eh? Then I’ll tell you that Parenting Beyond Belief is profiled in the Beliefwatch column of the current (July 16) issue of Newsweek .] Now shoo.
Change is…Good?
- June 30, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids
- 9
A post from June 2007.
In seven days, after 16 years in the same beautiful Victorian house in a Minneapolis neighborhood we love, our family is moving to Atlanta. Loss is a full-time occupation at the moment.
The picture above is a cup of dirt and grass my five-year-old daughter collected from around the legs of her swingset as we dismantled and discarded it. The new family wants the swingset out of the yard, so rather than waving to it as we drive off, my kids had to watch as I euthanized it.
First we gave them a full afternoon to ride the swings and say goodbye.
Then the ax fell.
Our move is not part of God’s plan. It’s not even a job transition. Either of those would have made it easier to deflect the kids’ occasional plunges into grief at the coming loss, not to mention our own. We could claim it was out of our hands.
Instead, we’re stuck with free will. We’re moving because I no longer have a brick-and-mortar job, which makes it possible to live closer to family and to flee the northern winter. We’re moving, in other words, because Mom and Dad decided to move.
Free will is a bitch.
A few months ago, everyone was thrilled about the move, but the approaching reality is more, shall we say, textured. Two nights ago my eleven-year-old boy literally cried himself to sleep. Like me, he doesn’t make friends at the drop of a hat. Unlike me, he has also acquired an actual girlfriend before acquiring an actual pimple.
When he asked me why, why, why we were moving, and whether it was too late to bump that inexorable momentum off course, I had nowhere to hide — no shoulder-shrugging over some transfer by a heartless corporation or the need to move to the high desert so little Timmy’s tubercular lungs could breathe freely again. No, our boy’s life was being uprooted because we, his parents, decided it would be. Three months ago he was excited about the idea. Three months ago he didn’t have a girlfriend.
Even beyond the near future, the consequences of such a move are staggering. Had my own family of origin not moved from St. Louis to LA in 1974, I would almost certainly not have gone to Berkeley, met Becca, and had the kids I now have. I’d have different kids, with a different woman. Joyless marriage and wretched, snot-nosed kids, I’m sure of it. As a result of my parent’s long-ago decision, that horrible woman is now probably married to someone else. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Heh.
Now here we are, rewriting the lives of our children and of countless others born and unborn with a single decision. They’ll now grow up with different friends and most likely marry different people than they would have. Assuming they have kids, tens of thousands of human beings will end up existing who would never have come to pass had we stayed put — and tens of thousands of others who would have resulted from their likely unions here will never be. Did we kill off the next Gandhi…or the next bin Laden? Or, on the other hand, have we now set into motion the creation of another future hero or monster?
Free will isn’t for the faint of heart.
I love to think about the chaos of innumerable butterfly wings that beat out the details of our brief lives. So do my kids. It’s endlessly fascinating to consider the real consequences of the absent helmsman. But here in the present, we’re drowning in the losses of the moment.
That’s okay. It’s good for all of us in the long run. I don’t think kids benefit from being too thoroughly protected from the experience of loss. It’s a guaranteed part of the experience of being alive. They’ll gain at least as much in resiliency, adaptability and self-knowledge from this transition as they will lose.
Right?
PBB Top Ten for June
10. PBB translated into Arabic!
Well, not yet. But I have been contacted by an Egyptian atheist who is enthusiastic about Parenting Beyond Belief, sees a strong need for an Arabic translation, and offered to do it himself. I declined for the moment, partly because the publisher controls all translations, but mostly because PBB is quite culturally specific, with references to church-state separation, Christmas, baptism… I know that sounds a bit like the question Bertrand Russell once received from an Irish woman when she heard he was an atheist: But is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in which you disbelieve? But it’s true – PBB is about being a nonbeliever in a largely Christian context. What’s needed, I told my Egyptian friend, is an Arabic book by Arab atheists and humanists dealing with the issues of being a nonbeliever in a primarily Islamic context. Plus that way I won’t have to deal with my fatwaphobia.
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9. The Amazon rank
PBB has been rolling along with very good numbers on Amazon – typically between 2000 and 4000 out of four million (the top one-tenth of one percent). But a recent story about PBB in the Minneapolis Star Tribune caused a phenomenal spike to #721 – the top two-hundredths of a percent.
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8. The UU side of things
As PBB readers know, I love Unitarian Universalists for many reasons. They also drive me crazy, which is OK, since they drive themselves crazy, too. Having redefined religion as…well, as pretty much anything you want it to mean, from the Flying Spaghetti Monster to a swift kick in the pants, some UU fellowships around the country are hesitant about being connected to this book. “I’m not sure that we as a religious community should be involved in promoting a book about raising children without religion!” said one (utterly nontheistic) UU correspondent. Thus am I failing to reach large swaths of the one community most likely to want and need this book, all because of the goofy way we define and redefine and undefine words.
On the other hand, UU World – the outstanding quarterly magazine of the UUs – is publishing a large excerpt of the book in the upcoming Fall issue.
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7. I’m sorry…can you repeat the question?
I did an interview recently with a wonderful, friendly reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. She had read the book, found it fascinating, quoted back large passages to me – and then, ten minutes into the interview, said, “But…you do believe in God, right?”
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6. “Tis 15,000 visitors, I muttered”
The PBB website (including the forums and blog) is getting pretty darn lively:
March 2007: 3783 visitors
April 2007: 7991 visitors
May 2007: 9743 visitors
June 2007 (proj.): 15,000 visitors [NB: actual visitor count for June: 16,500]
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5. Secular Nation
Secular Nation, the quarterly magazine of Atheist Alliance International, is devoting its entire Summer issue to secular parenting, including a feature by yours truly. Once it’s live, you’ll find it here.
