Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology

Tags

Childhood, Children, ethics, family, Four Hour Work Week, Francis Bacon, interview, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Kennedy School, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Parent, parenthood, Parenting, parents, Quilliam, relationships, Sam Harris, Tim Ferriss

Interviewer: You’ve briefly discussed the ethics of having children and the evidence that parents are less happy and less productive than their child-free counterparts. Why did you decide to have children?

Sam Harris: I guess there are two possible answers. One is it’s just a failure to be emotionally moved by the data. There are certain things you may understand to be true, but you just can’t make their being true emotionally relevant enough to have it guide your behavior. That’s one explanation.

I don’t think it’s the most likely reason in my case. I think it’s more a matter of my feeling — based on who I am and who I’m married to and what she wanted and what I wanted — that we were very likely to be exceptions to the rule. There’s no doubt a certain amount of self-deception if not delusion on offer there, when you begin looking at scientific data and imagining it doesn’t apply to you.

But in our case, I think we stood a very good chance of being happy parents, having happy kids, and being glad that we were parents — and finding the alternative, alas retrospectively, unthinkable.

And that’s sort of where we are. I’m a very happy father. I love my daughters. The idea that I might not have had them does seem unthinkable now.

But I’m also aware that having them has created forms of suffering that we wouldn’t otherwise know. And we’ve certainly given hostages to fortune, as Francis Bacon said.

You worry about the future, you worry about all sorts of things that you’d be quite insouciant about if you were just on your own, living out your adulthood.

It’s not without its downsides, but even the downsides have a silver lining. Being concerned about the future because you have kids is good ethically. And it does lead to a kind of productivity that might not otherwise be available…

To worry about the fate of civilization in the abstract is harder than worrying about what sorts of experiences your children are going to have in the future — and a future that hopefully extends beyond your own.

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Sam Harris, speaking with Tim Ferriss in his most recent Four Hour Workweek interview (these comments can be heard at around the nineteen minute mark).

Currently on my nightstand is Sam’s newest book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, a short dialogue with Maajid Nawaz. Nawaz is one of the truly compelling contemporary public figures. A former Islamic extremist, he spent five years in an Egyptian prison for trying to topple the Mubarak government and establish a caliphate. Now he cuts a suave figure in London as the head of the anti-extremist think tank Quilliam. I encourage you to follow the work they do, especially his. You can watch Harris and Nawaz’s illuminating discussion at their recent book launch at the Kennedy School below:

Read on:

Peter Hitchens: The House I Grew up in

27 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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BBC, Childhood, Children, Christopher Hitchens, interview, Nostalgia, parenthood, parents, Peter Hitchens, The House I Grew Up In, Time

“I know perfectly well that it’s actually quite wrong to try to live in the past or to seek it.

I think a lot of the reason why people do sometimes do it and some little moment of reminiscence will bring on a voyage into the past is because they would like to open a door and find that their parents were alive again. And then you could show them that you’d grown up. You’d like to say, ‘Look, all that nonsense that you had to put up with, it’s over. And here are your grandchildren,’ who in my mother’s case, she never met and in my father’s case he only ever met one of them.

So yes, that would be a good thing to do. It’s futile. There is no such door. You can go back into the houses of your youth and they are other peoples’ houses — they’re not yours anymore.

The only purpose of going into the past is to examine it and to know what it was really like. And often these days, people defame the past and pretend that it was a waste of time — nothing but misery and poverty and drabness. And to recognize that while yes there were many things that were wrong about the past, there were good things that we’ve lost and that are recoverable.

And those who know nothing of the past will simply experience the future as a series of unnecessary mistakes and of mysterious events they had no possibility of understanding because they have no understanding of the way people behave and the way nations behave.

He who doesn’t know his own past and the past of his own country and his own people is perpetually a child.”

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The concluding remarks from Peter Hitchens in his 2011 profile for the BBC radio program The House I Grew Up In, for which he returned to several childhood homes on the English coastline to see how they reflected and stirred his memories of family life.

These remarks are especially melancholic in context, as Peter spends much of the episode wandering the streets of his childhood and discussing his rebellious youth, which involved, among other things, burning his Bible on the soccer pitch of his prep school. That prep school, more especially the money it siphoned from his working class mother and father, is to his mind at least part of the reason for their unhappy divorce and his mother’s eventual, tragic demise. Peter declines to discuss either event in much detail; Christopher, his older brother by two years, was more open, facing it with beautiful, plaintive words in the first and best chapter (“Yvonne”) of his memoir Hitch-22.

I recommend listening to the entire episode, as Peter’s a first class guide of not only his past but of a kind of postwar English life that’s now nearly all gone. Perpetually overcast skies drizzling on hedgerows and Edwardian pubs; wheezing tea kettles; the cults of Winston Churchill and Admiral Nelson; double-decker buses and soldiers scuttling by in crisp Royal Navy uniforms. The England of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Peter can immerse readers and listeners in that world because he is of that world. His wry lamenting of his 60’s rebelliousness recalls one of his most epic lines, wielded in his debate at the Oxford Union on the existence of God: he opens his rebuttal by saying of his opponents that they — paraphrasing — “remind me of the most obnoxious, selfishness person I’ve ever known: my 15-year-old self.”

For more on Peter’s conversion to Christianity, pick up his apologetic memoir The Rage Against God. For more on his politics, check out The Abolition of Britain and Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler’s Life.

More Hitchens bro’s:

Peter argues you can’t know your country’s history unless you know its poetry
Peter asks can western civilization survive without religion
Christopher Hitchens describes his relationship with his mother
Christopher and Peter duke it out over the challenge of Nietzsche

A Mother’s Work

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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C.S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, home, letters, motherhood, mothers, parenthood, Sisyphus, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Work

“I think I can understand that feeling about a mother’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So the job of motherhood is the one for which all others exist…”

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C.S. Lewis, writing in a letter to a “Mrs. Johnson” on March 16th, 1955. This correspondence can be found in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume lll: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.

As I was busy posting about the anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination, I forgot to note two other events which November 22nd, 1963 also marks — the death of Clive Staples Lewis and the eleventh birthday of my mother, a reader of this blog.

Friendship, Love, Irony, Humor, Parenthood, Literature, and Music

14 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Aging, Christopher Hitchens, Dr. Zhivago, Hitch-22, memoir, parenthood

“A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so…

‘When people become older they become a little more tolerant,’ snaps the case-hardened Komorovski to the hot young idealist Pasha Antipov in Dr. Zhivago. ‘Perhaps because they have more to ‘tolerate’ in themselves,’ replies Antipov in what for many years I considered a very cutting return serve.

I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart. There is no point in pretending that the process doesn’t occur: it happens to me when near-beardless uniformed officials or bureaucrats, one third of my age, adopt a soothing tone while telling me, ‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you…’ It also happens when I hear some younger ‘wannabe’ radicals employing hectoring arguments to which I have almost forgotten the answer. But that at least is because the arguments themselves are so old that they almost make me feel young again. From this kind of leathery awareness, nature itself protects the young, and a good thing, too, otherwise they would be old before their time and be taking no chances. Meanwhile, all of my children have negotiated the shoals of up-growing with a great deal more maturity than I did, and most of my moments of feeling that the world is not as bad as it might be have come from my students, especially the ones who decided in college that they wanted to join the armed forces and guard me while I sleep. (Meeting some of them later, after they have done a tour or two, has been particularly uplifting.) No, when I check the thermometer I find that it is the fucking old fools who get me down the worst, and the attainment of that level of idiocy can often require a lifetime…”

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From Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens.

Read other excerpts from Hitchens’s memoir here:

The Grape and the Grain