September 6, 2024

Childlessness is now a political issue, thanks to JD Vance, who has held forth against "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. It's just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?"  Adopting or co-parenting in a blended family, as Kamala Harris is doing, does not count, it would appear.  Women must have more babies, and Vance has called the declining birth rate a civilizational crisis.  Well, I will not avoid the challenge.  I am not only something of an honorary cat lady myself, but a worst case:  I have no children, nor do I have adopted children or children from a blended family.  I have never wanted children.  Far from being “miserable” about my life choice, I have never regretted it.  This is not about me, but perhaps I might make a contribution to the debate from that perspective. 

Vance feels there is something wrong with anyone who does not want to have children.  Yes, he’s weird, but in fairness there is some amount of hypocrisy in the attacks on him.  Having children is still a social expectation, and women who reach a certain age are objects of anxious solicitude by their friends.  In an essay called “There Are No Children Here,” novelist Ann Patchett, who is childless, recounts the story of a woman who wanted a tubal ligation at 25 and was told she had to take a psychiatric exam first.  She did.  They still wouldn’t do it.  She cites “the sister of a friend” who remarks to her at a party, “Imagine how selfish a person would have to be to not have a child” (199).  This is her conclusion:

I suspect it had less to do with my best interest and more to do with the fact that I made them nervous walking through the world unencumbered.  I was setting a bad example. | People want you to want what they want.  If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated.  If you don’t want the same things, your lack of wanting can, to certain people, come across as judgment.  (203)

So Vance is hardly alone in his opinion that all women should have children, the crucial difference being that he is spokesman for a political party that wants to deny women the choice.  Moreover, and again in fairness to Vance, he is a Catholic convert, and he is repeating what is essentially Catholic teaching.  Despite being the most liberal Pope in many decades, Francis not long ago condemned people who did not have children as selfish.  And the desire to curtail not only abortion but birth control in order to produce more babies is consonant with Catholic belief that anything that prevents the making of babies is sinful, the difference again being that between preaching and coercion. 

Most people do want children.  Is this the result of social conditioning, or is there really a biological urge, even if, for whatever reason, it remains dormant in some people or is resisted by them?   The idea, once almost universally accepted, of a “maternal instinct” is now highly controversial.  We do not speak of a “paternal instinct,” even though it is often the men who want to have the children—they just do not want to take care of them.  That is the job of women, whose “maternal instinct” is supposedly an innate impulse to nurture.  Biologist Richard Dawkins’ idea of the “selfish gene” amounts to a theory that there is an innate urge in men to have children, but it is really the urge not of the male as a person, but rather of the genes, which try to perpetuate themselves by impregnating as many women as possible, as often as possible.  This is a technique of Darwinian survival.  It is a plausible theory, with only one weakness, namely, that there is no evidence to back it up.  It could be true, partly true, or the rationalization of a certain ideology.  That ideology could be stated, in ordinary language, as, “Women ‘naturally’ want to have and nurture babies.  Men ‘naturally’ want to get laid by as many women as possible.”  Stated that way, the theory looks pretty suspicious, especially since we are not obviously driven by a relentless reproductive drive the way that animals are.  We are not ever “in heat”:  Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic science fictional novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines an alien yet human species that goes into heat, called kemmer, portraying that kind of relentless desire as a terrible thing.  There was a rather startling episode of Star Trek showing Spock in the grip of such an urge.  Presumably the Vulcans developed their rigid rational self-control as a reaction to the tyranny of their reproductive cycle. 

One of the most insightful and even-handed discussions of these matters is that of Elaine Pagels, eminent historian of religion, in her groundbreaking book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988).  She explains traditional Jewish law in the light of a Darwinian imperative: 

For centuries—indeed, for over a millennium—Jews had taught that the purpose of marriage, and therefore of sexuality—was procreation.  Jewish communities had inherited their sexual customs from nomadic ancestors whose very survival depended upon reproduction, both among their herds of animals and among themselves.  According to the story of Abraham told in Genesis 22, the great blessing promised through God’s covenant with Israel was progeny innumerable as the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky (verse 17).  To ensure the stability and survival of the nation, Jewish teachers apparently assumed that sexual activity should be committed to the primary purpose of procreation.  Prostitution, homosexuality, abortion, and infanticide, practices both legal and tolerated among certain of their pagan neighbors, contradicted Jewish custom and law. | Both polygamy and divorce, on the other hand, increased opportunities for reproduction—not for women, but for the men who wrote the laws and benefited from them.  (11)

Abraham himself had a child by his wife and a child by his bondwoman.  The fact that the latter, Ishmael, was driven out was for reasons of inheritance (and his wife’s jealousy), not morality.  Later, God registered no complaint about Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines until one of them convinced him to erect an altar to a foreign god. 

