Jonah

Hey, About a month ago, Bridget Phetasy posted on Twitter that it’d been two years since her dog passed away. This was my reply:

The great thing about dogs — one of the great things at least — is the rules that govern ranking other things don’t apply to dogs. I have never doubted that someone was telling the absolute truth when they said their dog was the best dog ever, even though I know for a fact that I’ve owned two of the best dogs ever and my current dogs will one day join them on Mount Rushmore as the four greatest dogs ever. It’s just not like mountains or money. There’s only one tallest mountain or richest person. But the number of obviously best dogs ever is almost infinite.   I bring this up not to talk about dogs, though I think you know that I am happy to be thrown in that briar patch. I bring it up to talk about something that dogs are a good illustration of.

So, against all my better judgment, let’s stick with dogs for a moment longer. The replies to my tweet were more edifying than most, and not just for the conspicuous absence of antisemitic bile. People got what I meant. It’s not like I persuaded anybody. They already agreed before I said anything, because people who love their dogs understand that the realm they share with them is outside of the realms in much of the rest of their lives. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I like posting stuff about dogs—they don’t care about politics or “influence” and their indifference is contagious. I find that deeply comforting in this time of stupid, ugly politics.

Humans and dogs are very different in all sorts of obvious ways: number of legs, mathematical aptitude, etc. But one difference I think about a lot may not be so obvious. Telling your dog you love it is pretty futile; you have to show it. I know dog owners who will disagree with this. The ones who aren’t entirely wrong will say that dogs can pick up on your voice, mood, etc. Fair enough. But even so, that’s more showing than telling. The words alone are the “blah blah blahs” from The Far Side cartoon. We show our love in all of the mundanely obvious ways. We feed them, we play with them, and we just hang out with them. The hardest parts of dog ownership, by far, are the ones where our love seems like punishment: taking them to the vet, retrieving delicious but dangerous things from their mouths, giving them pills, and, worst of all, having to decide to say goodbye to them (though you’re doing that wrong if it seems like anyone but you feels punished).

Which brings me to parenthood. Children and dogs are very different, and I think it can be a mistake to be confused on this point. People frequently ask me why, in my tweets in which Pippa talks to people, she refers to me as “thumb guy” and my wife as “the special lady.” Part of it is just a long-running silly joke about how, when we’re in the park, I’m using my phone to take her picture on the thumb machine I’m always using. But the more serious reason is that I don’t want to contribute, publicly, to the “furbaby” discourse in which we talk about dogs as if they are human children. I don’t want Pippa referring to me as “daddy” or to the Fair Jessica as “mommy.” I won’t claim we stick to this rule in private, but that’s sort of the point: That’s private. You can quibble with the reasoning of my rule of thumb (guy), but I’m sticking with it.

For all the massively important and real differences between human children and dogs, those differences are, in some respects, narrowest when our kids are babies. That’s because when they’re babies, words don’t matter very much. Yes, talking to babies is good for their development and all that, but the imperative is to show your love more than tell it. Among the worst experiences in my life were the times I had to take my preverbal daughter to a doctor or hospital for her own good, because I couldn’t explain that it was for her own good. I had to do it anyway. Because that’s what parents have to do. Because we love our children. We’ll come back to that.

Nikole Hannah-Jones has generated a lot of buzz over her revelatory essay about deliberately sending her kid to a bad school. Some would describe her pensée as “soul searching.” I’m not inclined to do that, because I don’t think she searched as deeply as she wants to suggest. Charlie Cooke covers a lot of my thoughts on the matter.

He focuses, rightly, on something Hannah-Jones said in 2024: “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.” This is wrong. It’s wrong in profound ways. It’s also a very old and shockingly common idea.

In 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry was featured in one of MSNBC’s old “Lean Forward” agitprop ads in which she said public education was underfunded “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children ‘your kid is yours’ and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are ‘our children.’” Her solution: “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

Hillary Clinton said in 1996, “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.”

The first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day, than this new thought about the child … the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny … of the private home.”

I think this is gross. It’s no less gross if you are willing to grant that it is well-intended, something I struggle to do at times. We’re all familiar with the way good intentions can pave a path we don’t want to go down. Indeed, I find it fascinating how anyone can simultaneously treat The Handmaid’s Tale as almost a form of secular prophecy and entertain this line of thinking. After all, nationalizing, or socializing, the raising of children seems like a necessary first step down the path of good intentions leading to a kind of hell.

Before I get to my fundamental objection, I should offer a lesser one. This is bad public policy. One of the best ways to identify when the government is failing is not when we vote at the ballot box, but when we vote “with our feet.” There are few better examples of what social scientists call “revealed preferences” than packing up and moving someplace else—for better schools, lower taxes, or, in the case of people fleeing despotic regimes, for simple freedom. Watching a video of Germans trying to escape East Berlin, or of Vietnamese boat people, or anyone else fleeing countries with a more “collective notion” of raising children, will teach you more about those regimes than any textbook.

