Patrick Stewart, Susan St. James, and the Brilliant Transformation of Fatherhood

Fathers are becoming better and nicer by the day. See the recent deaths of Susan St. James and Patrick Stewart for evidence.

From Stewart’s Washington Post obituary it's evident what a sad childhood he had. A childhood that kids growing up today would in so many ways find unrecognizable.

According to Stewart’s obit, his father was a “‘weekend alcoholic’ who came home swinging at his wife.” Stewart added that “It’s taken me decades of analysis, beginning in the late 1980s, to understand and cope with the impact of the violence, fear, shame and guilt I experienced as a child.”

Challenging as Stewart’s young life was, it’s no reach to say that for him there was company in his misery. Stewart died at age 86. Based on his age, it’s no idle speculation that he knew other kids who had fathers like his. Some had much worse.

Some remember Susan St. James as the popular television actress (McMillan & Wife, Kate & Allie), others knew her as the wife of longtime NBC Sports head Dick Ebersol, and still others knew her from the 2004 tragedy in which a plane carrying her husband, along with sons Charlie and Teddy, crashed. Fourteen-year-old Teddy Ebersol died.

According to her New York Times obituary, St. James turned to her still injured husband at Teddy’s memorial to say that “It would be a terrible mistake if you, Dick, were to ever entertain any thought such as, ‘I should have been home more or I worked too much and that was bad.’ Because your passion and creativity and vision and successes and devotion to the details of your work and all the joy that you got from that was the pulse of the house.”

About the energy Dick Ebersol brought to his wife and kids relative to the abject fear that Patrick Stewart’s father brought to his own, the easy and rational response is that happy and sad as both anecdotes are, they’re still just that. Ok, but which father would be more recognizable to the young people coming up today? Which is the point.

Dick Ebersol’s parenting style is much more reflective of how things increasingly are. Better yet, it’s arguably a pale version of where things are headed.

Why are fathers becoming so much better, happier, more involved, and such a joy for their kids to be around? The view here is that it’s rooted in the ongoing mechanization of so much of what was once human work, not to mention the relentless globalization of all production such that everything - from the pencil to the iPhone – is an effect of billions of specialized hands and machines the world over.

Modern work is so much more than the living it formerly was, and an often brutal one at that. Thanks to machines that do and think for us in ever greater amounts, work is increasingly a showcase for the unique skills and intelligence of every individual on the job. The result is much happier fathers around the world, and much happier people.

While it’s no doubt true that Dick Ebersol worked endlessly, his memoirs (my review here) revealed a man happily at work in sports. He was doing what he couldn’t not do in a field (televised sports) that is a logical effect of soaring production, and the attendant consumption that’s an effect of so much production.

There are many more Dick Ebersols today as a result, and there will be exponentially more in the future. Before the globalization and mechanization that have become dirty words to some who should know better, there were far more Alfred Stewarts.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.