Parenting Amidst the Knowledge of Good and Evil
Meditations on the 5th Commandment, Pt. 3
The first commandment among people offers us a chance to once again resist the temptation of the tree in the garden.
See the reminder at the end about our upcoming book club on After Virtue, and a different opportunity to join the discussion.
Parenting and Predictability
As we have discussed already, the value given to the parent-child relation in the 5th commandment turns on the mystery of the relationship. Both parents and child come into view together, that each now inhabits a role which cannot be described totally in terms of the role itself. Though there are contours to what it means to be a parent or child, there is no textbook. There is no manual on what it means to be a child, or to be a parent, and you cannot anticipate what kind of children you get.
Since the advent of genetic testing, the door is opened wider to responding to just this kind of mystery by overcoming it. Once parents are given the ability to know certain things about a child, a constant decision tree—a new kind of tree of the knowledge of good and evil—opens up. The offer it makes is one of knowledge, of being able to differentiate at the onset what a good thing for our children consists of. The path opens up simply enough—a precaution here, a curiosity there—and takes us into darker paths which promise to undo the mystery before it can even unfold.
Let us stipulate at the onset that there is a line here between testing that parents do in order to be prepared to receive whatever your child is, and testing done that we might intervene. To know that your child is going to be a boy or a girl, or that you’ll be having more than one child can be seen as one kind of prudential preparation: one crib or two? Before there were more advanced methods of doing this, there were moon patterns, tea leaves, prayers to Saturn that you didn’t get twins or babies with birthmarks.
At this level, prenatal testing answers the prayers the one praying makes: you sought knowledge, and answered the prayer yourself. But here is where a little bit of knowledge leads to the desire for more, and not just the desire for knowledge but for action. The quandry here is that we are, in the Decalogue, past the confessions about God and into the territory of what humans are. And it is tempting to, once again, be like God in all things.
For God, knowing and doing are the same thing: God is purus actus, one without potential but one in whom intention and action and being are perfectly one. With God, there is no knowing a thing without will, or willing a thing without knowing it. But for us humans, these remain distinct—we can know many things, particularly with our children, but have not willed any of them. We can will many things, without knowing what exactly we have asked for1.
For in the very act of having a child, we do not know what we are willing. In fact, willing a child, as an effect of having sex, is precisely what we’re not able to do! From the very beginning, if a child happens, it’s out of the parents’ hands. There are ways of loading the dice, as it were, but the basic point remains that even with medical interventions, even the having of a child remains an act which we cannot will into existence, nor know perfectly2.
When it comes to what kind of child there is, this too remains out of our hands, though advanced genetic testing and interventions offer us more. But what is there still outstrips what we can know. Genetics are funny things, and do not behave in a straightforward fashion, activated both by environment and parentage. Thus, even if embryos are selected for or against for the sake of eliminating a more malicious marker, like sickle cell, there are innumerable things hiding in our biological inheritance which cannot be accounted for. That which is obvious to us from the past of the parents is only part of the story of what a child is, or what a child might become.
Able to will some things, and to know some things, we find ourselves in a place where our knowledge obscures as much as it reveals, and in which our willing cannot deliver on its promises.
And here are the murky waters: we know that we can will certain things when it comes to children—to not have children is as near an absolute thing as is possible to be willed. And we know that sometimes, what we will for our children can be made true: I can drive my children to tennis practice, and in this, they will be better players than they were before. But what our children receive in our willing for them is not always what we intend: who knows whether their presence on the courts will yield a harvest of love for tennis, or resentment?
Parenting the Living: A Conundrum
A turning point for my own intellectual journey was reading Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society: having been jettisoned by one university and received by another, I was trying to make sense of my own vocation, while also making sense of how our own children would be educated. It was the opening days of COVID, and the choice before us was whether or not to homeschool for a year. Illich makes the argument that education as it exists (in the 1970s) is largely concerned with credentialing, preparing for an economy which is largely credential based.
The mavericks, thus, are the ones who realize that education is a kind of mystery, and that it can be done just by doing things, trying things out, acquiring skills, and ignoring the siren song of having the right credentials alone. There are limits to his argument: sometimes, credentials and skills travel together, though it must be noted that the kinds of skills which get credentialed are frequently those which support the discipline as it is. Sometimes, those who are recognized are those most apt at keeping the elusive fire of knowledge burning. But his basic point, I think, is right: credentials, wherever they function, play an inherently conservative role to secure the institutions as credible, and more directly, to reduce mystery to technique.
If, as I have suggested, being a child and parent is a mystery into which we enter in, then parenting is more art than credential, more learning skills for navigation than passing a test. It is at this point that how we think about genetic testing fuses with our parenting approach: to be a person is a mystery, one which we can approach seeking to know and to will things for. But there are limits to what can be willed into another, and to what can be known about another. To press too far, desiring for another’s life that which cannot yet be desired, is to treat the child as a project and being a parent as a credential to master.
To parent is to parent a living thing, not a bundle of potential skills. And the temptation to reduce these living things to projected outcomes and manageable traits is omnipresent—in education, in church, in society at large. It is arresting parents for letting kids walk in neighborhoods alone, or presuming that theological education for children is a matter of good programming, or treating parenting as less habit formation than boundary-marking. There are boundaries for a child, to be sure, but they exist as those kinds of hinterland fences which mark off true danger. To understand boundaries like shock collars—ever-present realities to a child—is to already have marked out parenting as a process of rule-inhabiting, rather than taking on the risk of raising a living being.
Refusing to engage in genetic selection, discipline as a form of inquiring into a child’s needs and intentions, education as skill building—these are all part of a comprehensive approach which cohere to this basic facts of the relation. Entering into that requires a great deal of parents, and of children, for what you have been summoned into is a great mystery, and the fires of mystery always need tending.
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Reading Group Update: The first reading group session of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue will be January 12th, 2025, 7 p.m. It will be for supporting subscribers, but if you’d like to join in on the group, I’m going to do a special 10$ pass for all three sessions. Drop me a message here, and I’ll get you set up.
This is the premise of many tragedies, and horror films: to will into being that which we do not know. Pet Semetary and The Time Traveler’s Wife are, by this measure, the same film: the will to change the world exceeds our understanding of what is it that we have willed into being.
This basic point about how children happen should chasten our expectations, but mantras like “family planning” obscure mystery under a pious heading.