The conservatism of parenting
Twelve years ago today, I became a father. My son Matthew was born, and so, in a way, was the man I am today. It is a common experience for people to become more conservative (though not necessarily politically conservative!) when they have children. Why is that? The obvious reason is because it gives you a concrete stake in the future. The things you do, and the ideas you embrace (or reject) suddenly have more substance than you may have realized, because they are no longer as abstract as they may have seemed before.
As longtime readers of mine know — and I beg their indulgence in telling this story again; I’m writing to many new people here at the TAC blog — I was a professional film critic once upon a time, but had a sharp and unexpected change in my film-watching habits when my first child was born. I had changed jobs at the paper just prior to the baby’s arrival, so I was no longer watching movies professionally. But I was not prepared for what happened to me one day at home in Brooklyn, about three weeks after Matthew was born. I was at home watching TV when I saw that “Goodfellas” was coming on. It had been my favorite film of the year when it was in theaters years earlier, and I was looking forward to the opportunity to watch it again.
I lasted 40 minutes before the violence sickened me so much I could no longer take it.
This was something very new. I was an observant Catholic and a conservative in every sense prior to the baby’s coming, but I was able to hold film violence at an ironic distance. Suddenly, I felt it in my bones in a way I had never done. Why? I think it was the simple fatherly act of holding my newborn son close every day, and experiencing how unbelievably fragile human life is. Watching its wanton violation, seeing the terrible abuse of the human body and the graphic murder of human beings, was literally intolerable to me. It wasn’t that I became indignant about it; it was that I literally could not watch it.
I quickly came to consider sexually explicit material in the same light. I suppose I should have had a more thoughtful approach to this kind of thing from my prior religious and philosophical convictions, but it took the advent in my life of a child who was entirely dependent on his mother and me for his care and formation to make me think more deeply about the world in which he was to live and to grow into manhood. Six years ago, the liberal writer Jim Sleeper penned an extraordinary essay against what he calls “the pornification of the public square,” (the link takes you to a pdf version, the only one I could find today). In it, Sleeper says that neither liberals nor conservatives take seriously enough the power of Eros to shape public life. Sleeper says liberals are far too naive about what the degradation of sexual morality can mean for civil society, focused as they are on free speech. Conservatives, he argues, are far too naive about the role of market ideology in undermining the very moral values re: sexuality that they espouse. (Sleeper’s argument is more complex than that, but that’s the gist of it).
Along those lines, my conservatism changed in particular ways when Matthew arrived. That’s when I started paying more attention to marketing, and the insidious ways marketers try to turn our children into consumers. That’s when I started paying attention to food, and urban planning, and many of the things that eventually caused me to write “Crunchy Cons.” It’s not that you have to be a parent to arrive at these conclusions, or to have these interests. It’s that in my case, fatherhood made me reconsider so very much that I had taken for granted, or thought I had settled. I didn’t know it 12 years ago, but today was the day when the truth of Russell Kirk’s observation that family is the institution most necessary to conserve became real to me.
In fact, if parenthood doesn’t make you rethink much of what you believe, even if you end up affirming it in the end, then chances are you have not taken it seriously enough.
I have had pretty much the same experience. Of course, I was also reading Crunchy Cons around the time our first was born. Be that as it may, I have the same gut reaction about the frailty of life. When our first was born, suddenly the world became a Scary Place (but also an Enchanted Place, full of new beauty and possibility), and I realized that we play for keeps, that I’d die someday, that he’d bury me, that I was responsible for his rearing, his educatio, in mind, spirit, and body.
I became a father last year and will be adding another to our crew early next year. I can’t say I’ve become more sensitive to violent acts in general in the media (I’ve watched Goodfellas since my daughter was born ;^) ) but one thing is for certain: I cannot handle portrayals of violence involving children, or even hearing news stories about crimes or tragedies involving kids. They give me near-panic attacks. This emotional response is still very raw to me, and I don’t know if I will channel it into a new direction in my life the way you have (or if there is any way to.) It’s still very strange to me.
Essential to the way Melissa and I have raised our four girls has been the work of Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Jean Kilbourne (Deadly Persuasion). They both made clear to us the terrible, misogynistic effects that so much advertising has on young girls–turning them into sexualized commodities, and teaching them to internalize that turning. It’s a pretty scary world out there, sometimes, and while Melissa and I aren’t particularly “traditional” in any formal political sense, there is a deeply felt need in our family to hold onto the traditions and the truths that we have, to protect them–and the daughters which we have raised in light of them–from those that would turn those traditions and those girls into something which can be sold right out from underneath us.
Some of it is cultural and societal progress. One of my favorite comedians growing up was Charlie Chaplin; when Channel 9 in New York ran his short films one evening, I was laughing so hard that my grandmother worried that i’d throw up.
