Our broken market in parenting

Meritocracy has long been one of America’s most cherished principles. It informs the structure of our educational system, which at its best tries to ensure that the most talented students get access to the resources they need to succeed. Yet doesn’t the social mobility provided by education come “too late,” as it were? Before arriving at school, children are exposed to more or less random differences in the distribution of resources, simply by virtue of who their parents are. Talented students may be mired in a stimulus-poor environment, while the mediocre children of the rich receive, by virtue of a kind of genetic affirmative action, a wide range of educational opportunities that will ultimately be wasted on them. This so-called “system” of parenting prevents pure meritocracy from being achieved, meaning that there can appear to be a moral imperative toward market-distorting redistribution of wealth.

To remedy this standing offense against human freedom, I propose that we apply market principles to parenting. While there is currently no getting around the need to be physically born to a particular person, we can minimize the element of randomness by providing infants with parenting vouchers in proportion to their innate talents (as indicated by an appropriate standardized testing regime). Better parents would naturally be able to command higher prices on the parenting market. Thus the more talented children could then be matched up with wealthier and more socially prestigious parents, promoting the deserving child’s life chances and also making sure that the social and economic resources of their parents are not squandered. Children who were never going to contribute significantly to society could be given to less capable parents. If some kind of error occurred in the placement process, the educational system, as the engine of social mobility, would be able to correct for the problem — though presumably the system would improve over time, so that eventually even that correction would no longer be necessary.

Plato already recognized that something like this type of system would be necessary for a truly just society to emerge, namely, one in which each is rewarded for his or her own merits. While there is a considerable sentimental attachment to our current system, I think we all need to recognize that until our broken market for parenting is repaired, we can never be completely sure that those who are rich or poor truly deserve to be in their respective conditions.

A proposed variation on the theme of the workaholic dad who doesn’t understand the true spirit of Christmas

Over my visit home for Christmas, I saw snippets of several movies focusing on the theme of the workaholic dad who doesn’t understand the true spirit of Christmas. One widely-known example is Jingle All the Way, in which the former governor or California [sic] stars as a father seeking to find the hottest toy of the season on Christmas Eve, having shirked his duty to buy it earlier. The movie opens with him making sales calls and missing his son’s karate event as a result — simply part of a broader pattern, we are meant to understand. I didn’t wind up seeing the ending, but I assume that Arnold was ultimately made to submit to the totalitarian demands of Christmas.

What I’d like to see is a movie in which workaholic dad sits his son down and says, “You know what? I’m not really interested in your karate thing or what specific toy you’ve decided you want for Christmas.

Overheard remarks

In connection the directed reading over Lacan that I’m supervising, I recently read Jonathan Lear’s Freud, which I assigned to make up for the fact that we can’t literally do the ideal thing to prepare for the reading of Lacan, i.e., read all of Freud 14 times in German. Lear spent some time on Freud’s dream of the botanical manuscript, the interpretation of which hinged crucially on something Freud’s father said about him, in his presence, but not to him: “He’ll never amount to anything.” I recalled that Bruce Fink had also reported the importance of overheard parental declarations in psychoanalysis — and the fact that the crucial declaration may not even be about the child himself or herself (for example, if Freud’s father made the same declaration about the neighbor boy, but Freud had misunderstood it as referring to him), an idea that for some reason struck me as deeply tragic and meaningful.

A chain of associations opened up. For instance, once when I was in grade school, I decided that I should become a spy and hid under my parents’ bed and listened to an odd conversation.

The fantasy of fetal personhood

Most debates about abortion begin from the assumption that the fetus is a more or less isolated entity that can be considered in itself, that it is an individual. We talk about when this entity has “life” in the relevant sense, what its rights are, etc., completely ignoring the distinctive trait of fetal life: that it is radically dependent on, and indeed takes place entirely within, an autonomous human being.

This framing concedes the debate in advance, placing the fetus in the series of other entities with human DNA that were belatedly recognized as being entitled to full human personhood, with the attendant rights.