Religion is here shown rationalizing and backing up a biological imperative.  The pattern is by no means unique to Judaism.  Whether it is instinctual or an ideological choice, producing as many offspring as possible has been a survival strategy in many ages and cultures.  First, it offsets the appalling rates of infant mortality that remained the norm even through the 19^th century.  Parents more or less expected to lose some children, not just in infancy but throughout childhood.  “Expected” is not the same as “resigned to”: when Darwin lost his second child, Annie, at the age of 10, to scarlet fever, he wrote a heartrending memorial to her. As late as the 1920’s, my own father nearly died of diphtheria, and because of it only weighed 56 pounds in the third grade.  Second, parenting demands a network: the “nuclear family” has always been an illusion, all the more so in an era when both parents have to work.  Vance says that helping with childcare is the task of grandmothers and other post-menopausal relatives.  But eventually grandma herself will be another dependent needing care.  In a large family, the older children help care for the younger children, and for grandma as well.  Someday the children, grown up, will care for you when you become the dependent grandma. 

Third, children are social networking.  Reading 18^th and 19^th century English novels, you learn that marrying off one’s children was a complicated chess game.  At stake was the family estate and inheritance.  Daughters married by permission, and not always just because of paternal tyranny.  The family could not afford for the daughter to marry some rake who would thus gain control of a good chunk of inherited wealth and gamble it away.  Daughters on the other hand who were not attractive and popular could end up unmarried “spinsters” dependent on the family.  The eldest son typically inherited the whole estate, because dividing it up was the road to ruin in an era when it was not respectable to work and make more money or buy more land.  So the second son was put into the military, and the third into the clergy, whether either had the vocation for it or not.  Marrying a spouse from a wealthy family, though, was a primary means of social advancement, so that children became counters in a game of upward mobility.

Among the actual aristocracy and ruling class, daughters were married off to seal political alliances.  In Virgil’s Aeneid, the night Troy falls, Aeneas’s father Anchises at first refuses to flee.  He is old, lame, and tired, and begs to be just left behind.  But the gods play lightning around the head of Aeneas’s son Iulus, and Anchises gets the message:  he must cooperate for the sake of the child, who represents the future.  So Aeneas leaves Troy with his father on his back and his son by the hand.  But his wife, walking dutifully behind him, is lost in the crowds and the chaos, and when Aeneas goes back to find her, she is a ghost.  Eventually, Aeneas founds a new Troy, that will be called Rome, but to do so he has to marry the daughter of King Latinus, Lavinia, who does not speak a single word in the whole poem.  It is not a love relationship but a transaction, of a kind common down through centuries.  As for sons, one needed as many as possible for backup.  In the Odyssey, Telemachus is in a desperate situation because his father Odysseus has been gone, presumed lost, for 20 years, his grandfather is pining away with grief, and he is an only child.  He has no brothers to call upon for support against 108 suitors his own age come to marry his mother—in order to inherit the kingship and the wealth.  Brothers are allies—except, of course, when they aren’t.  What does it say about the rewards of having children when the very first human family was riven by sibling rivalry ending in fratricide?

