This is part 3 of a three-part essay arguing that people should have kids. In part 1, I described my view of happiness, which is found in the balance between emotional security and status (i.e., ambition). In part 2, I described why I think finding this balance is harder in the modern world. Now, I finally get to the point and describe what kids have to do with all of this.
There are also three parts to the present argument. First, I talk about the relationship between children and emotional security. Then, I discuss the relationship between children and ambition. Finally, I discuss the role of ideology and ideological transmission.
Children and Emotional Security
As I discussed in part 1, the brain has evolved to look for social cues to determine whether we are well situated in our community. But some of our most fundamental and powerful social instincts revolve around the need to seek a mate, and the need to care for children. These two categories of relationships not only provide rich sensory experiences that lead to immense joy, they also contribute significantly to a feeling of emotional security.
In my case, getting married to Mercedes was one of the most important moments in my life, but it didn’t immediately change me as a person. Marriage is hard, and it took a long time for Mercedes and I to learn how to recognize each other’s value. But when two partners find a way to repeatedly see and affirm each other, the effect of living in an environment rich with love changes both of them.
The difference between living in a world where you can’t trust anyone to value you for who you are versus living in an environment of love and trust reminds me of the transformation of a mistreated dog.
Similarly, the moment of Alberta’s birth was monumental, but afterwards I was still essentially the same. However, while the impact she had on me wasn’t immediate, it has been immense. From the beginning, there was something magical about holding an infant in my arms who depended on me completely. When she became a toddler, she would stop whatever she was doing each day when I returned home from work and would run towards me screaming “Daddy! Daddy!” Then, as she got a little older we started to get to know each other and develop little shared rituals.
Alberta is now six years old, and the years of interacting with someone who trusts me so much, and experiences the world with such intense emotion, has triggered a major psychological change in me. She has somehow opened up another dimension of my being. I really don’t think there is anything else like it.
I am not going to belabor the point anymore. Children can unlock new emotional dimensions. It is in our DNA. The only thing I want to add is a poem I saw recently that captures a tiny bit of what it is like to be a father to a daughter. Constellations by Steven Heighton — Poems | Academy of American Poets.
The final point I would like to make about the relationship between children and emotional security is to emphasize that the impact they have on our emotional state is twofold. First, they provide immediate emotional gratification because we are hardwired to enjoy interacting with them (although this clearly has limits). Second, and actually more important from my perspective, is that having children helps provide a deeper sense of security based on being securely situated in your social community. That is, having children depend on you makes you feel like you belong in the world.
For me personally, having a child expanded my consciousness in a notable way by enabling me (and motivating me) to routinely see things through the eyes of another person going through a very different life experience. In some ways, experiencing Alberta’s joy is even superior to feeling my own.
Children and Ambition
Perhaps for some people, the fact that children enable a more complete emotional experience is enough. But it’s not the only reason to have kids. As I mentioned in part 2, technology has created a world where we receive communication from all corners of the earth. Our economy is based on the division of labor among millions of other people. Our society has expanded, and with it, our consciousness.
Of course, the problem with all of these other people we interact with is that the interactions are fundamentally low bandwidth. The impact you have on other people in your facebook groups is miniscule compared to the importance of your interactions with your children.
However, there a number of ways in which one person’s influence can be felt across all of society (regardless of its size). The one I want to emphasize is the competition of ideas. When someone comes up with a new abstraction that serves other people well (where an abstraction is anything that can be expressed as information, such as a theory, a story, or a song), that abstraction can be shared widely and immediately.
Thus, we have people like Einstein or Taylor Swift, who achieve widespread fame and glory by coming up with something abstract that can be used (or enjoyed) by a large number of people. Striving to compete in the world of abstractions is alluring. Would it make sense for Einstein to teach only his own children the theory of relativity? Or for Taylor Swift to only sing for her own family?
No. It does not. Therefore, in my view any successful model of human happiness must account for the ability (or need) of some people to engage their ambition outside the confines of their immediate family unit. The world needs Einsteins. And Einsteins need to communicate to the world.
