If the hypothesis I outlined in this post is true – that humans are born in a broken, sinful state – then it stands to reason that each human would first emerge into the world in his or her most broken native state.
Let me preface this entire article with the following:
Yes – children bring their parents the most profound and sharp pangs of joy that they typically feel in their entire lives. We know this.
We also know that there is a dread and dark side to children.
Children are D*cks?
A close friend of mine recently admitted of his 4 year old son – in a rare moment of rest and reflection at the playground: “He’s a f*cking d*ck!“
He said this to get a laugh. And it worked. It was an outrageous thing to say about his own son, but like most good humor – this statement was funny because it was outrageously true.
Now, this boy is maybe a little willful – but he’s not unusual compared to other boys. Some annoying sibling rivalry, sure. But he has plenty of sweet moments, when things are calm and the mood is good. Right?
Yes of course – but objectively speaking he is still acts like a “d*ck“. My friend was admitting the obvious – by normal standards of moral adult conduct – this boy had spent most of his short time on earth being a near-constantly selfish and annoying d*ck. His many sweet and calm moments in each day are just so because he (the boy) is doing what he wants to do, in the way he wants to do it.
So are all children born d*cks?
Any parent who’s been through the trauma of rearing children from the terrible twos on through the pre-teenage years knows the intermittent dread – the true fear and loathing – that a parent feels having to constantly monitor children and thwart their naturally selfish behavior.
Its exhausting.
But fear? Loathing?
Yes.
So what are we parents afraid of? We’re afraid of a child’s wrathful will – that unrestrained “Id” – as Freud called it.
A Childless Philosopher Speaks the Truth
In my “Christian coming out” testimony, I described how the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had planted in my young mind the seed of belief in God – solely from a logical & metaphysical sense. As a young, hungry intellectual in my early 20s, I craved logical strength to beliefs. Philosophy gave me that.
But Wittgenstein was special. Not only was he a supreme mathematician & logician, he was also a mystic. His most profound insights were often the somewhat random sayings he’d tack onto the end of a much drier argument, like a tasty epilogue following an otherwise orderly cascade of premises and conclusions.
His posthumously assembled & published book, Culture and Value, consists mostly of just these sayings.
One of the most haunting quotes from this book that I remembered over the years was this piercing insight into child psychology:
“Anyone who listens to a child’s cry and understands what he hears will know that it harbors dormant psychic forces, terrible forces, different from anything commonly assumed. Profound rage, pain, and lust for destruction.”
Culture and Value, p. 4
I recalled this quote occasionally later in life, when I was struggling to raise my own children.
Not only did this insight help me feel that I wasn’t alone in my thirties when struggling to raise my own rebellious kids. But later, when I came to believe in Jesus Christ and finally understood the doctrine of original sin and the spiritually fallen nature of humankind, this insight made even more sense.
Small children are naturally the most selfish, morally vacant vessels. They literally howl at the constraints that the civilized world forces on them. They need to be ‘broken’ by their parents & society like the most willful, wild stallions.
If God is the ultimate source of self-giving, self-sacrificing love and outward orientation – then a child’s tantrum shows that the natural, virgin state of man includes an almost uncontrollable rage against God. This rage is what Wittgenstein was referring to – and is what made my heart nearly arrest from recognizing the deep, hard-to-face truth about humanity:
We are Born Completely Depraved
In the best case, young children are just simply selfish:
In the worst case, they are deceitful, violent and rage-filled:
The only reason this isn’t commented on more is that its such an accepted fact of life, from the farthest reaches of our collective past. No culture can remember – or can even conceive of – a time when humans were born to peace and virtue and equanimity. All we know is the pain and struggle of child rearing – and its only recognized as a struggle in those occasional reflective moments that parents share, when we remark to ourselves “man, being a parent sure is hard!“
When parents get to commiserating about the difficulty of they have with young children and babies, I’ve heard this exclamation more than once: “I can honestly say I understand why Shaken Baby Syndrome exists…“
Its Hilarious
So if children create such anger and dread in parents, then why is watching a child rage so often funny?
People give different answers, but I believe that the only reason we smirk and laugh at trantruming kids is due to the comic contrast between their deep, felt level of rage and their impotence to effectively act on that rage – to commit the brutal violence against their masters and the world that their hearts, in those dark moments, truly desire. And what a horror the world would be if children had the power of these pre-pubescent, tyrannical Hollywood characters:
Children are truly a gift – all life is a gift. But they are also a curse.
God’s curse on Eve as she was exiled from Eden spoke of her future birth pangs:
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.”
Genesis 3:16
What He foreshadowed for Eve by this curse was also the struggle that she and Adam – and all their descendants – would experience after the birth: the unrelenting mix of both love and attachment, but also sorrow and even dread – having to repeatedly and resignedly guide each rebellious generation of children out of their basic sinful natures, toward some semblance of virtue before they grew old and died.
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