Provocation: Why Don't I Have Kids?

Traditional religion, embracing life, and revealed preferences.

Every month, we give subscribers a chance to provoke our writers. Is there a question you’ve been burning to ask them? A point you’d like to get across? This month, it was

Shadi Hamid

’s turn.

Originally, Shadi chose to write about the more personal provocations he received. But the outbreak of war in Lebanon prompted him to write a second piece, covering the politics of the Middle East.

For our paid subscribers, here is the original, unpublished, uncut “personal” piece. Your provocations answered!

(In case you missed it, here is last month’s Provocation: “Beauty and Niceness in an Accidental World,” by

Damir Marusic

.)

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

---

It seems appropriate that a number of the provocations had to with religion, family, as well as children (and why I don’t have them). Those are the questions. I’m not sure anything matters more; certainly not politics. I’m reminded of this whenever I hear someone say this is the “most important election of our lifetimes” and I see people looking to find their life’s meaning in an election. Whatever this election is, it is not the end. On their deathbeds, there is little evidence of those confronting their mortality saying: “I wish I spent more days knocking on doors for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign,” “I wish I wrote more policy papers,” or “I wish I went to more protests.”  

Regrets tend to be of a different kind.  

One questioner asks: “Shadi, Come on... when are you going to have kids? Enough of this goofing off and fancy pants ‘thinking’.”  

Perhaps less encouraging is John Rainwater’s comment:

“You [and Christine] are reactionaries— recoiling and fretting and tut-tutting daily about the stunning abundance that life offers us in this moment.

Instead of embracing this new moment of stupendous new intellectual, sexual, and spiritual opportunity, you constantly ruminate about things like one’s duty to society and the future. Have children you say. But you apparently don’t know [if you] want them. You sound like a childless priest.”

These are indeed provocations, and I think it’s fair to raise them. If I really wanted to get married and have kids, the argument goes, I would have done so already. The fact that I haven’t reveals my true preferences, in contrast to my stated preferences. What we say we want can’t really be trusted, because our wants — as we express them to, say, a friend or a pollster — are socially constructed.

Accordingly, our statements are better treated not as blueprints but as aspirations, a way to indicate what kind of people we would like to become at some unspecified point in the future.

Also, our wants, as the philosopher

Oliver Traldi

wrote in an excellent Wisdom of Crowds essay, are their own kind of mystery.