On Making Babies and Making Enemies
To lower the temperature of social discourse, we need to use better interpretive principles
A few weeks ago, a tweet went viral and sparked a debate about the relationship between having children and the meaning of life. The tweet reads, “‘you should have children because it will give your life meaning like nothing else will’ is a profoundly reactionary statement, and also not true at all sorry!” This post ignited a back-and-forth between two sides that were clearly interpreting the original quotation in very different ways.
One side argued that it is reactionary to say children add unique meaning to life because it implies a person’s life (more specifically, a woman’s life) is meaningless or seriously deficient without children. The other side argued that observing the unique value of having children does not imply that a person’s life is bereft of purpose without them.
What troubled me about the whole exchange was how typical it is of our public discourse. Someone makes an apparently innocuous statement, and others, sensing that the speaker is not one of “us” but one of “them,” rush to give the worst possible interpretation of that statement. Those who perceive the original speaker to be on their side come to the speaker’s defense. A dustup ensues where everyone rallies around their respective flags. Nothing is accomplished, except an increase in the resentment we feel toward those we regard as our opponents—“Those fascists think women have no value apart from being breeders,” or “Of course, feminism is now showing its true anti-natalist nature.”
I worry that such exchanges are a symptom of a very serious societal malady, a sickness that C.S. Lewis warns about—namely, the desire to think the worst of people whom one regards as one’s opponents simply because there is a kind of pleasure in hating one’s enemies. This practice may be common, but it is corrosive to our politics and to our souls.
Why is it that we’re so ready to assume the worst of one another? And is there anything we can do about it?
The Hermeneutics of Suspicion
I suspect part of the problem is that we either don’t know or aren’t willing to follow sound interpretive principles. Rather than instinctually interpreting others in the best possible light, the dominant hermeneutics in our culture is what has been called, in reference to the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” The hermeneutics of suspicion, inspired by thinkers like Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, is a style of interpretation that seeks to reveal the hidden dynamics of power that lie beneath everyday social phenomena. What may appear to be innocuous words or practices, when subjected to the hermeneutics of suspicion, may reveal themselves to be motivated—consciously or otherwise—by the demands of sex (Freud), money (Marx) or power (Nietzsche).
Subtly, everyday cultural practices instill a “false consciousness”—warping the minds of the oppressed to get them to take part in their own oppression, as when the poor champion the efficiency of capitalism or women extol the virtues of the patriarchy. In the interest of truth and liberation, the hermeneutics of suspicion aims to reveal such subterranean expressions of domination for what they are.
Most college-educated people have experienced some amount of training in the hermeneutics of suspicion—whether they know it as such or not. The rest of us pick up the practice because it is ubiquitous in our social interactions. While typically associated with thinkers on the “left,” the hermeneutics of suspicion has also been adopted by those on the “right.” For example, they instinctively see in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts not a desire to help those who are struggling, but a cynical attempt of progressives and minorities to amass power for themselves and inflict pain on those they regard as oppressors.
Many people who read the original quotation (“you should have children because it will give your life meaning like nothing else will”) as reactionary are, even if only implicitly, thinking something like the following: “Such statements are a manifestation of subtle and structural sexism embedded in language that nudges women to think of themselves and their value as being found solely in their ability to bear children. People who say things like this are complicit in sexism even if they aren’t aware of it. And we need to teach the hermeneutics of suspicion so we can see it, identify it and root it out.”
The hermeneutics of suspicion suggests a distinctive approach to language. In this view, it’s less that people use language and structure to communicate with one another and more that power uses people and their language to perpetuate itself. That is, the question of what the person meant becomes less important. What matters is the subjection of those who are childless, especially women.
I fully appreciate the value of the hermeneutics of suspicion. For example, I think Marxists are correct in saying that ideologies are often produced by those in power to get the oppressed to accept and even justify their own oppression. We should learn to interpret the social world with a skeptical eye. At the same time, as Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf once suggested, the hermeneutics of suspicion should be a lens, not a corneal transplant. Part of the trouble is that for many people, because of their education or simply from living in our “all too online” society, the only principle of interpretation they have in their toolbelt is the hermeneutics of suspicion. We need more interpretive tools.
The Principle of Charity
One such tool is what the philosopher Donald Davidson called the principle of charity. The principle of charity doesn’t mean trying to be kind to your interlocutors (though that’s important too). It means that if you want to understand someone, you should try to maximize the rationality and truth of a speaker’s words. It means, among other things, that you don’t attribute obviously false beliefs to someone unless you have very good reasons to do so. This is especially true if you don’t already know what the speaker’s beliefs are.
