Elon Musk is a father, I suppose. He has at least fourteen biological children and is committed to having many more that he “provides” for out of his vast wealth. And yet it somehow feels wrong to use the word “father” to describe what he is up to, something that summons forth scare quotes when you try to describe him as “providing” for his children, even if each of his children has a great deal more wealth than my four little ones.
I know this disparity well—the gulf between the merely biological reality of being a father versus the deeper reality of it. I often say that I do not have a father, precisely because mine left when I was about two. Of course, biologically I, like everyone, had a father. Yet real fatherhood—full fatherhood—involves a lot more than just being there biologically at the origin or providing financially for an unencountered child. It generally includes both of these, but it is both more demanding and more intimate than mere biology or finance.
It is this more fundamental reality that Zechariah Mickel explores in The Unthinkable Sacrifice: An Essay on Fatherhood. In a time when the manosphere increasingly holds up cultural icons like Musk, Rogan, or the Tates as exemplars of “masculinity,” Mickel proposes we consider a different icon: that of a father holding his baby and looking into that baby’s face. This is a vastly different starting point than machismo and misogyny. It is the starting point, in Mickel’s view, of both real fatherhood and real manhood, one surely needed in an era shaped by declining birthrates, delayed adulthood, and a dwindling sense of masculine responsibility. Mickel’s vision of encounter provides an opportunity to find a deeper happiness and human connection for all of us: men, women, and children alike.
Mickel writes his book from two central experiences in his life: his being a father of a four-year-old and his engagement with Christian phenomenology. Both create strengths and weaknesses in the work. The scope of Mickel’s experience with children is narrow but intense. Because he is writing about being a father to a child in her baby to toddler phase, many aspects of parenting are not included: watching your child go on a first date, get her first job, or start his own band. There is thus a limitation in the scope of fatherhood, one Mickel expresses. He writes that he does not claim, and never will, that “this, and only this, is fatherhood.” He speaks of the fatherhood that he knows in a way that draws his readers deeper into this essential human reality.
It is also a book written from deep within a tradition of Christian thought in the French phenomenological school. This centers on a close consideration of human experience open to transcendence. Mickel engages this tradition in a relatively accessible way, but readers unused to figures such as Emanuel Levinas and Jean Luc Marion may struggle. As Mickel writes, “my thinking found its way into my life as a parent, and my life as a parent found its way into my thinking.” This combination of theory and experience is the source of much of the book’s richness but also some of its limitations.
The Refusal to Turn Away
For Mickel, the starting point for the realization of fatherhood is the face of the child. He draws on Levinas, for whom the human face is the call or even demand of the other person, who summons me to responsibility. Ethics does not arise from my own self-determination but from the demand of others, what the other requires of me. In this, Mickel thinks the child’s face discloses more than just cuteness. It reveals a soul, which he describes as the “existential heft of their life as a human person.” The human face expresses the invisible depths of the person. These depths are real but also precarious for Mickel. The child one holds faces all sorts of threats, including from her own father, who at best will fail his children frequently, and at worst will leave or harm them.
For Mickel, the child makes the father more than the father makes the child. Here my absentee father is relevant to this keen insight. Sure, my father fathered me and so “made” me. But, for Mickel, a true father is made by his child, in that true fatherhood is a response to the existence of the child. The child summons, and a father is properly a father inasmuch as he replies. The father is called “not only to attention” by the child, Mickel writes, “but to responsibility as well.” We are not made men by having a lot of money or a lot of women or even big social media following. Rather, it is “this refusal to turn away” from others, especially our child, which is “the very foundation of responsibility.” The human fully alive bases his life on that foundation. For Mickel, in our response to others’ need, we find real fatherhood and thus real manhood, too. But really this is true for mothers and all people, is it not?
This parental responsibility is so strong that parents are often willing to sacrifice everything for their child. What that sacrifice is, or will be, is unknown to us, unthinkable in fact. One of the great risks of being a parent is that one opens oneself to enormous risk in having a child. The vulnerability of one’s child becomes one’s own. My children’s sickness, scraped knees, first breakup, first detention all become mine. So too the kinds of things that are far worse, the things that elicit “the terror that arrives for the father with the onset of intrusive thoughts around some major trauma befalling the child.” To love is to risk; to love a child is to risk all. This is no bravado. It is vulnerability, the possibility of being wounded by love of another that makes a parent, and more broadly, a human.