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4. The Secular Web
The Secular Web — the largest secularist website in the solar system — will also have an article of mine as Featured Article for July. Once it’s live, you’ll find it here.
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3. Ask Miss Dale
I’m beginning to get a stream of requests for advice. One young mother is feeling the need to set ground rules for her evangelistic father now that her daughter is getting to the questioning stage. Another in my own city has four kids in an evangelical private school (for the academic rigor (in most areas (not science))) but is being driven insane by the overwhelming religious indoctrination and wants nonsectarian options. Others are seeking books on this or that topic, strategies for approaching a public school that’s violating church-state principles, or resources for counseling upon the death of child. I’m deeply moved and increasingly aware of the crying need that PBB has begun to address. There’s so much more to do.
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2. Removing the scales from mine eyes
Friendly and well-meaning Christians continue to invite me to “dialogue” or to “have a cup of coffee” because they find me “intriguing” and want to “understand better” where I’m “coming from.” This is a lovely idea in principle, and something I enjoyed for many years. But even if it doesn’t begin as a conversion attempt (and it usually does), these people each enter the conversation convinced that I just haven’t sat my silly self down with the right Christian. They are also convinced, without exception, that they, at last, will be that right Christian. They’ve heard this heroic narrative so many times – the blinded atheist from whose eyes the scales can be made to drop by the right turn of phrase – and just can’t wait to be the one standing all in white, hearing those scales tinkling on the tile between us.
If I consent, they give me the same, tired seven or eight or nine or twelve unconvincing things that convinced them. Once I heard the same seven or eight or nine or twelve things for the twentieth time, I gave myself permission to start declining these invitations. At which point I am inevitably accused of an unwillingness to listen to God’s Truth.
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1. PBB is going to Harvard!
After years of hard work and countless all-nighters, PBB has finally made it to Harvard! Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein has just informed me that Parenting Beyond Belief will be included in his course on Humanism and Atheism next year at the Harvard Divinity School.
Rubbernecking at evil
- June 19, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In morality, My kids, Parenting
- 11
Any kid knows there’s only one way to view evil:
Notice the difference between the Venetian blinds, above, and the blackout curtains, below:
The second girl is playing hide-and-seek. The first one is looking at something forbidden — or maybe playing hide-and-seek the way I always did.
I always admired Lot’s wife for peeking. Turning her into a condiment seems harsh, even for Jehovah. Two cities were being destroyed by God’s own napalm, including her own home town, and she was curious. We’re all rubberneckers when it comes to evil -– repelled and fascinated at the same time. We cover our eyes, then splay those fingers for a goggling glimpse. We’re curious, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The classic Disney films look darkness smack in the eye. Even when the medium is a cartoon, classic Disney evil is rarely cartoonish. Bambi’s mother is shot to death, and we watch the dawning realization in Bambi’s eyes as he treads back out into the snow to find her:
Snow White is poisoned. Cruella de Vil wants to make puppies into a coat, for chrissakes. This is genuine evil.
And I think it’s good –- even important -– for kids to see this stuff. They grow tremendously by engaging fictional evil. You can practically see it happening, see them grappling with and recoiling from –- and goggling fascinatedly at -– that evil. Just imagine Harry Potter without Voldemort. (Actually you don’t have to imagine it. Just check out one of the worst kids’ movies ever made, here.)
It can’t be a coincidence that two of the pivotal moments in the ethical development of my own kids were Disney moments. Connor developed into an instant Manichaean watching 101 Dalmatians at the age of three –- the Glenn Close version -– and discovering, through splayed fingers, that evil exists.
For the following year, Connor announced 15 to 20 plans per day for “getting bad guys.” “If a bad guy came, I would run between his legs and get away.” “If a bad guy came, I would run so fast into him that he would smack down.” My favorite: “I’m gonna start keeping my feet pointing two different ways when I walk, so if a bad guy comes, he won’t know which way I’m gonna run.” For half a day, he walked around the house like Charlie Chaplin. That one film seared the problem of evil into his consciousness like nothing before or since.
Disney introduced Erin (“the B”) to evil as well, and at the same age – but her reaction was decidedly different. Her epiphany came as Snow White entered the deep, dark forest, fleeing the wicked Queen. The Queen had certainly gotten her attention, but Erin’s eyes didn’t pop – and I mean POP — until Snow White fled into the storm-whipped forest.
“Daddy, LOOK!!”
“Oooh, yeah, look at that.” The whipping branches of the trees had transformed into gnarled hands, which were reaching ever closer to Snow White as she cowered and ran down the forest path. I looked over at Erin, whose dinnerplate eyes were glued to the screen.
“What ARE those?!” she asked, breathlessly.
“Looks like some kind of evil hands, B.”
“Daddy,” she said in an intense hush, “…I want to BE those evil hands!”
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I peeled myself off the ceiling, frantically waved down a passing trucker, and made a new life for myself in an undisclosed location.
In fact, the evil hands episode was the visible birth of one of the central threads of Erin’s personality: a fascinated obsession with good and evil, right and wrong. Erin is the one to notice, aloud, when we drift 3 or 4 miles above the speed limit. Or 20. Three minutes after condemning a passing smoker, she will furtively take a drag on a straw or pencil in the backseat, then recoil in giggly horror. When I was her age, I was taken with the polarity of true and false. But for Erin, it’s the polarity of right and wrong that holds the greatest fascination.
