My Babies Were Clueless, Never Dumb...

...so maybe there's hope for us!

Pictured above are mourning dove fledglings we named Fifi and Geraldo. They are from the second clutch of the season for their resolute parents, Flora and Jerome, and hatched in a hanging flower pot on our front porch (no, this has not gone at all well for the flowers; but thank you for wondering). 

We were privileged with the intimacies of watching Fifi and Geraldo, like their weeks-older siblings from the prior clutch, Felipe and Fiona, develop from blind, wet, sticky spindles exhausted by the ardors of cracking through an eggshell- into the nascent competencies of flight. They left us just days ago. Bon voyage, babies, and may you thrive at whatever it is mourning doves do when not living in a flower pot, making more mourning doves.

We will return to our little feathered god-children before we are through here.

Pictured below are my actual babies. Well, my family, in fact- my wife, our five children, and assorted Katz Family canines. Our “babies” are all adults now. But Catherine and I were privileged to watch them, too, through all the intimate triumphs and disasters of parenting, develop from a comparable state of helplessness into the diverse proficiencies of adulthood and independence they practice now, from dance to journalism, the social sciences to engineering.

My “babies” were never dumb- in fact, they are all highly intelligent; but they were, of course, clueless. Like all babies, they started out knowing nothing, and believing pretty much whatever they were told. 

They heard about Santa Claus, of course, and they believed. They heard about the Tooth Fairy…well, not exactly. My wife is French, and it turns out that in France, the duties of the Tooth Fairy are taken over by La Petite Souris- the little, magical mouse, adept at clandestine operations under pillows. So, yes, my kids all believed in that mouse.

They were, in a word, clueless. In several words, they were naïve, innocent, gullible, impressionable, defenseless- as all children are.

And then they grew. First, they were simply curious. One of our daughters, who learned Hebrew (it’s a long story), had a famous “lama, Daddy, lama?” phase. In Hebrew, “lama” – or more correctly:

למה

-means “why?” Corinda’s relentless “why”- is the sky blue? Is the ground down? Is water wet? Is fire hot? Do shoes go on feet? Does nostril hair grow in nostrils? Do arms have armpits? -nicely captured the curiosity era of childhood.

Of course, that doesn’t last either. Children ask fewer questions as they learn more of the answers. There is a phase of selective questions, more sophistication. Then, there is a phase when they think they know ALL of the answers (we were mostly spared that, but had an occasional taste). 

Ultimately, they turn out a lot like us. They are cautious, thoughtful, careful- understanding the way the world works, the need to separate dross from gold. They can be fooled, but it’s a lot harder. They distinguish what sounds too good to be true, from what might just be true after all. They aren’t always right, but they’ve got the same shot at it as the rest of us. They think like adults, and get better at it with experience.

They get there through what experts in child psychology call developmental milestones they could not skip. There are no shortcuts.

These days, I look on with all-too-frequent dread as nearly everything I hold dear, and much I either think or know is essential to the future well-being of those now-grown children, is beleaguered at once: social justice, human rights, fields and forests, the dignity of high office, the primacy of truth, equality, American values, democracy, the climate, the oceans, the food supply, endangered species, the modern hopes of humanism. 

All of that would fare considerably better in a world where the hive mind in which we have all inadvertently subsumed ourselves reliably recognized and rejected prevarication and propaganda. That requires the filters of discernment, and sophistication, and we may simply not yet have matured into those. After all, this hive mind of our devising, the way we conjoin thoughts and opinions through digital connections we barely understand, has only just hatched.

I say this recognizing that some of what divides us is legitimate disagreement, but that’s healthy. We are entitled to be conservative, or liberal; religious or secular. We can agree to disagree and still respect one another, even like one another. Why not? And let’s all remember we are most likely to learn something new when listening to someone who doesn’t echo the opinion we already own.

Much of what divides us, and all that divides us irreparably, is misunderstanding born of misinformation. We have, in the relative blink of an eye, invented entirely new ways to disseminate massive amounts of information, and misinformation. The law of unintended consequences applies.

So here we are, in a post-truth era of fake news, and even- perhaps most perniciously- fake claims about news, both fake and true. This makes sense, because we are all babies when it comes to thinking with a hive mind. We are all social media newbies, Internet echo chamber neophytes. We have thought and communicated one way (more or less) throughout all of human history, and are doing it in an entirely new and different way now. We simply aren’t good at it yet.

That doesn’t make us dumb; just clueless. We are infantile hive-mind thinkers, toddling social media communicators. Maybe we just need to grow up, and these are unavoidable steps on the way.

That gives me hope, because I see in routine human goodness the capacity to disagree about some things and still avow our common human bonds. In a hive mind matured into reliable differentiation of sense from nonsense, I don’t see the end of all divides, but I do see the beginning of many new bridges, fabricated from shared understanding.

I don’t know how long this will take. My children matured at the customary pace, from clueless babies to sophisticated adults in roughly two decades. The feathered babies on the front porch took flight less than two weeks after exiting their eggs.

I worry a lot, and often these days. But I hope, too, that the sky may yet be the limit for us- assuming we, too, can figure out how to fly. Here’s hoping we get there sooner than later.

-fin

David L. Katz