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, families with any social pretensions had servants. Among these were nannies, who helped with childcare, and governesses, who were tutors.  Some of these are legendary: among nannies, Mary Poppins; among governesses, Jane Eyre, Maria von Trapp (inspiration for The Sound of Music), and the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, who is not legendary in a good way.  Children could also be shipped off to boarding schools and academies for whole terms—yes, such as Hogwarts, though without the magic.  The culture wars of the present moment are being fought over an idea of the family that really only existed from the end of World War II to perhaps the 1990’s.  During the war, women worked at all kinds of jobs, including in factories, but when the men came back home, those jobs were given to men and women became “housewives.” They were middle class, and there were no servants or governesses—there were at best babysitters when parents wanted an occasional night out.  Women were trapped in the home because there were only a few jobs open to them.  One was nurse; another was teacher.  Vance is amusingly ignorant about teachers without children of their own.  They creep him out: there is something wrong about them, he says.  Evidently, he is too young to realize that unmarried teachers were close to being the norm when I was an elementary school student in the 50’s and early 60’s.  Most likely more of my teachers were “Miss” than “Mrs.,” so much so that I remember thinking of the married ones as being slightly unusual.  They were not feminists before their time.  The greater number of them were mildly eccentric, what a previous era would have called spinsters or old maids.  But most women did not work.  The lot of the housewife, who had sole care of the children except for the hours they were in school, was made easier by a raft of new labor-saving devices:  electric washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves and refrigerators.  Also by smaller family size.  Most families had 2 or 3 children: the era of a dynasty-sized family was over.  In my family, only my aunt raised 8 kids, because she was a pious Catholic who did not believe in birth control. 

But it all changed.  The conservatives blame feminism, but feminism was actually only made possible by the change, which was first of all economic.  Blue collar jobs began to disappear, and, even when they did not, a second income was needed to support a family, so men were forced to allow women to enter the job world—that was what made feminism possible, because it made women financially independent and able to leave a bad marriage.  One thing that made the second income necessary was that children had to be sent to college to acquire the degree increasingly required by the better jobs.  Educated professional jobs in turn often required moving, so that grown children and relatives were scattered all over the country instead of remaining within a neighborhood, so there was even less help with childcare.  America experimented with daycare, and found it wanting.  Right now, the position of nanny has made a comeback, a real service to families who can afford one.  The advent of work-from-home means that at least one parent may be in the house while the nanny is caring for the children, so that kids are not left unsupervised with a comparative stranger and the nanny does not have the anxiety of total responsibility in the event of an emergency. 

All of this together has led to the present disastrous condition of the American family, one that the present Surgeon General, Vivek H. Murthy, has declared an actual crisis.  Murthy is an unusual and interesting Surgeon General because he clearly sees his job as tending to the mental wellbeing as well as the physical health of American citizens—he has been speaking for years, for example, about an epidemic of loneliness.  He opens an article titled "Parents Are at Their Wits' End: We Can Do Better" by saying, “A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared to 26 percent of other adults who reported the same.”  And he can vouch for it personally:  “When I became a parent, a friend told me I was signing up for a lifetime of joy and worry. The joys are indeed abundant, but as fulfilling as parenting has been, the truth is it has also been more stressful than any job I’ve had. I’ve had many moments of feeling lost and exhausted.” 

In part, this comes with the territory: parenting has always been exhausting and stressful, even if parents were not allowed to admit it.  Sure enough, some reactions on the article’s discussion board said, predictably, “It’s always been hard, and you signed up for it, so stop complaining.”  These are people who did not really read the article: Murthy’s point is that parenting is, at the present time, much more stressful and exhausting than it has ever been, because of changed circumstances.   Both parents now must work; the financial situation of the middle class is precarious because of income inequality; society as a whole is mentally unhealthy and physically dangerous in ways that put children at risk; it is difficult or impossible to find childcare; and, last but not least, the United States is unique among modernized nations in lacking parental leave policies.  Murthy is not exaggerating.  I know from talking to my college students that their often- precarious mental health and sometimes shaky academic performance partly derive from the overwhelmed condition of their families.

Kamala Harris proposes a child tax-credit expansion and other policies to help families with children financially.  Murthy supports such notions, as well as paid parental leave and affordable childcare.  The conservative response on the discussion board was predictable:  more than one respondent griped about how the money for all this family support will come from his taxes, and that people should only have children when they are in a financial position to pay for them and not expect the rest of us to help out.  The conservative position is thus hypocritical and infuriating:  don’t have kids if you can’t afford them, but there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have as many as possible.  People are indeed choosing not to have children more than in the past, and it has little to do with feminism.  It is simply not a rewarding choice anymore, nor a financially feasible one.  