About a year ago, she went through a brief period of self-recrimination, literally dissolving into tears at bedtime, but uncharacteristically unwilling to discuss it. The morning after one such nighttime session, we were lying on the trampoline together, looking at the sky, and I asked if she would tell me what was troubling her. “Did you do something you feel bad about, or hurt somebody’s feelings at school?” I asked. “There’s always a way to fix that, you know.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t something I did.”
“Something somebody else did? Did somebody hurt your feelings?”
“No.” A long silence. I watched the clouds for awhile, knowing it would come.
At last she spoke. “It isn’t anything I did. It’s something…I thought.”
I turned to look at her. She was crying again.
“Something you thought? What is it, B?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“That’s OK, you don’t have to say. But what’s the problem with thinking this thing?”
“It’s more than one thing.” She looked at me with a worried forehead. “It’s bad thoughts. I think about saying things or doing things that are bad. Like…”
I waited.
“Like bad words. That’s one thing.”
“You want to say bad words?”
“NO!!” she said, horrified. “I don’t at ALL!! But I can’t get my brain to stop thinking about this word I heard somebody say at school. It’s a really nasty word and I don’t like it. But it keeps popping into my brain, no matter what I do, and it makes me feel really, really bad!!”
She cried harder, and I hugged her. “Listen to me, B. You are never bad just for thinking about something. Never.”
“What? But…If it’s bad to say a bad word, then it’s bad to think it!”
“But how can you decide whether it’s bad if you don’t even let yourself think it?”
She stopped crying in a single wet inhale, and furrowed her brow. “Then…It’s OK to think bad things?”
“Yes. It is. It’s fine. Erin, you can’t stop your brain from thinking – especially a huge brain like yours. And you’ll make yourself crazy if you even try.”
“That’s what I’m doing! I’m making myself crazy!”
“Well don’t. Listen to me now.” We went forehead to forehead. “It is never bad to think something. You have permission to think about everything in the world. What comes after thinking is deciding whether to keep that thought or to throw it away. That’s called your judgment. A lot of times it’s wrong to act on certain thoughts, but it is never, ever wrong to let yourself think them.” I pointed to her head. “That’s your courtroom in there, and you’re the judge.”
The next morning she woke up excitedly and gave me a high-speed hug. Once she had permission to think the bad word, she said, it just went away. She was genuinely relieved.
Imagine if instead I had saddled her with traditional ideas of mind-policing, the insane practice of paralyzing guilt for what you cannot control – your very thoughts. Instead, I taught her what freethought really means.
I’m more than a little proud of myself for managing to say the right thing. That’s always a minor miracle. I don’t blog about the three hundred or so times in-between that I say the wrong thing.
In the year since that day, Erin has several times mentioned that moment, sitting on the trampoline, as the single best thing I ever did for her. As with most such moments, I had no idea at the time that I was giving her anything beyond the moment itself. I just wanted her to stop crying, to stop beating up on herself. But in the process, it seems, I genuinely set her free.
“To hell with this goddamn freethought parenting!”
- June 12, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, sex
- 20
To hell with this goddamn freethought parenting! — Rebekah McGowan
That shocking phrase came hurtling from between the tender lips of the mother of my children as we sat nursing our morning lattés yesterday.
Turns out Becca had spent the end of the previous evening fencing with our nearly 12-year-old son over the appropriate bedtime for a nearly 12-year-old son now that summer has arrived. She was proposing 10pm. He was pretty much proposing dealer’s choice, but willing to settle for midnight, maybe 11:30. With occasional extensions to dawn.
I descended into my latté foam. When I surfaced, she was still there.
“Well?”
I set down my mug and made a conscious decision to leave the little beige mustache where it was, figuring it lent me a certain gravitas. I could feel it fizzing, not unpleasantly. “And this has something to do with freethought parenting, I’m guessing.”
“Yes. He asked why. Why, why, why. Why do I have to go to bed earlier, he said.”
“Mm. And you said?”
“I said it’s not healthy to stay up late and sleep late. And he asked why not, if you’re getting the same amount of sleep? And I said I read that somewhere. It isn’t good for kids.”
Pfft. Where did you read that? I thought.
“And then he said, ‘Pfft. Where did you read that?'”
“No!”
“Yes! And I said it’s a known thing. And he said he wants to see it!”
The sweater-vested professor in me grinned. Before he gives full credit, my boy wants to see Mom’s citation page. Exterior Guy remained carefully grinless.
I paused, licking off the foam in case I needed the energy for my next move. “So it’s about what’s healthy? I mean, that’s the real reason you…I mean we …want him in bed at ten?”
“Yes! It’s not healthy for a kid to stay up until midnight every night!”
“Okay. So are you going to look it up and show him?”
“No! No, I am not.”
“No, of course not.” I explored the java reef a bit, surfaced again. “And, uh…why is that?”
“Because…well, for one thing, what if it turns out not to be true?”
Let me here confess the crashing unfairness of telling this story. In our marriage, the conversational shoe is almost ALWAYS on the other foot. For all my puffed up blathering about critical thinking and having confidence in reason, Becca’s usually the one talking parental sense into my head. So for me to take one of her rare lapses and sing about it in my blog is just outrageous. It’s just wrong.
Where was I.
Oh yeah: She said, “What if it turns out not to be true?”
“Well, if it’s not unhealthy, and that was your real concern, then you’d have nothing to worry about anymore. What a relief, eh?”
She sat in silence for a moment, then executed a twisting jackknife into her own mug. When she returned, she looked like I usually do in these discussions: moded and corroded. Plus a little fizzy mustache.
I did a strutting endzone dance (uh HUH uh HUH uh HUH). In my head, of course.
