Fatherhood as Practicing Virtue

Reflections on having and raising children

When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pros and cons, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable.

– Oswald Spengler

I’m going to have my third child in December. I hope to have more, but for my demographic this is already a pretty high number. Only about a third of women in the US have at least three children in their lives now. Among my social circle, mostly people who are involved in politics, academia, or the world of ideas, large families are even rarer. Of the dozen or so friends I talk to on an at least weekly basis, none of them have had three or more children.

Since I’m a pro-natalist, I’ve always felt like I should be doing more to explain in personal terms why having kids is good. At the same time, this desire to talk about myself has always been counterbalanced by an intuition that a man talking about his family is gay. The worst are those who put pictures of their kids in their profile pics and then act sassy on twitter, which I see as akin to hiding behind human shields. I find this Hamas-like practice so detestable that for a while it led me to prefer something like a wall of separation between a writer’s ideas and his family life. But speaking with Daniel Hess reminded me that the fertility question is ultimately about culture, and personal narratives are among the best ways to change people’s values. I’ve therefore decided to take the risk of becoming a homosexual and reflect on the joys of creating new life and why I wanted to have kids in the first place. And since today is Father’s Day, there is no better time for doing that than right now.

First of all, in terms of pure self-interest, I completely endorse Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. There are social reasons to start a family and, as implied by the discussion below, I would have done it even if I didn’t particularly like children. Thankfully, I do. They’re cute and fun, and as someone who has always been interested in heredity and why people turn out how they do, I can’t imagine a more intriguing scientific experiment. On days like today, they give you rickety little presents constructed with tape and paper, and when you make them laugh by starting to tear up at their beauty and craftsmanship, you’re only half-joking.

Children experience life with a kind of magic and wonder that we as adults can only catch the most fleeting glimpses of, and it’s a joy to bring that perspective into your home and daily life. In their first few years, they are completely dependent on you, and this tends to snap you out of any sort of melancholy or existential dread you might be prone to.

Putting aside the narrowest forms of self-interest and focusing on the common good, I once thought that my personal case for having kids depended on the belief that I have the kinds of traits that provide outsized benefits to society. When I look around at the world, I notice that it has many problems, but the main one seems to be that other people aren’t like me. Some might be smarter, or more moral and charismatic, but I’ve found that no one combines brilliance, moral courage, and love of truth in the way I do. Since such traits are heritable, making children creates more people like me.

This was what I used to tell myself, but a childless academic friend recently convinced me that this makes no sense. Heredity isn’t that reliable as a means of transmission for the combination of characteristics that make me who I am, and I can probably do more to create additional people with Hanania-like traits and raise their status through forgoing the time and expense of having children and focusing on spreading my ideas instead. I said fine, Ruxandra, you have a point. If I once believed that creating more mes for the good of society was why I needed to have children, this must have been nothing more than a rationalization since I should have realized how little sense this idea makes before.

Now, one could say that having children makes me a more credible pronatalist. Yet publicizing the fact that I have a family was clearly never part of the plan. Like I said, I’ve practically never mentioned my kids before out of fear of being gay. But I’ll take it as a post hoc justification now that the logic of my original reason has been refuted.

Upon more reflection, perhaps we can say the real reason I had children and hope to have more is that it fits into larger narratives I am committed to about the world and my place in it. It is sort of like not littering. I get mad when I see other people throw garbage on the ground and tend to confront them. An effective altruist might argue that this is a waste of time, and instead of paying attention to who around me is littering I could do more by donating money to whatever organization does the best job of tackling the problem. This line of thought might lead to the conclusion that I shouldn’t even bother to refrain from littering myself since doing so doesn’t really add much to the problem. But it feels wrong to approach a societal issue in this way.

Leftists are often criticized for virtue signalling, which involves favoring largely pointless gestures instead of taking more substantive steps to address the problems that they supposedly care about. Perhaps that is what I’m doing when I yell at a litterer. But what is called virtue signalling in many cases can be thought of as making sure there is alignment between what one believes and how he behaves in his own life, which might be taken as one of the definitions of virtue itself.

It’s sort of funny that some conservatives attack leftists for incorporating their values into their personal lives while also feeling uncomfortable with the kind of cold utilitarianism promoted by effective altruists. I guess we’re all virtue signallers, whether we are signalling to the rest of the world or ourselves.

All of this is to say I have had children in part because I believe that low birth rates, particularly among individuals with desirable traits, is one of the gravest problems that humanity faces. This is the same reason that I don’t steal or litter, and I sometimes refrain from eating animals when other options are available. I have a vision of the kind of society I want, and it involves individuals behaving in a certain manner and making their own contributions. This is one way to overcome a collective action problem. You recognize its existence, and then just take an action that a narrower self-interest model of human behavior would predict is unlikely. I want a world with less crime, less litter, and more babies, so I (mostly) follow the law, don’t litter, and make children, even if my individual choices don’t themselves do much to solve society’s challenges.

Going beyond the social problems of today, the narrative of my life can also be considered in a more cosmic perspective. Like you, I have ancestors going back 4 billion years, through a chain of being that connects all life on this earth. Having a deeper level of self-awareness and understanding than that of any creature in the line that came before me, it’s sad to think of myself as the end. Somehow the first microbe found a way to reproduce itself, and the same is true for everything that came between that and my parents born in the Levant in the middle of the twentieth century. How am I supposed to live with the thought that, after all these creatures grasping their way towards survival and reproducing against microscopically small odds, a 4 billion year story will end because I wanted something as trivial as a bigger house or more vacations? Maybe this is the tragic story of humanity, where the characteristics that gave us self-awareness and allowed us to unlock the mysteries of the universe helped create an environment that was so unnatural that reproduction itself became a challenge. But this is an outcome that is worth fighting against, and doing my part in this battle provides meaning to life.

On the topic of meaning, creating life cannot help but change one’s relationship with aging and death. I’m confident my consciousness won’t survive the decay of my physical body, and while at an intellectual level I know that the existence of the world doesn’t depend on me being there to observe it, emotionally I just care less about things that I’m not involved in. Having kids means you will, in the likely event that they outlive you, take your last breath knowing that you left something behind that you care about at least as much as you care about yourself, and hopefully more so. As the generations pass, and finally you get to the point when not only contemporaries of your parents or grandparents, but your friends, cousins, and siblings start to get sick and die, you remain intimately connected to what comes next. Old age and finally death are not the end, but a To Be Continued. This is as much as those of us who don’t believe in an afterlife can hope for.

All this being said, the arguments discussed above are reasons to have children one might consider before meeting them. Once they are born, reflections on what you were thinking or hoping for beforehand become moot. Their very existence puts them center stage as the most important thing in your world. This is another reason I’m ambivalent about this entire exercise of talking about why I had children. It is itself a sign of decadence. Go and create new life, there will be enough time for the existential questions about one’s place in the universe and the future of humanity once you have skin in the game.