I want to share a video of a ten-year-old Islamic boy. There is something about this child that stands in stark contrast to the children I tend to see in America. I don’t mean this as a judgement against our own children. But in watching the video (and in watching the children of the Amish around here, and those of many indigenous American cultures), a deficit in the general American culture can be seen.

I think it’s good to notice the beautiful qualities of a people that we are intent on “bombing back to the stone age.” (I know the video is not about people from Iran. But this war is being sold to the US soldiers as a war against Islam).

And I think it’s healthy to recognize deficits in ourselves to balance out all the one-sided stories we hear in our own propaganda machines.

Here is the video of the Mufti and the boy: https://youtu.be/13UZJbaVSSE?si=NaLHmREBrIXurnV6

Even if this shows an unusually self-composed and self-aware child, he is a child of Islamic culture. He has a dignity and grace that is beyond his years (at least for our culture). Look how attentive and humble he is. There is no neediness in him, no whining. He is self-reflective, respectful and sincere of heart, without any fear of mockery.

And look at how that Mufti relates to the boy with a fatherly love — a calm, assertive manner that shows no sign of force, and none of the callousness, derogatory criticism, impatience or condescension that (in my experience) usually marks a strong male figure in our culture. In contrast, he treats the boy with kindness and respect, and with a quiet command that is not crushing to the child.

In our culture, we have a hard time finding what “the dog whisperer”, Cesar Millan, calls that “calm, assertive energy.” Most of us are drifting somewhere between two extremes that miss Cesar’s mark. The older extreme is “spare the rod and spoil the child”, which many conservative families admire. And the liberal extreme is permissive neglect.

The liberal extreme avoids the conservative extreme’s reliance on physical punishment and subjugation. But it does this by abandoning the child to their own devices and trying to compensate for this absenteeism by giving the child anything it wants. And this often leaves the child freer, perhaps, to discover their own way (if they are genuinely loved enough to handle it), but also without clear boundaries, and without responsibilities or any clear path towards maturation and coming of age. And it leaves the children seething with grievances that are difficult to appreciate, because we dismiss them merely as “spoiled.” But they are also neglected in their own way.

Think here of the character, Cartman, in South Park as an example of this extreme.

Children of the conservative extreme are forced to give up their autonomy in exchange for conditional belonging. And in passing through the gauntlet of a harsh upbringing, they surrender their autonomy to the authority of a family dictator, at least until they can supplant the dictator and become one themselves, or find their place as a loyal subject of a larger one.

Not many of our children are extreme Cartmans or rule- and loyalty-bound serfs or mini-dictators, but there were enough to elect Trump, or enough who ended up too grievance-bound and self-obsessed to care one way or the other.

Our children are encouraged to stand out as precocious talents, if possible, but not as humble and sincere apprentices of a larger world, who are being guided towards a rite of passage, as this boy is being guided.

In our culture, children grow up to be independent competitors upon graduation. But the child in this video is being guided into joining a community and a cosmic world that gives meaning to life, not merely into becoming a separate Self who has been severed from community, and who feels compelled to ridicule the superstitions of a cosmic vision.

The Amish are similar in this way. Their children are also apprenticed to join the tribe, educated into working from a young age on the family farm, which our culture tends to judge as “child exploitation.” But what we’re seeing in these cultures (for all their inevitable faults) is an admirable absence of condescension, and a recognition that children deserve far more respect, and can handle far greater responsibilities, if we are attentive to them in the right way.

But in this culture, we allow childhood to stretch to 18 years (and beyond), with no framework for coming of age, only a diploma that licenses them to compete for themselves.

Here, it’s hard to find any ten-year-old who is unself-consciously sincere about religion and questions of suffering and the meaning of life. Sincerity of this sort is a target of mockery.

But this is a child who has been marked by neither extreme. Otherwise, he would not show these signs of authenticity, or that freedom to feel and think without fear of ridicule. He is taken seriously, without anyone losing sight of his tender age.

He is the product of a culture that knows what Cesar Millan is talking about. As do most cultures that have an ancient heart, or who are tied to the ancient rhythms of the earth. He’s not “merely” talking about dogs, but about a rediscovery of one’s lost autonomy, and the healing of grievance.

In this video, for instance, Cesar reviews an insightfully funny South Park clip of himself, which demonstrates this way of being which is neither permissive nor punishing: Reacting To My South Park Episode! (And it’s interesting that many in our culture have criticized Cesar as a dog abuser for his style of “parenting” the dog. We are generally unable to see the difference between a parent’s discipline and a dictator’s cruelty, which is why we got where we are today).

At any rate, there are telltale signs of something we’ve lost in the bearing of the Mufti and the boy; in the manner of this boy’s quick flush of tears, and the unsentimental and unself-pitying way in which he quickly regains his happiness, like clouds and sun passing peacefully over a spring field. This is a true heart, a being already mentored to a point where he is ready to be a man.

Of course, Arabic and Persian cultures have their own cruelties — children who are brutally raised in a less kindly manner, trained as suicide bombers. And all the beheadings and religious wars and fundamentalism are evidence of addictions to punishment as well. But extremism is not a full picture of the culture, just as our own extremist tendencies should not be allowed to define us entirely either.

Extremism is what rises to the surface under conditions of violent dislocation. And when Islam is not riled up in this manner, there is a beauty and maturity in their everyday culture that we need to appreciate. After all, the West is deeply indebted to Islamic culture. While we were lost in our first Dark Ages (this is our second), Islam was leading the world in math, science, medicine, literature, architecture, and philosophy. Through them, we emerged from that dark age. And they have more to teach us, if not merely humility. But for that we’d need to hear them over the noise of our bombs. This is what I see in the video of the Mufti and the boy.