Tag: family (page 1 of 1)

January 13, 2025

cui bono?

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.

January 6, 2025

contractualism

If you look at three earlier posts in this series –

First, The Mill on the Floss and George Eliot’s own family experiences
Next, the Das family in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
Then, Robert Hayden’s poems about his own upbringing

— you’ll see that they concern (in Robert Frost’s words) “what to make of a diminished thing” when the thing that has suffered diminishment is one’s family.

Two features link these three accounts.

The first is that each situation arises from the assumption that — to borrow and adapt a famous distinction originally made by Henry James Sumner Maine — family is a function of status rather than contract. That is, you do not enter into a breakable contractual agreement to be a blood relation of someone else; that relationship is a status that you inherit.

The second is the demonstration in each account of the effects of forgiveness — the healing that arises when people, even people who have been hurt in multiple ways, even people who may rightly claim to be victimized by their family members, forgive them.

Now, let’s be clear about some key points:

It would be wrong, I think, for me or you to demand of any greatly wounded persons that they immediately forgive those who have trespassed against them. As a Christian, I believe that forgiveness is indeed what we are all commanded to offer, but for the broken to get to a place where the extension of forgiveness is even a possibility may take some considerable time. Praying for such people is a much more effective strategy than making demands upon them, and is more compassionate also.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are different concepts and different experiences. In the Christian account, forgiveness comes first, but reconciliation can only happen when those who have been offered forgiveness repent. (Those who nailed Jesus to the cross had not repented when he pleaded with the Father to forgive them.) I wrote about that process here. In short: the extension of forgiveness is not the end of a journey but the beginning of one, and the person who forgives can never know in advance how the other party will respond — and can never control that response.
One consistent theme in the best accounts of forgiveness is the good it does for the forgiver, regardless of what it might mean to the forgiven. In Clear Light of Day, Bim seems to expand and enrich her love her of family first for her own sake, so that she might help to offload the “stupendous caravan of sin” that she is bearing.
Many of the complexities surrounding forgiveness are explored in the current issue of Comment — I highly recommend the entire issue.

Okay, with those points duly made, I resume.

One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.

But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points. Thus:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

(Note, by the way, that Scruton is including erotic love alongside family membership as something unchosen. Many years ago I wrote on that theme here. I’ll come back to marriage — and possibly friendship, which in its strongest forms is also unchosen, in later posts, but for now I’m only talking about mothers, fathers, children.)

Scruton makes two important points here. The first is that “the ties that we never contracted” often cannot be “rectified,” that is, put right. They remain wounded, damaged in some way — as I say above, diminished. But such diminishment is no reason to abandon them, because — and this is Scruton’s second point — such ties matter to us “far more than our deals and bargains.” (Note, perhaps to be developed later: To say that they matter more to us does not mean that we consciously prefer them.)

If Scruton is right, and I think he is, then a development I have mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, the growing move of younger people towards cutting their parents wholly out of their lives, is based on a fundamental misreading of what it means to be human. That development — which you can read about here, here, and here — is unlikely for most of its adherents to achieve the “liberation” and “empowerment” they seek. Instead, they are likely to discover that that by trying to sever themselves from “a diminished thing” that have actually diminished themselves.

To accept that being human means that I am bound to my family even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolutely had it with them, is the beginning of something. But only the beginning. The people you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Boundaries must be set, then re-negotiated, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the family members you have most offended will do the same for you.

December 30, 2024

the angers of that house

Robert Hayden is one of the most acclaimed poets Detroit ever produced.

One of the most famous and widely anthologized American poems of the twentieth century is Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Whenever I read it I always note one curious phrase, a gentle and generous evasion: “slowly I would rise and dress, / fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The evasion, of course, is this: Houses are not angry.

The man we know as Robert Hayden was born in Detroit in 1913 and named Asa Bundy Sheffey. His parents, Asa and Ruth Sheffey, separated soon after his birth, or maybe even before — evidence about his early years is sketchy — and left him in the care of neighbors, William and Sue Ellen Hayden, who renamed him Robert Earl Hayden. Later in life he would learn that they never formally adopted him. It appears that William and Sue Ellen fought constantly — Hayden believed that his foster mother had never ceased to love her first husband, to whom she had borne three children, and that was one of the points of conflict — but he was not exempt from their rages. As an adult he said, simply, that they “didn’t know how to handle children.” This was generous: he once said, more bluntly, “Worse than the poverty were the conflicts, the quarreling, the tensions that kept us most of the time on the edge of some shrill domestic calamity. We had a terrible love-hate relationship with one another, and dreadful things happened I can never forget.” And: “I was often abused and often hurt physically.”

That abuse is depicted in his shattering poem “The Whipping.” The poem begins in the third person, as we see a terrified small boy being chased around the yard by a large woman bearing a stick: “She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling / boy till the stick breaks / in her hand” … but then, as the boy curls himself into a ball of ineffectual self-protection, shifts into the first person, depicting “My head gripped in bony vise / of knees,” and then what that boy, the poet, the teller of his own misery, saw: “the face that I / no longer knew or loved.”

