Does Parenthood Make You a Good Person?

Vice President Kamala Harris

Let me answer my title question unambiguously: No. The very fact that we need child abuse and neglect laws demonstrates that childbearing doesn’t make people good, or improve their character. Childbearing is a biological process, in itself literally no higher in moral regard than passing a bowel movement. Any human being can do it, and the worst people you know probably have.

Conservatives have espoused the moral necessity of childbearing at least since I’ve followed politics. Radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger loudly demanded her listeners have more babies so frequently, that it was a recurrent Saturday Night Live joke throughout the 1990s. Certainly, not all babies were equal, as Vice President Dan Quayle’s dig at Murphy Brown’s fictional out-of-wedlock pregnancy almost certainly torpedoed his political aspirations.

This week, when incumbent President Joe Biden removed himself from nomination, kicking his support to Vice President Kamala Harris, conservatives reawakened the shopworn argument. I’m unclear who originated the dig, but it got adopted by Republican VP nominee J.D. Vance, and subsequently became a right-wing talking point. How can Harris govern America, they wonder aloud, without the experience of raising her own hatchlings?

The flaws in this argument should be so obvious that they don’t deserve refutation. Should be. First, there’s nothing politically necessary about having children. You know who else, like Harris, had stepchildren, but no children of his own? George Washington. Other Presidents have had distant, neglectful relationships with their children; tales of Theodore Roosevelt’s inability to corral his daughter Alice remain hilarious today, over a century later.

Besides, there are numerous reasons—illness, birth defect, injury—why a woman might be unable to bear children, and others—childhood abuse, professional ambition—why she might choose not to. None of these reasons are anybody’s business. Indeed, after years of complaining about the Biden Administration’s “Nanny State” policies, conservatives suddenly demand a national mommy? Friends, your messaging machine is broken.

Senator J.D. Vance

Parenthood has no magical redeeming qualities. As stated, we need child abuse and neglect laws to effectively prosecute parents who misuse their authority. Amid the furor over “groomers,” supposed advocates overlooked the fact that parents, not drag queens, are the people most likely to sexually abuse children. As civic organizations, community arts, and religion continue dwindling, trapping people indoors with their families and nobody else, this is likely to increase.

One need only look across the electoral aisle to witness this. While Harris prioritized public service over parenthood, Former President Trump has a strictly transactional relationship with his own children, who were raised by paid caregivers. He’s openly discussed his physical attraction to his eldest daughter, Ivanka, but gives little sign that he knows his second daughter’s name, Tiffany. Trump clan portraits look less like family than like hostage situations.

Okay, but let’s get Aristotelian here. From a philosophical perspective, we can say that something is necessary without being sufficient. Conventional eyesight is necessary for reading a printed book, but it isn’t sufficient, as one still needs the skill of reading, and probably a level of personal discipline too. Parenthood isn’t sufficient, and doesn’t magically make a person good. But is parenthood a necessary condition for goodness?

Of course not. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise. Countless people without children have nevertheless accomplished great good for humanity and their countries, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Dolly Parton. One needn’t have kids to feel invested in their communities or value a healthy future for humankind; one only need recognize that other humans have feelings, ambitions, and dignity of their own, simply because they are human.

And that’s saying nothing about how expensive prenatal medicine, child care, pediatric medicine, and other obligations of parenthood are in America, during a time of diminished wages.

Please don’t misunderstand me; I don’t mean to disparage parenthood. Many of my best friends are parents, and indeed, I’m descended from a long line of parents, grandparents, and other childbearers. I greatly respect people who voluntarily accept the burden of parenthood and embrace its many responsibilities. Despite my dour comments in the opening paragraph, I’ve seen many people choose parenthood to channel their best, most constructive impulses.

Yet some of us haven’t had kids, for reasons unique to ourselves, and face constant pressure to procreate. From well-meaning aunts urging us to “fulfill our potential,” to J.D. Vance’s longstanding claim that childless people shouldn’t vote, singletons face vast formal and informal pressure to conform. By reducing people to their childbearing capacity, such pressures are literally dehumanizing—which, Vance’s campaign proves, may be the point.

