a weird review

Moira Donegan on What Are Children For

I spent the final days of summer working on What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, a new book that proposes to make the case for having children from a non-religious, not-based-on-birth-rates, and not-evil perspective.

WACF eventually concludes children are good—notably, one good among several others—because life is. I have some serious issues with the book: my main critique, which should come out in the next issue of The Raven, is that it has a Nietzsche problem. Nietzsche’s contention in Twilight of the Idols is that using logic and reason to argue for the goodness of life is self-defeating, and I think he’s on to something; and this is probably more true when it comes to children. See the expression on my child’s face above.

The book has mostly received praise, however, until this week, when Moria Donegan published a piece in Bookforum that is not just a bad book review, but a weirdly wrong one. The subject of children is at once anodyne and volatile, and as anyone can tell you, speaking in praise of one’s individual choice will often feel like a judgment on someone else’s. Donegan’s response to the volatility gets dark fast: she opens with an anecdote of feeling attacked by a comment from a friend who spoke out of hatred of yet another woman; she ends the review via the pleasure of malice, enjoying the literary revenge of praising the hated woman in question. As Nietzsche might say, bad air.

But the issue is not just that Donegan mistakes or misinterprets various positions, paragraphs, etc., because she let herself feel personally attacked and/or that public support for having children sounds like a slippery slope towards bad or oppressive politics. She also goes out of her way to portray the book as the opposite of itself, arguing that it’s for things it argues against. This puzzles me: I can’t tell if she’s a bad reader or acting in bad faith, or simply caught in the storm of feeling implicitly judged (the latter being a place I do have sympathy for). Because if anything, the book worked too hard to anticipate and avoid any sort of argument that might have even the appearance of supporting bad politics. But present in this work there was a fair amount of spelling out and clarifying of just what the book wants to argue for. So it’s not just that ducking under that work in order to be mad about someone else’s politics and one’s own friends is a little silly, the misrepresentation is egregious to the point of not fully making sense.

Here’s a few of the weirdnesses.

No. 1: Bad Bedfellows

Donegan writes: “They still advance two of the pro-natalist movement’s central claims: that motherhood is superior and childless lives are comparatively impoverished.”

Ok, well, no they didn’t. They went out of their way to present having children as one good among the most choice-worthy things. The approach was Platonic-Aristotelian or something akin, certainly, where not all choices are equally good (think addiction), but that’s still a much less controversial claim; they settled on the point that having children sits in the list of the top ten things that one might do if one is ambitious for the good (232-3). Donegan therefore has to present the claim that they secretly think motherhood is the best form of life as a kind of inference:

That friendship and ideas endure while people endure is not a platitude, it is a true fact. That it is true does not entail that an art or career within one’s life is inferior or superior to one that includes having a child. It is possible to share the generational labor (my one agreement with Donegan is that the book did seem somewhat unfair to economic concerns). We all need each other. This does not have to be an unjust or even a realpolitik concern. As Shadi Hamid put it recently, the good life is non-partisan, or it should be; it is possible to support a good thing for good reasons, and not for the bad reasons of other people, without a guilty conscience.

No. 2: Desire

Ok, no, this was actually one of the issues I had with the constriction of their method. They explicitly argue that desire isn’t the right way to investigate this, to the point of, on my read, finding arguments about desire suspicious as such (168). The word “instinct” is used only six times, usually to anticipate or incur pain, or to represent false wisdom. (I am pro-desire, and I don’t think being silent on the nature of desire is the best way to avoid the bad actors of evo-psych. But that’s an argument for another day.)

No. 3: Eco-selfishness

AB&RW have a lengthy final chapter on climate change and nihilism via eco-fiction. They argue that eco-fiction fails as fiction because it presents humans as cartoonishly selfish, and use Jonathan Lear to argue that this move represents a wasteful transference of anxiety that keeps us from more useful action (212). They were persuasive in this, as well as persuasive in pointing out that on the whole, as sociological trend, climate change as a reason for not having kids is not nearly as broadly operative as trends in activism would have one believe. This is interesting, and a valuable data point to take into account. But it’s not fair to smush these two points into one and conclude they “suggest” a cause of childlessness is selfishness.

No. 4: Le féminisme

Not this one either! The survey had its troubles, but it took a straight party line on whose views have become outré, noting the typical problems people have with each thinker.

This does, however, leads me to a final cavil. Berg’s final personal essay, which is affecting, is a kind of postscript describing her newly-arrived experiences with her daughter, who had not yet come into being during much of the book’s writing. The essay concludes by taking a position fairly similar to that earlier identified with Shulamith Firestone and Adrienne Rich, that mother-child love is at the root of all other love (241). But Berg doesn’t tie her essay back into the earlier conversation, perhaps in part because the critiques of Firestone and Rich seem unanswerable, or at least, to mention them seems unpersuasive. I did get the sense that the book argued more minimally for children as a good than the authors might ultimately conclude. The fairest motive I can ascribe to Donegan’s reaching for inferences and a certain measure of paranoia (justified in other cases, not this one) is hearing echoes of that larger case unsaid, in what is certainly a dangerously unsettled time for politics.

But the choice to argue for children minimally, for good or for ill, was the point of the book. It has to be possible to argue for good things that other people have misunderstood. Misrepresenting What Are Children For? will not solve politics, or make the lingering burnt-earth feeling of inter-woman hatred go away. Why not make a fair argument instead?