lies, damn lies, and fatherhood
With the exceptions of people living in totalitarian states and those sad, deluded people in our own free country who still choose to watch Fox News, at no point in your life will you and your spouse be lied to as much as the time surrounding your bringing of life into this world. Here are my favorite five- in chronological order.
(1) Being pregnant feels great!
I don't know if this is the result of the Puritan/Hallmark/Disney infantilization of American Culture, or if the need to believe this runs deeper. Simply put, it's not true. Being pregnant feels like being old. And Charles De Gaulle said being old is a train wreck. Before later saving France multiple times, the man invented the blitzkrieg only to see his books translated into German and adopted by Hitler's generals. France ignored him at their extreme peril. Don't you!
(2) You should [insert dumb*** course of action here]. It's natural.
This is usually in reference to some truly awful idea about how you should deliver or raise your child. For example, it's "natural" to forgo anesthesia, to give birth at home away from emergency medical attention, and then to let the baby sleep in the bed with you. All stuff our stone-age ancestors had to to do.
There is no way to be nice about this. The Flintstones was a cartoon and Dances With Wolves might as well have been.
The equation of "naturalness" with "good" is the dumber, hippy drippier, version of the equation of "god desires it" and "good." To show how ignorant this is in the case of nature (for the case of god, read Plato's Euthyphro), I quote the king of artifice, David Bowie-
News to hippies. Mother nature doesn't care about us, and to the extent that she cares about anything, she has special contempt for stupid people like you. "Nature" is a violent slaughterhouse interspersed with sleep, death, and extinction. Science is our best ally against nature, and you are an unwitting fifth column in this noble war.
There are more species of insects than human beings. Prior to modern dentistry, people had agonizing toothaches for at least one-third of their adult life.
If it is selectively advantageous for most of a species' infants to die, and for most mothers to die of childbirth at some point, then mother nature will bring that about. And she did for human beings. We gained immense advantage both by walking upright and having large brains relative to our body size. So much advantage that it made up for the all too predictable result- creatures with the narrow hips necessary for walking on two legs have a horrible time giving birth to creatures with big heads. As a result, the human childbirth is vastly more traumatic than that of other mammals and human babies are born vastly less developed than other mammals. So, for most of our existence on this planet (prior to us having the good sense to develop technology to defeat nature) a vastly higher percentage of human mothers and offspring die as the result. There's your mother nature for you! Thanks Mom!
So when somebody seriously advises you to forgo an epidural or episiotomy, or to give birth with a midwife, or to sleep with your baby in the bed with you, tell them to get stuffed. The cult of nature is one more example of how the far left and the far right are exactly the same. It's a fascist ideology.
(3) Don't worry. Babies are sturdy.
This is told to potential fathers who realize that they are clumsy slobs and are terrified they might drop or not hold the baby right. It's usually communicated right before the wife hands the potential father a very young nephew or niece to hold. Then you inevitably see his rictus of terror and desperation as he freezes up and prays to all of the Gods of any pantheon with which he is familiar. "Please God [or Ganesh, Angus Young, etc.] don't let me drop this baby or screw up and somehow not support his neck correctly. Please!"
A couple of newsflashes here. (a) You are not going to get your spouse to want to have children by subjecting him to this. (b) If your man is aware that he is a clumsy slob, and nervous about it, that's actually very good evidence he will be a great father. If you can get him to marry you and he's not an idiot then he'll quickly learn that happiness comes from doing whatever you want (this has been empirically verified). He'll produce offspring with you, and change diapers and do bottle duty. It will be the best thing in his life. (c) This one is for everyone, not just future wives.- BABIES ARE NOT STURDY. STOP TELLING PEOPLE THEY ARE. They are astoundingly delicate, and every decent new parent experiences terror over this. If you have any doubt on this point, just look at infant mortality rates in the third world or American south.
Luckily, the baby's grandparents come to visit right after birth and show the new parents over a period of days how to handle the baby. This is their penance for having told the couple many, if not all, of the lies on this list.
(4) Babies Travel Great at that Age!