Fast forward 30+ years. When my kids were old enough to be somewhat sentient, I got a collection of Charlie Chaplin short films in order to introduce them to one of the world’s best comedians. It was horrific: everyone was smoking like chimneys, women were avidly pursued and sometimes roughed up, fully 3/4 of the gags involved drunkenness, and the violence….
I have one simple bit of progressive conservative advice: set the color on your TV to B&W (you can always shift to color for specific programming, like, say, the Wizard of Oz….). It makes clear to your children that what is on TV is artificial (it also forces them to use their imagination more). Especially the commercials, which are color-designed to stimulate appetites (also pacing-designed, too…)
Nice post. I’ve had a similar experience since the birth of my daughter 11 years ago.
Remember the Janet Jackson Superbowl “wardrobe malfunction”? I remember reading soon after that people’s reaction to that incident (that is, how big a deal they thought it was) depended not on their political party affiliation, their age, their socio-economic status nor the region of the country they came from. It depended most strongly on whether they were parents or not. I find that completely believable. As someone who moves in homeschooling circles that encompass some pretty extreme political and religious differences, one thing we nearly all agree on is the excessive (indeed toxic) level of hyper-sexualization and violence in the wider culture.
Which makes childless me, one year Dreher’s junior, the control group (n=1). And over the last 12 years, I’ve changed in many of the same ways. The changes weren’t triggered by an event, and didn’t happen in a day or a month, but happened nonetheless.
I don’t care to see gratuitous violence, or any child violence, or naked women. (Well, maybe some naked women.) I’d rather stay home and eat a home-cooked meal than go out and inhale a tray of jello shots.
In my case, it’s probably just age. Maybe it’s that pop culture was Seinfeld then and and is Jersey Shore now — there’s more trash to avoid, requiring a greater effort on my part. Maybe the change is from reading blogs like this and its links. Or faith. Or marriage. Parenthood doesn’t own the rights to maturity or a desire to preserve a culture.
So maybe parenthood just accelerates the change in perspective that was going to happen anyway. Do parents really feel these things more than non-parents?
Well, yeah. Especially fathers of daughters. They’re just not alone.
I’m part of the control group too, DS, and I agree that age has a lot to do with this (I am also Rod’s age). I have less tolerance for violence on the screen than I used to– I even thought The Lord Of The Rings overdid it with the battle scenes. And Stupid Stoner Humor that might have had me cracking up at 19 now leaves me cold.
As for death, well burying your parents can bring that to new reality for you too. Or having a close call with the Reaper yourself. No one over 40 thinks he’s immortal.
In fact, if parenthood doesn’t make you rethink much of what you believe, even if you end up affirming it in the end, then chances are you have not taken it seriously enough.
Before I became a parent, I had nothing but contempt for families who took public assistance.
That got reassessed real quick.
Rod, again you make the claim of a particular kind of conservatism when I just don’t see it. You explain that the birth of your son made you more conservative “because it gives you a concrete stake in the future. The things you do, and the ideas you embrace (or reject) suddenly have more substance than you may have realized, because they are no longer as abstract as they may have seemed before.” I would just like to know why having a concrete stake in the future is “conservative”? Likewise, I would like to know what makes ideas having more substance and losing abstraction somehow “conservative”? Are these things not “liberal” values, too? The more I read your blog, the more I begin to believe that you think anything that is grounded human behavior is somehow “conservative” — that liberalism produces, for lack of a better term, “inhuman” behavior. Why do you do this? Don’t you see that it has the effect of de-humanizing liberalism (and, by extension, those who embrace liberalism)?
Jimmy, are you sure I’m the one who’s having trouble seeing clearly? This post of mine pointed out that the conservatism people tend to develop after they have children doesn’t necessarily have to do with political conservatism. It’s a temperamental shift, at least, and possibly a philosophical one. Jim Sleeper identifies as a liberal, but he is conservative about sex in the public square, if “conservative” is to be understood as being in favor of greater restraint (versus “liberal,” meaning liberalizing of restraint).
Rod, I purposely didn’t use the term “political” to describe your use of conservatism. You were very clear on that point. I might say that you mean a kind of “dispositional” behavior — but I don’t see how the kind of dispositional behavior you describe — i.e. having a concrete stake in the future, or ideas having more substance and losing abstraction — have really anything to do with greater restraint (conservatism). It would seem to me that embracing one’s stake in the future very much requires a lack of restraint in moving beyond the comfort zones of the status quo to secure the future for our children. Wouldn’t you agree, for instance, that we should not exercise restraint in taking on, for instance, the status quo of violence in today’s popular media, even within our own families? What I think you are talking about is not philosophical conservatism, but rather a type of progressive conservationism. Philosophical conservatism, as I understand it, is usually associated with a kind of retreat into the familiar comforts of the known past, coupled with a suspicion of change (maybe even necessary change) that can only come with some kind of liberalizing of restraint.
