In my first post of this series, I called attention to an issue raised by Christopher Lasch: “The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.”
But why do parents so cooperate? Lasch thinks it’s largely a matter of limiting conflict in the home, but I think something more important is at work: parents have internalized the logic of metaphysical capitalism and its implicit contractualism — its view that only what the individual chooses is legitimate for that individual — and are terrified of being tyrannical or even to be perceived as tyrants. Parents have bought into the illusion that if they do not direct and guide their children, then their children will make free individual choices — and then, if things go wrong, at least they won’t be able to blame Mom and Dad.
The illusion of free choice? Yes, absolutely. Here let me quote someone I’ve cited before on this subject, Christine Emba:
This story idealized detachment, “liberation” from mutual care, ensuring that relationships never came before career goals. It looked like bringing a capitalist mindset into our interactions, making it normal to use, discard, and objectify other people. And as they often do, our rapacious markets and short-term desires won out.
But:
Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.
If you look at those stories I’ve cited in earlier posts about people who are cutting off their parents, you might ask: Who is encouraging them to do so? And the answer is: therapists who profit from family alienation. Similarly, when young people experience, or think they are experiencing, what we’re taught to call “gender dysphoria,” who is encouraging them to pursue some major change? Often counselors at their schools, who have pressed for the power to hide such information from parents (though there is pushback against that policy).
So: Cui bono? As Lasch said, the schools and the “helping professions.” By encouraging young people to sever, or at least weaken, family ties, they create psychological and moral fragility that they step in to remedy, in exchange for money or power or both. And neither group has to deal with the long-term consequences of their interventions.
But we need a broader view. Counselors and therapists are not independent agents any more than the children themselves are. As Jacob Siegel has written, they are part of a much larger movement, the “whole of society” approach to social change:
Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”
In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them — creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.
This is an old idea. It’s not clear that Siegel knows it, but in his essay he’s resurrecting an idea once common among Marxist social theorists: the “ideological state apparatus,” a term coined by Louis Althusser. The state implicitly or explicitly recruits other elements of society, elements that work on the level of ideology rather than physical coercion or law, to accomplish its ends.
Similarly, as Agustina Paglayan has argued in her disturbing new book Raised To Obey,
Breaking with the tradition of leaving the upbringing of children entirely to parents, local communities, and churches, central governments in the nineteenth century began to intervene directly in the education of children, establishing rules about educational content, teacher training, and school inspections, and mandating children to attend state-regulated schools. Second, these state-regulated primary education systems expanded in size and eventually reached the entire population. While in the early twentieth century only a handful of countries had universal access to primary education, today this is the norm virtually everywhere. What prompted the expansion of primary education systems, and why did states become involved in regulating them? […]
Looking at history teaches us that central governments in Western societies took an interest in primary education first and foremost to secure social order within their territory. Fear of internal conflict, crime, anarchy, and the breakdown of social order, coupled with the perception that traditional policy tools such as repression, redistribution, and moral instruction by the Church were increasingly insufficient to prevent violence, led governments to develop a national primary education system. Central governments went to great lengths to place the masses in primary schools under their control out of concern that the “unruly,” “savage”, and “morally flawed” masses posed a grave danger to social order and, with that, to ruling elites’ power. The state would not survive, education reformers argued, unless it successfully transformed these so-called savages into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws.
This impulse on the part of the state — to “secure social order,” or what people in power choose to designate as “social order” — has not changed, but the number of institutions that it can recruit as its “apparatuses” and their power over children have only increased over time, especially in our age of maximally extensive cybernetic communications systems. (Cybernetic because the mechanisms of coercion become ever more precise via feedback.)
And the more utopian the dreams of the state, the more desperate it will be to eliminate all alternative sites of influence — beginning with the family. Indeed, the sidelining or destruction of the family is a key feature of all utopian schemes, going all the way back to the fifth book of Plato’s Republic. To utopians and statists — and all utopians are statists, though all statists are not utopians — the family is the first enemy, because the family is by their standards inevitably an anarchic force.
Cui bono? When the family is weakened and children are cut adrift (morally and intellectually, if not physically) from their parents, the therapists benefit, the pharmaceutical industry benefits, the medical-industrial complex benefits, the social-media companies benefit, the employers benefit — but, in our current system, all of this is to say that the primary beneficiary is the state, especially any state with a competent “whole of society” approach to achieving its ends.
The family may not be a “haven in a heartless world,” but even beset as it is it can become a site of resistance — and it ought to be, if we have any hope of rearing children who have not had the humanity extracted from them and replaced by the implicit conviction that everything worth having can be bought in the marketplace.
