Children, noise, Hayek, and broadband

[FYI, this is in part what I intended to respond with over at Rachel’s. I’m posting it on my own blog because it’s not my place to take over hers 🙂 It has grown somewhat as I worked on it, and I think I may now have an inkling of how den Beste must feel as he writes. Bear with me.]
I have had my basic liberal democratic principles questioned over on Rachel Lucas’s blog, in the comments to the post there that I linked earlier, by an apparent progressive type who thinks I am an opinionated, self-centered megalomaniac with delusions of godhood. (Hmm, that should get a rise out of Naylor.) Well, actually what he said was that the world doesn’t revolve around me.
But of course it does, sir. I hope it revolves around you, too. I think it has something to do with feelings of self-worth and self-conciousness, an opinion that I can change the world in some ways, and an acknowledgement that there are some things in this world that I can simply do nothing about. If I could kill Yasser Arafat, or Saddam Hussein, I’d be there locked and loaded. Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about that, short of backing the administration in their efforts to dethrone their sorry asses. So yes, the world does revolve around me. Live with it. I live with the fact that it revolves around you, after all.
The smoke and fire over at Rachel’s had to do with attitudes about noisy children (I believe I characterized them as squalling candy-grubbing brats) in stores and restaurants (in any case, in public spaces). Now allow me to state that in my opinion, noise (particularly that of children) in its place is fine. I don’t object to family reunions or birthday parties because of children running around screaming, or babies crying for whatever reason. Rather, I expect it, and I revel in it.
I think however that we are talking about a different type of noise. In public I expect a different sort of decorum. I expect children to be well-behaved, and their parents to control them if they are not. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the way it was when I grew up, and I expect nothing less of succeeding generations.
I have never subscribed (and will never subscribe) to the idea that control of YOUR children in public space is up to ME (or vice versa, so stay away from any kids I may ever have or suffer the consequences). Your children are not my responsibility (unless of course they have been officially handed over to my responsibility, such as in the Boy Scouts to go camping, or by a relative or friend to spend the weekend), regardless of what Hillary Clinton thinks. (Not that Hillary really thinks, but I digress.)
It does NOT take a village to raise a child, which is what my opponent would have us believe in telling me that I should lend a hand, or make a donation, or suggest that a particular store have a no-candy checkout lane, or shut up and suffer. That is the progressive, left-wing mentality which argues that all people, no matter how far removed — in other words, the “village” — must collaborate in the raising of a child. This is a fallacy perpetuated by the ghostwritten book ascribed to Hillary Clinton with that title. It was never the case in American history that the entire village collaborated per se in the raising of individual children (although I’ll retract that statement if someone shows me an historical example of a purely socialist governmental unit within the United States where parents surrendered their children to central authority to be raised; weird little Utopian religious communities like the ones in Southern Indiana don’t count). Correct them when their parents weren’t around maybe, but that was to be expected, because there was a certain decorum that reigned in people’s lives when the Republic was young, even up until say the 1950’s, and people weren’t expected to have to put up with unruly children. But parents of unruly children always found out about their behavior, even if they weren’t around to correct it in person. My mother and father were fully aware of this system of inter-adult communication while growing up. So then were my sister and I.
So contrary to popular belief on the left, it takes parents to raise a child, not a community of people waving their fingers in the child’s face. Ultimately it is not MY responsibility to correct YOUR child. To paraphrase what Rachel said, “YOU had ’em; YOU correct ’em”. And I won’t threaten to sic the cops on you when you do, unless you do something stupid like lock them in a closet or try to starve them or drown them in a bathtub. There are limits.
The difference between my opponent and myself is that I do not think like a progressive, and I don’t try to win arguments by setting up straw men that make it look like I should. I think like a liberal democrat (please carefully note the small “l” and small “d”) of the Hayek persuasion who believes that responsibility for all actions ultimately devolves on those who are most directly responsible — in this case, parents who should be taking responsibility for their own children — and not on the community at large. Community child nurturing, like central planning, doesn’t work. It’s what has given us the ill-groomed, black-clad, gloom-and-doom teenagers we see all the time who believe in nothing and see no hope in their future.
I do not hate children. I joke about hating children, but I don’t mean it (I helped a single mom girlfriend raise one, how can I hate children?). I simply do not prefer at this time to have them around 24/7. If I did, you can be sure that they would either be at home when Sally and I went out, or on their best behavior when out in public with us. I see no reason to take children shopping, certainly not four of them at a time as was postulated over at Rachel’s, and I see no reason to disrupt entire restaurants by bringing them along until they are old enough to behave themselves. Think about it for a moment — who is the more selfish? The one who complains about the bratty children who won’t shut up, or the parent who brought the children along because it was too much trouble not to? If you choose the first, you’re clearly from the left. If you choose the latter, you must be somewhere off to the right. If you can’t decide, you must be a centrist. (They used to call these people “mugwumps”. You could look it up.)
I can count at least four young men (only one related to me, through my sister) and one young lady who will undoubtedly consider me to be a beloved if curmudgeonly uncle when I’m old. (They consider me that now anyway.) I don’t feel bereft because I don’t have a child of my loins who will carry my name to another generation. Neither does my wife, and for much the same reason (except that she’s got a gazillion kids who feel that way about her).
It may shock a lot of people to know that if Sally and I did adopt children, I would likely be a stay-at-home Dad. And I’d love every minute of it. And I wouldn’t lose a dime in compensation.
How strange our lives are in this age of broadband ethernet and telecommuting … I don’t leave the house to go to work every day, but I make most of the money, which means that Sally was able to quit the job she had before we got married and take a job doing what she really LIKES doing (teaching swimming) that brings home considerably less than she made before. And who cares? It’s all OUR money, and we both enjoy what we do, and we enjoy spending OUR money together. So it works.
And so it goes.