Turns out we both want him in bed with lights out at 10, and that neither of us really finds argument by proverb the least bit compelling. Becca has vaguely moralistic reasons — it just seems somehow wicked to stay up late and sleep in late. I agree, for some reason, though I tend to think that’s Cotton Mather speaking through us. As for me, I want sex more than twice a year (decidedly un-Matherish of me). And we both like to read in bed uninterruptedly. Plus it throws off the family rhythm to have one person waking at 11:15 am demanding breakfast. Those reasons are more than sufficient. So we agreed. And at that point, if there are no further witnesses, the gavel comes down.
And that’s the part that’s so often misunderstood when other parents hear that we want our kids to question authority, even our own. Questioning authority doesn’t mean they have permission to DISREGARD our decisions and our rules. It means they are invited to challenge our decisions, to ask for the reasons behind them, to try to change our minds — but at the end of the process, while they are children, we’re gonna win. And if they disregard a decision, there are consequences. Just like in life.
It isn’t a choice between anarchy and fascism. Giving our kids permission to know the (real) reasons behind our decisions and even to question those decisions (1) shows them respect; (2) helps them develop their own reasoning abilities; (3) keeps us honest by ensuring our reasons are indeed defensible; and (4) further defeats and diminishes the ability of later authorities to make them into compliant, unquestioning automatons, voting and spending and acting and thinking as they are told and waving the flags they are handed.
Sometimes there isn’t time to explain. Sometimes I don’t CARE to explain. Sometimes we say, “Because I said so.” The trick is to make these rare enough to actually sound funny to kid and parent alike when they happen, and to know when I do it that it’s an unshining moment in my parental career.
Once we’ve made a decision, our kids can file a minority opinion, or even appeal, if they come up with an even stronger proverb than Mom is using. Sometimes they change our minds. Happens quite a bit. But they know it only works if their reasoning is strong. Whining or raging is a quick ticket to a summary decision by the judge.
Like bedtime at 8.
You put your whole self in
I don’t like bumperstickers. Half the time it’s just a self-righteous scold issuing from an automotive backside like a continuous ideological fart. I don’t even care if I agree with it; no fart is good when I’m behind it.
The rest of the time it’s witless humor. I see this in front of me in traffic
and begin weeping for at least three reasons. I have changed lanes in vicious traffic just to get an especially stupid sticker out of my sightline.
Once in a very long while there’s the exception that proves the rule, whatever that means — a bumpersticker that manages to be both witty and meaningful. I saw one two years ago in the parking lot of a Unitarian fellowship in Fridley, Minnesota. It said
I nearly wet myself with delight. Three days later I was pasting a copy on my own rear end. It’s still there. It captures the central joke of our existence, the difference between how big and serious we feel and how small and silly we are. [I’ve called this ‘the monk and the monkey,’ thinking I’d coined the phrase — then Googled it and learned otherwise. A classic monk-and-monkey moment.]
Best of all, the sticker calls into question the idea that “it” has to all be “about” some one thing.
It doesn’t, you know.
When someone hears that I think God is pretend, a meaning-and-purpose question is not far behind. But how do you get out of bed in the morning, and so on. It’s important in these moments to hide my instant, overwhelming desire to pull the person’s underwear up over his head and skip away humming I’ve Got a Loverly Bunch of Coconuts. Instead I pretend it’s a question worth answering. It isn’t, but what the hell.
I explain that we all ought to get out of bed in grateful surprise — unconditionally, every single morning — giggling with amazement at our luck to be conscious things, to be inside that tiny window of existence between two infinities of nonexistence. Most mornings I fail to wake up that way, and shame on me for that, silly monkey. For countless millennia I was mindless stuff. In a few years I’ll be that again. But for now… *HAHAHAHAHA!!!* LOOK AT ME, all up and EXISTING!!! WOOHOO!!!!!
You really have got to do that once in awhile, and mean it.
To insist on more is outrageously piggy. Our luck at even having that tiny window (most potential “people” never do, after all) and at being inside that window right now — why, that luck is so incredibly huge, we shouldn’t even be able to get to the end of our solemn declarations of the hunger for “meaning and purpose” without bursting into fits of giggles: “My existence is meaningful because…heh…heh heh….WOOHOO!!!!!!!! *HAHAHAHAHAHA!!* WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!!!”
But it isn’t enough, is it. I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
In the months that followed, my purposometer dropped to the mid-30s. I had no idea which way to go professionally. All of my romantic relationships had ended in flames and the waiting room was empty. I felt like a photocopy of a photocopy of a hollow log that wonders what the point is.
It was scary. It was unsettling. I didn’t like it one bit.
I scrambled to feed the meter with the only currency it had ever accepted: I went back to school. But I was haunted by the feeling that I was in the wrong field. I had followed what I was good at instead of finding what might fulfill me. My meter registered a cautious but bearable 50 and would have stayed there until the next square hat landed on my head, had not some damn fine M&P come strolling into view:
I had seriously dated enough of the wrong women (3, 4, or 5, depending on your definition of “serious,” “date,” and “woman”) to recognize the right one when she walked into the frame. I’ll refrain from further description of my lucky marriage, since it tends to come out like a Barry Manilow song. But when it comes to waking up everyday in grateful surprise…well, let me tell you, it’s just great to see her experience that every morning. Heh.
We were married, I got a job as a college professor, we had kids, and M&P became a non-issue. In one way or another, everything that mattered centered on them — and once the purposometer is in the high 90s, it’s pancreatic again.