Our system works on the assumption that parents care more about their children than anyone else. I’m not saying it works great, and sometimes that’s because parents don’t care enough. But a system designed around the assumption that parents not only don’t but should not care more about their kids is a recipe for a system that would make “the tragedy of the commons” a real tragedy. Imagine a school system where parental feedback did not exist, save as some sort of sentiment about children as an undifferentiated, commodified mass of future workers.

But my point isn’t about public policy per se. It’s about parental policy, for want of a better word. Hannah-Jones didn’t vote with her feet, she voted with her child. She made her daughter an instrument of her politics, a flesh-and-blood virtue signal. And she did it based, at least in part, on her “values,” which take it as a self-evident truth that her child is not worth more than any other. Now, seen from the perspective of an education bureaucrat or a politician, this is a more defensible claim than some are willing to concede. The job of public officials is to care about all of the kids under their supervision more or less equally. I say “more or less” because I think even here some distinctions can and should be made. The students who really care about doing the work should be rewarded with the ability to do it without having to navigate bullying, violence, or disruption by students who don’t. That doesn’t mean the bad apples should be written off. It just means that choices always have to be made. Having a whole class held hostage to the worst-behaved troublemakers is a choice, just as removing those troublemakers is a choice. To govern is to choose. There are no policy solutions, only trade-offs, and all that.

But Hannah-Jones isn’t an administrator or politician. She’s a parent. And her kid is hers—and her husband’s—and no one else’s. It’s a bit like the Marine Rifleman’s creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Except a child is not a rifle, it is a human being that is dependent upon its parents to become the best, happiest, and healthiest person possible. It’s hard. Every parent fails to one degree or another. But the failures are all relative, and with love, hard work, and, alas, a good deal of luck, the failures are modest.

But what is essential is the idea—no, not the idea, because ideas are just theories held in the mind—the passion, the conviction, the certainty that your child is worth more than all the others, to you. That’s the realm that children are supposed to live in. It should follow them around like a force field as they navigate the world around them. My parents are in my corner. They may get things wrong, they may make mistakes, they might “just not understand” this or that, but that they love me is unquestionable. I’m trying not to cannibalize my book in advance of it (eventually) being done. But the category error that Hannah-Jones makes is importing the logic of the external order, what Friedrich Hayek called the “macrocosm,” into her “microcosm” of the family. It’s the same mistake all of the people who want our children to be raised collectively make. They think the rules of our private realm of sacrifice and solidarity, familial loyalty and collective purpose, can and should be extended to the whole of society. But the political order in a liberal system—and ours is still a liberal system, for now—is for political things. Again, a politician can and should ideally work from the assumption that all children are of equal worth, because in a liberal system all humans are of equal worth. That is the core idea of liberalism: We are all equal in the eyes of God and government. But a parent isn’t a politician. A parent is a jealous guardian of their child or children. Vast swaths of good parenting are captured by the statement, “I don’t care what the other kids are doing. They aren’t my kids.”

And I should say, this is true in nonliberal systems, too. No society has ever been constructed where the attachments of family have been completely erased. Many have tried, with horrific successes at the margins. But total victory has always been impossible because love of children is written on the human heart, not in law books.

That’s because the microcosm is the cosmos we are born into. We can be torn from it, and trained to see the state as our parents, in some real-world version of Plato’s republic or some cockamamie postliberal “common good” or “social justice” utopia. But in the real world, we call such efforts the very definition of totalitarianism. That microcosm is where children and, yes, dogs live. The difference between dogs and children is that dogs never leave the microcosm. They stay in the pack of the little platoon forever. Where all we can do is show love without being able to explain it.

Children always keep one foot in the microcosm, ideally. But they also learn how to live in the macrocosm by first being formed in the microcosm. And eventually, the idea is that they create a new microcosm of their own.

I’m not saying what Hannah-Jones did was totalitarian or a crime. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love her child. She obviously does. I’m saying her attachment to politics broke the force field that is supposed to surround her child. As the line—often misattributed to Talleyrand—goes, what she did was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.

When Hannah-Jones explained that she voted with her child to her child, she “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.”

“‘So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?’ she said, hurling her words. ‘Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?’”

Hannah-Jones seems to realize her mistake: “Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”

But the primary mistake wasn’t that she didn’t send her child to the “‘best’ school” (there’s so much going on in those scare quotes by the way). That’s secondary. Najya’s shoddy education can be remedied, to some degree. But that’s a symptom. The real mistake, the actual betrayal, was in showing—and then telling—her child that she wasn’t worth the world, compared to all the other children in it, to her.