Dead Children Never Leave Us (Thoughts on Creation, capitalism and loss)

[sfwriter]

Dead children never leave us.
By Sandy Clark

I'm returning home after seeing the excellent and powerful film Creation and my chest hurts from tears. The rain falls in chilly spring curtains that drain the warmth from your soul and leave you to cold desolation. On the road before me, chilly puddles of yellow light reflect from dim street lights offering no warmth. Darwin's daughter Annie has torn me apart for the last two hours.

To live is to die, and we all experience death through our lives, but children are different. No death save your own will be more keenly felt than that of your child. It is an almost totally alien concept to us that the young should die.

We've escaped the worst of evolution's ravages which disproportionately take the young. Even in Darwin's time that number was falling with child mortality in London before the age of five at 74.5% from 1730 to1749 and down to 31.8% by Darwin's time a century later. What a shock Annie's death must have been to him.

That experience is even more alien now. Child mortality now stands at 7.2% and has led to a population explosion. There were just over a billion people on Earth when Darwin lived. Now we number nearly seven billion which circles my mind back around to Malthus, whose studies of population greatly influenced Darwin.

Thomas Robert Malthus' Principles of Population described the rampant natural tendency toward boom and bust cycles. Any creature given free reign will out breed its resources. Being an economist, he applied this to the poor. Being a naturalist, Darwin saw the hint of a process at work, each death the pounding of a hammer, each creature a wedge bifurcating creation.

Malthus looked forward and saw doom as society inevitably outreached its resources. Darwin looked backward and saw hope in the stunning depth of possibility.

Perhaps another of their contemporaries saw a middle ground. Adam Smith who penned that foundational document of capitalism, Wealth of Nations, Looked around him at the rapidly advancing machinery of the Victorian age and saw forces of great power at work. Another system of unseen laws. Listen to this quote and the similarity to Darwin.

"By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention…. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

Driven by the fears of Malthus, many a capitalist has ridden the advance in technology that science has brought us to a world that defies the natural laws Malthus understood. By any unit of measure, the population is beyond Malthus' wildest dreams of sustainability, yet here we stand, all seven billion of us.

My goddaughter Caitlin died a bit over a year ago. Watching Darwin struggle through his grief in the film overturned a lot of soil in my heart. I have felt my own children grow wispy and impermanent as Darwin's is imagined in this film.

Once precious and full of light, they are now tinged with a wisp of sorrow and terror. The unimaginable is now the possible. I will lose my own beautiful daughters one day to time and age if nothing else. The future is unrelenting and childhood fleeting.

Impossible feelings of guilt are commonplace when you lose a child. Darwin struggles with the question of his marriage to a cousin. Did he weaken Annie at conception with such a close match? A day at the beach where she caught a cold leads to that closed circle of blame and self recrimination. What if? What if? What if?

Anger is unavoidable as well. Darwin lost his faith to the relentless pounding. Why? Why? Why?

These feelings are as pointless and patternless as raindrops on an imaginary day.
Until he lets go of that world that isn't and will never be, Darwin is stuck. He can't move forward and he can't complete his great work. He is clinging to those rocks of sorrow on that beach, battered by those waves of guilt.

When you read The Origin of Species, those cold unfeeling rocks are there, pounded into wondrous diversity by the relentless and unseen forces at work on birds and barnacle alike. When you read of the exquisite beauty of this vision, the bravery of facing it and the wonder it instills, it is Annie's smiling face that shines back at you. It is her child like beauty that reaches out from the page.

Maybe I'm just too much of a softy that I would cry through an entire movie about evolution, but I keep thinking of dead children both near and far from me and the nightmares of Malthus.

You see, Darwin merely understood the way this unseen hand ordered things. He did not place faith in it. He did not worship the fatalistic inevitability of sorrow and death. While he could find beauty and wonder in the order and structure it produced, when faced with its reality, he fought desperately to save his child... as any of us would... as we have.