But in the end, all I have to go by is my own experience with these things. I have two daughters, 13 and 9. When my oldest was born, we got rid of the TV in the house (and we haven’t had one since). That transformation you write about in the wake of becoming parents was very much a part of my (and my wife’s) experience. But we always thought of this expression of our parenting as grounded in a liberalizing of restraint that allowed us to get rid of the TV, to seek to expand experiential horizons for our children in the world rather than shielding them from the world, to risk exposing our children to different worlds, contexts, and peoples that our own parents restrained from doing for us, etc. I’m not saying that this is not a possibility within the realm of what you call a philosophical conservatism (what I would call a progressive conservationism), I’m just saying that these attitudes and values are not anathema to philosophical or temperamental liberalism.
Was it the general tone of the movie, or a particular scene?
I enjoyed “Mad Max” and in fact had a tape of it. I happened to catch it again when my son was about 2. There was a scene where his 2 year old son is hit by a car, and all you see is the empty shoe setting in the road. I could never watch the movie again. My son is now 30, and likes the movie. Go figure.
Whenever I see this commercial, or any others hawking the hardware for hi-diddle-diddlers purveyed by this most appropriately-monikered (as in “Trojan horse”) of lubricious junk dealers, I realize that, rather than in any lotus-eaters’ petal-strewing utopian schemes on behalf of “saving the planet” – whatever sort of serial fools’ errands-cum-Children’s Crusades that entails – our only hope as a species lies in the fateful collision with the earth of a celestial fireball slightly larger than the sun, whose arrival – much like the dram-ad-is personae in the ad themselves, it would seem – cannot, Gott im Himmel, come soon enough.
Good thought provoking post and thanks for pointing me to Sleeper.
But just as liberals and leftists really do need to re-evaluate their support for free expression at all costs, so do real conservatives need to look at the economic system which creates this degradation.
Goodfellas (which actually strikes me as a profoundly moral film in that the acts of violence are monstrous, performed by wicked people and have real consequences – but then I have no kids) does not get produced in a vacuum.
Sex and violence are commodities which make vast profits for corporations.
Conservatives can rail as much as you like about ‘Hollywood’ but all Hollywood is is a bunch of corporations who care no more about morality than any other corporation.
To challenge the real roots of our cultural degeneration you have to challenge capitalism itself.
That doesn’t necessarily mean becoming socialists – capitalism may still be in some sense reformable but only if a new populist movement is willing to attack the divine right of corporations as and more radically than the original populists and progressives did a century or more ago.
I had a very similar experience Rod–in my case conceiving and carrying a child led me to the revelation that Catholic teachings on human sexuality are wise. Idealistic in the extreme, but at the heart, worth paying attention to and respecting.
Sex is incredibly powerful and our culture had evolved a way of managing the life and death forces inherent in it. Not perfectly–after all we are all imperfect and broken, but enough. Now that’s all been blown out of the water and we as humans are floundering. The rise in poverty and family instability, the threat of AIDs and antibiotic-resistant STDs–all point to the need for a cultural reining in of the sexual impulses we all have.
Roger,
I am about as liberal as they come, and support free expression at all costs in the national arena. However my family is not my country, nor is it a democracy, and my wife and I do not run it as one. We set the example, and expect our kids to try and live up to our standards, with consequences if they do not. We do very little banning (of TV, etc.), because we don’t have to. One thing we do encourage is critical thinking, and looking at different sides of an issue, be it our commercial culture, or why we find things funny that really shouldn’t be.
Ha, you will get more liberal again as your kids become teens and young adults.
I was just curious as to how a former film critic would say he was watching the “three years earlier” “Goodfellas” in 1999? The film had been released in 1990.
More to the point – how do these things become inherently “conservative?” There are a whole lot of us who feel precisely the same way when watching violence who don’t consider ourselves “conservative.” I get physically ill when faced with violence upon children. Yet, those who know me would never drop the tag “conservative” on me. Attempting to define ourselves as humans by political identification….is folly.
Civil libertarians and liberals are as capable as conservatives of criticizing violence in media, or sexual depictions they disapprove. They merely hold that such criticism and other social reaction should be separate from legal restriction. It is the true limited government response, “limited” in the sense of respecting liberty.
Rod,
Thank you for expressing the same transformation I went through when my daughters were born. I couldn’t explain it then, but I developed a strong aversion to graphic violence & cruelty on TV. My wife was unaffected. Non-realistic violence is fine, but pretty much all crime & gore shows are over for me.
My youngest is 18 now, and I still feel the same way.
I can’t say that it affected my political beliefs.
Randy: I was just curious as to how a former film critic would say he was watching the “three years earlier” “Goodfellas” in 1999? The film had been released in 1990.