It was about five years ago that I realized I hadn’t given M&P a thought in a long time. It only began to register again because my career had stopped satisfying me. My family was still my primary raison d’être, but work no longer worked. As the needle dropped, I could feel the hunger for a topping-off of my sense of purpose. I was spoiled, really. After so many years of fulfillment, even dropping into the low 80s was painful.
Last year I quit my job and became a full-time writer. There was no real M&P boost at first — the financial silence after the last paycheck was so terrifying that I was editing business books and telecommunications manuals, anything to put food on my family. If anything, the purposometer took a hit. But I slowly found work that was much more meaningful: writing for schools, writing for Nonviolent Peaceforce, and launching the parenting book. Deeply satisfying, purposeful work. Now I’m back in the high 90s. Wind from the NW, gusting to 20 mph.
Here comes the point.
“Meaning and purpose” is not an all-or-nothing commodity. It goes up, it falls down. It swings around wildly, trying to find its bearings. I don’t believe there is, or should be, one universal “meaning of life,” god-based or otherwise, no one thing that keeps all of our needles pinned. Neither do I believe we make our own meaning from pure random scratch. I think we discover what is fulfilling for us. We feel in the pits of our stomachs when we’re on a hollowing path, then register a shock of recognition when we veer onto another that fills us up.
When I was eighteen, I had no idea that family would end up being the most fulfilling element of meaning and purpose for me. I had to go hollow for a long time first. One of the most painful parts of parenting will surely be watching my kids go through trial and error in their own search for meaning — left foot in, left foot out, right elbow in, right elbow out. I may think I want them to be happy and fulfilled every minute of their lives, but no predigested meaning and purpose is going to feed them in the long run. Like everything else, the process of finding it yourself is essential to knowing when you can finally put your whole self in.
Then you shake it all about.
god’s burning love for me
The Minneapolis Star Tribune contacted me a few weeks back to see if I’d mind being featured in their “Believer” profile, a weekly sidebar in the Faith & Values section. Why not. They sent a few questions and gave me a 200-word limit. Here’s the result:
BELIEVER
Dale McGowan, 44, RobbinsdaleOccupation: Writer.
Identifies as: Secular humanist.
Favorite work of music
Piano Concerto in G Major, Maurice Ravel. The whole bittersweet human comedy is in that one amazing piece.What do you believe in?
This natural universe is all there is. We are all made of the same material as the stars, but unlike most of the stuff in the universe, we have the astonishing good fortune to be conscious for a short while. We should never stop dancing and singing in the face of that magnificent luck. We are cosmically insignificant, inconceivably unimportant — except to each other, to whom we should therefore be unspeakably precious.Describe something your values have helped you navigate.
I’ve spent 30 years reflecting on my father’s death. Now that I’ve reached his final age, a naturalistic understanding of death has led me to fear it less. I’ll never experience death, since my death, by definition, will be the absence of me. I won’t be there — so what’s to fear? Our identities spring entirely from a constantly recomposed electrochemical symphony playing in our heads. Asking where my “self” goes when that electrochemical symphony ends is like asking where the music goes when an orchestra stops playing. We are living music. How wonderful is that?
Only two Baptists called to save me, followed by weeks of silence. I thought I was out of the woods — until today, when I received this letter:
Dear Dale,
I’m sending these booklets to you so that you know God loves you. When you die, you don’t die like a dog. You will go on forever!
I’m 74, & received Christ into my life at age 11. I’ve never regretted it for a minute.
Love, & Rejoicing in the Lord Jesus,
Virginia H—
Enclosed were two signs of God’s burning love for me: a Jack Chick tract, including this panel:
…and a second pamphlet:
She sent them, she said, so I could know God loves me.
If that’s God’s idea of love, Virginia…well, he can frankly go love himself.
The Relaxed Parent Film Festival
- May 28, 2007
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting, sex
- 27
Our Friday night tradition started sometime last year. Every Friday we get a Papa Murphy’s pizza the size of a Buick and a family movie.
By family movie, I don’t mean “family movie.” I mean a movie that our whole family watches together, which believe you me is not often the same thing. And here’s where it gets interesting. It’s my job each week to choose the film. Here’s the audience:
MALE, 44, WRITER. Enjoys philosophical themes; unpredictable, non-linear narratives; line-crossing humor.
FEMALE, 41, EDUCATOR. Enjoys chick-flicks, ro-coms, foreign films. Has never seen a movie without crying.
MALE, 11. Enjoys science fiction, sports, fantasy, adventure. Hates everything he loved at ages nine and five.
FEMALE, 9. Enjoys character-driven dramas and comedies. Gets lost in non-linear narratives, requiring frequent paternal trips to the pause button.
FEMALE, 5. Enjoys an amazingly wide range of flicks, from Pokemon to war movies to comedies to space epics. Can’t read, so captions are out. Hides eyes whenever the music turns minor.
Okay now…find us a movie.
Wait wait, a few more things you should know. Neither of the parents will sit through anything numbingly stupid. Nothing that looks like That’s So Raven, and nothing of the Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh ouevre. If it’s animated, it pretty much has to be Pixar, which means actual plot and characters. And we’ve seen all of those, 4-20 times each.
As for parental concerns — well, our guidelines might strike some parents as reckless. I prefer the word relaxed. And that relaxation comes straight out of our worldview.
Conservative religious denominations often teach that humankind is inherently sinful — that beneath a thin veneer of civility lurks a boiling depravity, just itching to stretch its legs. We must erect all sorts of protections and precautions to avoid opening the floodgates, lest we crack each others’ heads open to feast on the goo inside, or worse, turn gay. “If not for the seventh commandment,” I once heard a Veneerist proclaim in a debate, “there would be NOTHING to keep me from walking out the door to cheat on my wife!” Nothing? Not love? I wondered. Or commitment? Or simple human decency? If you say so.
