Explaining Color to the Blind: Love to the Unloved
“Love comes from blindness,”
Histoire Amoureuse des Gaules, Comte de Bussy-Rabutin (1665)
It’s impossible to describe a color to someone born blind. At best we can make associations (e.g., Blue is like a cool mountain-stream.)
More tragically, infants deprived of visual-stimulation while their rods and cones are developing can subsequently live in a Technicolor psychedelic-circus, but will still be effectively blind because they can’t process the visual-information. The same is true of infants raised without sound becoming deaf.
The most heartbreaking example of all, 13th century Emperor Frederick II, seeking to determine which language in his multilingual empire children would naturally speak if never exposed to any, forbade nurses feeding, bathing orphaned newborns to talk to, or touch them.
Every blessed baby died.
Over five-decades, my most challenging patients were those raised unloved. Like the congenitally-blind, the best they could do was make associations: Love means someone is nice to you, takes care of you, provides for you.
It’s all true, but those qualities define kindness more than love.
How can we explain love to someone who never experienced it? More importantly, how can they love others, never loved themselves?
The most problematic verse in the Bible is the Second Commandment: “I, your jealous God, will punish the sins of the fathers who hate me for four generations.” (Exodus 20, 5)
We justify it suggesting the “Haters” refers to the four succeeding generations (which it follows in the text.)
Unfortunately, our explanation makes little sense. At best, it’s self-evident (like “Slippery when wet.”) It’s also paradoxical. Sins of the fourth-generation should then be visited upon four more generations.
The reality is, from biblical times, until today, all wars (Caesar, Oroi-Julato, Ottomans-Armenians, Guernica, Blitzkrieg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Stalin, Putin, Iran, Hamas, et al.) are designed to force the enemy’s unconditional surrender, therefore, endeavor to kill as many generations as frighteningly as they can.
For five-decades, I’ve suggested (hopefully, please God) the verse was paradoxically meant to be, merciful.
“Haters”, i.e., hateful parents don’t love anyone, including their own child. For four generations, the cycle of unloved children becoming unloving parents naturally continues until, in a divine miracle, one parent breaks it.
There is another divine miracle.
Five-decades, I’ve been unable to find words to adequately express to my children how much I love them. Truth is, the words do not exist.
Now however, they do.
Once my children had kids of their own, I could say “I love you as much as you love them.”
They could finally understand how I felt about them.
“The child is the father of man”, Wordsworth observed.
Every successive generation we are blessed to experience renders us a little less blind.
