Moral Passion

“I'm a bit sad that you dwell so much on the sad and depressing stuff of history,” my mother wrote me this week. Mother is smart as a whip, and she cares deeply about Simon.

She's right--the readings last week were high on the sadness and horror scale: all consuming fires on two continents, the Plague, doom and destruction. That combination of misery wasn't on purpose—that's where we were in the textbooks that week: the Great Chicago Fire for American history, and the Great London Fire followed by the Plague for world history.

“You probably just don't mention the positive, the creative, the artistic and technical breakthroughs,” Mother went on to write, adding, ”But they are so important. Don't forget them. How about journeys of discovery?"

Good questions--how about all the good stuff in history? The discoveries, the great feats of technology and construction, the grand achievements in the arts?

Many are covered, wonderfully so, in this year's primary textbook for American history, The American Story—100 True Tales from American History by Jennifer Armstrong. We've read stories about the building of canals and railroads; the discovery of a dinosaur in New Jersey; the finding of gold in California; the development of the clipper ship; the reconnaissance balloon corps used during the Civil War; the introduction of the steam-engine into mining; and Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, among others.

But none of these stories interests Simon as much as the ones that involve a tragedy, a searing injustice, or a unforgivable lapse in judgment. The violent and the shameful moments in history lead to longer conversations, to conversations that get continued over lunch and dinner, to big questions that rise unbidden from the back of the car on the way to the supermarket to buy lettuce and detergent.

“Mom--I have a question."

“What's your question?”

“Why do some people kill good presidents?"

And as we wander through the aisles of our local Publix, he turns and says: “What do you think was worse? World War I or World War II?"

Sometimes his questions leave me breathless because I'm so unprepared. He will have worked his way through an audiobook on his own, and I'll have no idea what historical moment he's been cogitating about.

Why do the dark moments in history take such hold of Simon's imagination? He's only eleven. He still sleeps with a nightlight and his arm around two stuffed polar bears called Erik and Dora, much loved presents from my mother.

A couple of years ago, when we studied Christopher Columbus for the first time, Simon kept going to the globe and tracing the daunting westward route to India that led instead to America. This year, everything has changed—not only has Simon grown almost four inches in the last twelve months, he has grown in ways I'm slow to perceive. This year, when the Columbus story was covered again in world history, all Simon wanted to talk about is smallpox and other diseases the Europeans exported wholesale to the Americas.

The last few days we read about Alexander Graham Bell and about Custer at Little Big Horn, but the technological wonder of the telephone could not compete with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's failure to listen to his Indian scouts. They told him not to attack the Cheyenne and Lakota. They told him he was vastly outnumbered. But Custer attacked anyway. He was going to teach the Indians a lesson. Custer--and every single one of his soldiers--was killed.

“What a stupid moron!” says Simon with utter indignation--moron is a favorite word these days thanks to The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. “Why didn't he listen to his scouts? And couldn't Custer count? Didn't he go to school? I can count. I wouldn't have attacked.” Simon is outraged.

The truth is of late is he is outraged a lot. Three days ago, for world history, we read about Louis XIV. Louis XIV was decreed another moron. “Why did he buy so much golden stuff when the peasants were hungry?"

In Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw suggests that the first great passion that we feel as children is not love--but the moral sense. Suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, children are inflamed with moral passion, and from that passion the adult is born. As one of his characters says:

All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless...grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion.

Late last week, I came upon Simon in bed looking at a book, a hardcover, not a comic book—those were strewn on the floor. His head was lying on his stuffed polar bears. In his hand he was holding a book I had just bought about the Civil War and had left on the coffee table, unsure as to when to introduce it, Photo by Brady—A Picture of the Civil War, also by Jennifer Armstrong. The book, pitched to teenagers, tells the story of the civil war through the pictures taken by Matthew Brady and the photographers he hired to make a record of the Civil War.

“Come here, Mom. Look at this. Look--the rebels stole the soldiers' shoes."

I sit down on the side of his bed and together we look at a picture of the dead at Gettysburg.

“They stole their shoes, Mom. Do you see? That's not fair."