Most depressing of all was his wife, nodding like a bobblehead in the front row.
I don’t buy this for a minute. Though we humans do occasionally screw things up rather royally, most of the time most of us behave well, especially if we feel loved and supported by those around us. It’s yet another gift of evolution. Populations with a tendency toward self-destruction would quickly lose the selective advantage to cooperative ones. The outlook that my kids are evolutionarily inclined to be good changes almost EVERYTHING about my parenting, especially compared to those who see their kids as simmering pots of potential felony and monitoring the flames beneath them as the most urgent parental task. It allows me, among other things, to focus on drawing them out instead of beating them in.
I don’t have to psychotically protect my children from scratches to their protective layer. I want to immerse them in the colors and contrasts and confusions of the world — gradually, yes, but definitely. I believe this fearless approach is ending me up with some pretty remarkable, multifaceted, complex, wonderful kids. You should meet them. I think you’d agree. So, dinner on Thursday, then?
I once had a student, a college freshman, who had never seen a non-Disney movie. It was the standard her parents had developed to protect her from certain ideas, images, and themes — call them “colors” — that could have scratched her veneer, damaging the porcelain doll beneath, or worse yet, letting loose the she-wolf within.
As a result, she hadn’t seen The Wizard of Oz. She hadn’t seen E.T. Is there a Disney film that deals with the longing for home as beautifully as those two?
Since we began our movie tradition about forty Fridays ago, my kids have been exposed to a fantastic variety of themes and ideas, cultural touchpoints they refer to over and over. Yes, we’ve seen Flicka and Flipper, Over the Hedge, Little Manhattan and The Karate Kid. But then there are these:
Pleasantville • Edward Scissorhands • Cool Hand Luke • The Great Escape • Jesus Christ Superstar • Rain Man • Big Fish • Empire of the Sun • Life of Brian • Groundhog Day • Walking with Cavemen • South Pacific • Raising Arizona • Intimate Universe • The Truman Show • Walking with Dinosaurs • The Pursuit of Happyness • Stranger than Fiction • I, Robot • About a Boy • Brian’s Song • Parenthood • Bridge on the River Kwai
In addition to the Gs, they’ve seen a lot of PGs, plenty of PG-13s, and a few carefully-chosen Rs (like Rain Man). That means once in a while our kids hear a good solid swear or a reference to actual human sexuality, and have somehow avoided the plunge into foul-mouthed promiscuity.
I think this kind of low-key, normalized exposure makes it less likely they’ll gravitate toward these behaviors. If instead we hide these things, we make them powerful, attractive…forbidden fruit. When a Veneerist jumps for the remote at the first deep kiss or angry curse, he underlines the message that something truly magical is afoot.
Veneerist readers will naturally suppose that I’m advocating porn and slasher marathons for toddlers. Silly Veneerists. Non-Veneerists know there’s something between Little House on the Prairie and Debbie Does Dallas — a great big juicy wonderful and textured middle. My kids have been there, and they’re all the richer for it.
In less than a year, the five of us have explored the importance of honesty (About a Boy, Liar Liar), felt deep compassion and empathy (Brian’s Song, Pursuit of Happyness), learned to care deeply about those who are different (Rain Man, Edward Scissorhands), admired courage and perseverance (Empire of the Sun, The Great Escape), contemplated the meaning of humanness (I, Robot), challenged smiling conformity (Pleasantville, Life of Brian, Big Fish) and questioned our assumptions about reality itself (The Truman Show, Stranger than Fiction, Groundhog Day, Big Fish). We even stood with Judas as he took Jesus to task for neglecting the less fortunate as he pursued his own fame (Jesus Christ Superstar), traced our origins (Walking With Cavemen) and learned never, ever to build a bridge for the enemy, even if your craftsmanship makes you proud (Bridge on the River Kwai). Can’t tell you how many times that lesson has come in handy.
My kids have cried with empathy for people who initially scared them.
Most important of all, they’ve learned that a man really can eat fifty eggs.
Yes yes, fine, Charlie Babbitt [Tom Cruise] says “fuck” about a dozen times in Rain Man. He does so because he’s an arrogant, selfish jerk — and arrogant, selfish jerks don’t say “boogers” when they’re mad. My kids didn’t want to be like Charlie Babbitt, so why would they emulate his language? Instead, they marveled at how his selfishness slowly transformed into first tolerance, then selfless love for his brother — something underlined by his changing use of the full palette of the English language.
About the tenth time Charlie cussed, Erin shot me a look and said, “Boy, you can tell what kind of person he is.” She had a chance to handle it, process it, and put it in perspective in our living room rather than on the schoolbus.
Best of all, they’re developing a taste for the unique, the creative, and the offbeat, for imaginative narratives and complex visions of the world.
Sure, sometimes I cringe and leap to the remote when a scene heads a little further than we’d expected. But it’s worth the risk. So next time you’re thinking about a film for the whole family, reach beyond G and PG. Let them engage the messy, fascinating world out there while you’re in the living room with them. They can handle more than we give them credit for.
GREAT RESOURCE FOR PARENTS: Netflix’s Parent Advisory feature in the left margin of the page for each film. Click on the “more” link for a terrific, detailed run-down of elements to help you decide what’s appropriate for your kids. You might care more about profanity, while I like to avoid people with their insides on their outsides. The advisory feature gives us each what we need to know. Here’s an example of the parent advisory page for Big Fish, a family favorite of ours. And here’s the advisory that helped us to green-light the R-rated Rain Man.
Kids’ behavior baffles secular dad
Help me out with this one.
