When Parents Murder Their Children

The Spirit of the Age

Of all the crimes found in the annals of the human race, children being murdered by their parents must surely rank as one of the most horrific and extreme.

We do not mean parents killing their children by neglect, such as when they unintentionally withhold from them those things necessary for sustaining life, like timely medical treatment. Nor do we refer to the unintended killing of a child through a fit of wanton rage or momentary loss of control. These things are bad enough.

Rather, we are referring to those cases where a parent, with malice aforethought, deliberately murders his or her child. The newspapers today carry news stories about a man in Melbourne, formerly a resident of New Zealand, who killed his three daughters, then took his own life. Killing those who depend upon you, then taking your own life, is an unspeakable evil. There is no other phrase that is appropriate.

It is a crime that is so contrary to nature, so terrible a denial of natural human instincts, so extreme a rebellion against God that instinctively we want to categorize it as an act that could only be performed by one clinically insane. Details of the case are sketchy, but apparently the father cared deeply for his three children. But he clearly considered that his life was not worth living and that with some perverted process of reasoning decided that it was better that his children also die.

What is does display is an extreme manifestation of what has become the prevailing, predominant evil of our age. The sin of self-absorption, or narcissism, is now so culturally predominant and ingrained that few think about it any more. The credo of our Unbelieving world has become "I believe it's all about Me". In Britain in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the credo was "I believe it's all about God, King and Country". Both creeds are wrong and constitute a rebellion against God. But we cite the older credo in order to shine a spotlight upon the current one.

Does not the older creed sound completely foreign to our modern ears--so foreign it appears to belong to another world entirely? Yet it was believed (often fervently) by our parents and grandparents--which after all is a relatively short time ago. The strangeness of the older creed to our ears underscores how profoundly and comprehensively the modern creed has captured the heart and mind of our culture. For an Unbeliever, if it's not all about God, King and Country, which professes that the objects of our primary devotion and loyalty lie outside of ourselves, it's almost certainly going to mean that one's ultimate loyalty and devotion will alight upon oneself. And that's exactly what has come to pass.

Our age has become preoccupied with gratuitous, egregious self-absorption. It can be seen everywhere, in ways too numerous to mention--but try these for size: demand rights and the ideology of entitlement; the proportion of our economic production and activity devoted to entertainment; the rapid growth of cosmetic surgery; the pedagogy of repeated affirmation and avoidance of failure in our schools which underpins the NCEA system, as well as the resistance to introducing national standards for reading, writing and maths; killing one's children whilst they are still in the womb; incessant appeals to pity in public discourse; gyms lined with mirrors; and the indulgent pablum found in popular women's magazines.

If you take up the lens of our narcissistic culture and look upon the father who killed his own children his actions are understandable. They are just an extreme form of the dominant credo of our age. Whilst the act itself remains unbelievably perverse--it is not foreign to us. It is, after all, just one more way of expressing the narcissism of our age.

The streets of Athens are piled high with rotting, putrid garbage; but to the narcissistic residents of that city they continue to effuse a self-indulgent glory.