The Island of Faith and Lies

Catriona Ward, Little Eve

On a tiny Scottish island forgotten in the backwash of World War I, a strange prophecy has come to fruition. Five people and a horse lie dead, and a 5000-year-old megalith has fallen over. This was the final act needed to purge the world and bring The Adder into the world, purging corrupt humanity. So what exactly happened here? How did one teenage girl cause so much death and destruction? And where, exactly, is The Adder?

This, Catriona Ward’s second novel, debuted in Britain in 2018, but didn’t receive an American release for years. Only after some of Ward’s latter novels, particularly The Last House on Needless Street, garnered American acclaim did anyone think readers across the pond would appreciate this novel. Having read it, I understand why publishers would’ve assumed a limited Yankee Doodle audience: it’s almost aggressively British. Yet I think that only increases this book’s American appeal.

The laird of Altnaharra, one John Bearings—identified throughout almost exclusively as “Uncle”—believes himself a messiah. He receives visions from his snake, Hercules. He has formed a doomsday redoubt inside his ancestral castle, comprised of two common-law wives and four foundling children. He forces everyone else to live austere vegetarian lives (while he indulges in beef and gravy), and performs periodic tests to determine which of his children will become the harbinger of his snake cult.

If this sounds like a frenetic mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Wicker Man, I won’t disagree. Ward channels a specific kind of apocalyptic fear, not of the world ending, but of unhinged people awaiting that end. The castle teems with caverns, hidden rooms, and labyrinthine hallways, the lifeblood of gothic horror. As in the best gothics, supernatural occurrences have become seemingly common, but we must wonder how supernatural they really are.

Trapped inside the Altnaharra castle, Uncle enforces capricious discipline, while his children adapt themselves to appease his moods. The war-ravaged outside world is too busy to interfere, so Uncle’s religion becomes ingrown, consuming the children. Teenaged Evelyn particularly struggles with Uncle. She wants his approval, and campaigns to be named his successor; but she also can’t help seeing how manifestly corrupt Uncle has become. Her attempts to escape only make her situation worse.

Catriona Ward

Ward starts her narrative at its conclusion, as the rural villagers living in Altnaharra’s shadow discover the bloodbath. What actually happened unfolds only in flashback, as the massacre’s only survivor dribbles out information sparingly. While the villagers seek pat answers and want to close the coroner’s inquest quickly, the few facts we receive only make things muddier. This is only made worse when it becomes clear that Evelyn has buried key facts, and Dinah, the only survivor, is lying.

It probably comes as no surprise to readers of horror literature that, the more thoroughly we believe something on Page One, the more surely we’ll see that belief shattered. Ward’s other novels have shown her ability to cantilever multiple twists. We attempt to predict what surprises Ward will throw our way, because horror literature since the late 1990s has trained us to watch for rug-pulls in Act III. Ward knows this, and her twists are truly surprising to today’s jaded audiences.

What, Ward asks us, makes a family? Uncle chose his two wives and four children because he needs adulation. He maintains their loyalty, not through love and devotion, but through caprice and Crowleyist woo-woo. Uncle’s wives have differing reactions to his ministrations, and their responses reflect traditions of Jungian psychology. But Uncle’s children choose not to escape, even when opportunities arise, because Uncle’s violent whimsy is all they know. They have no survival skills without him.

This novel also uses themes of religion as a shared activity. Uncle leads his apocalyptic cult unilaterally; he alone receives revelations from The Adder, and dispenses justice that might be god-given, or might be arbitrary. Religion holds Uncle’s ramshackle family together, but it also creates divisions, as cult members try to determine who’s blessed or damned. Capital-T Truth comes from Uncle alone, and his motivations are hardly beyond question.

Ward cultivates fear, not through monsters and blood—despite kicking off the story with a crime scene, Ward uses violence so sparingly that, when it does happen, it’s even more shocking—but through misdirection and claustrophobia. Our narrators lie because lying is the only language they know. The outside world of objective truth and information only confuses them. We see the world through their eyes, and what we see is truly terrifying.

