Socrates in the City: Conversations on Life, God and Other Small Topics

Q: I wonder if you might briefly contrast Kierkegaard’s balancing act of faith with nature’s nihilistic will to power.

A: In twenty-five words or less, Kierkegaard’s faith is not a balancing act; it is a leap— a definite commitment with all of his heart, but in a lot of darkness. Nietzsche made the opposite leap. He said, “I will now disprove the existence of all gods. If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.” That is faith, but it is the opposite faith. It makes no sense. It is Lucifer’s faith— “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.” I think when Nietzsche goes into hell, he will sing the words from Sinatra’s song “I did it my way.”

Q: Maybe I just misunderstood you. You are talking about the whole idea of either the result of evil or the result of suffering producing something good. I have also heard this philosophy called the Fortunate Fall— that it is a good thing that Adam and Eve sinned, because then God could send his Son. But that doesn’t seem to make sense. You also might have said something answering that other question about when you referenced death. I am just really confused.

A: If it is fortunate or good, then why not do it? If God brings good out of evil, then why not supply him with a lot of evil, because we’re not the General and we’re not advising the General. We are foot soldiers, and we have been given our marching orders. There is good, and there is evil. There is right, and there is wrong. Fight for the right and against the wrong. We’re also given little clues about the general strategy. God says, “Even when you do wrong, I can make good out of it.” That’s dangerous. It’s wonderful, but it’s dangerous and can’t substitute for the first thing. We know very clearly our marching orders. So, let’s go out and do them.

(#ulink_6e7e9a91-3344-5f26-817e-7cfc1d2ff7df) This is a reference to the deviation from the original Tolkien plot in which Faramir realizes that the ring is a thing of evil and should not be used. Thus, he is not tempted to hold on to the ring but sends Frodo, Sam, and Gollum on their way. Peter Jackson has Faramir bring them to Gondor and only later release them.

The Importance of Fatherhood (#ulink_40f7ae9c-013a-5a7c-95da-e488a9c7f1f0)

PAUL VITZ

March 25, 2004

Introduction (#ulink_8af87cf2-f597-5a1d-83f1-6ad0940d5b4c)

Good evening, I am Eric Metaxas, and welcome to Socrates in the City, the thinking person’s alternative to standing in front of Trump Tower and having your picture taken.

By the way, in passing, I want to publicly thank Donald Trump for adding to the aesthetic value of Fifth Avenue with that fabulous banner. It’s so charming that it really is almost Dickensian. It’s just wonderful to have somebody scowling at you from a building, isn’t it?

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Anyway, it is a pleasure to be here tonight and to see all of you. As many of you already know, the idea behind these Socrates in the City events comes from Socrates’s famous maxim that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” It follows logically that the unexamined maxim is not worth remembering. So, I think the fact that this Socratic maxim has been remembered for lo, these twenty-five centuries means that it has been examined and been worth remembering, although I am not sure if that is true, because I really can’t remember.

Anyway, our thesis here at Socrates in the City is that the illustrious inhabitants of our fair city— that’s us— are less likely to lead examined lives than people in other parts of the world, principally because we New Yorkers are very, very good at distracting ourselves with high-flying careers and low-flying entertainments. I am not certain that this is true. I have no data, but it is a thesis. And I will be sticking with this for the remainder of the evening. So, please humor me.

In any case, over the last five years, we have scoured the known world for brilliant thinkers who have led particularly examined lives so that they might share the benefit of their examinations with us here in our unexamined burg, as it were. Of course, we inevitably have had to look far beyond New York City for these thinkers— the thesis again being that New Yorkers are, by definition, too successful and too distracted and too ambitious to ever attain the level of self-examination and philosophical brilliance necessary to address one of these august gatherings we like to call Socrates in the City.

Here at Socrates, we have had speakers from everywhere but New York. We have had speakers from Boston, actually three: Dr. Armand Nicholi, who spoke on C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud and teaches at the Harvard Medical School; Dr. Thomas Howard on Chance or the Dance?, from Saint John’s Seminary in Boston; and the illustrious Dr. Peter Kreeft, who is a philosophy professor at Boston College. So, three from Boston, none from New York. We have had three speakers from the Washington, DC, area: David Aikman, the journalist and former senior editor at Time; we had Frederica Mathewes-Green just a couple of months ago; and of course, we have had Os Guinness, who has spoken at something like eight Socrates events now. That is a world record, I believe— a Guinness world record.

We have had speakers from Boston, speakers from Washington, DC, and we even have had a speaker come to us from merry olde England, and not just an Englishman but a bona fide Knight of the British Empire, Sir John Polk-inghorne. But as I say, we have never looked to our own here in Gotham for a Socrates speaker. Until tonight, my friends.

The presumption had been, as I said, that there simply did not exist a New Yorker of such brilliance and erudition and self-examination as to warrant an invitation to our happy convocation.

