In The Little Prince, author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry opens with a child’s drawing. The narrator proudly shows it to the adults around him, expecting them to recognize a snake swallowing an elephant. Every adult mistakes it for a hat.
The child is then encouraged to abandon drawing altogether and pursue “more useful” subjects.
This is not the only time the book talks about wonder. Throughout his journey, the Little Prince encounters adults trapped inside absurd forms of “reasonableness”: a businessman endlessly counting stars he can never truly possess, a geographer carefully cataloging maps of places he has never explored, a king obsessed with authority over subjects who do not exist. Again and again, Saint-Exupéry portrays adulthood as a narrowing of vision. The grown-ups are consumed by utility while detached from life itself. They know how to count stars, but not how to marvel at them.
It is a small moment that captures a great tragedy of modern adulthood. The grown-ups in The Little Prince are practical, efficient people. But they have become incapable of seeing beyond surfaces.
Yet the child sees mystery.
Perhaps that is why the book still resonates so deeply today.
Modern life trains us to explain everything immediately and emotionally flatten it afterward. Beauty must be deconstructed. Joy must be qualified. Hope must be escorted out of the room by a committee of caveats. Every sincere expression of delight is expected to defend itself against accusations of naivety.
We have developed a strange cultural instinct in which cynicism presents itself as intelligence.
Ursula K. Le Guin once observed, “Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” She understood what many modern people do not: Despair is not wisdom.
Consider one of the most beautiful graphs ever created.
The data compiled by Our World in Data on child mortality tells a remarkable story. For most of human history, childhood was extraordinarily fragile. In many societies, a significant percentage of children never reached adulthood. Parents buried sons and daughters with a frequency that is almost unimaginable to modern people. Yet over the last two centuries, and especially over the last hundred years, child mortality has fallen dramatically across much of the world.
That graph represents the millions of children who lived. Children learning to ride bicycles. Children celebrating birthdays. Children being tucked into bed by their parents. Children who grew up, married, had families of their own, and lived lives that earlier generations never had the chance to experience.
It is, in a very real sense, a graph of human flourishing.
Yet many people are incapable of looking at it with uncomplicated gratitude and instead reframe it within the desperation and the confusion of the now. What about this problem? What about that crisis? What about the next looming threat?
Some of these concerns may be legitimate. But their immediacy reveals something deeper about us: We struggle to allow good news to remain good news for even a moment before demanding that it justify itself.
The graph does not suggest that everything is fine, that suffering has disappeared, or that progress is inevitable. It does not ask us to accept the sedative of advancement and stop trying to solve problems.
In fact, it suggests precisely the opposite.
The dramatic decline in child mortality demonstrates that human beings are capable of confronting immense suffering and reducing it. It is a reminder that history is as much a record of extraordinary achievements as it is merely a catalog of failures.
We are not returning to the world of 1850, a time when childhood death was commonplace, and hospitals were places people entered expecting never to leave. The trajectory of human flourishing remains unfinished, but it is real.
Yet modern culture rarely rewards people for noticing this. We reward cynicism far more readily than gratitude. We commend the person who identifies the hidden flaw rather than the person who pauses long enough to appreciate the miracle.
G. K. Chesterton understood this deeply. In Orthodoxy, he argued that, though existence contains wonder, familiarity dulls our perception of wonder. Adults pride themselves on “seeing through” everything until, eventually, they can no longer truly see anything at all.
C. S. Lewis warned of something similar in The Abolition of Man. He feared the creation of people trained to debunk reverence and suspicion alike while never learning how to love what is good.
Modern society excels at producing critics. It struggles to produce grateful people.
This explains why many people today feel spiritually exhausted even while drowning in information. Human beings were designed to encounter meaning.
Perhaps this is because cynicism feels safer. Wonder requires vulnerability. Hope risks disappointment. Gratitude requires acknowledging that something genuinely good has occurred. Cynicism asks nothing of us except distance.
But a civilization that loses the ability to celebrate genuine goods eventually loses the ability to recognize them at all.
This is one reason Christianity places such importance on childlike wonder. Christ does not command His followers to become childish, but childlike. Children possess a radical openness to reality. They are capable of amazement. They do not yet believe that cynicism is proof of intelligence.
Christianity itself is a religion of wonder. A God who becomes man. A present creation charged with meaning, paired with a future in which all things are made new.
Perhaps the deepest crisis of modernity is imaginative. We have become frightened of enchantment, sincerity, all things delightful and worthy of embodying.
Despite this, the world remains filled with reasons for wonder: sunlight through stained glass, old hymns sung imperfectly, children laughing in grocery stores, the smell of rain on pavement, stories that still move us, stars that continue burning above civilizations convinced they have outgrown mystery.
The world has not ceased to be beautiful.
We have simply become unable to admit it.