The Perils of Making Work Go Away

As an avid cyclist, I’ve heard the semi-comical stereotypes. We’re self-righteous, have no personality, and wear ridiculous spandex clothes. But perhaps the most persistent stereotype is cyclists’ casual disdain for stop signs. Which, in fairness, is real. I’ve been bawled out several times for pulling an “Idaho stop” through a clearly posted stop sign—usually by a motorist who just rolled through the same intersection.

Consider, though, why cyclists might treat stops flippantly. First, we aren’t going particularly fast. Only elite cyclists, riding the most high-tech bicycles, can achieve the 35 MPH speed limit common on American residential roads, much less 45 on main roads or 65 on highways. We’re hardly caroming at breakneck speeds, as motorists often do. But the biggest reason is even simpler: once we’ve fully stopped, getting rolling again is serious work.

Stick-shift drivers know this feeling. Once the vehicle achieves a standing stop, nothing makes a bicycle go again except the cyclist’s bodily effort. While motorists heckle me from inside their hermetically sealed capsules, letting the engine do the work, I have only my limbs to make the bike move again. Only when I drove a stick-shift pickup, enacting the nuisance of constant upshifting, did I discover something comparable behind the wheel.

Of course, driving a car doesn’t make the effort of starting from a standing stop go away. The entitled motorist shouting from the comfort of his family sedan, with climate control and an automatic transmission, requires far more work to get that mass of metal rolling. However, where I invest the personal effort to move my bicycle, the motorist delegates the effort to the “other party,’ the car’s engine. The work still happens; somebody else just does it.

The more I look, the more I see this pattern recurring throughout society and history. The desire to offload tedious labor has dominated human development. I’ve read speculations that humans invented cooking, in part, to escape the relentless tedium of chewing raw food. Later, humans tamed horses because riding was easier than walking; our ancestors also invented sails because it was easier than rowing (and because water travel is easier than overland).

Early human technologies involved harnessing animal power. Ox-drawn carts and horse-drawn carriages eliminated the burden of walking large distances, an important advance in ages when twenty miles was a relentless slog. After hand tools replaced broadcasting seed in early agriculture, the next major breakthroughs involved animal-driven technology: Jethro Tull’s seed drill, and its immediate successor, John Deere’s steel plow, both drawn by draft animals.

Then there are attempts to harness the elements. Chinese and Greek inventors separately perfected the water wheel to grind grain; the technology, with fiddling changes, remains common in Amish and poor African communities. This technology wasn’t insignificant, either, as Jack Kelly describes the DuPont family harnessing it to manufacture America’s first commercial-grade gunpowder, inaugurating a chemical manufacturing legacy that persists today.

And, of course, slavery existed: the ultimate effort to offload boring labor.

The technologies of the Industrial Age and after, merely complement this process. Internal combustion engines overtook horses, and nuclear power may soon overtake coal, but the motivation remains unchanged. Then there are the more pessimistic manifestations. Generative AI basically promises to enable everybody to write books, paint portraits, and compose music, without the boredom of learning and perfecting the skills.

Never let anyone say I don’t understand the appeal of offloading labor. I love having central heat without having to bank the fire overnight; I enjoy bunking off on vacation without having to walk over hills and across rivers. But increased ease remains pricy. It’s impossible to have central heat without global warming, just as it’s impossible for me to vacation in Missouri without the soul-sucking ennui of the morning commute.

Also consider what losses we suffer. When I commute to work, or toddle off to Missouri along the Interstate, every drive becomes identical, dominated by repetitive buildings and dun-colored landscapes. On my bicycle, I see things drivers ignore, like subtle outbuildings, wide-eyed pedestrians, and—sadly—overlooked roadkill. Likewise, generative AI “artists” can mass-produce content, but they never develop their unique, inimitable style.

I certainly enjoy modern conveniences, like nutritionally diverse food, pharmaceuticals, and the internet. But when I bike to work, the experience is more complex and nuanced than when I drive. Does anybody really enjoy the feeling of road hypnosis? Is anybody particularly moved by an AI painting? Offloading tedious labor onto others makes life easier, certainly. But it also robs life of meaning.