For Mickel, our modern world makes such risk-taking less likely. We are constantly distracted by an endless array of unsatisfying satisfactions. Men refusing fatherhood for pleasures is an old phenomenon, but it is a broadening one in our time. Fewer men today become biological fathers, and other men turn down the responsibility of fatherhood. Mickel’s book expresses the seriousness of fatherhood and the phenomenological tradition which sees our life as fundamentally a call to responsibility in the face of the need and suffering of others.
Yet I fear that Mickel makes fatherhood too serious. Parenting is often hard, frustrating, and infuriating. The baby’s face does summon forth the deepest call of responsibility. But the baby also smiles for the first time, laughs at your silly faces (a key obligation of parenting is silly faces), and stares in total wonder at his hand for about a month as he realizes it is a part of his body. That is the fun, and funny, stuff. And it relates to another form of levity.
Parents should continue to enjoy all kinds of aspects of their life beyond their children. First, in my view, the deepest responsibility and source of joy for a husband and wife is each other. Secondly, they also need friends, hobbies, and vocations outside the household. It is simply not the case that “the child’s face is the light that reveals my own enjoyment to be rather unimportant,” as Michel claims. My enjoyment remains important, in part because it will make me a better father, and because over time, I will introduce my child into those enjoyments, whether that be canoe-camping or reading philosophy. A good parent does not need to “devote my full attention to this face” such that they give it their “undivided attention.” Thinking this is so may make one too overbearing of a parent and too prone to burnout. Parenting is an unbelievable responsibility—one summoned forth by need—but overstating the nature of that responsibility is unwise. It is also not likely to attract men to make the sacrifice needed.
The Distinctiveness of Fatherhood
This brings us to the most perplexing aspect of the book. It is not obvious to me that the book is really about fatherhood. Rather, it is much more about parenthood. Much of what parents do is shared; it is a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. But there are aspects particular to a man as father and to a woman as mother. Mickel does not dwell on the aspect of parenting that does not overlap, that is unique to a father. I kept thinking he would, and I wish he had added one more chapter in this short book to explore what is distinctive.
What, to my mind, is specific to fatherhood? I would point to two things from my own experience with my four children. The first is the experience of uselessness and secondariness. For nine months, in utero, I could do nothing for my developing child. Her mother did it all. And then in those first several months after birth, what my baby needed most was never me. Of course, I held my infants, experienced them skin-to-skin, changed diapers, etcetera. But I could not nurse them and thus could rarely comfort my little ones in the same way as my wife. To father is to know that you are not primary. But it also means something further.
As a father, I discovered my chief use in service to my wife. My first baby nursed for long stretches. What could I do? I could get the novel my wife wanted to read, fetch a glass of water, move the footstool. With subsequent babies, I helped most often by taking the other children, serving them and, in serving them, also serving their mother. A father of young children is something of a pack mule, carrying various items and various kids. It is also often the work of teaching your kids to get back up after a fall, to work in the yard, and to learn to be “brave and true” as I tell my sons and daughters. Fatherhood is much more than this, of course, much of which Mickel sheds light on. But he somehow misses what makes a man with children not just a parent, but a dad.
Being such a father is becoming an increasingly rare experience. Whether that is because men refuse the responsibility that makes a real father, whether they see manhood as dominion over women and thus refuse the need to serve child and wife, or whether they disappear into basement video games and never become even biological fathers, we face a deficiency of fatherhood. A book like Mickel’s is an important offering in recovering the meaning of fatherhood and thus reviving this essential vocation.
We will not be able to recover a sex-realist vision of life if we cannot summon forth a vision of fatherhood far richer than just making babies and paying for them. While I think we will need to balance Mickel’s account with a fuller vision of what makes fatherhood distinctive, we need his call to responsibility. May more of us heed that summons. And may all of us support those trying to do so.
