The Peace of Parenthood

What is it like to be a parent, and what might it teach us? In my own life, questions that had once seemed abstract have quite rapidly taken the form of an immersive experience: I have eighteen-month-old twin daughters, with a third daughter on the way in October, and so perhaps I can be permitted some reflections ahead of Father’s Day that I hope will resonate with others. Parenthood is full of surprises, but I’ve been struck by how I’ve come to understand it as fundamentally peaceful.

Peace is not the first thing that people typically associate with parenting. According to a Pew survey earlier this year, most parents describe parenting as “rewarding” or “enjoyable,” but significant numbers also find it “tiring” and “stressful.” These findings reflect the cost-benefit lens through which the modern world tends to view parenthood: a generally exhausting ordeal that imposes fearful constraints and burdens, while occasionally providing moments of happiness. In many ways, our most urgent social and political challenges—declining birthrates and family formation; pervasive feelings of isolation and anxiety—are the inevitable products of a cultural fixation on the costs of parenthood.

I’m not immune to cost-benefit reasoning (especially when buying diapers for twins), but I now realize that it neglects the core truth that being a parent is essentially peaceful in nature. It is peaceful not in the contemporary sense of freedom from discord (did I mention twins?). Rather, parenting is peaceful in the deepest meaning of the term, which is when we understand, embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

 

By emphasizing the peace of parenthood, we might provide a useful corrective to the prevailing cultural narrative that views the enterprise with such ambivalence. The relationship between peace and parenthood was not obvious to me before I had kids, and I think the same is true of other young people who might be pondering the questions I opened with. While familiar notions of parenting as happy, rewarding, stressful, or intense tell us something, they don’t quite capture the whole story.

Peace

In our secular age, peace is often defined in negative terms of what is lacking or missing, such as the absence or end of conflict. In this account, peace in the public realm means freedom from civil disturbance, while inside our minds it means freedom from troubling thoughts or emotions. In this latter sense, Augustine’s view that peace is “the tranquility of order” finds faint and distorted echoes in the modern emphasis on subjectivity and psychological analysis.

But there is a deeper, spiritual dimension of peace that I believe the experience of parenting helps bring more clearly into view. We might consider the Hebrew word shalom, a comprehensive term that encompasses the positive aspects of flourishing relationships, not just the absence of hostility. We might also note that in the Catholic Mass, just before congregants offer each other a sign of peace, they are reminded that Jesus said to his apostles, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.” Far from an instruction to withdraw into solitude, this is meant as an affirmation that true peace is a gift from God, something positive and relational that enables us to open up to each other and establish new connections.

 

This model of peace also works as a basic description of parenting. More than any other experience, being a parent opens us up to new life, and it deepens existing relationships within our families: husbands and wives grow closer, grandparents watch children become parents. It also encourages us to honor and delight in something outside ourselves. Our failure to see peace in its fullest sense as openness to the gift of God in others is, I think, related to growing cultural misgivings about parenthood. If we increasingly fail to see peace as something positive and oriented toward others, then we won’t associate it with parenthood. And to the extent that we see parenthood as daunting and isolating—as anything but peaceful—then it will be ever more difficult to encourage young people to form their own families.

Gift

Contrary to the modern focus on the costs of parenting, I have learned through being a parent that the true meaning of peace is the condition in which we understand one another as gift. Of course, there is a rich biblical tradition of viewing children as a gift, or a reward, from God. More broadly, this is related to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic view that creation itself is a gift; not self-standing, but created ex nihilo, from nothing, in a free expression of God’s love that is impossible for us to reciprocate. In this sense, creation is a gift in itself, a gift that signals a relationship, and a gift that instantiates its recipients. Something similar is true of the parent–child bond, and this bears upon parenting in three important ways.

First, the category of gift highlights that parenting involves reciprocal exchange even within the context of a highly asymmetrical relationship. Parents give time, care, and love to their children, who are entirely dependent and seemingly unable to reciprocate. Yet parents also know that children do offer reciprocal gifts in the form of laughter, smiles, joy, and love. This kind of reciprocal exchange cannot be expressed in economic terms, but it’s a profound part of the parent–child relationship.

Second, when we define peace as understanding one another as gift, it follows that we give part of ourselves to the recipient. An Aristotelian philosopher might describe this as the cause imparting something of itself to the effect. By analogy, a father recognizes that to give part of himself to a child—to welcome, treasure, and love the child—is to imbue the child with something of his own character. It might be true that modern parents exaggerate the impact of their efforts, but I still treasure the time I share with my children precisely because its usefulness is not measurable. Time, care, and attention each mediate, and give meaning to, the parent–child relationship.

Third, the category of gift reminds us to embrace what we receive from our children. As social media feeds demonstrate, it’s all too easy to celebrate the pleasurable parts of parenting, the conveniently photogenic occasions when the trip to the beach goes perfectly according to plan. But what about the less glamorous moments? As Public Discourse writer Nathanael Blake observed: “Changing a diaper is not that difficult. Doing it in the dark at 3:30 a.m. after a few weeks of rarely sleeping for more than ninety minutes at a stretch, while being screamed at, is the hard part.” Like so many others, I’ve learned that embracing the hard parts of parenting turns out not to be so hard after all; it’s a natural function of the peace of parenthood, of finding joy in what comes to us from our children—in all its gloriously messy forms.