A Brief History of the Explosions of War

Jack Kelly, Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World

The weapons we use to fight wars are, in their own way, tools; and, like any other tools, somebody needs to make them. I remember learning in Ninth-Grade World History that anonymous Chinese scientists invented gunpowder, which subsequently made its way to Europe through means unknown. But high school never taught me who did the laborious work of compounding early handmade gunpowder, or what effect it had on their peoples.

Jack Kelly is both a pop historian and a historical novelist, dedicating his career to glamorizing largely forgotten corners of humanity’s past. His nonfiction works are unified by themes rather than by personalities. This volume traces the arc of gunpowder—known as “black powder” to shooters and historical reenactors, to distinguish it from modern synthetic, “smokeless” powder—from China in the Twelfth Century AD to the early Twentieth Century.

That’s not to say that Kelly doesn’t consider individuals and their influence. He introduces us to the potentates who brought gunpowder into warfare, from nameless Chinese alchemists, through to King Edward III, Sultan Mehmet of Constantinople, and Hernán Cortés (gunpowder and imperialism are inextricable). But also the early gunsmiths who fashioned the weapons these potentates used: early cannons were so elaborate, and so individual, that armies gave their guns individual, usually feminine, names.

Rather, with each personality that utilized gunpowder and improved guns, the themes of power and technology advance. To give just one example, artisanal workers needed to collect black powder ingredients and compound the powder manually. The need to standardize gunpowder and bring prices down helped princes kick-start the industrialization that defined rising capitalism. Besides a weapon, gunpowder was also a technological and economic driver.

It's probably uncontroversial to say that gunpowder, always a weapon, was never morally neutral. In Kelly’s telling, however, it also isn’t administratively neutral. Scaling up gunpowder production sufficiently to make it useful, required massive bureaucratic organization. The number of saltpeter farms, charcoal burners, and artisanal powder-makers necessary required massive advancements in government administration. Gunpowder arguably contributed to the development of the modern technocratic state.

Jack Kelly

Similarly, Kelly sees gunpowder as advancing the development of modern science. Artisanal powder-makers didn’t really understand how their product worked, and experimented casually with manufacturing techniques. But early chemists like Hooke and Boyle tested gunpowder and its ingredients to better understand how physical reality works. As “natural philosophy” gave way to experiment and documentation, black powder seems present at every stage. Gunpowder, Kelly suggests, was instrumental to Boyle’s discovery of oxygen.

These claims may seem far-fetched, and indeed, Kelly frequently performs the pop historian’s fallacy of assuming everything is explainable through whatever lens he currently employs. For instance, his history of chemistry overlooks the influence of those newfangled hydrocarbons that England found so valuable in rising heavy industry. His descriptions of lurid Renaissance theatre pyrotechnics overlooks that other period-specific innovation, gaslight. Kelly is somewhat overfond of the totalizing narrative, that seeks one cause for multiple effects.

However, he does support his claims with evidence and documentation. Sometimes that documentation is sketchy—the scanty records of Sultan Mehmet, to give one example, teem with mythmaking and hindsight bias. But Kelly uses the best available sources to construct a story supported by facts and evidence. That famous unlocked door might’ve made the fall of Constantinople inevitable, but the siege was powered by Mehmet’s cannons.

Kelly’s narrative continues through to modernity. Multiple technological advances stemmed from attempts to both use gunpowder, and protect against it. Engineers redesigned cities to withstand cannon fire. Industrial-age inventors like Samuel Colt (a textile maker) and Richard Gatling (an agronomist) are more famous for their improvements to firearms manufacture. DuPont Chemical was founded as a mass-scale powder mill driven by a water wheel.

Unsurprisingly, since Kelly doubles as a novelist, his history has a narrative through-line, the epic sweep of novelists like John Jakes and James Clavell. It’s difficult to avoid wondering if Kelly hasn’t somewhat sanded off false starts and simplified events to keep the story moving. Yet within that standard, Kelly does tell an engaging, well-sourced story. Even if events weren’t this morally concise, Kelly at least illuminates the trends.

It’s difficult to avoid noticing the quantity of “history” being written today by journalists, novelists, and attorneys, rather than credentialled historians. Much as I appreciate historians like Kevin M. Kruse or Greg Grandin, they aren’t producing the bulk of today’s accessible history. Timothy Egan, Richard Gergel, and now Jack Kelly present history as comprehensible, fast-moving, and relevant to today’s audiences, and that’s something modern readers need.

