But here I get back to my daughter. She is a barbarian, or at least she was
when she was born. And I mean this fairly literally. Political theorist
Hannah Arendt once said that, every generation, Western civilization is
invaded by barbarians - we call them "children." Today's babies aren't
meaningfully different from those born 1,000 or 5,000 years ago. A Viking
baby magically transported to 21st-century America might grow up to be an
accountant or a bus driver. A baby born today and sent back in time might
become a Hun, Visigoth or Aztec warrior, whatever his parents expected of
him.
Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the
necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others.
One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are "taught to hate." This
is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly
capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The
differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why.
And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their
kids.
As a conservative, I'm a big believer in the importance of tradition, which
writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed "democracy of the dead." But tradition can
only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so, when I read
that 23 percent of British teens think Winston Churchill is no more real
than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society,
the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.
Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living
members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile
thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity. Indeed,
someone once told me that those who cannot learn from history are condemned
to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives. Of
course, that joke's only funny if you've heard of Santayana in the first
place.
Now, because even my daughter's minor joys are my greatest ones, I will
gladly fork over large sums of money so she can dine with fairy-tale
princesses. I will even play along. But she is only 4, and I'll only be
pretending.