 

Joy

So far, I’ve suggested that peace is not just the absence of conflict, but something positive, a state when we open up to the new life for which we are responsible and which presents itself to us in its own unique way. In addition, the other aspect of peace that I’ve come to appreciate through parenting is that it is characterized by joyful relationships. In his excellent dictionary of scholastic philosophy, Bernard Wuellner defines internal peace as “the calm and joy of soul in its love of a possessed good without further intense effort or uncertainty.” As it relates to parenting, I’d add that peace is not simply an internal state, but something outward-looking, oriented toward others.

That parenting is joyful might not seem like much of a revelation. On the other hand, parents often look harried and feel panicked. Though parenting is stressful, it gives rise to joyful relationships in which we feel fundamentally at peace because we’re not afraid or distracted, no longer striving for unattainable things or preoccupied with trivial concerns. There is, as Wuellner put it, no need for “further intense effort or uncertainty.” Michael Oakeshott noted that a child’s game is joyful because it has “no ulterior purpose, no further result aimed at; . . . it is not a striving after what one has not got.” The same might be said of parenting itself, of loving and treasuring our children for who they are and not for the value or utility of what they can offer.

Today it often seems that parenting is seen in the same way that some historians have viewed history: just one thing after another. One more obstacle to overcome; one more fire to put out. But my own experience has taught me not only that peace is (perhaps surprisingly) central to parenting, but that parenting itself offers us a positive vision of peace to inhabit—the opportunity to embrace, love, and find joy in one another as gift.

ESG, Woke Capitalism, and the Virtue of Humility

Americans can be forgiven for feeling disconcerted by the mutation of businesses and financial institutions into centers of woke capital. Following the Dobbs decision, major corporations like Microsoft and Meta affirmed that they would cover employee travel costs to abortion clinics, while others like Walmart and Lowe’s faced pressure to acquiesce to similar activist demands. But pro-abortion measures aren’t the only ways corporations are politicizing themselves: banks are expected to atone for slavery and small businesses are pressured to reduce their emissions even if they lack the resources, while tech giants seek to replicate China’s social credit system.

An important part of the story is the rapid spread of ESG, the investment framework that evaluates companies not according to profit generated or shareholder returns delivered, but on the basis of “environmental, social, and governance” criteria. Since a 2004 United Nations report—produced with eighteen of the world’s largest financial institutions—called for the global “integration of environmental, social and governance issues in investment decisions,” ESG has ballooned into what is expected to be a $34 trillion industry by 2026.

In concrete terms, the report’s abstractions have translated into the politicization of every aspect of business: “E” now stands in for climate alarmism that damages energy industries; “S” for pro-abortion and gender ideology; and “G” for decisions on hiring, firing, and compensation tied to critical race theory. Today, major investment firms grade companies based on their ESG policies, which means that activist notions relating to “environmental justice” and “racial equity” are significantly influencing business decisions. This thinly veiled project to pressure companies into elevating social justice grievances over making profit amounts to a direct attack on the free-market system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other in history.

 

After making deep inroads into corporate America, ESG is finally meeting resistance. A former senior executive at BlackRock, one of the leading proponents of ESG investing, is being vocal about the fact that it doesn’t work. The SEC recently fined Goldman Sachs $4 million for policy and procedural failures related to its ESG investment funds. In the words of a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business: “It’s very difficult to create a concept that’s empty at its source and toxic at the same time, but ESG people have managed to pull off that trick.”

ESG’s toxic impact on free markets and democracy calls for strong political, legal, and regulatory responses. But ESG also reminds us of the enduring truth that economic structures cannot be abstracted from the individuals and cultures that engender them. After all, ESG investing is enabled by woke CEOs, who enjoy the power and prestige that social justice advocacy confers. Some ESG critics argue that CEOs should focus instead on communicating the good that business does. Ultimately, though, overcoming ESG will require CEOs to grow in humility, developing self-regulatory habits of restraint, as well as a commitment to community.

Values Void

In his concluding reflection on Law & Liberty’s recent forum on ESG, Samuel Gregg emphasizes the role of CEOs in pushing back against the ideology. While acknowledging that ESG raises longstanding questions about the nature of the relationship between business, society, and government, he believes that intellectual arguments against ESG can only do so much. What’s really needed, he proposes, is for business leaders to be “far more explicit and confident” about the benefits that a profit-seeking system produces. If CEOs were “more skilled” at this kind of public advocacy, there might be “less of a values void in business that schemes like ESG try to fill.” Gregg’s focus on the role of CEOs reflects a broader trend among ESG critics that is likely to intensify with the new congressional balance of power in Washington, D.C.

