Strictfathermodel

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Monday, October 27, 2008

Friday, October 3, 2008

Voluntary sterility is functionally symbolic. It is a symbol for the search for moral purpose. For the most part it functions this way very differently, and perhaps more acutely, than any state of fertility. In almost any case, it is difficult to fully attribute fertility to free will.
There are currently over 6.6 billion people on the planet, and the collective resources to nurture and maintain this increasingly swollen population are vulnerable and grossly mishandled. Most alarmingly in the case of potable water, essential resources are tangibly shrinking beneath levels that can sustain the current needs of life – much less the needs of upcoming generations. Regardless, it appears safe to assume that the majority of people in the world remain committed to an ideology that making children is moral and appropriate. This is a concept that is not absolutely separable from the labor needs of agrarian society that in part gave structure to the ethical merit of children, but the ideology itself has independent meaning in contemporary industrialized society.
Reproduction is our powerful biological programming and it is also an understood, if not expressly instructed, moral teaching within most of our communities. The flip side of a resilient belief in the morality of procreation is that when people remain voluntarily childless, there is a sense in which they need to justify this abstention. This oversight of conscience exists within many of us who do not even consciously agree with its framing, but are emotionally tethered to it. To ignore traditional expectation, fail to fulfill our biological potential to reproduce ourselves (and our mates and our ancestors), and fail to exercise a proposed duty to support and further the family unit, is – by the parameters intrinsic to activating this moral dilemma - an ethically suspicious act.
The unique rewards and consequences of having and raising children are generally agreed upon and require little rehearsal by me, who has no first hand experience with the matter. The rewards, consequences, effects, and definitions of not having children are significantly less clear, less measurable, and less inspected. Who are the beneficiaries when we refuse to create our own children? Even more curiously, who might be cheated through this refusal? Who you determine as cheated or rewarded depends very much on what moral system you are using to solve the question.
In contemplating this, I became interested in George Lakoff’s “nation as family” metaphor and his construction of two opposing moral systems within it. In a series of books, beginning with his seminal 1996 Moral Politics, Lakoff has described how we all comfortably entertain metaphors for the nation as a family because our formative experience with governance and authority is found within the home. Expressions of this metaphor are found in rhetoric such as “founding fathers,” “band of brothers,” “daughters of the revolution,” “fatherland,” or “Mother Russia.” Lakoff describes his first moral system as being rooted in progressive values of empathy and responsibility, and he calls it the Nurturant Parent model. He names his alternative moral system, based on conservative ideas of reward, punishment, and self-sufficiency, after the right-wing parent coaching of James Dobson: the Strict Father model.
I wanted to submit the moral dilemma of reproduction to Lakoff’s two models, and see what conclusions could be reached. Lakoff writes that even dominantly progressive or dominantly conservative people have both Nurturant Parent and Strict Father models active in their brains. They may use one model at home and another on the job, or use a blend of the two in the voting booth. They may exclusively pursue Nurturant Parent morality, and yet activate a Strict Father model to understand certain brands of entertainment or sport. Lakoff calls someone who utilizes both moral systems a “biconceptual.”
Different aspects of one’s decision about reproduction fall under separate domains within both of Lakoff’s systems. I reasoned that within the context of a contemporary industrialized society, decision making about reproduction is always going to be an innately conflicted, biconceptual process. However, no matter how many nuanced factors entered into my own decision to have a vasectomy, I couldn’t escape the notion that I was somehow refusing the Nurturant Parent model by opting out of the proactive responsibility to help directly mold and nurture the next generation. Despite self-identifying as a progressive in almost all areas of my life, I wondered whether I was violating basic terms of Nurturant Parent morality within the arena of reproduction. With this uncertainty in mind, along with other considerations related to my paternal Hungarian lineage, I ultimately titled the exhibition project built around this experience Strictfathermodel.
However, having classified the matter broadly as a biconceptual decision making process, I needed to consider how my refusal to have my own children fit into the Nurturant Parent model. After my wife, then girlfriend, and I had an accidental pregnancy in 2003, followed by a miscarriage in 2004, I began to think of my own un-conceived children as substantial and reckonable realities and not anonymous abstracts. Unwanted or not, we had named our pregnancy and empathized with it. It remains the only time either one of us have been faced with or sharply pushed away from imminent parenthood, and the entire length of the experience was complicated and difficult for both of us. It is the Strict Father model that identifies the world as an innately dangerous place that requires the protective discipline of a strict moral authority. However, even the Nurturant Parent model necessarily acknowledges that danger exists in the world and that protection, albeit of a different order, is called for.
Once you admit the concept that the potential genetic weave of you and your mate is unique and specific, you quickly confront a conclusion that this potential for new life exists outside of you. One small but generous step further places you inherently in the role of parent, with or without actualizing your reproductive prospects. Is it possible, as a Nurturant Parent, to offer your children the ultimate guarantee – by never allowing the world the opportunity to wound or starve them?

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine of them would be blank. On the last page I should write: “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.”
-Albert Camus, 1937

Can morality be defined or summarized, as Camus suggests, by a “duty to love?” If so, a duty to love whom? Is it a duty to love yourself, or to love someone else, or both? Love in what way? If you love your family, for example, how should you demonstrate that love? Can you love the wrong way, perhaps in an immoral manner that discounts the love that motivates the action? Or is the loving in and of itself always right and always moral, even if the consequences are harmful or destructive?

As George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkeley, might observe, love is an idea that has an uncontested general meaning, but it becomes a highly contested concept once you begin to develop specifics or apply them. What might be interpreted as an act of love by one person may easily be seen as something entirely different, or potentially even hateful, by someone else.

Is holding someone’s hand an act of love? Is there an instance in which it wouldn’t be? What about leading the way for someone else? Is that an act of love? Or is it better, or at least more loving, to leave them alone?

Is it better to get a pet for company or protection? Is it more loving to get a gun? Is it loving to have something precious to protect? To get married and have a family that depends on you? It is said that the love one acquires for one’s own children is unique to itself and unlike any other type of love. Is it our duty to create that love? Is it our responsibility to fulfill our biological potential to create and raise our own children?

If so, to whom do we owe this to? Do we owe it to ourselves? If so, what part of ourselves do we owe it to? To our biology or to our spirit? To our sense of emotional responsibility or to our need to be loved in return? Do we owe children to our spouse or lover? Do we owe children to our mother and father? Our ancestors? Do we have a duty to the human race to copulate and reproduce? Perhaps we have a duty to the potential children themselves – those unconceived children, unique to the genetic mixture of us and our mate? What theoretical rights do we assign to our own unborn?

If unconceived children have rights, is it loving to protect these rights? If so, how do you protect them? What if you refuse to create these children, and instead protect them from the world by never introducing them into it? Does that count as loving? If you could protect your children from all potential harm, wouldn’t you do it? Or is that love of the self? Is it protection of the self? And if so, Camus, does that count?