Melissa Harris-Perry created a media flurry when she stated that if we as a society considered “all children” to be “our children,” we would spend more money on childhood education. Critics at Fox News and other pundits called Melissa Harris-Perry a communist socialist Marxist, accusing her of wanting the state to take children away from their parents.
Some commentators framed their critique of Harris-Perry using the model of “ownership,” insisting that parents own their children, not the state. To this charge Harris-Perry responded by quoting Kalil Gibran’s poem which rejects the idea that parents and by extension anyone else can “own” children:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
The poem continues:
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
This makes it clear that Gibran is telling parents that children have their own minds and individualities and will make their own choices. Children do not exist to fulfill the needs and wishes of their parents.
While in my opinion Gibran’s statement is true, this is not the main point Harris-Perry was making when she asked us to consider all children as “our children.” Harris-Perry was asking us whose children we care about. She was asking us to care for all children–not only the children in our own families and not only the children that look like them.
I saw this as a “teaching moment” in which process philosophy comes to the rescue—providing a way beyond a dead-end in the thinking that shapes US political debates and discussions. Harris-Perry’s critics framed the debate as the individual against the state, or individualism and the collective, asking viewers to choose between these two options. I suggest that the relational worldview of process philosophy can help us to find a way beyond this impasse.
Instead of affirming the “rights” of the “isolated individual” against “the state,” process philosophy affirms “individuals-in-relationship.” Individuals do not exist “on their own” but always in relationship to each other and the whole web of life. The isolated individual who must assert his rights against a hostile world has never existed. Even Rush Limbaugh lives in a relational world. He would not be speaking to his listeners if he had not had a mother and other individuals who cared for him as a child. Nor would he be speaking his thoughts on the air if there were no other individuals to respond to his words. Quite simply, the notion that he is an independent individual “against” the world is not only a fiction, but an “error in thought.”
In a relational worldview individuals in relationship are real and each has a contribution to make to the whole, because individuals respond to each other and to the world. The process worldview encourages us to think of the world in terms of individuals in relationship rather than in terms of the isolated individual against the collective. Of course the power of the state and other institutions including the global military industrial complex and global banking industry need to be limited. However, if we think of the world as made up of individuals in relationship, we will approach these questions differently than if we think of the world as made up independent isolated individuals always fighting for their rights.
The ethics of care stems from a relational worldview that articulates interdependence in the web of life. In a relational worldview caring about all children as “our children” is the appropriate way to acknowledge that neither you nor I would be where we are today if someone had not cared for us! Because we were cared for, we are called upon to care for others. It is as simple as that.
The question is not the individual or the state. Rather it is about the appropriate responses of interdependent individuals to other interdependent individuals. Native Americans say that even animals and plants are “our relations.” Harris-Perry didn’t go that far in her statement. She only asked us to view all children as “our relations.” Nonetheless, she was thinking out of a relational worldview.
Greed and the desire to hoard wealth vs. the desire or willingness to share it are at the root of many political debates in the United States. I suggest that the “error of thinking” that pits the individual against the state must also be addressed. Perhaps we need to insert metaphysics 101 into our political conversations. The fiction that it all comes down to the individual against the collective is a dangerous “error in thought.”
Carol P. Christ leads life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete through Ariadne Institute. There is still space in the spring tour May 25-June 8. Join her and learn more about the pre-patriarchal Goddess culture of ancient Crete. Carol spoke on a WATER Teleconference recently which you can listen to now if you missed it. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.
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“…if we as a society considered “all children” to be “our children” so much of our rhetoric about each other and about “others” would change. Perhaps there would be less of the sense that “we” are good and “they” are evil.Especially worth thinking about as we contemplate the events in Boston and two “children” who lost their way and wreaked so much havoc. Hard as it is, especially at a moment such as this, can we afford to lose sight of the notion that “all children” are “our children?”
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Love reading FAR every morning, my newspaper almost lliterally: what’s happening? what unexpected realities evolving? Today’s post, thank you, Carol, also evokes the question: “Whose child are you? Whose child am I?
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As usual, Carol, your blog is excellent and thoughtful. I watch an hour of MSNBC (Chris Hayes) every day, so I see Harris-Perry’s spots and saw the one about the children. I don’t think we can own living things–our children, pets, the earth herself are all their own beings. And our children are outward bound from the minute we deliver them. We care about and for them, but we don’t own them. I keep wondering who has cared for kids like those two boys in Boston, and how people cared for them. Not an issue I can solve. Thanks for writing this and giving us all something to ponder.
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Great post, Carol. Beautiful and effective re-framing of one of the most important questions we can ask and must answer.
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Prayer
Everything every child on the planet
is feeling—I feel.
And you feel, too.
How does it feel?
For me, the word agony
comes closest.
May every child in the world
be happy.
JANINE CANAN 2013
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Thanks, Carol, for this post. I’ve just returned from the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology symposium in St. Paul, and during that time I was surrounded by women (and one man) who take for granted that all children are our children, who take for granted that we’re all in this together (not out for ourselves), and that we are part of the interdependent web of all life. We’re all Goddess scholars, passionately dedicated to greater knowledge about Her/Them as well as seeing a “matriarchal” value system (å la Heide Göttner-Abendroth) come into our lives and our society in a bigger way.
I just wanted to add that we don’t have to go to process philosophy to find this perspective. It’s the perspective of many if not all indigenous groups (especially those that are matriarchal) as well as that of the “self-in-relationship” psychologists, feminist psychologists like Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and the women at the Stone Center.
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I agree Nancy that we don’t need process philosophy to provide this perspective. However, a metaphysical system holds together what might otherwise seem like a series of assertions, or a “return to the past,” showing that the insights from all of the groups you cite, and others, hold together in a coherent worldview that takes account of the conclusions (but not the metaphysical assumptions) of modern science. This has been important to me, providing a firm foundation underneath my worldview. Process philosophy can also help us to see that “relational thinking” or an “ethics of care” are not “women’s way of knowing” but should and must be the best “human ways of knowing.”
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Beautiful post. Perhaps we should insert metaphysics 101 into our education system too. The fact that we’re all connected and the way to a harmonious world is through the “ethics of care” should be taught from kindergarten through 12th grade.
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