The term I use for the activity of going out into the world and trying to engage in a competitive adventure is “the Hunt”. But in my view, a hunt must always be in the context of the village. That is, you go out, you hunt, then you come back and share the spoils. I don’t want to say anything more about the Hunt other than I recognize the need for its existence, and that it is, to some extent, in tension with achieving emotional security.
Instead, I want to focus on another element of ambition that depends more on having children. Namely, building a legacy. While in some sense the Hunt necessarily focus outside the borders of the family, how you view building a legacy in some sense determines who your family is.
For example, a nationalist ideology might encourage someone to view their legacy in terms of the mark they make on their nation. A scientific ideology might encourage you to view your legacy in terms of your contribution to theoretical understanding of nature.
What I propose is that, now more than ever, your ideology is your legacy. The highest human pursuit, which every modern human should be engaged in, is to determine what it means to live a good life, live it, and pass it on to the next generation. In other words, one important outlet for our ambition is to improve and propagate our own ideology. Children are an important part of this effort because the transmission of culture from parents to children is one of the chief means of cultural propagation. Therefore, having children is essential to building a legacy.
Culture War
Perhaps at some point in the past we would not expect people to even be aware of their own worldview. But one of the great insights of post-modern philosophy is modern people must become responsible for our own ideology. For example, critical theorists have explained how ideology can become oppressive to women and people of color. But criticism the patriarchy isn’t the only application of post-modernism. We now have the tools (and therefore the responsibility) to question the underlying assumptions and impacts of our own worldview.
Furthermore, modern people are much more likely to be exposed to multiple conflicting world views. In the distant past, the extended family was pretty much coextensive with society. Thus, the culture and ideology taught by family and nation were essentially the same. But, as the size of the nation grew, it became more and more distant from the family. Now a person can be exposed to two very different ideologies at home and from their national culture. Although I didn’t really understand it at the time, I experienced a pretty acute version of this growing up in a Mormon family.
Things are even more confusing now because our national culture is beginning to fracture. For reasons people have discussed at length elsewhere, our shared national identity is breaking up into antagonistic subcultures. In other words, we are in the midst of a culture war.
One of the interesting things about the culture war taking place is that one of the key issues seems to be whether culture should primarily be transmitted locally (the conservative view) or globally (the progressive view). One of the most obvious examples of this is the disagreement related to funding of education (i.e., the voucher debate).
Many education activists probably believe that the voucher debate is about school quality. In reality, it has more to do with an ideological clash. The older ideologies are propagated more at home and at church, so they prefer education systems that are driven more by family and church. Modern ideologies are generally propagated using more modern means (like public schools, television, and now, the internet). Thus, conservative institutions are often antagonistic toward these cultural transmission mechanisms.
Render unto Caesar
So, should you personally seek to perpetuate culture at a local level (i.e., by raising children) or at a global level (i.e., by competing in the hunt or by being politically active)? My answer: both. But to do this properly, you need an ideology that is flexible enough to do both things and helps you to mediate among them.
The precise nature of such an ideology is beyond the scope of this essay. However, any suitable ideology will probably differentiate between local norms (i.e., how you interact with your in-group) and global norms (i.e., how you interact with strangers). A functional modern ideology also has to deal with a lot of grey area between local norms and global norms.
Still, it seems pretty logical that global norms must be mediated and transmitted globally, while local norms should be mediated and transmitted locally. In some sense, your local ideology should be directed toward achieving emotional security, whereas your global norms should be suitable for mediating everyone’s ambition.
If you don’t want to have children, it is probably because you are viewing the question from within a worldview that does not emphasize local cultural transmission. Because, quite honestly, there is no local transmission mechanism as powerful as passing on culture to your own children.
So let me sum up a with a few key points:
1.A person must embrace both emotional security and ambition to be truly happy.
2. Global competition and building a legacy are two components of ambition.
3. Passing on your ideology (i.e., culture) is a key element of your legacy.
4. There are two categories of cultural transmission: local and global.
5. You should focus on transmitting local norms locally, and global norms globally.
6. Having children is essential to both emotional security and local cultural transmission (i.e., the local component of your legacy).
