My wife and I read to our 4-month-old daughter Emerson every night. Dr. Seuss, Aesop's fables, The Little Engine That Could and so on. Emerson doesn't understand a bit of it at this point. But the point is that she someday will.
We do this because we're convinced that the single best predictor of success in life is reading; that if the hook of reading can be set early, everything else pretty much takes care of itself. The examined life isn't always bliss, but people who read develop intellectual curiosity and become capable of lifelong learning. They have to try hard to fail.
But according to Adam Swift, a philosophy professor at the University of Warwick in England, we should feel guilty for reading to our daughter. Why? Because it supposedly disadvantages children who don't get read to, and thereby increases inequality.
As Swift put it in an Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio interview, "I don't think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people's children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally."
Reading to your kids is, apparently, one of those "familial relationship goods" that must be taken into account when balancing the social-justice scales. And, at least for one philosophy professor, it knocks those scales badly out of whack.
Thus, the radical left's hyper-egalitarianism continues to push it ever deeper into Mad Hatter land, in this case a fanaticism that discourages reading to kids because of the inequalities that result between those who are read to and those who aren't.
Those of us who thought we were doing things (in this case parenting) the right way have, all this time, only been making things worse. So leave Goodnight Moon and the Brothers Grimm on the shelf.
What next? That parents who make sure their kids are fed and clothed properly and do their homework are guilty of social oppression? That teaching right from wrong is wrong because children who are taught the difference become law-abiding citizens and those who aren't become criminals?
It is easy, of course, to ridicule the nutty ideas that spill out of the insular world of academe ("micro-aggressions," "trigger warnings," "safe spaces," etc.), but Swift's particular nuttiness is helpful because it concisely shines a light on two troubling leftist tendencies.
The first is the left's continued efforts to erode the distinction between the public and the private (captured succinctly in the obnoxious motto that "the private is the political"). There are, after all, few aspects of human life usually thought more private and thus fenced-off from governmental interference than home and family. But for the left, family must be considered within the context of relationship goods that might require government regulation for the sake of more abstract social and political goals. Therein is found, once again, the totalitarian temptation.
Reading to our daughter should be no one's business but ours, but for people like Swift, everybody's business is their business because there is no nook or cranny of life incapable of benefiting from their superior virtue and wisdom.
Second is that the family, as the primary source of multigenerational inequality, is increasingly viewed as an enemy of hyper-egalitarian leftism.
We all know, of course, that the biggest influence upon the development of children is their parents; that both "nature" (in the form of genetic inheritance) and "nurture" (in the form of home environment) profoundly influence life prospects, even if we still argue about which matters most.
This is a continual source of frustration to the left because it suggests that, unless the family can be somehow squashed, or at least brought more to heel, the rest of its ideological program won't count for much. The achievement of genuine equality (the equality of outcome/condition kind, or even equality of opportunity) will be forever obstructed by the pernicious influence of family life (which is, again, all the more pernicious because part of civil society is shielded from governmental control). As long as the family strongly influences development, there will be dramatically different life outcomes, and thus considerable continued inequality.
An obvious inverse relationship therefore exists between the strength of the family, on the one hand, and the capacity of the left to achieve its ideological goals on the other. What weakens the family thus strengthens the left, and vice-versa.
Not surprisingly, Professor Swift is, as on other points, admirably candid about his reservations regarding the family as an institution, acknowledging that he has at times considered (only to demur) proposing its abolition as a means of creating a "more level playing field" and "solving the social justice problem." In such comments one senses a sincere ideological desire muted only by temporary tactical infeasibility.
In the end, there is indeed something sad that some children aren't read to by their parents and grow up in homes without books.
But that's their parents' fault, not mine. And it isn't going to stop me from reading to my daughter. Or make me feel the least bit guilty when I do, either.
And I remain convinced that the best anti-poverty program of all is also the cheapest: a library card.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 05/18/2015