We have had speakers from Boston, speakers from Washington, DC, and we even have had a speaker come to us from merry olde England, and not just an Englishman but a bona fide Knight of the British Empire, Sir John Polk-inghorne. But as I say, we have never looked to our own here in Gotham for a Socrates speaker. Until tonight, my friends.
The presumption had been, as I said, that there simply did not exist a New Yorker of such brilliance and erudition and self-examination as to warrant an invitation to our happy convocation.
So, that was my presumption, and, dare I say, the presumption of more folks than would care to admit. Some of them are perhaps in this very room. But on behalf of all those whose presumption that was, let me tonight say that in the person of Dr. Paul Vitz, we present our admission of error and our most profound apologies. That’s right. Horrid as it is to fathom, Dr. Paul Vitz is that extraordinarily rare New Yorker who is able to live, indeed thrive, amidst the inescapable din and the infinite enticements of this great city— and yet to be a self-examined soul.
And for this, my fellow New Yorkers, I think he deserves some kind of prize. Unfortunately, we have no prizes to give away tonight, save one, that being an attentive audience, which is to say, all of you. Yes, you, ladies and gentlemen, are that prize of which I speak. Doesn’t that make you feel good? Perhaps it just makes you feel cheap. In any case, that is the situation.
So, now, a word of introduction about our indigenous speaker, Dr. Paul Vitz. Dr. Vitz lives right here in the belly of the unexamined beast that is New York City. He is a professor of psychology at New York University, which is also located in that self-same unexamined beast’s belly. Dr. Vitz is a senior scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, and he is the author of hundreds of articles and several books, among them Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship; Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism— he will be touching on that thesis today, among other things; Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious; and others. Most of these books are available at our book table at a reasonable discount, and I am sure Dr. Vitz will be happy to autograph them for you, if you ask nicely.
Dr. Vitz lives here in New York, in Greenwich Village, with his wife, who is a professor of French, also at New York University. They have six children, and I would assume that this alone gives Dr. Vitz all the credentials he needs to say something worth hearing on the subject of fatherhood.
Fatherhood is one of those subjects that seems, at least in my lifetime anyway, to be somewhat neglected. We hear a lot about motherhood these days, but fatherhood seems somehow to have gone, shall we say, out of vogue. The happy images that we would get of fatherhood from such past movies as Life with Father and such TV series as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, however unrealistic they might have been, nonetheless had their fingers on the idealized essence of fatherhood, and I think it is safe to say those images could be reassuring in a good way.
But the four-decade backlash against these images sometimes gives us a contemporary view of fatherhood that, on the fictional side, would be Al Bundy and Homer Simpson and on the nonfictional side would give us something like, for example, Michael Jackson hanging Junior over a balcony at a fancy high-rise hotel— not exactly the kind of thing that Andy Griffith or Robert Young would have done. They certainly would not have made their children wear masks.2
But, in any case, things have changed. I think some of these changes make me long for what Dr. Vitz has to say on the subject of fatherhood, whatever that will be.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Paul Vitz.
1 A massive advertising banner for The Apprentice starring Donald Trump hung from the Trump building located just across Fifth Avenue from the University Club, at which this event was held.
2 The late pop star and singer Michael Jackson was in the habit of appearing in public with his children wearing masks, and in 2002 he famously shocked his fans when he impulsively dangled his infant son, Prince, from the fourth-floor balcony of the high-rise Hotel Adlon in Berlin, Germany.
Trust New York to come up with an introduction like that. I mean, really. It is true I’m a New Yorker. I’ve lived in the City now for almost forty years, and whether I’m up to all those adjectives, that’s another thing for you to judge later. I’m not so sure, but I hope to hold up Manhattan in this list of speakers.
It’s not just a pleasure to be here, but it’s also a challenge. I don’t think I’ve ever addressed an audience of the kind you were described as, and it looks like you really are. I met some of you beforehand. You come from different countries. Some of you have very odd names; some of you have very familiar names. But I expect that there is a little bit of the world here tonight, not just New York in a parochial sense.
What I’m going to talk about is the general theme of fatherhood. I think that I can show, with a few comments and analysis, that the crisis of our culture today is in important respects a crisis in the family. But 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, because I think all men are called to be fathers. Now, I don’t necessarily mean they are called to be biological fathers. I mean that they’re called to be fathers to at least some of the younger people in their life.
But I want to introduce this with a remark from the ancient Hebrew Scriptures where they say that “the sins of the fathers” go on for generations, sometimes for three or perhaps for seven. It is interesting that they only speak, so far as I know, about the sins of the fathers being perpetuated onto their children.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that mothers aren’t capable of sinning or of not being good mothers. But there is something very profoundly true about the scriptural observation. First of all, I think mothers are much more reliable at being mothers than fathers are at being fathers. There are many, many more “good enough” mothers, relatively speaking. So they’re less likely, I think, to be causing damage to their children. I know there are exceptions. After all, I’ve been an active therapist for years, and I certainly know people who have had serious trouble with their mothers. But in general, mothers are much more reliable at being mothers than fathers are at being fathers. Second, if a mother is not reliable, usually it shows up very soon when the child is young, and other women who observe it— the grandmother, the sister— step in and help out. You find substitute mothers and foster mothers coming in quickly, if the mother is one of those who are truly unsatisfactory.
And finally, there’s another reason why these comments from the Jewish Scriptures are correct, and that is, if the mother really fails and there’s nobody else to pick it up— if mothering fails— the children are so damaged that they can’t pass their sins on to anybody, that is, they’re not out there functioning. They may be withdrawn, they may be in a mental institution, and they may be so frightened or anxious that as members of society, they simply fail. Or let’s say that the children got into some socially destructive mode, when they got a little bit older. So, in a certain sense, the sins of the mother are much less likely— even if they do occur— to be passed on to subsequent generations.
And so, they speak of the sins of the fathers, and what happens is something like this: The child has a good enough mother, and then the father comes along and fails in some substantial way; perhaps he’s an alcoholic, or he abandons them and runs off with another woman. In fact, one of the tragic ways in which a father can fail when the child is young is simply to die, and the child feels abandoned. Young children don’t understand death as an accident; they just feel purposely abandoned. There are ways to overcome this to some degree, but for some of the people we will look at, their failed father was a dead father— a dead father who was not later replaced in any way by a new substitute father.
What