No. They. Don't.
The Yahoo map thingy said Thanksgiving car trip would be four hours, and it took nine and a half. For parts of that Thomas cried and there wasn't anything we could do about it, which is one of the worst feelings in the world. My wife has blogged about the experience here.
Let me also point out that people are absolute morons in assessing the very real dangers of travel. Car wrecks are the number one killer of Americans twenty five and younger. This isn't because younger people are more likely to have fatal accidents, it's only because heart disease and then cancer take a bigger hit later in life. 50,000 Americans a year die in cars or from being hit by cars. There are no public statistics on this, but I would bet even money that in terms of how many years are taken off of human life, riding in cars is far worse than smoking. Again, smoking related illnesses are not indiscriminate; they hit people far closer t the point they would die anyhow.
And every person who says that riding an airplane is safer than driving is being misleading. Per miles traveled, yes it is. Per trip, it's about as safe as riding a motorcycle. And flying on commercial airlines in the United States is torturous now in any case.
Evolution primed us to assess the kinds of risks that a hunter-gatherer faces. As a result, something like terrorism, crime, illegal drugs, or the music of Celine Dion that effects very few of us seems much more threatening than something that affects all of us (and well over a million Americans are hurt in car wrecks a year, it being the leading cause of debilitating brain damage too). But you won't see one presidential candidate even mention United States airline hell or this this ongoing automobile slaughter that has now taken far more Americans than those who have died in all of the wars, foreign and domestic, combined.
I'm not neurotic. You are desensitized.
(5) But Grandma Needs to See the Baby!
No. She. Doesn't.
The "grandma" in question here is invariably the baby's great grandmother, who lives out of state in an assisted living facility and cannot be moved to visit the baby. Due the fact that we have yet to overcome our evolutionary heritage and become gloriously post-human, the baby's great grandfather is almost invariably dead at this point.
The pressure to travel out of state with your child will be intense here, because you don't know how long your grandparents will be with you. Resist the urge. YOUR CHILD IS A HUMAN BEING, NOT A SHOW AND TELL PROJECT.
In conclusion- A parent's primary duty is to ensure that his or her offspring are happy. This does not mean that the child's life will be a series of Hallmark moments, but rather that as much as possible he or she will grow to be healthy, compassionate, creative, wise, intelligent, hard working, and joyous. Unless your family suffers from Jerry Springer levels of dysfunction, your family will be your best resource in helping you parent well. If they are zealots, however, you will get number two style lies (and it must honestly be said that left wing idiocy is not equal to right wing idiocy here; bad left wing advice doesn't rationalize child abuse or lead to a rash of gay adolescents committing suicide every year the way bad Southern Baptist style parenting advice does). If your parents, family, or friends are zealots, factor that in. Numbers one and three style lies come from people wanting you to reproduce. Since parenthood is the greatest thing in the world, the motivation here is golden. However, once you or your spouse are pregnant, they will continue to believe the lies and tell them to you at pretty irritating moments. There you go. Number's four and five style advice come from your family members' desires to see the baby and help out. Again the motivation is love, albeit love tempered by all too human stupidity. Don't give in.
Finally, your parents did for you all the stuff you are doing for your baby. They would have, and would still, die for you. They watched helplessly during your adolescence, which was even more hellish for them. So even when telling them "no" about something, never forget this.
Last night's was a doozy. It involved not being able to check in to the Francis Drake hotel in San Fransisco during an American Philosophical Association meeting. The woman at the desk wasn't able to work the keypad because of these grotesque really long fingernails, I mean as long as Howard Hughes' were when he was holed up on a closed off floor of that Vegas hotel during the last phase of his madness (which also involved collecting his own waste in big glass jars that were then set up artfully around the room). She kept having to start over. In the dream this somehow telescoped into thirty minutes, at which point the time for presenting my paper had passed.
I was sure that the wonder-working powers of Mr. Bowie would get me through this though. I hailed him like an old friend, confident that he'd recognize me as a humble foot soldier of Rock, and in the ways of all great generals through history, help me out of this bind. George Patton did the same kind of thing for his men. So did Caesar.