So, that was my presumption, and, dare I say, the presumption of more folks than would care to admit. Some of them are perhaps in this very room. But on behalf of all those whose presumption that was, let me tonight say that in the person of Dr. Paul Vitz, we present our admission of error and our most profound apologies. That’s right. Horrid as it is to fathom, Dr. Paul Vitz is that extraordinarily rare New Yorker who is able to live, indeed thrive, amidst the inescapable din and the infinite enticements of this great city— and yet to be a self-examined soul.

And for this, my fellow New Yorkers, I think he deserves some kind of prize. Unfortunately, we have no prizes to give away tonight, save one, that being an attentive audience, which is to say, all of you. Yes, you, ladies and gentlemen, are that prize of which I speak. Doesn’t that make you feel good? Perhaps it just makes you feel cheap. In any case, that is the situation.

So, now, a word of introduction about our indigenous speaker, Dr. Paul Vitz. Dr. Vitz lives right here in the belly of the unexamined beast that is New York City. He is a professor of psychology at New York University, which is also located in that self-same unexamined beast’s belly. Dr. Vitz is a senior scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, and he is the author of hundreds of articles and several books, among them Psychology as Religion:The Cult of Self-Worship;Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism— he will be touching on that thesis today, among other things; Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious; and others. Most of these books are available at our book table at a reasonable discount, and I am sure Dr. Vitz will be happy to autograph them for you, if you ask nicely.

Dr. Vitz lives here in New York, in Greenwich Village, with his wife, who is a professor of French, also at New York University. They have six children, and I would assume that this alone gives Dr. Vitz all the credentials he needs to say something worth hearing on the subject of fatherhood.

Fatherhood is one of those subjects that seems, at least in my lifetime anyway, to be somewhat neglected. We hear a lot about motherhood these days, but fatherhood seems somehow to have gone, shall we say, out of vogue. The happy images that we would get of fatherhood from such past movies as Life with Father and such TV series as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, however unrealistic they might have been, nonetheless had their fingers on the idealized essence of fatherhood, and I think it is safe to say those images could be reassuring in a good way.

But the four-decade backlash against these images sometimes gives us a contemporary view of fatherhood that, on the fictional side, would be Al Bundy and Homer Simpson and on the nonfictional side would give us something like, for example, Michael Jackson hanging Junior over a balcony at a fancy high-rise hotel— not exactly the kind of thing that Andy Griffith or Robert Young would have done. They certainly would not have made their children wear masks.

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But, in any case, things have changed. I think some of these changes make me long for what Dr. Vitz has to say on the subject of fatherhood, whatever that will be.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Paul Vitz.

(#ulink_b2519879-51a7-55e5-9f48-0fd61e4026ce) A massive advertising banner for The Apprentice starring Donald Trump hung from the Trump building located just across Fifth Avenue from the University Club, at which this event was held.

(#ulink_ad34e0a5-a519-57e7-847e-557ee6637abe) The late pop star and singer Michael Jackson was in the habit of appearing in public with his children wearing masks, and in 2002 he famously shocked his fans when he impulsively dangled his infant son, Prince, from the fourth-floor balcony of the high-rise Hotel Adlon in Berlin, Germany.

Talk (#ulink_c738e710-737b-5448-af8a-a886c5108ba8)

Trust New York to come up with an introduction like that. I mean, really. It is true I’m a New Yorker. I’ve lived in the City now for almost forty years, and whether I’m up to all those adjectives, that’s another thing for you to judge later. I’m not so sure, but I hope to hold up Manhattan in this list of speakers.

It’s not just a pleasure to be here, but it’s also a challenge. I don’t think I’ve ever addressed an audience of the kind you were described as, and it looks like you really are. I met some of you beforehand. You come from different countries. Some of you have very odd names; some of you have very familiar names. But I expect that there is a little bit of the world here tonight, not just New York in a parochial sense.

What I’m going to talk about is the general theme of fatherhood. I think that I can show, with a few comments and analysis, that the crisis of our culture today is in important respects a crisis in the family. But at the center of the crisis in the family is a crisis in what it is to be a father. We’ve lost this understanding of the capstone, in my judgment, of what it is to be a man, because I think all men are called to be fathers. Now, I don’t necessarily mean they are called to be biological fathers. I mean that they’re called to be fathers to at least some of the younger people in their life.

But I want to introduce this with a remark from the ancient Hebrew Scriptures where they say that “the sins of the fathers” go on for generations, sometimes for three or perhaps for seven. It is interesting that they only speak, so far as I know, about the sins of the fathers being perpetuated onto their children.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that mothers aren’t capable of sinning or of not being good mothers. But there is something very profoundly true about the scriptural observation. First of all, I think mothers are much more reliable at being mothers than fathers are at being fathers. There are many, many more “good enough” mothers, relatively speaking. So they’re less likely, I think, to be causing damage to their children. I know there are exceptions. After all, I’ve been an active therapist for years, and I certainly know people who have had serious trouble with their mothers. But in general, mothers are much more reliable at being mothers than fathers are at being fathers. Second, if a mother is not reliable, usually it shows up very soon when the child is young, and other women who observe it— the grandmother, the sister— step in and help out. You find substitute mothers and foster mothers coming in quickly, if the mother is one of those who are truly unsatisfactory.

