My Review by Aubrey Neal

Frank Schaeffer’s new book Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy (2021) adds a new dimension to his already impressive list of timely and thought-provoking publications. His supporters will love it. Those who only know him by reputation will be amazed. America’s most famous born-again atheist has written a love story for the whole human family. It starts with advice from his four year old granddaughter and grows into one of the wisest and most inspirational books I have ever read.

Schaeffer’s new book is an inspiring sequel to the subtitle of his last book, Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to give love, create beauty and find peace (2014). Fall in Love… picks up precisely where his previous book left off. Frank Schaeffer has found peace. It all started when Schaeffer and his “best friend”, Genie. were ambushed by joy. He writes, “Lucky for us, Covid-19 brought our grandchildren home full-time after we’d hit sixty-five” (p. 214). There was never a happier unplanned parenthood. Fall in Love… “is, Schaeffer writes, “for every parent fighting for more time with their children; every grandparent who cares about their grandchildren [and] anyone thinking about having children” (p. 7). The theoretical side of the book is highlighted by his new experiences as a parent the second time around:

Me: “Nora, what are you chewing?”
Nora: “Nothing.”

“I can see you are chewing something.”
“I’m not.”

“You have something in your mouth.”
“No, I don’t.”

“Look in my eyes and tell me that.”
Nora shooting me a direct I-know-you-hate-chewing-gum-but-I-don’t-care LOOK: “I don’t have anything in my mouth.”

“I can see it! How can you look me in the eyes and say you don’t have chewing gum when you do?!”

Pause for thought, then: “To be fair, I wasn’t looking at your eyes but at your nose.”

I was still laughing an hour later (p.300).

Fall in Love… shows a happier side of Frank Schaeffer than the reading public has ever seen before and It may help dispel some prevalent misunderstandings about Schaeffer’s previous work. The quality of the writing and research in this new book is high and could stake a claim for Schaeffer as an important American moral philosopher in his own right. Fall in Love… is a sophisticated invitation to be happy. Contentious ideological controversies are treated gently as a much mellower Frank Schaeffer explains why we all should be friends.

Fall in Love… describes human nature as naturally empathetic, compassionate and concerned. It makes a robust claim altruism is the fundamental survival trait for the whole human species. Schaeffer touts it ebulliently. He claims new research proves, “Evolution actually engineered us” to care for each other (p, 54).” Our “big brains” evolved only because those who cared for us had big hearts to begin with. We could not have developed and no one could have survived if the biochemical foundation of our everyday being was not, in its original and healthiest form, organized for us to care about each other.

In other words, evolution knew not only that giving birth is tough-to-fatal for human females but that motivating the successful raising of humans was going to need a powerful community-wide, gender-neutral inducement (p. 68).

Our endocrine system provides us with that powerful, gender-neutral inducement. The human body produces it naturally to reinforce our genetic aptitude for nurturing and caregiving. It’s our human birthright. Schaeffer dubs the biochemical inducement to care and nurture, “oxyjoy” (p, 69), the happy, healthy natural high that makes us want to care for each other.

“Oxyjoy” is Schaeffer’s fountain of youth and preferred recreational drug. He recommends its unrestricted use in unlimited amounts on all occasions public and private. He believes it will be highly addictive. Its many positive side effects should include better government. Under its influence, he believes, we can, as human beings in a real world (instead of the ones we belligerently fantasize about)—learn to be friends. “The survival of the friendliest” is the broad version of the primary insight Schaeffer has learned from personal experience and anthropological research. Mature content warning: the old Frank has mellowed, but he has not moved in with the Munchkins, yet. The recovering evangelist, wrestling mightily with his youthful addiction, still falls off the wagon and (to most reader’s delight) unmistakably does not mince his words.

According to Schaeffer. the group in greatest need of daily megadoses of “oxyjoy” is the modern adult male. On average, he needs to be much friendlier. Schaeffer believes women, in general, are much further along the path to survival level friendship than men. Frank can be frank: Many “males feel good about shitty behavior" (139). Feminist values are closer to our evolutionary foundation, so women, at this point, are better survivors at the social, moral, political and species level than men. Men, Schaeffer says, are drowning in an epigenetic morass of macho male aggression and careerism. This sad fact requires them to support the full and equal participation of women in every facet of public life. Careerist males who put promotion and job status ahead of loving their family get a salty lesson on misplaced priorities. The basic “authoritarian, vainglorious, and blustering male” (p. 117) needs to concentrate on “empathy, parenting and especially love,” instead of “the male leadership qualities of a thug” (p. 117). Your golden calf of a career “is still just a fucking job” (p.153). And, in case you still do not get it: “The movie The Terminator got it wrong: the machines didn’t take over—the assholes did” (p. 180).

Chapter 5: “The Survival of the Fittest…(and) the Subject of Dogs” makes the central point of the book. The survival of the fittest was not the survival of the assholes. The fittest are the friendliest. Survivors were the ones most concerned with the well-being of the group. Exhibit A is dogs:

According to Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods of Duke University, authors of The Genius of Dogs (2013), we tend to give ourselves too much credit when telling the story of how dogs came into our lives…We have a long history of eradicating wolves…So how, Hare and Woods ask, was “this misunderstood creature tolerated by humans long enough” to evolve into . . . Zip?…“The short version,” they write, “is that we think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest.” (p. 190).