At this point, a considerable irony enters the debate in relation to people like Vance, whose demand that everyone have children, and lots of them, is based on Christian ideology.  If Vance knew anything about history, he would be aware that “family values” derive from pagan and Jewish traditions.  Christianity shocked ancient society precisely by rejecting them.  To both Jesus and Paul, family was an obstacle to religious commitment, and therefore to salvation.  Jesus said more than once that we cannot serve two masters: not God and Mammon, but not God and family either.  The entire first chapter of Elaine Pagels’ Adam, Eve, and the Serpent is about this.  Let me point out that Pagels is anything but a bitter family-hating feminist: her book is dedicated “To our beloved son, Mark, who for six and a half years graced out lives with his presence.”  Her first chapter is simply making a historical point, indicated by its title, “The Kingdom of God Is at Hand.”  There is no use thinking about family, even about marriage, because the kingdom is imminent.  It may arrive within the lifetime of some yet living, Jesus said.  Marriage and family are worldly values, and, insofar as they are an obstacle to spiritual commitment, may have to be regarded as temptations.  You must choose one or the other:  “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace, but a sword. |  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law” (Matthew 10: 34-35, King James translation).  Pagels notes that Matthew already represents a later tendency to qualify Jesus’ either-or distinction as recorded in Luke.  Matthew goes on to have Jesus say that “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (37).  But that is a kind of reasonable this-worldly compromise position.  Elsewhere, Jesus unequivocally rejects not just childbearing but marriage itself:

The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: | But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: | Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God,  being the children of the resurrection.  (Luke  20: 34-36)

Jesus practiced what he preached.  At the age of 12 he was already running away from his concerned parents to preach in the temple.  When his parents found him, he said that he had to be about his father’s business.  Once, when he was preaching, a multitude informed him that his mother and brothers were present.  He replied, “Who is my mother, or my brethren? | And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! | For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother. (Mark 3:32-35).  Paul continued Jesus’ message that celibacy was the best policy, though he bowed to practicality enough to say that, if someone really can’t manage the rigors of celibacy, “It is better to marry than to burn” (I Corinthians 7:8-9), hardly a ringing endorsement.  Pagels documents the way in which, as the kingdom kept not arriving, a more accommodating view superseded the spiritual absolutism of Jesus and Paul, including in the “deutero-Pauline letters,” letters that claim to have been written by Paul but which a consensus of scholars now accept were written by others in his name:  “All reject Paul’s most radically ascetic views to present instead a ‘domesticated’ Paul:—a version of Paul who, far from urging celibacy upon his fellow Christians, endorses only a stricter version of traditional Jewish attitudes toward marriage and family….a version of Paul that softens him from a radical preacher into a patron saint of domestic life” (23).  The Letter to the Hebrews “expresses a positive reverence for marriage—and specifically for sexually active marriage: ‘Marriage is honorable unto all, and the marriage bed is not polluted’” (Hebrews 13:4). 

Pagels documents how later writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Augustine worked out  what she calls “a durable double standard that endorses marriage, but only as second best to celibacy” (28).  Even within marriage, however, both Clement and Augustine thought sexual desire was sinful, a product of the Fall.  She quotes Clement as saying,

Our ideal is not to experience desire at all….We should do nothing from desire. Our will is to be directed only toward what is necessary.  For we are children not of desire but of will.  A man who marries for the sake of begetting children  must practice continence so that it is not desire he feels for his wife…that he may beget children with a chaste and controlled will.  (29)

Pagels’ dry comment is, “To accomplish this, as one might imagine, is not easy” (29).  In other words, lots of luck trying to have sex by will, without desire.  But if it may still be lust to feel desire even while having sex in order to procreate, desire for its own sake is clearly damnation-worthy.  Hence the intent of Project 2025 to crack down on “recreational sex.”  But if desire is for men a kind of necessary evil, a bad means to a good end, it is not necessary at all for women, and women should not feel desire at all.  In fact, good women don’t, and there is something wrong with a woman when she does.  She is a vessel, an instrument.  Sex is a marital duty to which women must submit for the higher good.  Vance and his Christian nationalist cohort still adhere to this position, which goes back to the ascetic Church Fathers of the Middle Ages.   It is a minority position which they are trying to impose upon society as a whole.