My kids have been showing a pattern of behavior lately. Well, truthfully, it’s nothing new. They’ve been this way for years. But it’s only lately that I’ve come to recognize it as a pattern, and I just can’t figure out where it comes from.
My worldview is completely nontheistic, so as you know I choose my morals at random every Monday morning and teach my kids to do the same. Connor chooses his each week from a fancy wheel-of-fortune gizmo. Erin uses a dartboard. I guess I’m old-fashioned: I draw my morals out of a hat.
Which is why this pattern of behavior in my kids has me scratching my head.
Let me start with my oldest. Connor, 11, can’t stand to see an animal hurt, even spiders, even insects. When a bat got into his grandmother’s house, evangelical Grandma wanted to get a tennis racket and whack it straight to Jesus. But Connor (then eight) insisted on catch-and-release — and, to our astonishment, managed it himself.
This was easy enough to explain. “Be kind to other living things” must have come up when he’d spun the wheel that week. It’s right there between “trip blind people” and “pee in the lemonade when nobody’s looking.”
He has three jars for his money. No, not JOY (Jesus, Others, Yourself), but SOY (Savings, Others, Yourself). But here’s the weird thing: He splits his allowance evenly among the jars. I first noticed this shortly after we’d seen a homeless man under a bridge on Regent’s Canal in London. Connor was deeply affected by this. He wrote a poem about that man and we talked at length about how fortunate we are. The very next week I noticed that the money in the jar for “others” was even with the one for himself. I just can’t figure out why. Even when his spending jar is tapped out, it never occurs to him to go into the one reserved for others. To date, he has saved several acres of rainforest and sent food to hurricane victims with that jar.
It gets weirder. He wanted a MySpace page. We looked into it a bit and decided, ah, no — especially when we learned that he would have to lie about his age to register. I had chosen “don’t lie” from the hat that week, so the MySpace page was out of the question. He agreed, grudgingly, so I’m guessing “don’t lie” had come up on his wheel that week as well. A funny coincidence.
When we offered instead to allow Connor to set up his own website, he leapt at the chance. I thought he might include game links, photos of himself, maybe a blog about football or Green Day, and some sketches of his inventions. But no. Instead, he immediately hit on the idea of a website that would feature one worthy cause per month, with articles and links about that cause. Connor will write to celebrities each month, encouraging them to donate money through the site to that cause. The top donor each month will be interviewed by Connor for the site.
“How much of the money will you keep for yourself?” I asked.
He looked at me, puzzled. “None. Why?”
“Why? Jeez, I dunno,” I said sheepishly. “I can’t remember where I put my list.”
See the pattern? Don’t kill, don’t lie, take care of others — it seems, in some odd way I can’t place, to be a non-random list.
I consulted friends of various worldviews — a Buddhist, a Jew, a Humanist, a Utilitarian, a Christian, a Jain — and learned that there is a name for this pattern. They all called it “goodness.” Somehow, inexplicably, even in the absence of belief in a god, my son happens to have selected values that add up to something known as “goodness.”
I just can’t figure why that would be.
He doesn’t go to church or Sunday School and does not believe God is watching him. He thinks The Ten Commandments is a thrash metal group. Yet he gravitates toward behaviors that are undeniably — lemme see, what would the adjective be? — “goodnessful.”
His sisters seem headed down the same path — showing “kindness,” expressing “empathy” for those less fortunate, hating “injustice,” planning a life of “service to others.” Stuff like that. One begins to suspect that our family’s random, blind process of moral selection is in fact…non-random.
Now I must admit, they aren’t consistent in this pattern. Last Saturday, Connor lay in wait for his sisters at the edge of the porch roof with cold water balloons and pelted them mercilessly, even when they asked him to stop. We called him inside and asked how he would feel if someone did that to him. Later he apologized to the girls. Grudgingly. We insisted on it. Not sure why, but we did.
Yesterday was Monday morning, and my curiosity about the pattern began to overwhelm me. I tiptoed to Connor’s door and quietly peeked into the room while he was spinning the wheel for the week. It slowed to a stop on “Steal and cheat.” He looked around — fortunately he didn’t see me — and then did something I simply can’t explain. He shook his head and spun the wheel again and again, until it landed on “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”
That one he wrote on his list for the week.
Any ideas for how to restore moral chaos to our home will be gratefully received.
Jerry Falwell and the absent dancers
To philosophize is to learn how to die.
Michel de Montaigne
Oh relax. I’m not going to impugn the recently departed Jerry Falwell. Christopher Hitchens is taking care of that, God bless ‘im. I will grant, for reasons unclear to me, the traditional period of immunity enjoyed by the newly demised. It was Falwell’s death that got me thinking, but this post isn’t really about him. It’s death itself I’m on about, not the corpse-of-the-moment. Death and the absence of dancers.
But first, that immunity thing.
My first experience of the weird immunity we grant to the recently dead was at my dad’s funeral. I was thirteen and he was forty-five, my age next year. I loved my dad. He was a good guy.
Still, the eulogies offered by Dad’s friends and colleagues struck me as…weird.
I remember one colleague of his saying, “Dave didn’t have an enemy in the world.” “He was always thinking of others, never a thought for himself,” said another. “Everyone loved him.” “He loved his family more than any man I’ve ever known.”
Okay. I guess.
Like I said, he was a good guy. But this was my first experience of the genuine canonization of the dead that is socially mandated. Although my dad was funny and smart and hardworking and endlessly curious, he also lost his temper frequently and even sprained his thumb once. Oh, while beating me, I left that part out. I had been a shit to my younger brother, again, and Dad had come off a 60-hour week, and he couldn’t find it in himself to not sprain his thumb on me.
