Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children

11 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Psychology

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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.

__________

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:

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Calvin Trillin on Parenting: Your Children Are Either the Center of Your Life or They’re Not — the Rest Is Commentary

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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About Alice, Biography, Calvin Trillin, Children, family, fatherhood, motherhood, Parenting, parents

Alice Trillin

“There was no doubt about [my wife’s] priorities. While our girls were growing up, she hated being separated from them; after a two-week trip to Asia, when they were about ten and thirteen, she decided that one week was her limit. Concerning children’s constitutional right to sit down to dinner with their parents every night, Alice tended toward strict constructionism. When it came to trying to decide which theories of child-rearing were highly beneficial and which were absolutely ruinous to the future of your child — a subject of considerable discussion among some parents we knew — we agreed on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.

After both girls were out of college, there was a period when Abigail was living in San Francisco while Sarah was in Los Angeles. Alice said that if they remained where they were we would simply have to live in California for part of the year. ‘If we want to be convenient to both of them,’ I’d say, ‘we could find a nice little place in between — Bakersfield, or maybe Fresno.’ Alice would shoot me the look I associated with a catch phrase from a radio sitcom I used to listen to as a boy ‘’Tain’t funny, McGee.’ By then, though, her desire to be near them was no longer based partly on her need to influence what kind of people they would become. In her New Yorker article about the recurrence scare in 1990, at a time when Sarah was a sophomore at Yale and Abigail was in Teach for America in Los Angeles, Alice wrote:

In the days after that bone scan, I couldn’t find a hopeful way out… I did manage to imagine uplifting conversations I might have with my daughters about how it was O.K. for me to die this time, as it absolutely had not been when they were four and seven, and I had foreseen their adoring but occasionally absent-minded father getting them the wrong kind of sneakers or losing track of their dental appointments after I was gone. Now I was sure that I had told them everything of importance I knew; they had understood it all and figured out a lot on their own, and were as close to perfect as they could possibly be. Then it occurred to me that neither of them was married yet, and I would hate to miss the weddings and the grandchildren. I speculated about which of my friends I would assign to help them pick out their wedding dresses. Then I cried and decided that I really wanted to stay around.

My problem in 1976 would have been much more serious than sneakers and dental appointments, I realized, when I finally allowed myself to dwell on what would have happened if Alice hadn’t survived. The real problem would have been that I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone else to be involved in raising our girls. I not only thought they needed to know everything of importance that Alice knew; I also thought, I suppose, that she was the only person who knew it. When I’m asked how both of our daughters came to be involved in the sort of work they do — Abigail is a legal-services attorney for children, Sarah is a clinical social worker — I, naturally, deny having anything to do with it. ‘I want to assure you that I tried to instill in them the value of selfishness and even rapaciousness,’ I say. ‘When Abigail came down to breakfast during her years in high school, I would tell her the temperature and the starting salary for an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.’ But they had Alice there as a model. Because she survived, they were exposed every day to someone who (as a friend wrote after Alice died) managed to ‘navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.’ Sneakers and dental appointments are the kind of things you can figure out, or find someone to figure out. Exemplars are hard to come by.”

__________

Excerpted from chapter seven of Calvin Trillin’s 2006 book About Alice.

In a recent interview with Olivia Gentile, Trillin offered a few simple words that illuminate the above point, only this time from the perspective of grandfatherhood:

Do you feel [your daughters are] raising their kids with pretty much your values and techniques?

Yeah. Alice used to say that we were easy about the small things and strict about the large things. By large things, she basically meant values…

I’ve always believed that parenting essentially boils down to one thing: Your kids are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.

So, the question of which childrearing book you read or something like that is really not relevant. It doesn’t make any difference because, in the first place, you’re not going to act against your own nature anyway, and the kids see you in so many different situations that you can’t put in some kind of artificial system.

Trillin dedicated About Alice to those grandchildren. Picture above: Trillin and Alice.

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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.”

__________

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: