Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Whose Children Are Our Children? Whose Children Do We Care About?

This was originally posted on 4/22/2013

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.”