Raising Kids With Character

The Ability to Understand Goodness

In 1965 the Catholic philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand, wrote a book called The Art of Living which outlined seven cardinal virtues necessary to living a grounded life. In 1994 his wife, Alice von Hildebrand, added an eighth chapter bringing the total of cardinal virtues up to eight.

These virtues, although presented in a spiritual way, are good virtues and should our kids learn them will guide our children through life with confidence in a world in which assured security seems to be less and less probable. These short summaries of the von Hildebrand’s wonderful chapters don’t do them intellectual justice, however if applied, I know will change the lives of you and your children.

Virtue number 5: The ability to understand goodness

Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. ~ Desmond Tutu

For a number of years our oldest boy has been one of the lucky students selected to attend WE Day celebrations in Winnipeg. According to their website, “WE is a movement that empowers people to change the world.” Sounds simple enough. While the scope of the movement has grown into a social justice juggernaut, the message remains simple enough; turn me into we.

The centrepiece for the WE movement is WE Day a massive gathering of socially minded students for concerts and inspiring speeches and, well, indoctrination. Each year when Malachi attends I remind him that there are going to be amazing bands, huge lights, inspiring videos and energy like he has never experienced and he will want to just agree in his heart with everything he is being told, and that, I tell him, is a dangerous thing. There is much good at these events (which is why we let him attend) but I don’t want him to just join a movement, or get some humanistic ultra-utopian attitude that he alone can change the world.

The ability to recognize goodness is therefore a bit of a strange concept. On the one hand we see it in the social justice clubs in schools, Pink Shirt Day (with the goal of ending bullying), and youth group missions trips. Yet, the concept of goodness is often sorely lacking in our everyday lives. We love the big events and trips and Facebook videos that restore our faith in humanity but often the gauge of goodness isn’t apparent. What makes something good and something else not?

I will tell you what I believe goodness isn’t; that misused, abused, and tattered word tolerance. Tolerance isn’t the same as goodness. The best way to demonstrate a statement like this is to slip into the extreme, taking the Nazis for example. There were many values they were very tolerant of. Now someone will reply that of course they were tolerant of their evil practices and values, but they were clearly intolerant of Jews, the elderly, and sick. But this only demonstrates the problem with equating goodness with tolerance, it is fine and good (and completely accurate) to say the Nazis were evil but not because of their arbitrary tolerance or intolerance.

When people today use the word tolerance they typically mean acceptance of any and all values, but that would mean we need to tolerate Nazi values equally with social justice values and clearly we don’t want that! What tolerance actually means is respecting someone despite differences in belief. It doesn’t remove the differences, nor does it necessarily agree with the other person.

My fear is that we are teaching our children that to be good is to accept everything as right, but that isn’t goodness at all, it is a cultural standard. All cultural standards must be examined, even scrutinized, to see if they are indeed appropriate standards.

The standard of culture is rarely an objective standard. How could it be? Even if our current standard is the result of evolutionary processes for the good of the human race (as many suggest), we would still argue about the actual standard!

What religions bring to our standards of goodness is a suggested objectivity, at least the major theistic religions do (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). A Christian says something is good when it reflects the values of the Bible, which in turn, reflect the holiness of God Who is the source of goodness. The Christian would say their definition of goodness is objective because it originated outside of the human race and, as such, no one movement defines what is and isn’t good, that’s God’s job.

This is the point, we want our kids to be good, but we also want them to be thoughtful. Goodness without thought could easily lead our children astray. If what our kids are spoon fed at events such as WE Day (remember, I see the value in it!) is blindly accepted as the standard of goodness, our kids are in danger!

We have to teach our children to discern what is good and bad thoughtfully and against an objective standard. But how?

Obviously at a young age we don’t insist that sharing our toys is virtuous because it reflects God’s heart, we tell our kids to share their toys because it is right and “I said so!” But as time progresses, we need to become the annoying one who incessantly asks “Why?”

I don’t want my children to choose Christianity because their dad or mom did, I want my children to choose Christianity because they have discovered it is true! So I ask them lots of “why” questions. I help them think and then I help guide them towards answers without providing mere packaged, superficial platitudes.

Goodness is a critical virtue today. Our kids need it and will need it. But blind goodness isn’t goodness at all, it is mimicry. Goodness must be accompanied by thoughtfulness to be truly good.