However—again trying to give him some limited credit—Vance is, I think, accurately sensing on the part of some people a desire to escape the bonds of family and parenting, an escapism that he does not like.  The choice to become a parent is an enormous sacrifice, entailing an immense loss of freedom.  Women of course had no choice, but men could theoretically choose to remain bachelors. When a man got engaged, his buddies typically made jokes about his finally getting caught, and a bachelor party celebrated a last night of freedom.  Social pressure made sure that most men gave in, but Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy” promised men that they could live a free, hedonistic lifestyle if they were affluent enough to afford it.  It would not mean celibacy—women would flock to you for your  money, your sports car, your expensive stereo and expensive drinks.  You could even live this way while married if you found a wife who was compliant because that was the price of being maintained in style.  This is still the way many elite men live, including Donald Trump.  Elon Musk has fathered 12 children, by their account cared for none of them, and has rejected his trans daughter. 

Still, family has been for some of us what we needed to escape, not for the sake of some shallow hedonism but because family was the pressure cooker of a stew of neurosis.  Family dysfunctionality is usually rationalized as exceptional: sure, a few families are bound to have their problems.  But is dysfunctionality the exception or the rule?  Is there something inherently neurotic and neurosis-fomenting about the family?  Cain and Abel seem to have set the pattern for the whole human family line, including Jacob cheating his brother Esau out of his birthright as eldest son; including Joseph thrown in a pit and sold into slavery by his jealous brothers.  Say what we will about Freud, he exposed the neuroses of the Family Romance hidden behind the façade of respectability:  fathers and daughters molesting daughters, sons jealous of fathers and in rivalry with brothers.  Add wealth and power into the picture and you have the television series Succession, which is said to reflect the actual vicious infighting of Rupert Murdoch’s family. 

The joys of family?  “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” says Tolstoy in the famous opening line of Anna Kerenina.  This implies that happy families are the norm, but the norm is boring, whereas the abnormal fascinates us.  But if happy families are normative, it does not also mean they are the majority.   A quick consideration of how family dynamics are portrayed in literature is not encouraging.  Freud chose the family of Oedipus for his psychological paradigm—Oedipus who killed his father, married his mother and had children by her, and cursed his sons, who fulfilled the curse by engaging  in fratricidal warfare. Then there was Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter to the gods for the sake of wind for his ships to sail to procure Helen, who had run away from her husband to Troy.  In revenge, Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra connived with a lover to murder Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War.  His son Orestes avenged this murder by killing his own mother.  In the Middle Ages, the Courtly Love tradition dictated that true romantic love was necessarily extra-marital.  Its most famous stories therefore tend to be of adulterous lovers, Lancelot and Guinivere, Tristan and Isolde.  Shakespeare’s romantic comedies end in weddings, but the painful conflicts in getting there lead us to wonder what some of these marriages are going to be like.  As for his tragedies, the Oedipal overtones of Hamlet were not lost on the Freudians.  We see unhealthy mother-son relationships in Hamlet and Coriolanus, unhealthy father-daughter relationships, to put it mildly, in King Lear. 

The novel, born in the late 18^th century, continued the tradition of romantic adultery in a more middle class, realistic, and ironic way, exemplified by Anna Kerenina itself, along with Madame Bovary.  Some of the most famous European novels of the 19^th century were, like Anna Kerenina, family sagas, from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which turns upon parricide, to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in 1901, about the generational decadence and decline of an elite family.  In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, a surrogate for Joyce himself, cries out Non serviam! I will not serve.  He refuses his ”duty” to his country, but also to his family, although he is haunted—quite literally—by the dying mother with whom he refused to pray.  Some of us in the counterculture in the 60’s were deliberately breaking with  our families.  Bob Dylan in “The Times They Are A’Changing” sings,

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly aging

Commentators spoke of a “generation gap,” as hordes of young people detached from their families and formed alternative communities of friends and kindred spirits.  Everyone needs a place to belong, but it does not have to be family.  We cannot choose our family, but we are not stuck with it, despite voices to the contrary harping upon family “duty.”  In a slightly later generation, that was the idea behind the sitcom Friends. 