But then through my veil of tears I saw David Lewis (David Lewis!) checking in. But instead of awe, I tried to score cheap points off of his metaphysical status. "Hey! Hey! He's not even alive!" Given the level to which I'd sunk, perhaps it is better that nobody listened. I grew more disconsolate.
First they came for our booze, then they came for our drugs, and now they come for our cigarettes and fatty foods. It should by now be blindingly clear to every concerned citizen of this Republic that success is making the Puritanical jerks in charge more and more hubristic. Soon they will begin to come for thought itself:
You laugh now, but just you wait until everyone you care about stages an "intervention," threatening to abandon you unless you throw away all those philosophy books and convert to Twelvestepism. Just wait until your offspring report you to the school counselor and the War on Thought goons come kicking into your study, chopping up the now empty bookshelves to find your stash of printed matter.
And any evidence that you do not in your soul accept the hunky-doryness of everything will be grounds for removal both from your job and polite society. 
You get to bring twenty CDs to tide you over between this life and the
next. To avoid being reborn as factory farmed livestock, you have to Rock Out
as much as possible during your layover in limbo. Which ones do you
bring? Please put them in alphabetical order, so debate is just
limited appropriately to the important metaphysical issues. For me, my
ontological suitcase is always packed with the following.
[notes: (1) Associate Professors lay in the middle of a sorites series starting with the stupid properties of Assistant Professors and then slowly shading into those characteristic of Fulls. Rather than present my controversial views about the semantics of vagueness, I just present the assorted dysfunctions below in terms of those characteristic of Assistants, Fulls, and both. (2) Faculty members have no monopoly on vileness in the university. See Philosophy Factory's excellent 
Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city's unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: "Work, spend, work," say slums like Huamdonggil, "or you, too, will end your life here." Moreover, entrepeneurs take advantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters. Huamdonggil can thus pay its way in taxes and bribes. MediCorp opens a weekly clinic for dying untermensch to xchange any healthy body parts they may have for a sac of euthanize. OrganiCorp has a lucrative contract with the city to send in a daily platoon of immune-genomed fabricants, similar to disastermen, to mop up the dead before the flies hatch. Hae-Joo then told me to stay silent; we had reached our destination.
from Anthony Bourdain-
It's like this everywhere. The chief of an Ashanti village is very proud of the jet-fuel-like apatashi--a
distilled liquor made from palm wine in fifty-five-gallon drums in a
jungle clearing behind his court. The man offering you a glass is his
minster of war, or his herald, or the keeper of his herds--and you
would be well advised to drink deeply and enjoy. You are being
watched. Basic decisions about you are being made. To choke, to
cough, or, God help you, to decline would be a terrible rejection of
the tribe's hospitality and cultural heritage. It is useful to remind
yourself in such circumstances that the people offering you a drink
have very likely been around longer than you and have a more glorious
history, and that you are damned lucky to be where you are and the
beneficiary of such kindness.
411 and 404 B.C.E.- Students of Socrates set about demonstrating their teacher's
key claim that the study of philosophy makes one more ethical. First, they destroy religious statues and help the Spartans defeat their own city state of Athens, and then they institute murderous reigns of blood upon the struggling democracy. This is all topped off by establishing violently class-based dictatorships. Sadly,
both dictatorships were short-lived in Athens, and it would be over two
millenniums before the philosopher king (and student of Plato and
Rousseau) Pol Pot was able to finally achieve a lasting society based
on Socratic principles.
330 B.C.E.- Aristotle goes to Syracuse, I mean Macedonia. His student, the not yet great Alexander, would go on to wipe up the floor with Socrates' and Plato's students. While defeating the known world, Alexander funds Aristotle's Lyceum, the first philosophical school combining Platonistic a priori speculations with detailed empirical observations. The new Aristotelian scientific methods yield fascinating new data for philosopher/scientists down through the ages to consider, such as Aristotle's discoveries that slaves and women lack souls, women have a different number of teeth than men, the primary function of the brain is to cool blood, and that mice spontaneously generate.
