I completed my book Peace Talk just before Christmas. I was pretty proud of it, and when I wrote out a Christmas card for my sister-in-law I told her about it and that I intended to send a copy to her eldest daughter, Meredith, in September, when she starts high school.
Then I started thinking about the dedication I would write for her – even though September was several months away. The more I thought about it the more difficult it became, so that now it is something of a major dilemma. Here’s the problem:
My sister-in-law and her family are, unsurprisingly, a perfectly normal family, probably leaning a little right of centre. In other words they have little idea how the world really works. My book is seriously radical – by mainstream standards. Although I genuinely believe it’s a wonderful piece of work, it shatters just about every controlling myth our rulers use to keep us in our place – and then it gets worse: it proposes a New Idea for fixing things.
So my dilemma is fairly obvious. I’ve promised to send a copy of my book to Meredith, but I know that if she actually reads it, it will conflict with just about every value she has been taught so far, and it will conflict with just about every value she will be taught in the future.
I firmly believe the world consists of two kinds of people: those who are part of the problem, and those who are part of the solution. The former group is, by a very long way, the bigger one – even though the vast majority of them don’t actually know that. Those few of us that are part of the solution have a duty to re-educate the problem group; but what about the human cost of doing that?
On the one hand I’m driven by my responsibility to re-educate (failure to do so would make me part of the problem group). On the other hand I’m aware of the potential for causing pain – which is not something that comes easily to me.
The potential for causing pain has two very real sources. Firstly, there are Meredith’s parents. Lovely people though they are, there are parts of my book that will scare them rigid: that fly full in the face of some of their most deeply held values. Revealing to Meredith truths that would most likely embarrass her parents is not a recipe for fostering family harmony. Possibly more serious than that, though, is the fact that real enlightenment – understanding the truth of how our world really works – is not a happy outcome; it’s really quite depressing. If we actively seek such enlightenment, and find it, we should be able to live with the consequences of our own action – the searching. But is it right to inflict the pain of depression on someone who was previously perfectly happy and hadn’t sought enlightenment? Ignorance is bliss, they say, probably for this reason; but at what point is it right to point out that it’s the primary reason for The Problem – in fact, it is The Problem.
When people are enduring unimaginably difficult lives as is normal for millions of families in the third world, there’s a strong case for mandatory enlightenment – after all, how much more miserable could their lives be? But a child being raised in the relative luxury of the first world is a different story: what excuse can I have for causing her pain? Because I think it’s right to do so? I did that once before – hurt someone I loved because I thought it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t.
All this over a bloody book! Which Meredith probably won’t read anyway. And then there are her two younger sisters…