ד"ר סטיבן לו הוא מחברם של ספרים ומאמרים רבים ובהם השאלות הכי הכי גדולות. אנו שמחים לארח את מאמר האורח שלו.
Children are natural born philosophers
By Stephen Law
Children are natural born philosophers. They are constantly
looking for reasons, justifications and patterns, and their enquiry knows no
bounds. Behind each answer they soon discover another question to ask. It is
not long before they have dug down to some of our most basic beliefs and
preconceptions and are asking philosophical questions, questions like: What
made the universe exist? Where do right and wrong come from? and: How do I know
this isn't all a dream? Once we become immersed in the details of our
day-to-day adult lives we quickly lose sight of such questions. The average
grown up lives out his or her existence within a fairly narrow envelope of
concerns. But children have time on their hands, an inquisitive nature and no
preconceptions. They are still open to the bigger picture. What is our reaction
when children start to ask philosophical questions, and what should it be?
Unfortunately, when Sophie asks, say, "Why did the Big Bang happen?"
the temptation is usually to fob her off.
One way we do this is to insist that the pursuit of such questions
is a foolish waste of time. Sophie may well receive the brusque reply: "It
just did. Don't ask silly questions." If she learns that philosophical
questions tends to provoke irritation, and perhaps even rebuke or ridicule, she
may well stop asking them.
The other way we tend to fob children off is to take their
philosophical questions more seriously but pretend that they have pat, easy
answers. Religion provides a convenient crutch here, even for the non-believer.
Where did the universe come from? God made it. Why is doing so-and-so wrong?
Because God says so. These answers may satisfy the child, at least temporarily,
but they are for the most part inadequate. Either they do not really deal with
the mystery with which the child has begun to grapple, or else they replace
that mystery with another that is no less perplexing.
For example, if Sophie asks, in the spirit of rational inquiry,
where the universe came from, it will not do to reply with an air of authority
that God made it, as if that conclusively settled the matter, especially if
one's response to her next question — And where did God come from? — is to
fudge or distract her with an offer of an ice cream. I am not rejecting
religious explanations per se here. I am objecting only to their being used to
stifle inquiring young minds. Why do we fob children off? There are many
reasons. One obvious reason is that we don't know the answers ourselves and our
ignorance can be a hard thing to own up to, especially to our own children.
Another reason is that the philosophical questions are pretty
difficult to think about. Most adults are scarcely any more sophisticated in
their thinking about them than is the average child. We know that engaging in
some sort of debate with our offspring is likely to be hard, headache-inducing
work and that we are likely quickly to end up out of our depth.
A third reason is that we can find such questions not a little
uncomfortable to think about. And that is not just because some of them
confront us with our own mortality and the possible meaninglessness of our
brief lives. Philosophical questions can also induce a rather disturbing sort
of intellectual vertigo. They may reveal that what we took to be the firm
ground beneath our feet — what we thought was "common sense" or
"just obvious" — is actually illusory. They may reveal that we are
suspended over an intellectual void. To think philosophically is to think
without a safety net.
Here's an example. Most adults in this country — to the extent to
which they even think about the issue — would profess to find it "just
obvious" that while killing and eating humans would be a moral outrage,
killing and eating other species of animal is perfectly OK. Now most children
will quite spontaneously question this moral belief at some point in their
development. They find it intuitively dubious. And so they ask us to justify
it.
The problem is that, as the philosopher Peter Singer has shown —
it is an extremely difficult belief to justify (it won't do, for example,
simply to say that pigs and cows are less intelligent than us: that would
justify our eating mentally handicapped humans). In fact, it is difficult to
avoid the conclusion that we are guilty of what Singer calls speciesism: a form
of unreasoned bigotry against other species similar to racism and sexism.
Indeed, it's hard to avoid Singer's conclusion that the slaughter of many
billions of animals each year merely to satisfy our taste for a certain sort of
foodstuff is a moral outrage at least on par with, say, the slave trade. It's
not surprising, then, that rather than deal properly with the child's request
for justification we find it more comfortable to fob them off (much as the
child who questioned the legitimacy of the slave trade might have been fobbed
off a couple of hundred years ago). We dismiss their worries about eating meat
as silly and childish.
Either that or we attempt to shut down their line of inquiry with
a glib religious answer: "God put the animals here for us to eat. It says
so in the Bible." Whatever the reasons why we dismiss the child's
philosophical question, we shouldn't, at least not in the long run. Here are
three good reasons why. First, those who have either been conditioned out of
thinking about such questions or else have glibly assimilated pat religious
answers lead impoverished lives. Like a goldfish that lacks any sense of there
being something beyond the glass walls of its bowl, such individuals have no
real sense of the mysteries that lie beyond the boundaries of their day-to-day
lives.
Secondly, and more importantly, those who have never taken a step
back — who have lived wholly unexamined lives — are not just depressingly
shallow, they are also potentially dangerous. Merely to slip into adopting the
mental habits and unexamined assumptions of those around one is the mark of the
moral sheep. A moral sheep may do the right thing. But they don't do it because
it's the right thing. They do it because it's what the other sheep do. If the
flock takes off in a more insidious direction — if it wanders into hatred and
bigotry, for example — the moral sheep follows blindly along. A society of
moral sheep is a very dangerous thing.
Thirdly, the skills that early exposure to a little rigorous
thinking about the big questions can engender are both immediately transferable
and highly valuable. Being able to formulate a concise argument, follow a
complex line of reasoning or spot a logical howler are abilities that are
always useful. At the very least such skills can provide a lifetime's
immunization against the wiles of snake-oil salesmen and religious nutters.
Thinking hard about the big questions is an important part of
life. It's part of what makes us fully human. We should not discourage children
from asking such questions. We should actively encourage them.
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