So: 1) friendship is a vital “heritable trait”. We learn it by being parented. We develop it by being parents and primary caregivers, ourselves. 2.) Friendship is our primary natural aptitude and the key to our species survival. These two points show Schaeffer is a responsible conservative moralist. Orthodox moralists simply have no ground to stand on when they denounce Frank Schaeffer as an enemy of traditional values. He, patently, is not. What he is, is the open and avowed enemy of the gastro-tractarians who run American politics and its consumer economy. Schaeffer makes lists of things to do to about them and other lists about how to keep from becoming like them. One can enjoy his lists. They are as insightful as the stories.

Schaeffer’s third major point uses Helena Cronin’s groundbreaking book, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today (1993). He links the book to a BBC interview: on a Radio 4 program Thought Cages (November 22, 2018). The radio episode was titled “For Greater Diversity, Be Less Fair.” Schaeffer summarizes Cronin’s controversial position on women’s rights:

Cronin described the subject of equality between the sexes as a “third-rail issue—-touch it, and you die” because her views are contrarian to the faux feminism of shilling for capitalism (p. 238).

Cronin’s “contrarian views” on radio in 2018 do not do justice to her groundbreaking book of twenty-five years before. In the book, the ant is a mindless drone and the peacock is trading beauty for sex. Cronin, not surprisingly finds both of these situations unacceptable. Her position on the radio show is trading away beauty to be a drone does not advance the general cause of social justice and quality of life very far.

Cronin took the title of her book from an historic debate between the co-discoverers of evolutionary theory: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Darwin said the Peacock’s beauty was a transaction initiated by the female. Wallace said beauty was an accident, almost an aberration. The only evolutionary question was why the female was so plain. The “ceaseless hustle” of modern life is still caught in the old Darwin/Wallace debate—-a frill or a business—-what else is there? Cronin nailed it in the radio interview and Schaeffer uses it to open up the larger question of beauty in the world. He and “his best friend,” Genie; put it like this:

If opening a door for a child to something thrillingly beautiful doesn’t epitomize the concept of good, then what does (p. 320)?

Classical aesthetics has played a role in Schaeffer’s emotional re-education. He sees the Fine Arts as the power grid for distributing “oxyjoy”. The Fine Arts are a child’s first experience with a skill that has no ulterior motive other than itself. Sports often claims this pride of place, but the claim is obviously false because playing the game always has an ulterior motive. The arts, taught and practiced properly, are the first emotional experience in caring for no other reason than caring, itself. The great Enlightenment moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant, called the sublime, “a reason which embarrasses reason”. The “thrillingly beautiful, ” in Genie’s words, embarrasses the short-term values and turgid circumlocutions of ideology, theology and the political economy. Art is for all of us, at all stages of our life, an initiation and a reminder of what it means to care without ulterior motivation—-what it means to care for the pure, primary purpose of just feeling he joy of caring. Our survival depends on feeling that joy and understanding what it means.

The contemporary world raises formidable obstacles to the natural joys of caring, parenting and loving. Schaeffer concludes Fall in Love…with a compendious list of practical ways to exercise your spirit and keep it growing. Here is my favourite:

You can’t change another person, but if you love them, you can slowly change yourself for them (p. 339).

This point goes a long way to explaining the reason for Fall in Love…. Love changes you. The more genuinely you love, the more authentically you change for the better. Fall in Love… attempts to answer the question: Is genuine, unqualified love even possible? Schaeffer answers yes with a two parallel bodies of evidence. One body of evidence is a personal affidavit based on his own spiritual growth and development. The other body of evidence is an academic presentation of research in evolutionary biology. The conclusiveness of his presentation is not as important as the conversational skill with which he makes it. Schaeffer shows there are still ways to talk about hope, happiness, care and concern without sounding sappy or cognitively challenged. A middle ground for discussing the vital attitudes and values essential for a civil society is welcome in our current era of conspiracies, con-artists and absurd confabulations. One does not have to find Schaeffer’s discussion conclusive in order to find it inspiring. We can all care better—-literally. We, all together, as a group can care better. Caring better, together, begins with talking about it better. Frank Schaeffer’s book offers a constructive path to caring better together because it proposes a better way of talking about it.

Over the last thirty years, Frank Schaeffer has spoken to us in an accessible anecdotal style which can appear deceptively simple. Schaeffer’s whole opus is a rare hybrid. Behind the plain language and the self-inculpatory anecdotes there is a serious message. The message is sometimes lost because Schaeffer’s work fits no traditional category of inspirational writing.. Like previous offerings, this new book does not fit smoothly into any established political ideology, therapeutic discipline or theological perspective. It should not be ignored on these accounts. If anything, the book should be read by a wide variety of readers precisely on that account. Schaeffer claims being better is a natural talent we all have and then follows up with the really radical claim being better is also fun. Such high optimism may be hard to swallow. If it all sounds too good to be true, consider this: Schaeffer’s book is not like a vaccine. Those who do not want to take the medicine can still benefit from just reading the prescription. Fall in Love is the best self-help book to appear in the United States since Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Don’t miss it. It’s good medicine, good for you and easy to swallow.