49-62 C.E.- Seneca the Younger pens several successful works of stoic philosophy demonstrating that happiness only arises as a result of a long regime of self-restraint, humility, discipline, and respect for others. Throughout this period, the Young Emperor Nero is such an avid student that Seneca becomes his principle adviser, in the process transitioning from endoo- to enthusiastic ecto-morph, bedding countless married women, and amassing three hundred million sesterces in four years. 
525 C.E.- Boethius
delivers his last words to Lady Philosophy, "You mean you can't help me
out here? Is that what you're saying? After all we've been through,
I'm actually on my own with this thing? No. Come on. You really can't
do anything? I'm just trying to get clear on this one point, I mean. .
. OH JESUS, THAT HURTS!" This passage is inexplicably missing from
later editions of the Consolation.
1119 C.E.- Dude! That one guy Abelard?
Like these other dudes totally chopped off his family jewels in a fight
over this one totally hot chick. Dude, I s*** you not, my man's all
bleeding and limping around and he goes off to become a monk, but not
the kung-fu kind. They named some tuna after him? Hey man, you want
to go get high?
1626 C.E.- After an afternoon putting his empirical philosophy into action by seeing what happens when you stuff snow into a dead chicken's butt, Francis Bacon catches fatal pneumonia. As a result of his untimely death, the fortunes of radical empiricism enter a three hundred year period of decline, only to be revived by W.V.O. Quine's meticulous observation of the behavior of his two first-born in their new and improved Skinner box (the newer one not only had the floors wired for direct current, but also contained a bar they depressed with their nose for food pellets).
1784 C.E.- Immanuel Kant
extracts brutal revenge upon the noisy church choir down the street by
using their noon-day practice as an example of a violation of the
categorical imperative. In Kant's fevered imagination, this was to
lead the choirmaster to say, "Uncle! Uncle!" Alas, it is not to be.
1831 C.E.- Thesis: contaminated cantaloupes; Anti-Thesis: G.W.F. Hegel's digestive tract; Synthesis: heart stopping gastro-intestinal disorder. 
1889 C.E.- Friedrich Nietzsche
begins to hoard feces in a bedroom drawer. His long suffering and
devoted sister Elizabeth explains for the tenth time that he's supposed
to be staring into the void, not doing this, this thing that he's doing. But her protestations are to no avail.
1931 C.E.- In a whirlwind tour of Europe, W.V.O. Quine lunches with Rudolph Carnap, who from the Aufbau onwards explicitly argued that
the unit of meaning was the language as a whole. They discuss fellow "young turk" A.J. Ayer (who in Language,
Truth, and Logic argued for a holistic form of verificationism that allowed
one to hold true any proposition come what may). After returning to the United States Quine
pens his revolutionary anti-positivist tract, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”
Philosophy is never the same!
1935 C.E.- After going bankrupt from running an ill-conceived boarding school with his now completely estranged second wife, Bertrand Russell recoups his losses by penning several best selling books telling other people how to live their lives.
1957 C.E.- In a public interview Martin Heidegger shamefully refuses to say
that in retrospect “Arbeit Macht Frei” was a poor choice for the original opening epigraph of Sein Und Zeit. Supporters and detractors continue to debate its appropriateness.
1966 C.E.- It is the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer, or it is not the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer.
1994 C.E.- Insert (huh-huh-huh, he said "insert") joke involving Saul Kripke, rigid designation, and Princeton co-eds. Maybe use the word "detumescent." Oh man that's a funny adjective.
circa 1995 C.E.- Jet lag and low blood sugar
from forgoing desert on the flight back from Australia combine with
the aftereffects of childhood dyslexia to lead David Lewis
to misread Hamlet's retort to Horatio as "There are more things
dreamed of in your philosophy than in Heaven and Earth." He drops his
Shakespeare, leans over a tattered, much abused copy of "On the
Plurality of Worlds," and can't quite bring himself to pick it up. [note: this entry plagiarizes Aidan McGlynn.]
2002 C.E.- All promotional material for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film 
