It’s a Good Time To Be a Parent

We live in Boogie Nights, not Brave New World

Here is a new guest essay from our friend

Ben Christenson

. He writes a Substack newsletter called Trimming the Wicks. Like the Savage Collective, he is writes about how to “(hold) on to light and levity even when the future looks grim.” We share an interest in family and fertility within the age of machines. Please support Ben’s writing.

When we try to make sense of our hedonistic, superabundant culture, we often cite Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World. Huxley imagined a future with happily engaged workers who filled their leisure time with soma—a perfect drug offering pure pleasure with no come-down.

In hindsight, soma seems less like a pharmaceutical breakthrough than a breakthrough in genetic and social engineering. I suspect that the no-come-down drug is probably more a product of the test tube babies, genetic manipulation, and behavioral conditioning than the drug itself. In other words, to get the soma effect we also need the alterations to human nature.

Since we haven’t done that preparatory work, we now are witnessing the fallout of an entire society that is constantly “chasing the dragon.” Although not for lack of trying, the perfect high or the perfectly uncommitted sexual encounter remain elusive.

It appears that when you throw ordinary humans into a pleasure-saturated environment, we don’t end up fat and happy. Instead, we’re more like Dirk Diggler, Mark Wahlberg’s character in the movie Boogie Nights. Diggler is an average Joe who gets swept up in the edgy, exciting, hedonistic world of the adult film industry. Ultimately, this cornucopia of pleasures ruins him, and he ends up a cocaine addict with erectile dysfunction.

David Foster Wallace wrote that Boogie Nights “presents everybody in porn as cretinous, pathetic, or both” and he observed that in real life, the deadening effect pornography has on its performers is “a chilling contradiction of the industry’s claim that it’s all about pleasure and unfettered play.” Boogie Nights is seedy, and I personally would never rewatch it. (I prize prudence and chastity now more than hipness). But to its credit, it doesn’t glamorize evil.

You don’t really want to be Dirk.

Diggler ends up trying to scam a drug dealer by selling a half-kilo of baking soda disguised as cocaine. It does not turn out well.

Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction researcher at Stanford, argues that there is no biological free lunch when it comes to pleasure. The come-down is inevitable. She uses an analogy to a scale with pain and pleasure on either end. When you take a shot of vodka, for instance, it tips the scale toward the pleasure side.

To restore balance, she asks you to imagine “these neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. But the gremlins like it on the balance, so they stay on until the balance is tilted in equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That's the hangover, the come-down, the blue Monday, or just that state of craving.”

Conversely, though, if you frontload the pain through exercise or taking a cold shower, the gremlins hop on the pleasure end of the scale. That’s the runner’s high, the measurable dopamine increase that comes after cold exposure.

When asked why she thinks people are prone to addiction, she acknowledged that some of it is market conditions. An addict is the perfect customer, so it makes sense that products would aim to be as compelling as possible. Nevertheless, there’s a demand side to the equation as well.

Why are we so desperate to numb out, as Catherine Shannon put it. Lembke admits she can only speculate, but this is her theory:

I think we’re essentially struggling with endemic narcissism, where our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it’s creating is this deep need to escape ourselves. And I think that is what is driving much of our pursuit of intoxicants as a way to just not have to think about ourselves for a blessed, you know, hour or two.

It’s becoming self-evident that you cannot pull on the pleasure lever in perpetuity, as Lembke explains:

It seems to me we’ve crossed over some kind of abundance set point where we went beyond meeting our basic survival needs and now have so much access to so many pleasure-inducing substances and behaviors that we may actually be changing our brain chemistry such that we’re in a dopamine-deficit state. Now we need to keep using these highly stimulating drugs and behaviors, not to get high and feel good, but just to level the balance and feel normal.

In other words, the gremlins keep hopping on the pain end of the scale, and we try to distract ourselves with scrolling and substance abuse. Of course, painful things like exercise or a cold shower—things that would level us out in our superabundant environment—are very difficult to choose consistently. Usually, you need routines and accountability partners to stay committed.

So how can we then keep the gremlins under control? I have an idea: have more children. When I read Anna Lembke’s speculation, perhaps because I have three under three, I can’t help but think of all the misery my children have likely saved me from by demanding my attention.

Eugène Manet and his Daughter at Bougival (1881) by Berthe Morisot

Parents often cede too much ground to the “kids suck” crowd. You don’t even have to appeal to the infinite dignity of the human life or a divine mandate. Parents could simply acknowledge that children are demanding, permanent commitments and give thanks for this counterbalance that they do not have to actively choose every day. How much harder it would be to do a cold plunge every morning!