“Deaths of Despair” and the Working American Man

The expression “deaths of despair,” once an exclusively scholarly term, became commonplace somewhere around 2019. It describes the heightened mortality among poor and working-class Americans from alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide. The problem is both class-based and distinctly American, and apparently mostly affects men. When it creased public awareness, “deaths of despair” were a disproportionately White phenomenon, though recent changes see it rising among Black Americans.

My post-college career has caromed from education to manufacturing, to construction, to marketing, and most recently, back to manufacturing. (FWIW, knowing how to do high-skilled professional work differs markedly from knowing how to find high-skilled professional work.) This rapid oscillation gives me a binocular perspective on the American economy. While the sources I consulted for this essay emphasized comorbidities like obesity, diet, and poverty, I suggest “deaths of despair” are caused by economic propaganda.

Working-class American men continue marinating in post-WWII messages emphasizing male self-sufficiency. Though most have accepted they’ll probably never again support a spouse and kids on a single paycheck, they continue hearing messaging that they should. This is especially true for younger working-class men raised on digital technology, as the phallocentric world of alt-right messaging fetishizes a Little House-ish strain of bucolic libertarianism that mostly only exists on TV anymore.

Ian Haney López notes that the White Americans most likely to oppose “welfare” and other forms of federalized help, are the White Americans most likely to need it. This happens, he writes, because “welfare” is racially coded in American political propaganda; Black people need help, White people should be self-reliant. This claim becomes somewhat flimsier with the recent rise in Black deaths of despair. So I don’t want to call Haney López wrong, but his position needs expanded.

In addition to race, federalized help is also coded criminally. Accepting government money is a form of stealing. Not corporate subsidies or PPP loans, certainly, which are necessary to maintain a well-oiled market, but any government money you’re eligible to receive is, essentially, picking the taxpayers’ pockets. That’s why thought leaders keep tying EBT to drug tests, criminal background checks, and other forms of screening to identify crimes. Because anybody who needs help is, a priori, a thief.

Therefore, whenever a worker reaches a point of destitution where it becomes necessary to start thinking about asking for help, it flips a moral switch. The demographic class raised up on mythology of friendly cops, law’n’order, and “just comply,” finds themselves asking: “Am I seriously committing a crime?” This trips them into the same guilt spiral healthy people experience whenever the intrusive thought of killing somebody appears. They feel compelled to stop the trajectory.

Unfortunately, the positions aren’t similar. When that intrusive “you could just strangle him” thought appears, we short-circuit the process by just not strangling him. The same simple solution doesn’t appear when the impoverished worker starts considering asking for help. Because even if they never actually request help, the poverty doesn’t just disappear. The conditions that made the request necessary linger, and the worker remains as incapable of bootstrapping as ever.

Please note, “crime” is something we do, but “criminal” is something we are. If you strangle somebody, the event has a clearly delineated beginning and end. But you never stop being a murderer, even after you serve your sentence. This becomes especially true when one’s crime isn’t a legal definition, but a moral category—think “crimes against humanity.” The crimes judged at Nuremberg didn’t transgress any written law, but Euro-American society’s definitions of human decency.

Social stigma leaves the criminal wearing an invisible scarlet letter. Unfortunately, in situations of moral judgement, that letter may be so invisible that only the person wearing it sees it. Have you ever seen working-class men asking their buddies for help? It’s almost impossible for most men to seek financial help without lowering their heads and shielding their faces. Yet their buddies, though perhaps not cash-flush, will cheerfully open their wallets to the extent possible. Because they don’t judge the seeker like the seeker judges himself.

American working-class men have internalized a message that seeking help, especially federalized help, is theft. Therefore, needing help equates to “criminality.” And what do we do with criminals? We judge and punish them. If a man’s friends, family, and community don’t punish him in the way he expects, he’ll punish himself, often with the vigor of a medieval flagellant. To prevent “deaths of despair,” we must stop racing after individual self-harm, and change the message working men receive and believe.