From here in 2010, the global population jumps to nine billion by 2050 as we continue to defy evolution's wrath. Yet when confronted with the consequences of that, we turn around and sacrifice our children on the alter of another unseen hand.

How many times has capitalism been used to justify the deaths of 45,000 Americans each year during the recent year-long health care reform debate? How many times have we been told not to touch the consequences of the economic downturn for fear of disturbing the market? Suffering is just a consequence of the market. When did we decide to become playthings of the unseen hand?

Imagine the monster who would rail against the use of medicine for fear of thwarting the unseen hand of evolution? All of our history, humans have beaten back nature, curtailed its ravages and protected our children from it as best we could. It is utter perversion that we would now throw ourselves into an economic parody of that same vicious world we escaped.

Our ingenuity exists outside this natural force. There was no market reason to go to the moon, but when directed to, it was a problem we could solve. The Salk vaccine was given away. Profit motive was not required to cure polio. Still, we still cling to the notion that greed works and survival must therefore mean YOU are the fittest economically.

Even then, all around us, the system is gamed at ever greater levels. When Adam Smith envisioned markets, they were quite simple. Left to their own devices, today's corporations will inevitable produce a monopoly or oligopoly. The information gulf between what you can know at any moment and what a corporation can know is simply too large for a free market. See banking, music, media, cable, energy, and Walmart for examples. In such systems, we are tamed into ordered rows like cabbages.

As crazy as braving the elements of unrestrained nature would be, it is crazier still that we would line up like fat cabbages to give up our general welfare to corporate entities outside our constitution.

If we are to secure liberty for ourselves and our children, then it will be because we shake off the unseen hands, guide our own destiny and make our own justice using the powers of that very constitution. The hope in that document, the idea that man could guide his destiny, was the work of Jean Jacques Rosseau. His words of 1762 are every bit as true today as they were when he first wrote, "Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains."

Caitlin would have graduated college in May. Her death has sharpened my empathy. I keenly feel every note of the grief that awaits us if we don't throw off those chains. It grieves me knowing that so many of my fellow humans do not feel this. I am horrified that real deaths can be so casually cast aside with a dismissive wave of greed's unseen hand.

The casual suffering of so many living children goes unmourned. We don't even acknowledge their reflected light on our balance sheets. Those deaths will never leave us. History will not treat us kindly. Their deaths are spots we cannot wash out.

I feel the presence of Darwin's dear Annie and my own lost girl at my side as I drive home. The future looms, and the trembling, spectral hand of Malthus beckons. I can taste each sip of the bitter cup being offered us.

Creation has left me in a dark place as I arrive home. It is all cold rain and reflected lamp light outside. In my own home there is warmth and for today at least, the laughter of children.

[Xipe Totec]

1. For then

I want to die young at the end of the day On the High Sea, with face to the sky, When agony is but a dream far away And the flight of my soul is a bird soaring by.

Let there be no sad tears as I draw my last breath, at one and alone with the sky and the sea, No sobbing, nor prayer, nor laments of death; I only would hear the deep waves cover me.

To die when the bright glow of twilight is fading, And catches the waves in its last net of light; To be like that sun as its luminous shading Expires and is lost in the arms of the night.

To die, and die young: before time has destroyed The delicate fabric illusion has spun; When life can still say:"I am yours," but the void Of a final echo tells us death has won!

- Gossamer Stories,
Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera,
Translated by John A. Crow

[Klukie]

2. Thanks for this...

I think of these things quite often..thanks for saying it so clearly.

[sfwriter]

5. you are welcome... I sometimes feel crazy for seeing it.

[Klukie]

6. no...you are not crazy

you feel deeply...as we all should.

[Possumpoint]

3. The Thought Of Losing One's Child

is a closed door no one want to enter. Most think of the natural flow of events to be the parent dying before the child. My sympathy to anyone who has to face the reality of a child's death.

[Hekate]

4. KnR

[blindpig]

7. Malthus....

Most people don't understand what that piece of shit was about, especially environmentalist. It drives me to despair.

He is buried here:

http://monthlyreview.org/1298jbf.htm