I’m being a bit facetious, and I do actually think childrearing is a meaningful, holy, and necessary task. But just at the simplest level, the assumption that kids are hard and therefore undesirable is a flawed model of human happiness. Not only are we so far off balance that a little suffering would benefit most of us, there’s also a rich Christian tradition around the spiritual value of suffering, even suffering that seems meaningless!

I won’t pretend to summarize the historical discussion, but I’ll just share one remarkable story from Kyriacos Markides’s The Mountain of Silence. You’ll have to excuse the length of this interjection, and I’ll just ask your indulgence.

Markides recounts a story told to him by an Eastern Orthodox monk. The monk began:

Elder Ephraim went to Mount Athos when he was only twenty years old. Right from the start he became a subordinate to Father Nikeforos…unfortunately, Father Nikeforos was a notorious elder with a reputation for being a very harsh and authoritarian man. I can’t describe to you the difficulties that elder Ephraim had to go through during his apprenticeship with this elder. Father Nikeforos was merciless, had no discernment, no trace of human sympathy, no compassion.

The monk admitted that it’s a “mystery and a paradox” why elder Ephraim stayed. What elder Ephraim told him was that “every time he decided to leave [Father Nikeforos], he felt the Grace of God abandoning him.”

Markides confessed, “None of us could understand such a state of mind since none of us knew what it means to be abandoned by Grace.”

Finally, after forty-two years of elder Ephraim’s subordination, Father Nikeforos died. Elder Ephraim would tell his confidantes, “Forty-two years, but they were seconds. Do you understand what I am telling you? Turn forty-two years into seconds in order to imagine that I lived not only days of martyrdom, not only hours, not only minutes, but also seconds.”

At the funeral, elder Ephraim finally got an explanation (of sorts). The monk telling the story continued:

When Papa Nikeforos died, they conducted the funeral rites. Elder Ephraim, as the subordinate, and as was customary, made a prostration and for the last time kissed the hand of his deceased elder. At exactly that moment Divine Grace spoke to him and said, “What you did all these years was the will of God.” And the elder replied, “and you only tell me this now when he is dead? For forty-two years I wailed and implored you, day and night, to tell me what to do. I was burning inside, and now that he is dead you tell me this is your Will? What if I had left?” Then God answered: “Had you left you wouldn’t be where you are now. In fact you would be lost.” It was spiritual development that elder Ephraim was after. This is what he wanted, and this is what he got.

Now contrast the suffering of Elder Ephraim with your own as your baby cries in your ear but the next moment falls asleep and makes your heart burst with his cuteness. That was a pain, oftentimes, of thirty minutes, not forty-two years (hopefully).

So, contrary to popular opinion, I think it’s fair to ask if children have ever been more of a blessing than they are today. Have their difficulties and demands ever been a more needed respite from our cultural hedonism and narcissism?

And did I mention they’re super cute?

Mother and Child (1908) by Mary Cassatt

I’m not saying you should use children to hack your dopaminergic system. That would be insane. I am merely trying to say that the hard parts of childrearing should not all be tallied in the negative column. I find it helpful to remind myself that tough moments are of spiritual value in the long-run and psychological value in the short-run. I don’t doubt that empty nesters might enjoy their freedom, but I do doubt whether removing the challenge of raising kids would allow you to start the good times at age 30.

Now that may be completely self-serving. After all, I’d like to believe that my marriage and family weren’t foolish life choices. But perhaps the moment-to-moment neurochemical balance works at the scale of a lifetime as well. Of course, too much pain can break people. But I don’t believe that wisdom or simple observation indicates that we are in danger of striving too much, of bearing too much responsibility.

Instead, even as adults are ever more safe and self-centered, children are derided as a hazard to health, public nuisance, and obstruction to adult self-actualization. These complaints against children seem less like good sense and more like a common tactic of tempters discussed in The Screwtape Letters. As Screwtape explains:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

Along the same lines, Paul Kingsnorth said in a recent conversation with Freya India, “If the Devil wanted to destroy human love, affection, romance, mystery and family life, he could not have come up with anything better than dating apps, online porn and Instagram feeds. And this is exactly what is happening.”

I would add, if the Devil wanted to drive humanity to despair, in this present moment, undermining family life and childrearing might well be his best line of attack. Thus, the most effective act of resistance, fidelity, and witness may be something as simple as holding a crying newborn with love.

And when he stops crying and the gremlins hop off the scale, you will not only be Resisting The Machine, you will be holding a baby in your arms.

And that’s very fun and very cute.