Being childless | Financial Times 10/11/20, 10:31 pm

FT Magazine Life & Arts

Being childless
Why are we so intolerant of those who choose not to be parents? A childfree
life is as good as any other – and often better

Photographs: Dreamstime

Janan Ganesh JUNE 27 2014

There is nothing like that moment when you cradle a friend’s newborn baby, gaze into its
helpless eyes and realise, with a pang, that you would rather be almost anywhere else.

There are some hardy dissidents in this, the Age of the Child. “Ours is a culture not of
ancestor worship but of descendant worship,” wrote the MP Rory Stewart, taking his career
into his hands, last year. “Our opium is our children.” Which makes voluntary childlessness
something like our hemlock. Over the past half-century, society has come to accommodate
every human type and version of the good life but one. Gay rights proliferated, women
were ushered into the workplace, racial discrimination was outlawed. We abased ourselves
to “communities” and “faith groups” touting shopping lists of sensitivities, privileges and
special dispensations.

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We are no longer citizens, sporting just one indivisible identity. We have become our
genders, pigmentations, sexual leanings, lifestyle choices and credal enthusiasms, and our
expanding notion of rights is always taking in new minorities: transgender people, the
depressed, the merely offended.

There is one exception to all this mutual reassurance. The tent of identity politics was never
pitched wide enough to cover people who forswear parenthood. There is no childfree
“community”, lobby or discourse to speak of. The childless are political unpersons – not
persecuted but not noticed either. Politicians on the prowl for female voters invariably
dangle pro-natalist policies, even though a fifth of British women have not given birth by
the age of 45. The welfare state is disproportionately a resource for parents. Child benefit,
subsidised childcare and the like constitute a prodigious transfer of money from non-
parents to parents. Every other redistribution – from rich to poor, native to immigrant,
young to old, region to region – is viciously contested. It is the stuff of politics. But not this,
the silent subvention.

Voluntary childlessness may be the one lifestyle of which we have actually become less
tolerant. In the 1970s, Britons did not mind or even notice that their prime minister, Ted
Heath, was both childless and unmarried. Could someone like that be elected now? In our
time, successful politicians not only flaunt their broods but, in the instances of Tony Blair
and David Cameron, add to them in office. Our attitude to the private arrangements of our
leaders has mutated from indifference to vulgar curtain-twitching curiosity to an
expectation that they will prove their fecundity to the pullulating masses.

In response, politicians simper and ingratiate. Cloying rhetoric about “hardworking

families” and “mums ’n’ dads” – of “giving every child the best start in life”, an aspiration
that does not even make sense in theory – is now the ambient noise of politics. A visitor
from the past exposed to the public life of today might assume the franchise was withdrawn
from people without children at some point in the 1990s, so little are they mentioned.

The childfree are short-changed by culture as much as by politics. The classic of the genre
is About a Boy, Nick Hornby’s smarmy story about a childless roué who – of course – ends
up undergoing an epiphany about the redemptive properties of fatherhood. Something
similar happens in both versions of the film Alfie (tellingly, the later one, made in 2004, is
more jeeringly censorious about the protagonist’s lifestyle than the earlier one, made in
1966).

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In literary fiction, he who shuns family life is affectless and sometimes malevolent.
Meursault, the titular outsider in Albert Camus’ existential novel, kills an Arab on a beach,
ostensibly because he feels like it. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho is just Jack the
Ripper transferred to Wall Street. The foremost chroniclers of masculinity unmoored from
hearth and home are Martin Amis and Michel Houellebecq, both conjurers of dark,
reptilian dystopias. Without a nest to tend, even our louchest writers seem to be saying,
nothing stands between a person and the moral abyss.

And that’s just the men, who are at least shown to be having a good time. Would that
childfree women were so lucky in their cinematic or literary renderings, which range from
the non-existent to the dowdily spinsterish. Perhaps the problem here is inherent to
storytelling: a narrative needs tension and ultimately a twist. A happily childless person
going on being happily childless won’t do. But it is a living reality for millions.

If childfree people win recognition anywhere, it is the market. “ Dinks”, the grating
commercial code for households with dual incomes and no kids, are too lucrative a bunch
to ignore. For marketing men, they are next of kin to the “ pink pound” and the bachelors
whose ardour for bars, restaurants and assiduous grooming keeps much of the urban
economy going. The historian Niall Ferguson took a mauling last year when he drew a
causal link between John Maynard Keynes’s rumoured homosexuality and his economic
counsel: only someone without heirs, he suggested, could be so insouciant about short-
term borrowing to fend off a recession. The debt would be borne by strangers.

Although Ferguson withdrew his theory in a din

of recrimination, it was not miles away from
Cloying rhetoric about getting at a truth about the rational incentives
‘hardworking families’ and that face childless people, gay or straight. To be
‘mums ’n’ dads’ is now the childfree is to encounter what economists call a
ambient noise of politics steep discount rate: money is worth more now
than in the future. Pension provision aside,
there is little reason to defer gratification.
College fees, a nest egg, a house big enough for a playroom – there sure are a lot of things
to not bother saving for.

