My 13-year-old asked: why are the terrorists killing innocent people? A straightforward question, but one that has so many answers that it has no answer. You bring your values to however you respond.
I could have told her about the human hunger for certainty, the terror of death that fuels religion, the purgatorial appeal of violence and the psychological compulsion to divide people into “in” and “out” groups. But my take would simply have been an interpretation of the facts, and then I would have had to explain to her that that’s all we ever have. I’m not sure she’s ready for that truth yet. Why should she be, when most of the adult world isn’t?
A secret we keep from our children, and perhaps from ourselves, is all that we don’t know. Children live in a world where they believe parents are powerful and all-knowing. The truth is more difficult to accept – that we are whistling in the dark.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do the wicked prosper and the good suffer? Why do people hate? What is consciousness? These questions are rarely addressed in schools – for good reasons. In reality, the foundation of the world is in uncertainty. We are born into an existence where sense impressions flood into us, and we are forced to make them intelligible or go mad. So we do the best we can, with the help of our society and our families and peer groups.
We, as adults, cannot really deal with the question of uncertainty, because we are frightened of it. Nominally, we devote university departments to such questions and name them philosophy, but thousands of years of probing have not produced any definitive answers, only endless disputation of spiralling complexity.
Part of my role as a parent is to debunk this myth of knowability – to make it acceptable for a child to answer a question with “I don’t know”, without shame. Yes, we can have answers to mathematical and factual questions and scientific problems – but the thing we pretend to understand, which is, what it is all in aid of, we brush under the carpet, or dress up in religious or ideological finery. I’m not arguing in favour of ignorance – more in favour of humility towards knowledge and the acknowledgment of mystery.
One answer to why people hate one another, why they kill, is because people have a larger purpose than their rational self-interest. It is the need to reassure themselves that they count for something in an incomprehensible and mutable universe. We cleave to our own beliefs like comfort blankets. So what I’m suggesting we teach our children is that intractable beliefs, however you dress them up as virtuous or evil, are dangerous. There may be a difference between the certainty Tony Blair felt invading Iraq and the jihadis’ certainty that they are killing in Allah’s name. But the end result may be much the same.
Evidence only takes you so far. After that, there is only faith, a word I use in a strictly secular sense. The faith that love is better than hate, that peace is better than war, that every human life is equally valuable. And in case you think those things are a given, there is no shortage, historically, of movements and societies that have rejected such precepts on principle – Japanese militarism, nazism, the Khmer Rouge, Maoism and Stalinism all predated jihadism. People can feel as much passion for death – and for certainty – as for life.
Only by accepting the depths of our not-knowing can we grow into truly whole and compassionate human beings and societies. It’s what distinguishes us from the fanatics. Not the will to knowledge, but the courage to doubt.
