He may never have read—in fact there are palpable evidences he hasn’t—the biblical mandate to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply,” but, whether consciously or unconsciously (my bet), he’s obeying it. “He?” One Howard Veal, from Muskegon, Michigan, of whom it is reported that he has produced 23 children by 14 women. He is now in legal trouble because he either cannot or will not support the women and children financially. Or in much of any other way as well. (He owes over $500,000 in child support.)
No observant American can be surprised. In fact, Veal is a piker compared to one Desmond Hatchett of Knoxville who reportedly produced 30 children by 11 women. (Two men produced over five football teams!) Like eyesight in fading light, one becomes accustomed to such things. Let the reader beware: we may have a budding television series here. To re-phrase Barnum: “Nobody ever lost a dollar overestimating the prurience of the American public.”
Culture observers can legitimately see the event as a definitive snap-shot of modern America. How so?
1. Marriage, in any meaningful sense, has fallen on very hard times in western civilization. This event does not necessarily signal the end of marriage but it signals (along with many other “marriage” issues) a culture-wide dismissive attitude towards the single most important institution of our history, and rational people can only anticipate, despite faint and desultory rhetoric on the other side, that traditional marriage has a bleak future here. The church herself, once the pro-marriage bastion in America, has herself chosen—by and large—to stand aside as a non-participating observer.
2. The event also sends a palpable signal of the growing sense (far too weak a word) of entitlement, as in, “Children should become, at birth, the responsibility of the state, which has ‘all the resources necessary’ to take care of them.” Few would call them serious voices, but seriousness counts for less and less to modernity. (Remember: both Plato’s and Orwell’s dystopias called for the same arrangement.)
3. The nexus of the event with Father’s Day, 2013, is interesting. The late Dr. Joyce Brothers famously said that “Fathers are a distinctive and necessary social invention.” She was right and wrong: Fathers are a distinctive supernatural invention (see Genesis, chapters 1 and 2) but they are, indeed, demonstrably necessary. I know of no psychotherapist of any sort who would not say that the most distressing fact about our culture is the absentee father—either physically or emotionally. A friend of who has a nation-wide ministry to prisoners says he has never met a prisoner who did not hate his father. (The essay to read here is that of Dr. Paul Vitz, in Life, God, and Other Small Topics, ed., Eric Metaxas. Vitz is a professor of psychology and prolific writer and speaker on fatherhood. Here’s a sample: “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.” Emphasis added.)
The point of attack in ameliorating the causes of such dysfunctionality is, as always, a sure and certain word from God Himself in His book in which He is famous for not equivocating about such things. Alas, modernity has voted overwhelmingly against God and His book. Perhaps a quote from one not so transcendent will be acceptable. Dr. Henry Kissinger once said: “People think that responsibility is hard to bear. It’s not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence.” One could wish for a culture-wide parsing of Kissinger’s last word in the light of this event of biting irony: a man spectacularly potent in reproduction but spectacularly impotent in responsibility.