Provocation: Why Don't I Have Kids?

Shadi Hamid on unmet aspirations and revealed preferences.

Every month, we give subscribers a chance to provoke our writers. This month, Shadi first took on Middle East politics and then turned to the more personal provocations he received — on kids, religion, and the mysteries of living well.

By popular demand — and because we will also publish a response to it — we have unpaywalled Shadi’s original, unpublished “personal” piece.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

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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.  

Do You Know What You Want?

For a long time, I wanted to want to get married and have kids. But I had trouble getting from “wanting to want” to simply, well, wanting. And now I regret that it took me so long. I’ve tried to be more open about that publicly. It can feel lonely. I think there’s some good that can come out of sharing that vulnerability. So many of us are struggling with questions that can seem as obvious as they are intractable. There is a weight to these questions, and sometimes it can seem easier to just put a pin in them and return to them later, without quite knowing when later will come. But, at some point, they have to be confronted.  

I’m reminded of what an editor once said, “We write the books we need to read.” If we spend time, perhaps too much time, extolling the benefits of marriage and children, then perhaps the real audience — even if we don’t quite realize it — is ourselves. I have found, over the years, that my writing is an extension of an ongoing internal dialogue. In writing, I learn about myself. I don’t usually plan a lot before I start typing words on a blank page. I want what I write to be a natural expression of my state of mind, and to see what comes out.  

If I’m marshaling survey research on how the happiest cohort of Americans are those who are both married and have children, then I’m not only reminding you. I’m reminding myself. The data is clear. The same for being more religious. Religious people are happier, healthier, and participate more in civic life. (For the full-throated case on religion as a force for good, I lay it out here in detail).  

Humans are wracked by contradiction. We can be inscrutable even to ourselves. For many of us, there is a kind of moral chaos, or at least wrestling, that is constantly occurring inside of us, at either low or high intensities. Some of suppress it, some of us are less successful in bringing it to order. This is a condition of living in a modern, liberal society, where there is unlimited choice and where our individual autonomy can feel so complete as to be overwhelming.

The personal is political, and the political is personal. I write and speak about the importance of structure and constraint, in part because without those constraints, I have felt more unmoored. I have experienced this truth intimately, and that can’t help but affect the way I look at the world. At a fundamental level, I don’t believe we were made choose from an unlimited menu of life options. We are not naturally “choice maximizers.” (And the behavioral economics literature backs this up — too much choice is paralyzing and makes us unhappy).  

Which brings me to another, related question from a reader:

How do you live with the cognitive dissonance of being serious thinkers and social scientists while maintaining the pretense that what are transparently castles built on desert tribal fairy tales originating 3+k years ago are not just to be taken seriously anthropologically but literally believed?

By definition, for people who are religious, there is no such dissonance. I’ve struggled with my own religious practice. Not so much with belief. I think the case for God is as compelling and rational as I could hope for. If it was any more clear, it would be too clear. If we could all see incontrovertible proof of God, then that would undermine the entire structure of religious accountability based as it is on free will and moral agency. In any case, I feel just as strongly on the reverse: Few things seem more implausible to me than God’s non-existence. Now that seems like a fairy tale.  

Does my attachment to “traditional” ideas around religion, family, and children make me a “reactionary”? I think it’s unfortunate (and political malpractice) to allow the good and meaningful things in life to be right-coded. Why should we cede that ground to Republicans? It wasn’t always thus. Up until just a couple decades ago, there was no massive gap between the parties when it came to religious identification and participation. The good life is non-partisan. Or at least it should be.  

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