I can’t believe I read the whole thing

It’s been a long time since we’ve criticized one of Milbank’s interventions, and his seemingly infinitely long piece on gay marriage may present a good opportunity.

On one point, we agree: “In effect, if marriage is now understood as a lifelong sexual contract between any two adult human persons with no specification of gender, then the allowance of gay marriage renders all marriages ‘gay marriages.’” Yet the conclusion he draws from this is strange, involving an idiosyncratic definition of “clear-thinking”: “Given such a situation, were it not for the space afforded by canon law (namely, the possibility of church marriage) a resort to cohabitation – which has hitherto been understood as ‘common-law marriage’ – would be the only logical path for clear-thinking Christians.”

The questionability of the traditional family

It’s well-known that when you put people in a position of power over others, some of them will abuse that power. There are ways to try to minimize this effect, for instance by dividing power or multiplying means of supervision or surveillance — but there’s no way to avoid it entirely. If enough cops pull over enough people, odds are one of them is going to take advantage of someone sooner or later, no matter what evaluation or management procedures are in place. The same goes for every situation where there’s a power differential. You can hope that the people in power will be good and responsible, and you can do as much as possible to make sure that only good and responsible people are selected for the job or that the structure of the institution incentivizes good and responsible people — but at the end of the day, people are people, and abuse of power is all but inevitable.

With this knowledge in hand, the model of the patriarchal family makes absolutely no sense.

Gay marriage and birth control: Why not?

A question that is often asked of those who oppose gay marriage is, “Why do you care?” After all, no one is proposing making gay marriage mandatory. What your neighbors do in the privacy of their own bedroom should be their business, etc., etc.

All this is true. But what changes when gay marriage is allowed — or even when homosexuality becomes a publicly affirmable preference — is not what goes on in the privacy of their own bedroom. Homoerotic encounters have occurred in basically all known human cultures, and honest conservatives (starting with Plato) have acknowledged that this is more or less inevitable. What disturbs opponents of gay marriage isn’t so much the gay sex as the public acceptability of gay relationships.

A thought on pedophile scares

It is undisputable that the greatest danger of child abuse comes from people the child knows and trusts — their father first of all, but also close relatives or authority figures. Although abduction and abuse by a stranger is a horrible tragedy, it happens very rarely. Thus it seems clear to me that efforts to target pedophile strangers — such as sex offender registries, or the more recent program in New York City whereby you can be ticketed if you’re near a playground unaccompanied by a child — are disproportionate.

Even worse, however, they put the child at even more danger of family abuse, as it has the effect of turning the family unit into a kind of fortress.

A premature review: States Without Nations by Jacqueline Stevens

Last year, Columbia University Press sent me a review copy of Jacqueline Stevens’ States Without Nations, at my request — and unfortunately I let it sit for a year. This is unfortunate not only for reasons of politeness, but also because I’ve finally started reading it and absolutely love it. She argues that birthright citizenship is one of the primary causes of injustice and suffering in the world and that it should be abolished, along with any state recognition of essentially anything hereditary (inheritance of wealth, ethnic groups, etc.).

While she acknowledges that capitalism is also a major source of injustice and suffering, she believes that the left has historically been blind to the need to combat nationalism and family ideology, believing them to be “holdovers” from previous eras that will essentially go away by themselves. I find her focus on the family and on the fantasies underlying national loyalty (namely, the fantasy of obtaining immortality through identification with the eternal being of the nation) to be an interesting variation on the Marxist turn to psychoanalysis to figure out why the revolution failed to take place or whatever — instead of just plugging psychoanalytic concepts into a framework where it is presupposed that the economy should be primary but is being spuriously covered over, she directly confronts the primary domain of psychoanalysis, namely, the family unit.

As a long-time opponent of nationalism and family values, I’ve found that Stevens’ book provided a nice combination of confirming previous intuitions and giving me more food for thought. Her analysis and proposals are as far-ranging as any “continental” figure, yet her approach is much clearer and more argument-centric than Agamben or Foucault. I will definitely be using this book in my future work, even if the second half inexplicably falls off in quality.