Take any child (cross-posting)

Click for Justin on New Year's Eve

Generally, I try these days to separate my posts: Devenish (this blog) for family-related material; Inishmacsaint, for other writing. But time constraints—as well as the subject matter of this post—force me to merge and be done with it. If you only want to read family news, look away now; the same applies if you don't like opinion pieces informed by personal details. It's Friday afternoon, and I've allocated just one hour for this piece, so the results may be patchy and loose-ended...

Over the last few weeks, especially since the school shootings in Newtown, CT, I've been continually troubled by some aspects of that particular tragedy that seem to have gone unreported and so un-discussed. No, that's wrong, for it is the reporting itself, and the associated commentary, which bothers me as much as the deaths of so many children.

What upsets me is what seems to be a kind of pressure for moral equilibrium in many people's minds: that the victims of a mass killing are viewed as better, purer, more innocent, more spiritually enlightened human beings in virtue of having died together than they would have been considered to be had their deaths come not at the hands of a deranged killer, but individually, as the result of separate acts of violence, clinical negligence, childhood diseases or simple accidents in the home. Conversely, the perpetrator is viewed as increasingly evil or depraved in direct proportion to the relative youth, number, and helplessness of his victims. (As if age matters; as if teenagers or unarmed adults are any less helpless in the face of a gunman). And more evil the perpetrator, it seems the more blessed, the more innocent, even the more beautiful the victim. So, it goes, this Good and Evil, like pre-schoolers on a see-saw, each moving out from the fulcrum of moral neutrality.

One only has to examine the press and public reaction to other news stories to see the workings of our perverse moral scales. Consider these two news headlines from the UK in recent months:

• Tragic two-year-old 'who died after sipping mother's methadone from beaker had also ingested heroin and cocaine' Read more

• Girl, 15, who died after ecstasy overdose told her friends not to call ambulance. Inquest hears that Isobel Jones-Reilly found pills in university lecturer's drugs stash during an unsupervised house party. Read more

Was Riley Rettipierre less beautiful, less intelligent, less sorely missed than the CT kids because his mother was—it seems—a negligent, perhaps abusive, drug-user? Because he wasn't killed by a relative stranger but by a strange relative? And would he have been regarded as even more worthless had he died at age six, running out into the road for the first time after a ball? Was Isobel Jones-Reilly's death any less tragic than that of the children in Newtown, because she was older, or because she was to a some extent responsible for what happened? At two days, two months, two years, two decades, every child is some parent's son or daughter: the desolation and loss a parent feels is—I imagine—in no proportion to the objective beauty, intelligence, moral probity, or characteristic behaviour of their child. Nor is it greatly relevant whether the child is killed by falling off a ladder one Sunday morning (as happened to a school friend of mine, when I was 13), by being struck by a car driven by an elderly woman on her way to church, or by a joyrider high on solvents. The child is dead—and the manner of their death—however malicious, however violent, however unintended—does not alter the value of the life lived. At least, it shouldn't.

My father—to my mind, and in the view of many—was a good, kind and generous man. He died slowly of the consequences of Parkinson's disease over a period of months, a condition exacerbated by a heart operation that should have given him more, not fewer, active years. But he was not better, kinder and more generous because of this lingering death: had he died suddenly in surgery, I would miss him no less. Nor would he have been any less of a good, kind, generous man if—years earlier—he had yielded to alcoholism and died in his forties: the fate of his younger brother, Ronald, and Ronald's son, my cousin, Peter Duffield.

The story also draws attention to another related problem with popular morality: the notion—inescapable in our culture, and perpetrated by Hollywood, and popular fiction (including the tabloid press)—that there are good guys and bad guys: the children of Sandy Hook were good people in virtue of being children, the adult victims of Adam Lanza were good people by association with those children ("innocence", rather than guilt, "by association"); Adam Lanza himself was a bad person, the type of person the NRA proposes arming us all against, his evil predisposition sufficient explanation of his actions. This kind of moral fundamentalism is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the whole thing: like other kinds of religious and political dogmatism, such 'purity' destroys and corrupts everything it touches, as violently as acid on a Muslim girl's face (albeit less obviously). A facile distinction between the fair maid and the evil witch may be harmless in fairy stories for the under-fives, but it has no place in mature discourse, past elementary school. The idea that there are angels and sinners, and that we can reliably tell them apart—the bad guys are always 'the other'—or the related notion, which cognitive anthropologists call the Fundamental Attribution Fallacy, that people who act badly are inherently bad people, and conversely: these are ideas that blind us to deeper, but messier, truths. Jimmy Savile was no Josef Mengele: the many serious crimes he has been discovered to have committed do not invalidate the good things he did for other children, any more than his occasional selflessness excuses his egotistical abuse. (In one sense, Josef Mengele was not Josef Mengele either, but no amount of special pleading can really mitigate the awful suffering for which he was directly responsible.)

When my middle son Julian asked me about the shootings in Connecticut, if the same thing could happen in Japan, I told him no, it could not. 'Is that because there are only bad people in America?' he asked (Julian has persistent difficulties with grammatical scope, but that is a topic for another day). No, I said: 'it's because there there are no guns in Japan...And anyway, there are no such things as bad people: there are people who do bad things.' I really believe this, and its opposite (i.e., there are no good people, though when I look at Justin, I'm not quite sure. But that is just parental bias, probably: it also shows that I am as prey as anyone else to the first impulse I talked about: to think that being cute and relatively defenceless makes a child with Down Syndrome any more virtuous than one without. I know this though, as every parent knows: that none of my children are any less than perfect, or than perfectly equal, to me.

Well, my hour is (more than) up.