The Gift of Fire, Richard Mitchell [best e books to read txt] 📗

far as you can go in making changes in what might be called a certain and fixed portion of the endowment with which she came into this world. It will be useful to you, in your task of wise child-rearing, to be mindful of what can be brought about and what can’t. Let us call, for convenience, that which can not be changed by the name of Necessity. Whatever it is, it is. The best we can do is to hope that there isn’t too much of it, and that what there is of it does not preclude such things as goodness and happiness, or even whatever we mean by success.

So we consider what you can do. Let’s start with seeing to it that she is good. Of what does that quality consist? How does one be good? Are certain deeds good and others bad by nature? Are we good or bad by temperament or genetic endowment? Are good and bad relative conditions, like rich and poor, providing some broad middle ground of the mostly OK? Don’t answer those questions. Ask this one first: Have they already been answered?

Of course. A million times, but not in a million ways. The answers to such questions come in just a few standard brands, but they all have certain things in common. The answerers have traditionally imagined that goodness itself comes in at least two standard brands. It is out of one sort of goodness that a child refrains from throwing grapefruit around in the supermarket, and out of another that she habitually tells the truth. You will, I am sure, want her to have as much as possible of each, but I am just as sure that you will prize the latter somewhat more than the former. Naturally. But why do I suppose that preference “natural”? Is it really?

For just a while, forget the little girl. She will wait. Ask yourself that question again. Is it indeed natural that the one sort of goodness is more to be prized than the other? That question would not appear on an intelligence test, and its answer, if it has one, would not be like the solution of a problem, not a “correctness” like the meeting place of the trains. It would lack the quality of public verifiability, which is surely an essential attribute of solutions. That is actually good news, not bad, for even if you haven’t mastered the trick of choosing the right diagram, even if you don’t give a hoot as to the destinies of Bob and Alice and Carol and Ted, you are nevertheless the one and only power that we know of in the universe that can give thought to its own thought, a mind with the gift of fire. So stop reading for a few minutes and answer the question: Is it natural to prefer that goodness which impels truthfulness to that which impels acceptable behavior?

I presume that you have made your answer. (Such answers, unlike the solutions of problems, seem best described as “made” rather than discovered.) Your answer is a good one. I am perfectly safe in saying that. Any answer to such a question is better than no answer; and one who is willing to rest content with no answer at all, or without even asking the question, shouldn’t be allowed near children anyway. Who wants a child to be “good” ought to have some idea what he means by that, and some idea as to how to have some idea. Children reared out of thoughtlessness are in danger.

My answer went something like this: I remembered Socrates talking about the difference between being good and seeming good. It is obviously possible that the outward appearance of goodness is a sign of inward goodness, but it is just as possible that it is not. As to which is which, experience is a remarkably poor teacher. So I imagined some rearer of a child who actually did prefer the goodness of social acceptability to the inner goodness of truthfulness, who said, in effect, I care not at all what she is like inwardly, but only what the world imagines that she must be like inwardly. I will see to it that she behaves impeccably both in supermarkets and salons, a practice which, it must be admitted, is not always possible to those who are truthful by habit and intent. From that, I went to wondering what I might call such a would-be rearer of children, asking also whether I would want to give him charge of one of mine. I decided against it. I went further, and found in him something that I had to call perversity, a twist, a disorder that seemed to make of him something not entirely human, and thus, unnatural. So I concluded, roughly but readily, that if it is unnatural to prefer the goodness of social acceptability to the goodness of truthfulness, then the contrary condition might well be deemed “natural.” My answer raises, I know, swarms of other questions, but it is an answer, and I made it. If my answer has brought about some revisions in your answer - good. If it brings about, now that I can look at it, some revisions in itself, good. If I could know yours, I would surely be able to improve mine, and that would be good. And, so far at least, we have not had to consult Dr. Spock. Also good.

But what, exactly, do we know? We know this: That wanting a child to be good is not enough to bring her to that condition, and that we had better know what we mean by “good.” We even have to know which good is the better, and, if there seem to be many sorts of good, which is the best - for which most parents cross their fingers and hope.

