Why we need to publicly shame Nick Cannon
He's being cruel to his children
Nick Cannon announced this week that he is having another child. This is his twelfth child; those twelve children have been divided unevenly between six different women over the span of about 11 years or so. This level of chaotic dysfunction is usually reserved only for the deeply impoverished (and only then if they live in wealthy Western nations, where the upper classes broadly tolerate this kind of dysfunction in the impoverished). But Nick Cannon appears to have a bee in his bonnet about impregnating a lot of women with a lot of children, so I guess he’s the wealthy exception that proves the rule.
Here is a question: Why is he not being publicly shamed for this? Why is there no broad, sustained campaign to make him feel guilty for what is obviously reckless, selfish behavior? I cannot really make sense of it, in large part because we live in a society where public shaming is very popular. People will shame and berate their family and friends and neighbors for much less than this—to their faces, behind their backs, on Twitter, on Facebook, on NextDoor, whatever. There’s no shortage of shaming today, we are in the midst of an absolute shame surfeit.
Yet apparently nobody is interested in shaming Nick Cannon, who has to be among the biggest candidates for public shame of the last decade or so. You might argue that he’s done nothing worthy of the honor; he’s simply had consensual sexual relations with a bunch of women, there’s no victim, this isn’t shame-worthy. But of course the issue here isn’t Nick Cannon’s behavior or that of his many mistresses, not primarily, anyway; it’s the well-being of the children that result from these couplings. Both Cannon and the mothers of his children are quite deliberately and consciously bringing children into the world into profoundly sub-optimal conditions. Any one of his kids will be painfully aware that Daddy has five other families, that there are five other Mommies out there with many other children, five other sources of diversion and entanglement that pull away Daddy’s time, love, discipline, respect, affection. These children are and/or will be aware that they have many other siblings out there, brothers and sisters with whom they might otherwise have been forming deep and lasting and rewarding relationships and bonds—but of course those kids are part of other families, with other priorities, other schedules, other friends, other networks, other loyalties. Periodically these other families steal away Daddy for protracted periods of time; eventually each little holon of this network may come to deeply resent, even hate, the others within it. Each child will figure out at some point some version of the following: “At some point Daddy and Mommy were together, and they made me, but I wasn’t important enough, or deserving of love enough, for them to stay together and raise me together; instead Daddy decided there were other mommies and other kids that were more important than me so he went to be with them.”
Do you know what these sorts of thing do to a child? Do you know how painfully and unhappily it scrambles their brains and cripples their development? You are lucky if it never happened to you. Try and consider the confusion and pain and anger you would have felt if it had. It is rough-edged, brutal stuff, unhappy and dark.
Our culture has in recent years grown to devalue these sorts of considerations, because for some reason it’s broadly assumed that if you take care of the immediate practical needs of children—food, shelter, sleep, education, a minimum level of affection—then it doesn’t really matter in what kind of circumstances they’re raised in. And to be sure, all of Nick Cannon’s children probably have material advantages you and I will never have: The man is worth $20 million and he appears to support his kids pretty lavishly.
Big whoop. Children desperately crave the undiverted time, attention and comfort of their parents; it’s existential for them, it defines their own existence and stabilizes them in ways nothing else can. Imagine a child who needs his father right in that very moment, who is scared or upset in some momentous way and needs to be held and comforted by his dad—but he can’t, because Dad’s with one of his five other families, not sure which one, but whoever it is they’re simply more important than you are right now, and you’re not scheduled to get him for another three weeks. Sorry, kiddo, try and control your emotions until then.
It’s not okay to do that to children. And if there were any practical decency in our culture, our efforts at shaming would be redirected away from the petty social media tantrums that have become so popular in recent years and toward the moral opprobrium necessary to prevent this kind of shameful behavior. Instead, everybody jokes about Nick Cannon’s dozen far-flung children, har-har, he announces he’s having another kid and Ryan Reynolds cracks wise about it and Chili’s does a promotional tie-in. Disgraceful stuff here, the sorry trappings of a society that has utterly forgotten what is right and correct and good.