And finally, there’s another reason why these comments from the Jewish Scriptures are correct, and that is, if the mother really fails and there’s nobody else to pick it up— if mothering fails— the children are so damaged that they can’t pass their sins on to anybody, that is, they’re not out there functioning. They may be withdrawn, they may be in a mental institution, and they may be so frightened or anxious that as members of society, they simply fail. Or let’s say that the children got into some socially destructive mode, when they got a little bit older. So, in a certain sense, the sins of the mother are much less likely— even if they do occur— to be passed on to subsequent generations.

And so, they speak of the sins of the fathers, and what happens is something like this: The child has a good enough mother, and then the father comes along and fails in some substantial way; perhaps he’s an alcoholic, or he abandons them and runs off with another woman. In fact, one of the tragic ways in which a father can fail when the child is young is simply to die, and the child feels abandoned. Young children don’t understand death as an accident; they just feel purposely abandoned. There are ways to overcome this to some degree, but for some of the people we will look at, their failed father was a dead father— a dead father who was not later replaced in any way by a new substitute father.

What is the father’s major function? I’ll talk about some of the data later, but the father is a kind of Mr. Outside, while the mother is Mrs. Inside. She forms the basic character, the emotional life, the interpersonal responsiveness of the child, much more than the father. But the father introduces the child much more often to the outside world. The father symbolizes the structure of that world, of law and order, of the activities, of the things that you get involved in when you leave the home.

What happens when the child is functioning okay because of having a good enough mother but has a bad father? Very often, the child will get out into that world and cause a lot of trouble, because the father hasn’t been there. In fact, in social science, probably the most reliably documented piece of evidence is the effect of bad fathering on children; we can see it in various pathological indices. It’s unbelievable that this information has been around for over fifty years in extremely substantial ways, but it continues to get little attention.

Let me mention in summary what some of these indices are: Researchers have found that the father makes major contributions to the child’s development, especially to individual identity and social identity. The father helps the child to separate psychologically from the mother, teaches the child much more to control its impulses, especially in the case of small boys and older boys as well. The father serves as a buffer from the mother’s attention and keeps the child from being overly emotionally bound to the mother. “This often happens when the mother really has no one else to get involved with, because the father has abandoned her. The father is very instrumental in the development of the intellectual life and the outside activities of the children and in their respect for the outside world in terms of law and order.”

The most common finding is the tendency to criminality in boys and young men who didn’t have fathers. It’s so common that it’s a cliché. We see it over and over again. Our prisons are filled with young men who didn’t have functioning fathers. This is a common response to a lack of discipline and fathering. These young men also lack an understanding of the outside world and often have a kind of incompetence in dealing with it that leads to anger and a rage, and it shows. They often run into a bunch of other young men like themselves, and pretty soon you’ve got a gang with all of its well-known problems.

By the way, when the father is present, the children end up with higher cognitive capacities, higher IQs. In addition, when the father is in the family, the children are more likely to be employed, make more money and more often succeed in life. This is true for both the boys and the girls.

We’ve all heard about something called “the Mozart effect.” I’m not talking about the effect of his music on your brain but about the effect of Mozart’s father. Mozart was the product of his father’s devoted attention, though perhaps a little bit too intense. In fact, history is filled with children like that. There’s Pascal, whose father spent his time at home, schooling the young genius, and there was John Stuart Mill with his father, James Mill. At age three, young Mill was learning Greek. His father focused intensely on him. In the athletic world today, we have many outstanding athletes whose fathers were important to their success. Michael Jordan talks about his father as having helped him, as having modeled for him, as having led him. For Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, it was his deeply involved grandfather. And when it isn’t a father, it’s a coach, or a teacher or another substitute father.

Many times, young women who are very successful show the same phenomenon. They have a strong sense that their father is with them and has broken the barriers down for them. I don’t know all of the examples. Recently I saw in the paper an article involving a very successful, wealthy New Yorker who is the head of Citigroup— Sandy Weill. I’ve never met him, but there was a picture of him with his daughter. They were smiling next to each other. The daughter had just had her first IPO. He was right there with her, giving her support. This is one of the things that fathers do for their children.

But returning to criminality: This is perhaps the major way in which failed fathers pass on their sins to the next generation. There are plenty of poor environments where the fathers are present and there is no criminality. We think of criminal behavior as somehow related to ghettos or the inner city or something like that. When the social scientists take out whether the father is present and the whole issue of the stability of the family, there are no ethnic, racial, linguistic, or cultural factors related to criminal behavior. It is family structure that counts, and the crucial family person that isn’t there is the father. The mother may be there, but she commonly struggles through welfare; if she has a job, the children get farmed out to daycare. Either way, there’s a big price to pay for the children.