It’s a thick old English forest; the sunlight struggles through in patches. We pass minstrels and other tourists, but the forest dominates. Many trees seem ancient and could pass as “Major.” They fold off the path into a tangle only Robin or his men could find the way through. Gideon is playing Robin and I am Will or Little John as needed. He carries Paddington Bear on his shoulders.
Being Robin, here in Sherwood, the actual Sherwood, is a unique moment in his relationship to Robin. It’s way better than the tableaux in Nottingham or the plays they do near the gate. Those are representations, like Errol Flynn and Gideon’s Robin games with his friends. But this is actually walking along inside the myth of Robin Hood. It’s that myth which excited him from the start, not any particular representation or version of it. Those came after his original identification with the myth itself, in all its compulsive flexibility, as scholar Stephen Knight says in his book Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. A myth grips you not in any specific details, but precisely because of its malleability and adaptability, the many meanings and situations it can include. You gather a sense of it, connect it to your own sense of the world, then explore and expand it, as required or desired.
I’d say this is similar to what a moral sense is about: not learning good from bad or right from wrong, but feeling that the world is limned in terms of good/bad and right/wrong. The thickness of that sense in the myth of Robin Hood is what attracted Gideon. It reflected his powerful sense of good guys and bad guys, he felt at home in it because of the underlying moral presumption in all stories and versions. It’s because of this foundational, proliferating quality that I think of his moral sense as complex rather than ambiguous. Are bad guys nice to each other? Sure, sometimes. Does that make them good guys? In a way. It depends. Etc. His moral sense is not ambiguous—it’s rich and tangled, like the forest.
The Major Oak is about a thirty-minute walk in. It’s massive and anthropomorphic, like the gnarled trees in The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings. It’s protected by a fence; its branches are buttressed, propped, and trussed, like an old cathedral. There are some stands and kiosks. We buy a beech-wood bow and arrows to go with the rest of our gear and there he is in the heart of Sherwood, romping around the big oak, shooting away. I relent on the plastic and foam items because he’s right and I’m wrong: why insist on prissy adult distinctions about what is authentic or worthy and what isn’t? It’s the flexibility of myth.
In my teens and early twenties, I taught a lot of Sunday (or Saturday) school at synagogues. The curriculum often involved teaching moral values. It’s a fad that races through the pedagogical world regularly. In the introduction to a 1997 edition of Piaget’s moral judgment book, William Damon wrote that the point of the studies was not just to discover “how young people learn to distinguish right from wrong,” but “most importantly, how can we induce them to prefer the former over the latter.” To me that sounds disrespectful: pushing free moral agents in a particular direction, teaching them which goals to value and pursue. Either they make their own free choice or one is imposed on them, and, if the latter, you deprive them of the dignity that makes them moral agents to start with.
But after our walk into the heart of Sherwood, I’d say there is also something superfluous about teaching moral values. The broad sense of right and wrong is endemic. It goes with being human; it’s virtually the same thing. (Two things fill me with awe, said Kant: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.) That’s why I find Gideon’s tendency to see the world as a playing field for good guys and bad guys compelling and, in its way, sufficient. He is voicing the inherent moral quality of human existence. To think it has to be instilled or developed is like saying breathing must be taught, or speech. Kids aren’t taught to speak. They have an innate bent which unfolds as they grow. Same thing with the moral sense. At most you can aid or hinder it as the child discovers and cultivates it in himself.
This brings me again to Piaget. He discerned “two moralities of the child” that occur in sequence: a morality of “constraint,” imposed on kids by adults, and a later morality, built on co-operation between peers, between ages nine and twelve. It is internalized; it judges on the basis of intentions and motives rather than external consequences. The first teaches mere duty; the latter, an inner sense of good. According to Piaget, the transition between the phases corresponds to a historical move from primitive, superstitious communities to complex, differentiated societies, marked by individual responsibility. This marks a “qualitative” advance—in kids and societies. So the development of moral judgment in the child builds smoothly and inevitably to the better, more abstract, more truly moral viewpoint of the older child and then the adult—as history is sometimes thought to progress inevitably toward equality and democracy.
Now, even if there are types of morality, it seems to me risky to link them, sequentially or otherwise. Think about the people you know who behave according to fine principles: serving the poor or oppressed, but who are not very nice to others in their own lives and lack empathy. Or the ones with loathsome moral and political views, but who you know would stand loyally by you in a crunch.
But what really bugs me is not Piaget’s tidy schematism. It’s the way his approach denies to both small kids and primitive peoples the possibility of exemplary moral behaviour, as would be the case if we (grown-ups and/or citizens of advanced societies) had a lot in common with them and could learn from them—which I think we can. I am at least as likely to learn from Gideon as the reverse and have always found this with kids. The requirement to advance doggedly through set stages is condescending toward both kids and earlier generations of humans. It’s like traditional Christian condescension toward the unsaved—those born before Christ, or those who failed to receive his gospel.
You can make just as good a case that moral complexity and sensitivity get off to a good start in small kids, then deteriorate. This may be easier to see in the arts, where creativity and imagination are common in kids, who then have those qualities baked out of them, so that the task of artist is to recapture those early impulses and resources. I know kids aren’t inherently nice and can be brutal. What I’m arguing for isn’t their niceness; it’s their moral acuity, that surprisingly sophisticated sense of good and bad.
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