This is why the procreating majority sometimes resents voluntary childlessness as an

expression of decadence and self-regard. There are, of course, poor childfree couples,
ascetic childfree couples, munificently philanthropic childfree couples. But the classic
Childfree Couple – the one in people’s heads, the one gloss-published on magazine covers
– always radiates a gilded narcissism. He is a banker, she is a barrister, their lifestyle is a
king’s ransom of Nespresso machines, luxury holidays in adults-only resorts, stress-free
nights on the town.

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This picture of denatured affluence is grossly wide of the mark but it is worth asking
ourselves what would be so bad about it if it were true. A conceptual challenge to which
even the most liberal societies are not yet equal is accepting that, for a good number of us,
this life – the material, temporal here and now – is enough, thank you very much. We
accept that many people do not hunger for a connection to the transcendent through God
but we struggle to understand people who do not seek transcendence through progeny
either. We assume that everyone must want to subsume themselves into “something
greater than ourselves”. But many of us do not. If our lives lack meaning as a consequence,
it is not obvious why a life with no meaning is any less enjoyable than Churchill’s “pudding
with no theme”.

And that is a colossal “if”. It is a dismal thing, life, if its highest meaning is its own
perpetuation. The distinguishing thing about being human is that we have other reasons to
live than the bleak circularity of continuing our species. We aim for more than the
Darwinian minimum. Art, travel, cuisine, sport, sex that signifies nothing but its own
pleasure, conversation with friends that works towards no practical purpose. We live for
the ludic. It is easier to partake in most of these things without the constraints of family.

Any distaste we feel about this account of the good life is at odds with almost everything
else we believe. After all, the whole point of the liberal journey that western societies have
been on since the 1960s – and, really, since the Enlightenment – is the primacy of the
individual. This is why we think discrimination on the basis of group identities – race,
gender, nation, faith – is so insidious. It is perverse to invest in this idea of individualism
for so long and then go all squeamish when it arrives at its logical conclusion: the childfree
life, the ultimate expression of self-realisation above living for others. Deeply conservative
societies can shun the decadently childfree and be consistent. Liberal societies – and
faithless, consumerist Britain more than most – simply cannot. Respecting those who
stand far from the breeding crowd is the unfinished business of liberalism.

If elective childlessness were inherently anti-social – and if it kept attracting more and
more adherents as a lifestyle – then by definition our civic culture would be doomed.
Society would become, to use the English title of Houellebecq’s most famous novel,
atomised. But what if this malign judgment of childlessness is not just mistaken but the
outright opposite of the truth? Stewart’s provocative case for a less child-centred society is
that it may actually allow for more, not less, commitment to the public realm. “People who
might once have been public figures, deeply invested in their work, are instead busy
serving their children,” he wrote. “I’d prefer our opium to be the struggle to create a living
civilisation.”

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Parenthood is socialising and de-socialising at the same time.

Yes, it plugs us into society’s institutional web – schools,
hospitals, nurseries, parks – and gives us an emotional stake
in the future. But it also means our familial duty supersedes
our duty to anything or anyone outside. The ancient Greeks
had the same worry, that reproduction dangerously narrowed
a man’s obligations from serving the demos to serving only his
family. It is why they saw a kind of civic virtue in
homosexuality. For them, the social contract was between
people living there and then – not, as Edmund Burke had it
two millennia later, between successive generations.

Photograph: Dreamstime The best case for parenthood is the most modest. It is no more
“meaningful” or “social” than the alternative lifestyle but it can be more soothing. A happy
family is a haven in an impersonal universe. In Don DeLillo’s career-making novel White
Noise, Murray Suskind, a cynical college professor with a theory about everything,
postulates that the family is the “cradle of the world’s misinformation”. We are “fragile
creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts” and so we form families to protect us by
“sealing off the world”. In these cocoons, “small errors grow heads, fictions ​proliferate”.
This is why the “strongest family units exist in the least developed societies”. It is not
necessary to go all the way with the professor on this one to sense that there is something
of the flight to safety in the nesting instinct. To form a family is to retreat into something.

Gary Becker, a real-life professor who won the

Nobel Prize for economics and died in May,
For a good number of us, agreed that rational calculation informs family
this life – the material life as much as gloopy sentiment. Parents invest
here and now – is enough, in their children, he suggested, to ensure that
thank you very much they are rich enough to look after them in their
dotage. The cold logic that runs through his A
Treatise on the Family upset many on its release
but it is true that people often talk of their desire to start a family as though they were
taking out an insurance policy: they hope it will give them “security”, “stability”, “someone
to care for us when we get old”.

These are proper, natural desires. Nobody could be thought less of for possessing them.
But they do give the lie to the notion that it is only childfree people who act out of
pragmatism and a longing for comfort. In fact, those who disavow the nuclear family
expose themselves to the world in all its sumptuous pleasures – and its harshest
vicissitudes. It is a kind of enhanced reality. Going childfree is not a frigid denial of life, it is
the ultimate immersion in life.

Janan Ganesh is an FT political columnist

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——————————————-

Letter in response to this column:

Single and childfree is a double crime / From Ms Judith Melby

Copyright The Financial Times Limited

2020. All rights reserved.

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