Perhaps the finest way to develop a loving attitude towards other people is to recall,
in the face of their difficulty, that we are, in the end, all children.
The claim is an odd one. Adults are clearly not children. They have powers of reasoning
that quite outstrip those of younger people, they have options and a sound grasp of right
and wrong, they are capable of causing serious damage; they should know better.
Children, on the other hand, are well-known for their powers to melt our hearts. Partly
this has to do with their physical appearance: with their unusually large eyes, their full
cheeks, their unthreatening statures, their tiny fat fleshy fingers. But ultimately, the
child attracts our tenderness because, when they act in ‘bad’ or tricky ways, it tends
to be easy to work out why they have done so: they hit their little sister because they
were feeling left out; they started to steal things from the other children because their
parents were going through a divorce; they ran away from the party without saying goodbye
because they were panicked by a sense of unworthiness.
Overall, when it comes to the psychology of children, we discover a surprising and hugely
gentle truth: that ‘badness’ and difficulty are, invariably, the result of some form of
pain, discomfort, hurt or wound. The child does not start by being dreadful, they become
so in response to injury, fear or sorrow.
With adults on the other hand, confronted by nasty or terrible behaviour, our thoughts
do not - for understandable reasons - generally turn to imagining why it might have occurred.
We’re satisfied with nimble and compressed reasons: because they’re an arsehole, because
they’re crazy. This will do for now.
And yet it is always open to us to wonder why someone acted as they did - and here we
are liable to stumble on an always provocative and properly revolutionary idea: the reason
why little children and big people do wrong is - despite the differences in age and size
- exactly the same. One category may be no bigger than a chair, the other can be gigantic
and able to carry guns, post lengthy screeds online or start and bankrupt companies, but
in the end, the psychology of blunder, meanness and anger is always the same: evil is a consequence
of injury. The big person did not start off evil, their difficult sides were not hard
wired from the start, they grew towards malice on account of some form of wound waiting to
be discovered.
It is work of extraordinary patience and humanity - it is the work of love - to go in search
of what these wounds might be. To search is morally frightening because we too easily
imagine that it might require us to wind up thinking well of behaviour we know is abhorrent:
it doesn’t at all, we can remain appalled while simultaneously tracing a path back to
the true catalytic factors. The work can also be practically frightening because we imagine
that it might require us to leave someone at liberty to cause us or others yet more
pain: but again, we can keep the wrong doer safely behind very high bars, even as we sensitively
explore the origins of their violations.
Once the full stories of our trespassers become known, our perspective may swiftly rework
itself. The bully who pursued us online had once worked as a porter, then been fired some
years back and fallen into depression and was facing the bankruptcy courts. The angry
populist politician was remorselessly belittled by a powerful father. The sexually impulsive
person used their addiction to calm themselves down from some unmasterable anxieties related
to early emotional neglect. Our judgement on behaviour never has to change; our sense
of why it occurred can be transformed.
The discipline of psychotherapy has been central in helping us to chart the sometimes unobvious
or contrary connections between a symptom and its genesis. Boastfulness may have its
roots in fear; anger can mask terror; hatred can be a defence against love. The haughty
air of the grown up can take hold as a way of compensating for invisibility. A satirical
manner can be a shield against an exiled longing for sweetness.
THe prison system in most countries tends to place people below the age of eighteen
in separate young offenders’ institutions, which treat inmates with a degree of kindness
and hope - in order to delve into the psychology of transgression with a view to understanding
and overcoming its causes. But after this age, for the most part, prisoners are locked
up in bare cells and the key is - metaphorically - thrown away. They should, after all, have
known better.
And yet we are all, as it were, young offenders, however old we might actually be; in other
words, we all need our crimes to be treated with a degree of sympathy and empathetic investigation.
It is an exquisite feat of mind to be able to imagine them as always still, at some level,
infants in a cradle.