National victory – the better one

"From now on we must take better care of our children and young people so that Finland's competitiveness would be preserved also in the future."

Look at the previous sentence. It's not a joke or sarcasm. It is the editorial conclusion of a Finnish newspaper a few months ago. In many ways a praiseworthy editorial about children's and young people's violence slipped in a solution which might be part of the problem.

The reasoning revealed a national value system: we are not to care about children and young people above all else because they live a unique human life and are valuable in themselves. Neither because human experience about the purpose and meaningfulness of life is ultimately connected with the experience of loving and being loved. We must care about children so that we would be profitable even in the future.

The sentence above also raises the question that on what basis we should take care of sick children. My friend's disabled child will probably never hold up Finland's competitiveness. Neither will he hopefully ever be able to read or understand those lines. And hopefully not his mother. Although the woman is happy about her child and thanks God for him every day, sorrow is not far away either. But sorrow and worry come above all else because the hardening world counts everything in money. To be the personification of a money-spinner is a hard fate for a small or even a bigger human being.

So as not to succumb to unfair meanness: the point in the quote was probably a sincere, although clumsy attempt to motivate also those interested in money to flare up for children. The writer is in actual fact right. Competitiveness, among other things, suredly suffers in a society whose members kill each other on the spur of the moment. The prerequisite of a healthy economic infrastructure is an ethical infrastructure; that has been proved many times by history.

But how is a nation's ethical base being born? It isn't born with a glee of money in the eyes. Means to an end will not do as the fundamental value justification. Something must be found behind it which cannot be controlled but which can be partaken and which can be missed. Community's notion of fundamental good is born out in a complex procedure from all that we cherish as valuable and unnegotiatable. That good that keeps us alive should not be thrown away lightly.

Last week I saw something valuable and unnegotiatable. The Finnish Kaurismäki film The man with no past is a noteworthy cultural work of art not only for its bressonic style but also because the film depicts just that world where a society's hope rests: uncalculated goodness. I cannot be defined, and there is no need to, but one recognises its existence.

The writer and a philosopher Simone Weil did in her work Gravitation and Mercy a significant observation about art and morale, "An imagined evil is romantic and varied whereas real evil is grey, monotonous, deserted and boring. An imagined good is boring, real good is always something new, wonderful, intoxicating." Therefore according to her art is usually either immoral or boring; only a genius can make an exception.

I urge you to look at the work of a genius.