I am a father who served for many years as the primary caregiver for two young children. How did that happen? I made deliberate choices that sacrificed my earning potential in the formal economy for value and quality of life gains for my entire family at home. Did I earn less? Absolutely. Was it 100% the right choice to make? Without a doubt.

Even today, now that my kids are in school, figuring out how to make things work is often a serious challenge. I still work occasionally from bedtime to midnight or 1 a.m. so I can be there to take care of my kids during those precious hours when they’re at home. As I write this by dictation I am rushing to make a delivery so I can finish and be back in time to pick up my kids from school.

My life went a certain way because of choices I made. Did I pay a price for those choices? Sure. Did I also gain things from that tradeoff? For certain. People aren’t simply the products of their environment or social conditions or economic structures. People aren’t simply piano keys to be played by some larger forces. We have our own desires and values and make our own choices based on them, and there are demands and responsibilities and ambitions that we have to prioritize, because it really isn’t possible to have it all or do it all. We aren’t superhuman. We aren’t God.

I often feel, though, like experts and activists and politicians and the government are trying to convince me otherwise by making the argument that I could have it all and wouldn’t have to make any compromises, that my choices wouldn’t need to matter so much and have such high stakes and complexity and risk so much, if only I would give them a bit more power and funding. And that’s a tempting offer. Who wouldn’t find that pitch appealing? Give up a bit more of my responsibility and my productive capacity and autonomy to them, and they will take care of me and relieve my load.
To be perfectly frank, there are some responsibilities I’m reluctant to surrender to paid or government-funded substitutes and institutions, even for the sake of ease, convenience, and freedom. Especially when those solutions compete with or may even be trying to replace evolved solutions refined through thousands of generations and millions of years to give individual humans personal agency over the most fundamental responsibilities that human life entails.

Responsibilities, I should add, whose assumption provides the greatest means for durable meaning and happiness in life that exists. Marriage and parenthood are by far the most important and meaningful and productive jobs you will ever work at. And some of us are sensible enough to know that and make choices based on it. It isn’t for everyone, but even if it isn’t, it’s still the strongest game in town. I’ve read Melinda Gate’s book, and it’s essentially a plan to replace both the assets and feelings of marriage and parenthood with government and NGO programs, so everyone can live their best lives and become an engineer or executive like her. And that’s the kind of benevolent nightmare that not only won’t work but that will fundamentally denigrate humanity, not empower it.

Having said that, her motivations are understandable. She has seen the failure of husbands and the consequences for wives and mothers, and she has seen the failures of parents and the consequences for their children, so she wants to put something in place to make up for these failures and ensure that these people are provided for regardless of the lack of human capital and structure in their personal lives. She’s an engineer, so she sees it as just a matter of building the right machine to assist us. More than a safety net, a vision for a new structure of human provision in relationships and productivity, a new system designed to solve the problems that marriage and parenthood were designed to address.

The problem is, so much of our identity as a species and who we are even on the most basic biological and psychological level is so deeply designed around these innate species-technologies that it is it is extremely unclear and unpredictable what will result from deconstructing or replacing them. There’s also the problem, as Thomas Sowell has often pointed out, of how unlikely it is that any one person, or even a group of people of finite intelligence and wisdom and capability and knowledge will (in the course of mere years) successfully devise a universally applicable solution to a problem that took tens of millions of years and thousands of lifetimes of experimentation and consequences to achieve the solutions we already possess. Assuming you take a non-religious view of the world.

The implications are the same regardless of which view you take of history and human nature. Human social relationships aren’t arbitrary structures that we simply invent and remove or replace as we wish. They’re adaptive. Evolved. Or designed. How they were designed isn’t the issue, in either case you end up at the same place. We are designed for these species-technologies on the deepest levels of our being. Trying to design a solution or alternative to the existing pathologies of those systems, which certainly do exist, by removing or replacing them does not respect or acknowledge the fact that they are endemic to our being and our very sanity, happiness, development, and meaning in life. It’s like offering to remove our capacity to see to save us from seeing things that might disturb us, or our capacity to feel pain, lest we suffer a terrible trauma. It is hubris and delusion, anti-human, and doomed to fail. This kind of solution might prove even worse than the problems it is meant to address. By seeking to abolish them we seek to abolish humanity itself.

Sex, parenthood, and even work weren’t made for us; we were made for them. Quite literally. And any philosophy, no matter how well-meaning or how accurately it sees the problems we face or how genuinely desires to address them, that cannot understand them cannot help them. You cannot provide greater health if you do not deeply understand the nature of the patient you’re treating, or the nature of the diseases that afflict them, if you do not really know what health looks like or where it comes from. And hardly any of the unconstrained utopianiasts do. They take their vision for granted. They are so busy designing what life should be like that they have never really looked hard enough at what life is.

Melinda wants to design a better world, like a benevolent God. The world we live in is often a painful and tragic one. And she has a tender, caring heart and has the skill and determination to try to do something about it. That is wonderful. But her philosophy, her medical and moral theory, is flawed. She has the unconstrained, utopian vision, as Thomas Sowell would put it. There is a kind of nobility and ambition and beneficence to her rejection of the tragic, or constrained, vision of the world. She invites us to imagine what the world could be like. You getting to be more like her, among other things.

Unfortunately, attempting a broad-scale redefinition of the most basic, fundamental structures of human society has not tended to be one of the great success stories of history. Utopian perfectionism and optimistic creativity make for fantastic helpers, but dangerous guides. The unconstrained vision can be the crowning grace of humanity when it supports and builds on and cares for and nurtures the realities and emergent solutions of the tragic, constrained vision of the world.

The problem isn’t that one vision is wrong and one is right, the problem is when you get them the wrong way round so they don’t work as intended. If you put the tragic vision in the position of trying to perfect the world, it might not go anywhere or do anything because it might not see that there is anything that can or should be done. It can become cynical and careles, heedless of the cost of its own means and unwilling to challenge or reinvent them. It can become callous and disengaged and selfish. But it is very good at seeing the world as it is and making practical, personal decisions about how to understand and deal with it.

If you put the unconstrained vision in charge of understanding the world and deciding what to do about it, it won’t respect the world as it is or try to comprehend it or appreciate it, but will just try to ignore or replace it. The unconstrained vision will wander too far and do too much, things that never should have been done, in an attempt to remake the world according to its preferences, whatever the cost. It can be naive, careless, dangerously unrealistic, and dangerously experimental. Both Visions can become tyrannical. And both can be blind to the cost of their approach and justify them too easily in the service of their vision.

Both outlooks have their value. You have to respect the constrained vision, and you have to love the unconstrained vision. But if you can’t marry both those attitudes, you’re in dangerous territory and will have a hard time addressing or understanding the world. These outlooks are part of the fundamental psychological and social technology we have been given to understand and address the world and its challenges.

And you probably can’t be or possess both in a single person. And that’s OK, you don’t need to. But you do need to have your relationship to the other vision in its proper shape. If you’re tragic but can’t love the utopian, you’re going to go wrong. If you’re utopian and can’t respect the tragic, you will go wrong too. You’ll be missing half the human vision of the world and half of human capability, and will inevitably become unbalanced.