But is the problem really that CEOs lack communication skills? While Gregg rightly calls for business leaders to articulate that profit is both a sign of customer satisfaction and the foundation of broader social goods, his own choice of language points to deeper concerns. He warns business leaders not to “play the appeasement game or avert their eyes from the wider agenda with which some ESG proposals are associated,” and he advises against the “calculated endorsement” of schemes, like ESG, that undermine the freedom on which capitalism depends. These notes of caution suggest that combating ESG is not just about communication; fundamentally, it’s a question of character. Free markets require free individuals and free competition, but to function correctly they also require these individuals to be virtuous.

As woke CEOs have embraced ESG, often for self-aggrandizing reasons, one virtue that has been conspicuously lacking is humility, which Augustine saw as the prerequisite of all other virtues. Humility involves recognizing the limits of our knowledge, overcoming our self-centered inclinations, and evaluating ideas in ways that orient us toward what is good and true rather than what satisfies our own preferences or fashionable political views. Since these tendencies would be beneficial within the context of resisting ESG, it’s worth encouraging business leaders not just to communicate more effectively, but to attend to cultivating the virtue of humility. In particular, humility will help clarify the importance of restraint and the meaning of community, each of which has tended to be neglected in ESG conversations.

 

Restraint

To a significant degree, ESG’s rise has been enabled by a lack of restraint among business leaders and the broader culture in defining the nature and ends of business. Profit is no longer enough; ESG investors and activists seek an extravagantly expanded conception of the values that business should pursue, including divisive ideas related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Predictably, this has prompted some right-leaning critics to call for a more assertive political response that would replace ESG causes with an alternative set of mandated values.)

What can humility teach us about restraint? Here we might turn to the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, perhaps an unlikely source of business advice. (Though since ESG seems like religion for many of its advocates, maybe theology is the best response.) For Aquinas, the function of humility is “to temper and restrain the mind, lest it tend to high things immoderately.” ESG ideology is a textbook case of the modern mind’s failing to restrain itself, failing to keep business in its proper perspective, and failing to focus on profit and shareholder value. Instead, ESG investment metrics encourage CEOs to strive for dubious goals that lie outside the regular scope of business and belong more properly to the realm of NGOs.

By contrast, business leaders who embody humility would be less inclined to prioritize their own needs, ideological motives, or self-regard. They might be more receptive to the growing evidence that ESG doesn’t work, with funds underperforming and investors increasingly doubtful of ESG’s redefinition of the core purpose of business. More broadly, a posture of humility and restraint is a more natural fit with the messy uncertainty of free markets, which work precisely because they enable free individuals to exchange goods and services with each other—not because they can be managed and manipulated with reference to ESG priorities.

 

As corporate and political elites find more and more ways to publicly signal their compliance to ESG orthodoxy, Aquinas’s insight that true virtue is an “internal movement of the soul” might also be relevant. The ability to restrain ourselves from inadvisable public actions rests on the awareness of our own private limitations: the inner person shapes the outer world. This means that virtue will not be found in external gestures, but in the inward choices that we make over time. It can, as Aristotle said, be cultivated. The model of the CEO as humble, restrained, publicly modest, attentive to virtuous habits of mind, and carefully focused on delivering value for customers and shareholders sits uneasily with cocktail receptions and networking dinners at Aspen ESG summits. But it’s a model that needs to be restored if ESG is to be resisted in the long term.

Community

If ESG undermines a modest and restrained approach to business, it also challenges traditional views of the meaning of community. This is because ESG prescribes cookie-cutter practices of governance, social relations, and environmentalism, compelling businesses to incorporate arbitrary, predefined, and often contentious issues as part of their strategies. McKinsey, one of the largest management consulting firms and a leading ESG advocate, concedes that “top-down ESG pronouncements can seem distracting or too vague to be of much use.”

As an alternative to the top-down, coercive uniformity of ESG investment theories, humility will help business leaders and other supporters of free markets to prioritize the value of community. Humility is often seen as a personal disposition, but its etymology implies a wider, communal dimension. It is closely related to the Latin word humilis, which literally means on the ground, or grounded. To be humble, then, means to be grounded, rooted, and formed as part of a community, whose members we engage with constructively and without undue concern for our self-centered inclinations—or for calculations of what might be politically expedient.

 

How might this aspect of humility bear upon ESG? It reminds us that businesses—before they are anything else—are on-the-ground enterprises, located within specific industries and cultures, responding to customers, and providing goods both directly and indirectly to local communities. As such, businesses will flourish with a local, contextual approach to social and environmental considerations, rather than the one-size-fits-all ESG agenda emanating from international conferences. In this sense, it is unsurprising that resistance to ESG is being driven most notably by state leaders, who are best placed to discern its adverse effect on key industries.

Being humble is not the same as being lowly. It means recognizing that our actions are significant precisely because they shape the social fabric, each of whose members are of equal worth and dignity. It matters that CEOs attend modestly and diligently to the core purpose of business, which is to generate profits and shareholder returns, create jobs, and provide needed products and services. And it matters that CEOs perform this role as grounded in the communities that they form, and by which they are formed in turn. These are not small things—and if they provide the basis for repelling a toxic investment ideology that threatens America’s free-market economy, they will turn out to be more valuable than any corporate communications strategy.