Genetics, culture work together to drive us to pursue what we want

By David McElroy · December 24, 2017

Some people believe holidays change people, but I think they’re far more likely to bring out what’s already inside — for good or for bad. Holidays that center around family frequently tell me who someone really is.

I pay more attention to children than most adults do. I watch families. I talk with children when I can. I take them seriously and I play with them frivolously. I love their world and I love the ways in which they can change how I see my own world.

That’s never more true than around Christmas.

Whether children are from families which are religious or not, there seems to be something magical that takes over around this time. (I presume the same is true in cultures where there are other religious and cultural traditions, but my experience is in an American Christian cultural context.)

Something I experience in these children at this time changes me — or at least brings out something in a stronger way that’s always there.

I watch happy children singing Christmas songs for parents and grandparents. I watch their eyes light up as they talk about stories they’ve learned, whether it’s about Jesus or Santa or the Grinch. Some of the excitement is about what they hope to receive, but there’s definitely something more.

It’s as though they experience a certain kind of magic in this season — and it rubs off on some of the lucky ones around them who pay attention.

Nothing makes me want children of my own the way this season does. I can’t rationally explain that. In fact, I can tell you why the rational thing is to avoid having children. They’re expensive. They’re a lot of work. They put a lot of things in your life on hold (if you spend enough time with them). And no matter how you raise your children, it’s possible you’ll end up with your heart broken — and you might not even be able to understand why, even when it’s clearly explained to you.

But something in me needs to create life and raise happy, healthy children — and I have very specific instinctive ideas about the sort of woman I have to reproduce with. I can’t explain where those strong convictions came from. I can’t justify that they’re right. I certainly can’t force them to become reality.

I just know — in the most secret part of my heart — what is right and what ought to be. There are times when what you know is right trumps all reason and all other logical desires and conclusion.

Around this time of year, the urge to make this a reality becomes more like an obsession. I’m driven to do whatever is necessary to build the reality I see so clearly in those images in my heart.

Maybe I’m not alone in this. Just today, I ran across a journal article that shows people across 129 countries (where data are available) become more interested in sex and reproduction at the times of their culture’s equivalent of our Christmas season. In a paper called “Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods,” five researchers show in dry statistical language that this is true.

On the surface, it’s about sex, but on a deeper level, it’s really about sex as a means of expressing a desire to fulfill a genetic and cultural imperative to reproduce. In language that’s not so dry and statistical, it really means there’s something about this time of year that makes us even more likely to want to become what we already want to be — and what I want is to be a husband to the right woman and father of our children.

This season makes some people bigger jerks than usual. It makes other people more greedy than ever. It makes some people put on airs to try to impress other people with their wealth and social position. It makes some people eager to drink alcohol and consume other recreational drugs — in attempts to escape what they are or to find some sort of pleasure they can’t find in their sober states.

Whatever people are — whatever people want — they seem to become that much more of that right now.

This season fills me with the longing for children — and all the things which come with that in my mind’s eye.

This isn’t a sudden revelation for me and it’s not news to anyone who knows me well. But it’s not a rational desire or goal. It’s not like a desire for a nice house or better clothes or shiny gadgets. It’s more like the desire for air or food or water.

It’s a fierce desire to fulfill one of the key reasons I’m alive.

Many people have no such desire to reproduce. And even some of the ones who want children in a theoretical sense have no interest in doing the difficult work of nurturing them in healthy ways once they’re born. I have no objection to people not having children. In fact, many children would be better off without being born to certain parents. (The most important decision you ever make for your children is who the other parent will be — and many people fail to take that decision seriously enough.)

I’m not saying everybody ought to have kids. I’m just saying that I need children. Something in my genes drives me toward that — and the study I read today makes it clear that culture drives others to feel this way, too.

On this Christmas Eve, I know plenty of people who are enjoying spending time with their children, delighting in the wonder that these young children are experiencing. I envy them. Now that stores and restaurants are closed — and church services are finished for the evening — I’m at home alone with a dog and a bunch of cats.

I love my little zoo, but they can’t take the place of what both genetics and culture are driving me toward. I want this every single day of the year, but at this time above all, I need to be a husband and father.

That’s the part of me that gets magnified right now, because it’s who I am in my heart.

Merry Christmas to everybody, but especially those children who are experiencing the magic which I long to experience with kids of my own.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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