Is there no middle way between the dreary and depressing ideology of marriage and procreation for survival and social advancement on the one hand and rebellious separatism on the other?   Milton in Paradise Lost tried to remind people that God had more than reproduction in mind when he created Eve.  He did say, “Be fruitful and multiply,” but he also said, “It is not good for man to be alone,” nor for woman.  Milton, who was married three times and had three daughters, had some personal authority on the subject.  He understood the need to insist on individual freedom and happiness and not just marital duty so well that he wrote four pamphlets arguing for freedom of divorce, not just for reasons like adultery or abuse but for what we would now call irreconcilable differences.   Marriage is about more than breeding and continuing the race.  One of the key thematic words of Paradise Lost is “conversation,” which is the deepest need fulfilled by marriage.  Eve speaks a beautiful lyric poem to Adam that begins, “With thee conversing I forget all time.”   Yes, Milton does accept Paul’s assertion of male dominance: when Adam speaks the notorious lines that to some brand Milton as sexist, he is basically quoting Paul.  But, first, he expressly denies that this means coercion of any sort.  When Eve insists on going off by herself, which leads to her downfall, Adam argues himself blue in the face and finally, exasperated, gives in.  Second, the purpose of sex is by no means just for reproduction, whatever the ascetics say.  Before they fall, the lovemaking of Adam and Eve continues their “conversation” in non-verbal form.  In other words, Christianity is not inherently conservative.  It depends upon what ideology is attached to it. 

I have never regretted being childless.  I am not a people person and would have had no talent for parenting.  Children simply do not interest me:  I do not find them endlessly fascinating and entertaining, as some do.  I fulfill my self-interested need for belonging by relations with friends and colleagues, my need to give something to others by teaching and writing.  I no doubt pay a price for my lifestyle, but so do those who choose to be parents.  What I would wish is that the lives of parents be made much, much easier.  I am glad to pay taxes to that purpose, as I happily support every school levy.  I support the liberal, moderate fixes of child-tax credits, parental leave, and all that.  But as a progressive (economically, at any rate), I urge a return to a dream of a more fundamental social re-organization that was common in the 60’s, though it sounds utopian now.  Back then, there were forecasts of a forthcoming age of leisure as the modern world moved from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance.  Technological advances would greatly increase productivity, and many jobs, especially the more dehumanizing ones, would be automated.  All this has happened, and is continuing.  Yet people work more than ever, at least in the United States, under increasingly fraught conditions.  The reason is the massive shift, beginning in the 1980’s, of most of the country’s wealth to the top.  That is literally true:  the top 10% own as much as the bottom 90%.  That money could be used to change the lives of working people.  There is no practical reason that work hours could not be greatly reduced, a guaranteed annual income be put in place as a safety net,  and a Scandinavian-style social welfare system be instituted along with it.  Before the culture wars, this was not regarded as a radical proposal.  It seems that way now only because of decades of social conditioning by big capitalism, which wants an anxious and therefore docile mass of workers to exploit without restraint. 

The conditioning has been fairly effective.  Many people are proud of a “work ethic” under which they “earn” the survival and comfort, while others are “parasites” and “takers” who benefit from their hard work.  It is hard if not impossible to get them to see that community does not have to be organized in such a Social Darwinist, zero-sum way, that the present system is a deliberate political choice by those who profit from gross income inequality. Without the cult of overwork, society could grant leisure to its citizens.  Reduced working hours would make parenting less of an ordeal.  And people would be able to pursue the education that they had to sacrifice when they became parents.  People in mid-life could go or return to college, and could study the liberal arts, not just STEM subjects, business, or technology.  People would have time to read, to patronize the arts, and therefore might be more willing to subsidize them.  There is nothing the least bit airy-fairy idealistic about this—except, of course, that it would be aggressively opposed by those whose interests are ever more profits, ever more power, ever more authoritarian control.  That is no reason for giving up on it.  In fact, if we do not begin moving in such a direction, the world of our children—the children of all you parents, the students in my classes and their eventual children—is going to be the dystopia that too many passively pessimistic voices are announcing every day.  I think we should shut our ears and ride the wave of joy and hope we are presently experiencing into a world in which we have all become as little children again. 

References

Pagels, Elaine.  Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.  Vintage, 1988.

Patchett, Ann. “There Are No Children Here.” In The Norton Reader, 16^th edition, 2024.  General Editor Melissa Goldthwaite.   194-209.