Raising Children and “The Way of All Flesh”

Our previous bookclub meeting was surprisingly well attended. Not only was it the largest meeting since I began running the group—fifteen people joined—but also we’d read The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. I hadn’t heard of the author or his semi-autobiographical book until it was suggested to me, and I only begrudgingly approved the reading.

The group’s rough consensus was that the thin plot was compensated by the excellent writing, philosophical interludes, and humor. I agreed with the consensus. Here’s one of the many passages that made me laugh out loud:

Yet when a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also. The two are like God and Mammon. His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and did not spill things on the table cloth at meal times, or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did not quarrel among themselves.

This quote is characteristic in two ways: not only is it funny, but it’s also about money. Throughout the novel we’re given the size of stipends, incomes, investments, inheritances, and expenses. The narrator even suggests that the skill of double-entry accounting is next in importance after reading and writing! Were the Victorian gentry more materialistic than we are today? I doubt it, but the novel did come across that way. Perhaps it is in part because the plot hinges on the large inheritance that Ernest, the fourth-generation hero of the Pontifex family, will come into upon turning 28 years old.

Parenting is another major theme of the novel. Butler’s parents, like Ernest’s, demanded a lot of their children. They forced their sons to learn Latin and Greek at an early age and beat them if they didn’t focus on their lessons. In one harrowing passage, Ernest is beat when he can’t pronounce the hard “c” in “come”, saying “tum” instead.

The harsh discipline was intensified by his parents’ great expectations for his future: “For Ernest, a very great future—she was certain of it—was in store. This made severity all the more necessary, so that from the first he might have been kept pure from every taint of evil.”

We also have great expectations for our daughter and are perhaps overly attuned to any promise she shows in her three-year-old endeavorers. Reading Butler’s semi-biographical accounts prompts me to reflect whether we’re being too much like his parents, whom he greatly disliked. Of course, one can err both ways. I’ve seen enough undisciplined children to know that too little is not good. Where is the golden mean?

My current thinking is that parents should be strict regarding the treatment of others, but we should be more open regarding our children’s studies. Even here, though, a prudent balance is needed. Children left alone will watch TV all day. One sees such children, glued to phones, even at a young age. The mean lies between endless TV and forced Latin lessons. I think a child’s studies are best encouraged by building on their own interests. To help them progress, then, identify and encourage their interests. Ernest’s Aunt did much the same thing for him by arranging to have him build an organ:

Ernest was perfectly well shaped but unusually devoid of physical strength. To supply this want by some means which should add also to his pleasure was his Aunt’s first anxiety. Whatever it was to be, it must be something which he should like as much as other boys liked cricket or football, and he must think the wish for it to have come originally form himself; it was not very easy to find anything that would do, but ere long it occurred to her that she might enlist his love of music on her side.

In the end, she has Ernest build her an organ—using his love of music to pull him to do an activity he otherwise wouldn’t have. How can one apply this today? If your daughter is drawn to princesses in ball gowns, encourage her to read by showing her she can read more about princesses. Paint princesses with her. Teach her about textiles. Use her interest to pull her forward instead of pushing them forward with timeout or spankings.

The culmination of our childhood studies is our selection of a profession—another topic that is much discussed in The Way of All Flesh and explored in the plots of the four generations of the Pontifex family. Butler’s father, Theobold, didn’t want to be a clergy man, yet “before he was well out of his frocks it was settled that he was to be a clergy man. The boy’s future destiny was kept well before his eyes from his earliest childhood … Nevertheless a certain show of freedom was allowed him.” It is noted, however, that a few neighbors were “carried away” by this show: “I believe two or three heads of families in the neighborhood gave their sons absolute liberty of choice in the matter of their professions—and am not sure that they had not afterwards considerable cause to regret having done so.” There is, again, some golden mean to be found between the liberty of the child and parent to make a selection.

My parents, at least in my recollection, didn’t push me towards any particular profession. Although, unlike Theobold’s father, they didn’t have a large inheritance available to influence my direction. I remember picking biomedical engineering because I was interested in biology, chemistry and physics. I wanted to study physics because it wasn’t “arbitrary”, unlike human-made programming languages—the direction my dad was encouraging me to take. How shallow and idealistic was my eighteen-year-old perspective! I didn’t understand what it is like to make a living. You add the most value doing what you know well to do (e.g., FDA 510(k) submissions). Only very few people spend time at the border of human knowledge, and those that do must fill their heads with “arbitrary” skills such as grant writing, lab organization, and so on. I’m happy I landed where I did, for I enjoy my work and people pay me well for it.

Why is one profession better than another? Why is it better to be a doctor than a barista? (We may wince at such a suggestion, yet most parent’s actions betray any idealistic claim that all are equally good.) Here, as always when asking ethical questions, we’re drawn up to the question of the good. What is a good profession? Certainly what is good for one person may not be good for another but that also doesn’t mean all are the same.

We visited one of my old professor’s last weekend. Her daughter, a Junior in high school, asked me how I picked my career. I told her it was largely chance and that I believe the idea of “finding your passion” is overrated. You start doing something for a while, you develop a passion for it. Her mom agreed and restated my advice in stronger terms: “Finding your passion is bullshit.” Butler seems to disagree with this line of thinking, if we accept the words he gave Ernest’s aunt as his own:

“Don’t scold Ernest if he is volatile, and continually takes things up only to throw them down again. How can he find out his strength or weakness otherwise? A man’s profession,” she said, and here she gave one of her wicked little laughs, “is not like his wife, which he must take once for all, for better for worse, without proof beforehand. Let him go here and there, and learn his truest liking by finding out what, after all, he catches himself turning to most habitually—then let him stick to this.”

In The Way of All Flesh, after Ernest leaves prison he marries a former servant who turns out to be an alcoholic. He’s saved in the end because it turns out she’d already been married. They separate and he gives his bastards to a peasant family out in the country. At the end of the novel he visits them and approves of their decision to become bargemen, instead of pursuing an education. Is this (as one member of the bookclub suggested) only acceptable because his bastard children were of a lower class?

Butler’s life, in some sense, was a success—to be read centuries after your death is rare enough. Is it possible the harsh discipline was worthwhile? Or was he “successful” despite it? Or maybe he was an unhappy despite his success? In the same passage where Ernest is beaten for his phonetic shortcomings, we’re given this comment about greatness:

What, then, it may be asked, is the good of being great? The answer is that you may understand greatness better in others, whether alive or dead, and choose better company from these and enjoy and understand that company better when you have chosen it—also that you may be able to give pleasure to the best people and live in the lives of those who are yet unborn.

Greatness is more pleasurable. You can better identify and enjoy great books and music and live on, as Butler does in The Way of All Flesh. I doubt his childhood beatings contributed to such greatness.

I enjoyed reading and pondering The Way of All Flesh. I’ve discussed a few themes in this essay, but there are many other philosophical interludes on a variety of topics, including false tastes (IV), the relation of virtue and vice (XIX), the utility of greatness (XXII), pleasure and duty in your studies (XXXI), how to produce new ideas (XLVI), faith and reason (LXV), and certainly several others. If you enjoy a well framed sentence and are interested in any of the above topics, then I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading The Way of All Flesh as much as myself and our other fifteen book club members.