On Good and Evil (or, Don't Touch the Howler Monkey)

Okay, this thing here is called a universe. It's a good place to poop in. Also there's tons of room to crawl around, and a lot of it can fit in your mouth. Not that, buddy, that's a tuna sandwich from last week. And that's an outlet! Those things are bad. What does "bad" mean? Well... lemme think.

I turned forty last week. It's an awfully big number, folks. Imagine carrying an Ark through an adder-haunted desert for forty years. Especially if you mixed up your Arks and brought along a giant boat. I also learned that my wife Ellen is pregnant with our first child! (Not on my birthday, which would have been cool, but a couple of weeks earlier, on Father's Day, which was actually even cooler.) I'm elated, terrified, puzzled, hopeful—all the things I gather it's usual to be.

Kids seem to like me for the most part. I assume it's because I have an attenuated sense of bodily dignity and no real problem with rolling around in the grass. And of course, as they're generally other people's kids, I can always toss the "better ask your mom" card on the table if they happen to ventilate a kerfuffling can of worms. But Ellie's not gonna let me get away with that when it comes to our own kid(s), nor ought she to. There's a whole cosmos of complicated things I need to figure out how to explain.

Axioms. Gotta give the kid some foundational understandings to act as premises going forward. God is good, A is A, existence exists, that kinda stuff. Should be easy, my kid's gonna be smart. And data: plenty of raw facts to furnish a context, to build a world out of all the tumbling world-bits. These are shoes. Those are pears. That's a howler monkey—which, contextually speaking, should not be in my kitchen. No, don't touch the howler monkey, those are bad. I mean like, not intrinsically bad, but for an infant—

Oh right, we were gonna talk about badness. How do I explain that? Not just the contingently bad use of good or neutral things, but actual personal Evil? No, buddy, there's no bug monster under your bed. But since you bring it up, there are much, much worse things dwelling on the doorstep of your mind, clawing and cajoling day after day for the chance to come inside. You should probably watch out for that.

Maybe we should start with goodness. I love you, buddy. And in so doing, I partake very slightly in the personal energy of a Person Who Is Love Itself. Also note that at this point, you haven't actually done anything to earn my love, apart from growing rapidly from a single cell to a barely noticeable bump in my lovely wife's belly and causing her to throw up all the time. On the other hand, what have I done to earn the love of Love, apart from drinking too much and writing dumb blog posts? But we love our kids, don't we. We smile when they smile and we laugh when they laugh. So just imagine how much... Well. You know.

Welcome to the war, kid.