“Alex Marlow and his colleagues at Breitbart are among the most impressive people I know,” said Dennis Prager on Friday’s edition of his eponymous radio show, offering his praise of this news media outlet following a live conversation with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
“[Alex Marlow] called in because he listens to the show. I’m very touched,” said Prager of Marlow’s listenership to his program.
“Does having children make you happy?” asked Prager of his audience. “Do children bring happiness?” On Fridays, the second hour of Prager’s show is entitled the “Happiness Hour,” with last week’s topic being children.
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Prager regularly declares that happiness is both a choice and moral obligation. He further advises his audience that happy people make the world a better place, while unhappy people make it worse. Along this theme, he recommended compartmentalization of “misery” to protect others from one’s pain:
You really have to compartmentalize, and I think people need to put the unhappy things in a sealed compartment so that the water doesn’t seep out. I always have images in my mind of life, where a ship — and there are compartments — the Titanic sank because the compartments leaked water; they were supposed to be watertight. You will sink if you allow the compartments of misery to leak. They need to be placed in sealed compartments.
Marlow reflected on his experience thus far as a father to an infant son. “I am loving parenthood. I have an 11-month-old, and I think it’s the greatest thing. I’m 33, and it’s my first son, and it is so underrated. … It just so happens the “Happiness Hour” today is on this exact topic, and I’d love to share my thoughts.”
Parenthood provides purpose, said Marlow, recalling Viktor Frankl’s thesis in the latter’s Holocaust memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning:
If you believe the Viktor Frankl axiom that man’s ultimate purpose is to find meaning as opposed to pleasure — I guess that’s the Freudian side — then it’s a total no-brainer. Immediately, the sense of responsibility comes in, and it really overwhelms you, but the thing is that even for the Freudian side, it has been so fun every day. If you have not had the pleasure of making your baby laugh, then I feel like you’re really [and] truly missing out, and I feel like as a society, we’ve kind of gone a little backwards at this point, where we focus so much on career early on, in those key childbearing years for women, in particular, and [in years] where men are very high-energy and can do things late into the night or early in the morning, and I do think we’re kind of a little bit off-kilter here.
I’m trying to use the platforms I have to encourage people to start earlier because my wife’s a medical doctor, and she’s 32, and we’re already thinking about biological clocks because after 35 it becomes more dangerous [to conceive and bear children] and exponentially so after 40, if it’s even possible.
Contemporary Western society’s broad postponement of marriage and child-rearing relative to the norms of human history is a “problem,” assessed Marlow.
“I think society, particularly Judeo-Christian communities, I really think we need to start encouraging younger people to get married and start families earlier on, even if you’re not as far along in that career as you want,” estimated Marlow. “I think this kind of goes hand-in-hand with the broken education system, where we’re all coming out with huge amounts of debts, and it’s slowing the start of families, and that’s a problem to me.”
“I agree with every word you said,” replied Prager.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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