the New Pantagruel

Weddings and Wrong Choices

by Ragan Sutterfield

was recently at a wedding that was, as weddings often are, the reunion of old friends. Afterwards, a few of these friends and I got around to discussing our feelings about the marriage. The conversation was, surprisingly, one of concern–concern for the choices our friend was making and for the kind of life that he was moving toward. That life was domestic and simple. Having decided against earlier plans for graduate school, he had decided to work instead as a house-framer, an occupation he had come to love over several summers of work. He and his wife were to live on two acres in a rural community and hoped to create a good home economy which produced some of its own food. Moreover, both were open to the possibility of children in their marriage–meaning that they were not interested in the expense and effort required to technologically exclude them.

Four Soils by Jim Janknegt

I could not have been happier at the choices the new couple were making. I felt that they were better suited to rural living than to life in the academy, and I felt that at its base it was a good life, one concerned with justice and responsibility toward neighbors. Yet I was the only one among my companions who felt this way. The rest feared that the couple was making a mistake; that the groom was throwing away his talent and intelligence, not to mention his “education.” Such criticisms are examples of a quiet and pervasive prejudice that animates our age and economy–a prejudice that legitimizes our economy of violence and keep us ultimately from an economy of Good.

The first result of this prejudice among my friends was their aversion to family. They could not understand why someone would so entangle themselves. It was not that they were against marriage. They could understand the idea of marrying some loved one. What they could not understand was the idea of marrying and allowing oneself to be “tied down” with children.

Children, undoubtedly, often keep one from doing what one may want to do. With children, travel is limited and more complex. Schedules become more regular and less spontaneous. Time and attention must be concentrated on activities outside of our list of wants and goals. Children interrupt the ideal modern marriage in which both partners want the same things and share the same goals. In short, children inevitably break the modern ideal of shared selfishness.

That the groom’s critics were implicitly aware of these facts was obvious. What is no longer so obvious is the assumption that selfishness is a vice. On the contrary, advertisers have done a good job of turning it into a near virtue, a momentary good against our otherwise complete altruism: “Do something good for yourself today, you deserve it.” Yet if any ethic is to have success it must begin with the understanding that there are people other than oneself; this is the first step that must precede the real ethic of treating others as oneself.

Children not only offer a break from narcissism but are also instructors in care. It is commonplace for people who once lived risky lives to change when they have children. By excluding children from both married and societal life, our culture has indefinitely prolonged our ability to act irresponsibly in the pursuit of our desires. Children make one think not only of the future, but also give a sense of purpose beyond personal goals. A culture that welcomed children would be less destructive to both the social and natural worlds simply because the focus would be turned, even slightly, from our selfishness. Children remind us of our dependence and thus of our own responsibility to those who came before us and those who come after us. The young and old demand our care, and the disabled require it. And for each demand our personal freedom is limited. The dependent “tie us down,” they “trap us.” And ever since Rousseau the temptation of liberalism has been to leave the epileptic in the street–to remove the limit and forget about it. If we cannot completely remove a limit (as in abortion) then we give it to an institution that can absorb it (as in childcare). The result is an unbounded person, free to move from place to place and buy without limit on abstract credit. And while limits will eventually impose themselves on us, we continue to view them as “problems” that must be mitigated rather than the very possibility of community.

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