We're all upset about Baby 59. So what else do we agree on? | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian
We're all upset about Baby 59. So what else do we agree on?
The more we rely on very clear moral markers for our sense of ideological community, the fewer questions we can ask
Zoe Williams
On Sky News last night, as the Zhejiang baby in the pipe, Baby 59, lay incubated, away from the hurly burly of his beginnings, the anchor Anna Botting and pundit Jonathan Maitland were arguing about which photo the papers should have used. The choice was between the baby coming out of the pipe, which was Maitland's preference, and the baby rescued, alive and well in a hospital setting, which was Botting's.
The newspapers were divided down the middle. Maitland's point was that the baby is not the story; the baby in the pipe is the story. Botting's reply was that the baby in the pipe was yesterday's story. Today, the story is that the baby is alive and well.
Maitland, of course, was looking at the baby as a regular human, albeit a very small one. His story was the miracle of his survival, his existence the beating heart of human endurance. Botting's reading was much closer to a reality that appears to be cross-cultural; the baby's survival is only the beginning. The immediate aftermath is mass generosity. Baby 59 has been inundated with offers of everything, from nappies to a loving home. Meanwhile, the situation is interrogated for who's at fault – how did the baby even arrive in jeopardy? – which matter is often decided rather too fast, with no due process and before all the evidence is in.
The excavation of this event doesn't tell Chinese society anything it doesn't already know about itself. It's no secret that the state barely recognises the children of single mothers, who often can't get their children registered for the provision of healthcare and education without the say-so of a neighbourhood committee.
There is no great conundrum around the probable results of such a patriarchal setup: a proportion of women with no choices will spend their pregnancy in denial.
What is the point of being a realist when you have no realistic options? And yet that point is raised almost as a throwaway observation, some necessary but boring context to the main event: an outpouring of rage against the individual (in this case, so far, 59's mother), which will soon enough have a backlash ("it wasn't the mother's fault, it was the father's") – a phase of collective handwringing with an inchoate agenda and no answer ("what kind of a society are we, that we would allow a mother to get in such a situation?"), and a reconciliation – a group sigh, before the world turns its attention to something else. A conversation that starts with a baby almost never proceeds in a sensible direction.
The hold babies have over us, emotionally, is that they are entirely vulnerable. And even at many removes, across many time zones, that stirs powerfully protective feelings. There's something obnoxious lurking underneath mass outpourings of any emotion, whether for a stranger's baby or a princess's death. There's exhilaration in it, a readiness to anger that, before Facebook, was unprovable – just an atmosphere.
In our socially mediated age, we can actually see the empathy shift to rage before our eyes, the way you can watch a fight between dogs unfold. "Wtf!!!" opined a kid on Twitter. "These KIDS that are having kids just sicken me. Don't open ur stupid legs then." With no way of knowing how old the mother was (she's 22), and clearly no insight into reproduction and parenting (last time I checked, women didn't just have to open their legs for foetuses to fly in), it was a line that was powerfully reminiscent of David Cameron's response to the death of Baby P. "Let's be honest," he said, in 2008 – happy days, when we didn't have to care what he thought – "this is a story about a 17-year-old girl who had no idea how to bring up a child." Baby P's mother was 27; on mature consideration, you wouldn't say the problem in this household was a knowledge deficit.
Mass emoting is a complicated business. The easy, metropolitan line is that it's all fake, but frankly, if a feeling feels real, it's real enough. The problem is that it segues into blame for the purposes of keeping itself buoyant – the mere acceptance of a sad fact will peter out into nothing. The search for a culprit breathes in a new energy and turns it into an escapade.
But it is not just for their vulnerability that babies appeal to us, pull our eyes towards them. Their tabula rasa quality, their uninscribed psyches, are a way to avoid complication. The perfection of this story is that there is no moral complication when a baby is wedged down a pipe. Any ill perpetrated against a child (preferably one too small to speak) can be marshalled into a shared certainty. In the growing absence of obvious moral absolutes, this offers a semblance of a belief structure. Or to put it another way, we can't agree on much, but at the very least we can agree that babies shouldn't end up in toilets.
Right, folks?
The more we rely on these very clear moral markers for our sense of ideological community, the fewer questions we can afford to ask. If Baby 59 drags anyone into a conversation about gender equality in China, or Baby P raises a row over whether the social services are underfunded or incompetent, the unity they created evaporates. The moment will be lost, and we'll just be individuals again, atomised, alone with our shaky morals cooked up on a case-by-case basis.
The very emotion generated by any news-baby, always beautiful, equally tragic, stands in the way of asking the deeper questions about the situations that will shape, or often have already ended, their lives.
Twitter: @zoesqwilliams