You’re right about that — I would have bet money that it came out in 1995, and won best picture at the Academy Awards in 1996. I’ve corrected the original entry.
If you’ll read more closely, you’ll note in my original entry a difference between moral conservatism and political conservatism. I see no reason why one cannot be a liberal on economics and politics, but be quite morally conservative. That is more or less the Catholic view. And please go re-read my favorable citing of the liberal journalist and essayist Jim Sleeper on this point.
Does the term “moral conservatism” make sense, outside the confines of a particular tradition, such as Catholicism? Consider a feminist, who has quite strong moral views. She thinks a lot of modern media sends a bad message. But what she opposes in that regard is quite different from what a Catholic opposes, more focused on what gender roles are assumed as normal, than, say, nudity or premarital sex. Their views may be somewhat aligned on gratuitous violence, though she sees its glorification often as part of how male privilege is propagated. And so on, as the two look at other moral issues, from contraception to the death penalty.
Is she a moral conservative? I suspect most Catholics would say not. Despite the fact that she has strong moral views that fall well within what is now an American tradition. So I wonder if “moral conservatism” doesn’t just become a way for its proponents to tacitly elevate a particular tradition as the one to which “conservatism” is desirable, or at least worthy the term. (And it opponents may be using the ugliness of a particular tradition to attack the broader notion!)
This is the typical path of a conservative. The difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives have no capacity for empathy or sympathy. They cannot understand that old age or illness makes a person less capable, or that brutal violence snuffs out precious life, or that loving a person of the same gender can be real love and devotion. Most conservatives see humans as functionalities… digits of function… and when that function is incongruent with the conservatives notion of what that function should be, then there is social shunning, derision, and outrage.
Though I have never had children, the random, senseless depiction of gruesome violence always affected me in the way that Mr. Dreher says it now affect him…. because I didn’t have to have a child to know that life is precious. I don’t need to be gay to know that two members of the same sex can have as loving and as devoted a relationships as I have with my wife… that people in far flung countries kill our soldiers because it is understandble not to want to have to live under occupation –wouldn’t we try to kill foreign soldiers that sought to occupy the US?
What is it about conservatives who are so incapable of putting themselves into another person’s shoes… and getting a sense of what life would be like as that person? I believe it is simply a gap in the development of their human personalities.
Mr. Dreher –why could you not know the same sense of the preciousness of human life BEFORE having had a child? So many other people are capable of doing so. Have you asked yourself that question?
Gotta tell you, Dan, for someone who chastises conservatives for a lack of empathy, you sure do exemplify what you condemn. I was going to respond to you, but it occurs to me that anything I might say to someone capable of writing “conservatives have no capacity for empathy or sympathy” will be words wasted.
Mr. Dreher –why could you not know the same sense of the preciousness of human life BEFORE you had a child?? Most human beings are capable of doing so. Your essay begs the question. Have you dared to ask yourself that question?
Let me qualify my statement. . . conservatives are incapable of empathy or sympathy for those outside their immediate circle. The classic example is Senator Domenici from New Mexico who regularly voted against funding for care and study of mental illness…. he seemed to think it was just some people acting out. But when his daughter was diagnosed with a bi-polar illness, and when it was explained to him what bi-polar disease is, he wanted to increase funding for research for bi-polar disease. But guess what, he couldn’t bring himself to fund care for other mental illnesses –because those other illnesses were suspect, fakers, not real.
Conservatives can have compassion –but it is limited to their own personal experiences…. things that they experience directly –like your conversion to the understanding of the preciousness of human life. I always say, if it affects a conservative within the four walls of his home, he can be very attententive and responsive. However if the problem is outside his four walls, the conservative cannot put himself in the shoes of the “other” to understand the “other”. And yes, I do believe that this is a function of a gap in the development of the personality. How do you explain this? I’m sure you know some people in your circle of friends/family who simply are tone-deaf when it comes to the suffering of others. I have a nephew who actually asked my sister why she was helping people who were lost in their city…. she had to explain to him that it’s right to “help people”… he will never understand.
And by the way, I challenge you to answer the question in my last post. I noticed your response to me completely glossed over that question. Completely. Why?
Of course I have. But you are not inquiring in an honest way, and I’m not going to waste my time having a discussion with someone whose mind is made up.
[...] week, Rod Dreher wrote a blog post called “The Conservatism of Parenting” about how having children twelve years ago had caused “a sharp and unexpected [...]
Besides which, Dan Cobb, the answer to your question is in the original post, if you had taken the time to read it carefully instead of rushing to set down your categorical denunciation of all conservatives as incapable of empathy.
Have you taught your kids about the doctrine of Hell? Eternal torture for a thoughtcrime makes the most violent movie look benign.
[...] Via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this post by conservative writer Rod Dreher on fatherhood and the way it effected his ability to tolerate violence in movies: [...]