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Notes -
I left the Motte for a week, because I felt kind of embarrassed and irritated based on last time I tried posting here, but did want to post on this.
Anyway, yes, it came across as very odd, especially from Caplan. I had more sympathy for Scott, since he did not write a book about how easy raising kids is, has young twins, and comes across as more self deprecating.
Both Scott and Caplan are writers, which is unusually incompatible with small children. I've mentioned before that I really enjoyed Virginia Woolf's take on that in A Room of One's Own -- mothers were almost never writers, even when they were educated for it, since writing (and she was focusing on poetry) takes an unbroken chain of thought through multiple hours of the day. I would be interested to hear more about George MacDonald's writing habits, since he was poor by modern standards, and he and his wife raised eleven children, and he was en unusually excellent writer. All his stories have the characters wandering around among the heather at sunrise, thinking, and I imagine him doing the same. It's probably no coincidence that his best work is in fairy tales, so he probably told them to his children. David Friedman talks about how much more he enjoyed his children once they learned to read. Dickens sounds like he had a pretty tumultuous home life.
I listened to a storyteller a few months ago, who tells stories to rooms full of children at schools, and also publishes books. He said that his process is to tell the stories to the children first, a lot of times, for months and months, maybe dozens of times, see what gets good responses, and then writes it down afterwards. That's my impression of ancient storytellers as well. I knew a priest who told unusually excellent sermons, but almost never wrote them down, but I think his process was similar: he would watch the people in real time, and iterate off of that. Scott doesn't seem to have a process anything like that, as much as I like Unsung and shorts like the one about the Hinge of History, and wish he would write more fables.
There was a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, as I recall, where Orwell was talking about how the British underclass weren't really educated to be literate, but that when charity workers would come around and offer books and classes they mostly weren't interested, and Orwell thought that was just as well, reading and writing weren't much compatible with the lives they were leading. Which seems reasonably likely. There's a lot of noise about lower than hoped for literacy rates in America, <a href=https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read">where "literacy" is, for instance, understanding and appreciating something like Bleak House, but the hoped for outcomes of that campaign are under discussed. I remember my uncle (who owned multiple businesses, was athletic and had a teacher wife and three children) talking to my dad (who reads Kierkergaard out of personal interest) about not reading books. He didn't like reading books, he liked playing sports and doing business stuff. He was probably functionally illiterate, by the Bleak House test. That might be a perfectly valid strategy, actually! Meanwhile, the kids are in bed, and I'm here writing this, which isn't necessarily an improvement, or any more civilizationally useful, even if I can read Dickens just fine.
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