Again, you should apply the principle of charity not necessarily because you are trying to be kind, but because you likely won’t understand what a speaker means in the first place unless you do. You might end up having to attribute false beliefs to someone, but you can’t start there. The principle of charity is an opening gambit. As you proceed to dialogue with the speaker, you can and should update your interpretation in light of new evidence.
So, bearing in mind the principle that if you want to understand someone, you should try to maximize the truth of what they are saying and avoid attributing false beliefs to them, I submit the following: It is obviously false that people only have meaning or value insofar as they have children. It is also false that people are missing something essential to a meaningful or valuable life if they don’t have children. Consequently, we should not start our process of interpretation by attributing those beliefs to people, unless we have really good reasons to believe that this is what they think.
Is there a way that we can plausibly preserve the truth of the original tweet’s quoted statement (“you should have children because it will give your life meaning like nothing else will”) without attributing to the speaker false, reactionary beliefs? Yes, I think there is. I believe that statements of this kind are primarily statements about the speaker’s own experiences, not about the hearer’s life, meaning, value or whatever. In other words, such statements can and, in the absence of reasons to the contrary, should be read as testimonials.
Testimonials are common in our culture. From our friends to commercials, people tell us we should do things: “You should try the fettuccine alfredo—it’s to die for.” “You haven’t been to Disneyworld? Have you even lived?!” “I think you should go to college. Studying the classics under an expert will expand your mind in a way that nothing else can.” “You should go to a Brazilian steakhouse; it will change your life” (I can testify to this one myself). There is nothing at all unusual about people recommending that other people try something on the basis of their own experience.
But, since the original topic was having children, I suspect there’s something deep and interesting going on with this kind of testimonial. Having children is an instance of what philosophers sometimes call “transformative experiences.” Other instances include falling in love or having a religious “peak” experience. Some people report life-altering transformations after using LSD or undergoing MDMA therapy.
In such cases, it’s not as if the person was incomplete before having the experience. Completeness versus incompleteness is just the wrong metaphorical space for thinking about experiences of this kind. A house may be improved by an addition, but it doesn’t mean it was incomplete before. A circle is not an incomplete sphere; rather, a sphere is circularity extended along a new axis.
People who have had a transformative experience have undergone a change that they find hard to explain or even make sense of to someone who has not had that experience—including, I think, their earlier self. Their self or their reality is extended in a new dimension that they couldn’t fathom before and that borders on the inexpressible now.
The crucial point is that growth in one dimension is not necessarily better than extensions into other dimensions. Having a child and becoming a religious mystic both extend the self, but they do so in incompatible and perhaps incommensurable ways. Both may lead people to think of their present state as superior to their previous state. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they think their present life is better than other lives they might have lived.
In life, we are sometimes confronted with the choice between incompatible paths. Due to the nature of transformative experiences, many of these decisions are made with a kind of blindness. C’est la vie! Those who love us may wish to shed a small amount of light on some of our available paths, though they know that “our mileage may vary” (and the better they know and love us, the more sensitive they’ll be to this fact).
They may say: “I offer testimony for the path I’ve chosen. I encourage you to take it too. You might not understand it now, but in the end, you’ll wonder—as I do—how you could have ever lived another way.” Such testimony implies the speaker thinks the hearer will regard their life after the change as better than their present state in a unique and irreplaceable way, but it doesn’t mean they think it is necessarily the best in any absolute sense.
Why It Matters
In the absence of context and knowledge of what the speaker believes, I think the most charitable—and therefore the most plausible—interpretation of the speaker who says “you should have children because it will give your life meaning like nothing else will” is to take it as a kind of testimony. The upshot is that we no longer need to believe that the speaker is reactionary. In fact, it seems to me that, if my interpretation is right, the speaker might also endorse pretty mainstream feminist views about the value of women, law, cultural norms and the like. The two aren’t obviously incompatible.
Viewing the social world solely through the lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion may seem like the basis of good political advocacy, but it’s not. If we are fluent in multiple kinds of interpretation, we’re more likely to understand what people are actually saying and to have productive conversations with them. We’re also less likely to alienate potential political allies. Consider: Many, if not most people, would regard the text of the quotation in the tweet as simply unremarkable. They will likely (and understandably) find the suggestion that they are reactionary for feeling this way alienating.
We live in a liberal democracy. And in a liberal democracy, if you want to avoid bad political outcomes for women (or for anyone), then the best thing you can do is develop coalitions and foster solidarity. If you take roughly half of your potential allies and imply that they are reactionary for sympathizing with fairly mainstream views about having children, that will make them less likely to come to your aid should you call for it. They might just, instead, be tempted to return the interpretive favor. In sum, injudicious use of the hermeneutics of suspicion is likely to create enemies out of potential allies. Bad hermeneutics is bad politics.
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