In addition to occasionally thrashing us, he wrote poetry and read Cyrano de Bergerac and smoked like a chimney and ate like a bison. He also taught me everything he knew about astronomy and yelled at my mom. A lot. And he sang with her. A lot. A mixed bag, like the rest of us.
Why do we need to pretend someone was a perfect saint in order to remember him fondly? And why the particular need to deny the mixed bag just because someone is recently dead?
Purgatory. That’s why.
In the medieval church, the recently dead were believed to stop in Purgatory before being dispatched to heaven or hell. It was during this layover that incoming prayers were tallied up and the person’s life assessed. Even marginally bad thoughts might tip the balance southward, so if you had anything bad to say, it was crucial to hold your tongue while all the hanging chads were counted. You know, if you can’t say anything nice, keep it inside, where God can’t hear it. Like saying “bless you” after a sneeze, the post-mortem immunity is a habit based in antique superstitions.
Well, whatever the reason, we can’t say anything bad about Jerry Falwell for a little while, because this terrible, tragic, unexpected thing happened to him: his body stopped working. And that was awfully sad.
Which gets me at last to the missing dancers.
President Bush issued a statement of condolence: Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Falwell, a man who cherished faith, family, and freedom. Various religious leaders have “mourned” Falwell’s passing or “grieved” his loss. Great rivers of tears will certainly be loosed at his funeral.
You see where I’m headed. Stick with me anyway. I want a credible answer.
According to the stated beliefs of Jerry Falwell and virtually every person who is “mourning” what happened to him, he has shed his earthly vessel and become a glorified being in the very presence of the Living Lord and Creator. He is in Heaven. This is the big time, the radiant confirmation of all his cherished hopes, the fulfillment of the promises of the scriptures to which he devoted his life, a happiness beyond anything mere words can devise.
And the proper response to this, apparently, is to be “deeply saddened.”
This question hit me for the first time not at my dad’s funeral, but at a funeral I attended for the mother of a friend one year earlier when I was twelve. The distraught sobs of the congregation and the soothing promises of the minister that she was “with Jesus, smiling down upon us, happy and free of pain” provided such a stark contrast that it suddenly hit me — they don’t believe him!
I hesitate to say such a thing. Having been confidently informed that I, a nonbeliever, really do believe in God, way way down deep, I shudder to make confident claims about what other people believe. I make this claim out of true bafflement at what else can explain the evidence. It’s the only credible explanation I can find for the day-and-night contrast between what Christians say happens at death and how they behave upon hearing someone has died. They pray like mad that a sick person’s glorious transfiguration will be put off, then weep and gnash their teeth when the person finally attains it. So I’m stuck with one hypothesis — that they wish with all their hearts to believe it and actual believe they believe it, but do not believe it.
If they did, wouldn’t they be singing and dancing and shouting praise-choruses to the sky? The funerals of children should be occasions for particular celebration — Little Suzy’s passed up the whole vale of tears and gone straight to Jesus! Instead, the loss of a child is seen as the greatest of all tragedies. Why? Where are the dancers? Shouldn’t the phrase “I’m glad Falwell’s dead” draw something other than shocked outrage? Shouldn’t a true believer who really loved him and wanted the best for him say, “I’m glad he’s dead, too!” — not as a mumbled coda, that’s common enough, but as a statement of certain joy?
The image of Snoopy dancing on a grave beneath Jerry Falwell’s name looks like the prelude to a stinging critique. You may well have assumed as much when you saw it. But shouldn’t it look like the polar opposite — like an elated confirmation of what Falwell believed to be true? Shouldn’t a Christian look at that and say, “At last, the atheist gets it!”
My wife claims that funereal tears are for the survivors, not for the departed person, and of course that’s a part of it. But why then, when a believer hears of a death — especially an untimely one — do they gasp and say things like, “Oh, that poor, poor girl”? Shouldn’t it at least be seriously mixed?
Imagine, for example, a Tutsi mother in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. The UN is pulling back as machete-wielding Hutus approach the village. After much tearful pleading, a UN peacekeeper agrees to take the woman’s four-year-old child to safety in another country. She is unlikely to ever see him again. If she survives, she will miss him terribly. But her tears would be undeniably mixed with profound joy that her son has a chance at happiness and safety. You can picture a relieved smile beaming through her tear-streaked face as the truck pulls away.
If I truly believed in heaven as advertised, that would have to describe my face at the funeral of a loved one. Right? He made it out to happiness and safety. Next time you’re at a funeral, see if you can spot even one such face.
Coming to grips with mortality is the greatest of all challenges for a conscious being. It’s a life’s work. When someone asks how on Earth I can bear the idea that my death will be the end, I want to look the person in the eyes and say, “Yes, it’s very hard…isn’t it.” I’ve never tried that, but I dream of doing that just right, just once, and connecting with the honest knowledge of mortality we all carry inside ourselves.
I’m not one of those secularists who pretend that our mortality is no big deal. It’s a very big deal. I don’t especially like it. But I’m a big boy, I can handle it — especially since I never bought into its denial, and so had no childish illusions of immortality to abandon.
And neither will my kids, I’ll wager. They know about the heaven hypothesis, and they know the oblivion hypothesis, and like their dad, they’ll spend a lifetime working it out and coming to grips with the fact that, no matter what comes next, this life ends. I hope also to instill a passionate love of reality so they’ll work to understand and accept what is rather than what goes down most easily. Heaven sells itself, for the most part. My job is to help them, and myself, find the genuine comforts in the naturalistic model. There are many, and I’ll yammer about those soon.