Consider the finger-crossers, hoping for the best. It can be out of only one condition that they do that, the very condition out of which we have just come, a tiny step or two - ignorance. It is because they don’t know what the best is that they have to hope for it, and can find no way to pursue it. And they face the sad certainty that, should the best in fact come to pass, they wouldn’t be able to recognize it. They would be in like predicament as to the worst. We do not know what the best is either, but we do know that one “goodness” may be better than another goodness. That is something. And we know also that we are able to discover whether one goodness is better than another. And that is a big something.

Because of what you know, you are going to have some difficulties in the rearing of that child, difficulties perhaps never dreamed of by those who don’t know what you know. It is simply a fact that the two goodnesses at issue do, and not infrequently, collide with each other in a terrible crash. Which to follow, and when? How to learn that delicate art? And how - an even more difficult question - how to teach it to a child in whom there is yet no power of discourse, no familiarity with the abstract or with principle, no mind’s grasp of itself?

When Socrates made his preposterous defense to the jury that was going to convict him no matter what he said, he warned the jurors that, should they make the mistake of setting him free, he intended to embark at once on a career of recidivism. I will surely commit, every day, he said, the crime of which I am accused, which is nothing other than talking about goodness. We imagine, because Socrates has been rehabilitated by most of Western thought, that the jurors who weren’t vindictive must have been simply confused, and supposed that what Socrates called “talking about goodness” was really something else. How, after all, could anyone who had come to, and rested in, his senses object to talking about goodness?

But I suspect that those jurors who weren’t out for revenge had, nevertheless, some pretty strong reasons for finding that practice dangerous to the health of the body politic. I suspect also that some of them - how lucky we are that they are gone - might find the same of your considerations as to which sort of goodness is the better, and why. What ordinarily masquerades as “talking about goodness” is really nothing more than the recitation of precepts, perhaps with footnotes. Which precepts are recited will depend on that party of the reciter, who is, more often than not, an “expert” in goodness. Usually with a license. From his party.

Our trouble in noticing this comes from the preposition. When we talk “about” fish, and keep strictly to the subject, not talking at all about ourselves and how we feel about fish, we are stuck with a reality that has nothing to do with us. Fish are fish. About fish, we can make demonstrably true or false statements. No matter what we say, the fish remain what they are. When Socrates described his crime as talking about goodness, he meant a different kind of “about.” It is an about not of description but of discovery, not of prescription but of predication, whose limits are not dictated by a reality that has nothing to do with us, but by a reality that has everything to do with us, and is what it is only because and when we make it. In fish there is no good or bad, no fair or foul, no right or wrong. In us, the case is otherwise.

Those who talk about goodness, therefore, are indeed something of a danger to the peace and health of the body politic. They are asking what goodness is, in spite of having been told a thousand times, and whether they might discover and understand it for themselves, and in their own minds, in spite of the popular belief of every body politic in our time that goodness is not the proper business of the intellect, but of feelings and beliefs, and, of course, the proper business of a few highly trained specialists.

There is, in fact, some threat to the tranquility of society in talking about anything except fish. As long as we stick to fish, or to any of countless equivalents in the world as provided to us, we are very unlikely to fall out with one another and come to blows. But the world as provided to us is not the world, for there is also the mind-made world, which is not subject to the test of hard experience that can force us to agree as to fish. We can’t even come to agreement, and probably shouldn’t, as to how far one’s “family” extends, or as to the meaning and purpose of banking, to say nothing of intelligence - or goodness. That is good, for it permits us to make such conceptions, and to remake them. But it also permits us to make and remake them wisely or foolishly, and to be either blessed or stuck with them.

Goodness is not fish. In thinking how to rear a child, therefore, your talking about goodness is truly a way of considering whether you are blessed or burdened with the ideas about goodness that you happen to hold, for whatever reasons. If we suppose, for instance, that intelligence is measurable by the skill of problem-solving, are we blessed or burdened with that idea? If intelligence were a thing that exists on its own, like a fish, there would be no point in asking such a question. But it isn’t. We do not have to settle for it. We make it, and live with what we make.

Children, also, are not fish. There are many ways to define children, and the silliest possible one is the one that we