Hayden’s bookish introversion — evident from early on, and intensified by extremely poor eyesight that made sports and games impossible for him — was incomprehensible to his foster father and, it seems, also to his natural father when he briefly met with that man at age twelve. He found refuge only in books, and especially in the poetry he read and, later, wrote. His foster parents apparently came to understand that a life of learning was the only reasonable path for him, and supported his study at Detroit City College. From there he went on to graduate study at the University of Michigan, where he fell under the influence, and experienced the encouragement of, a professor who taught there for only a short time: W. H. Auden.

It is noteworthy that when he recollects the terrors and miseries of his upbringing in verse — however he may have spoken of them in other venues — Hayden always seeks some reconciling vision, some expansive comprehension. He concludes “The Whipping” by showing us not the boy but the one who whipped him:

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged —
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

And whatever his foster father did to him — surely things as bad as his foster mother did — in “Those Winter Sundays” he chooses not to ignore “the chronic angers” of his family but to displace them to the house itself, relieving his foster parents of the burden of them, so that he can remember more clearly something that was also true: that his father faithfully performed some, at least, of “love’s austere and lonely offices.”

It’s a generosity of spirit greater than anyone could ever demand; greater than we could ever expect. But all the more awe-inspiring for that.

Sources:

The brief bio at poets.org
The brief bio at Lift Every Voice
Edward Hirsch, “A Reckoning and a Testimonial: On Robert Hayden’s ‘The Whipping’”
Brian Short, “Robert Hayden: Ascent and Repose”

December 23, 2024

“gentle parenting”

Marilyn Simon:

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

Forgiveness is the precursor to redemption, a transformation that happens on the inside. A child becomes an individual moral agent only through the transformative process of parental punishment and forgiveness. It is an act of faith on behalf of the parent which calls out the inner goodness of a child while punishing the badness. Faith in the good is precisely what calls out this punishment. Somehow this doesn’t quite work if one holds goodness as the granted condition of the child, for then there is no faith required, no moment of uncertainty that is the ground of trust. There is no view of the child as an autonomous moral agent, and thus it offers no space for a child to grow.

December 23, 2024

by the clear light of day

I began this series by reflecting, in a general way, on what conservatism is. Then I wrote about Christopher Lasch’s ideas about the family. I turned from that to a reflection on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and the author’s experiences that shaped and formed that powerfully tragic book. Now I want to meditate on another novel about family — about the forces arrayed against it, and the force that it is.

Whenever people talk about neglected masterpieces, the first book that comes to my mind, always, is Anita Desai’s 1980 novel Clear Light of Day. What follows will reveal some key elements of the plot, but I don’t think knowing these things will spoil anyone’s experience of this deep, rich, generously meditative book. It’s the kind of book that gets better with re-reading.

The book concerns the Das family of Old Delhi. As the story begins, a middle-aged woman named Tara returns to her home city. Long ago she had married and moved away, but her sister Bimla had remained in their childhood home, working as a teacher and caring for their autistic, or intellectually disabled, brother Baba. Their older brother Raja — who has often indeed behaved in a kingly way towards them — is a source of tension, especially for Bim, and the two sisters warily circle around that topic of conversation.

At the outset we see events primarily through the eyes of Tara, who notices that the old house has become decrepit. She soon discovers that Bim is even more aware of this than she is, and is embittered by it — indeed, is embittered by her whole life, which has been devoted solely to the care of others. She had always been responsible for her siblings — watching over Baba, nursing Raja when he suffered from tuberculosis — while Tara had looked for some means of escape from what was to her an oppressive home, an escape which eventually, through marriage, she achieved.

The first section of the book is set in the characters’ present. The second goes back to 1947 and the Partition of India — a complicated time for the family, because Raja, under the influence of their prosperous neighbor Hyder Ali, had converted to Islam. But this conversion only slightly widened the gaps that had already formed from strong differences in temperament. And anyway, the greater source of tension involves their aunt, Mira-masi, who cared for them after the deaths of their parents but gradually descended into madness. That was when Bim first had to become the primary care-giver for the others. The third section of the book goes back to their early childhood, when their parents were still alive, but, obsessed by social life, largely inattentive to the children. (Nothing much changed for the Das children when their parents died.) And the fourth section of the book returns to the present, as the two sisters try to come to terms with their past and with the very different people they have become. This four-part structure is deeply and resonantly indebted to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which also gives the book one of its two epigraphs.

In this final section the point of view shifts to Bim, whose anger comes to a crescendo when she bitterly asks Baba whether he would be willing to leave the only home he has ever known to go live with Raja in Hyderabad (where Raja had moved during the Partition). Bim is simply lashing out, but — she immediately realizes — lashing out at the one person in her life who has no defenses against her. When she sees Baba’s devastated look, she stammers out an apology, and then retreats to her own room in shock at what she has proved capable of.

And lying there in her darkened room, she experiences a revelation. In the shade of her grubby old room

she saw how she loved [Baba], loved Raja and Tara, and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread. They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she was of them, so that the anger or the disappointment she felt in them was only the anger and disappointment she felt at herself. Whatever hurt they felt, she felt. Whatever diminished them, diminished her. What attacked them, attacked her. Nor was there anyone else on earth with whom she was willing to forgive more readily or completely, or defend more instinctively and instantly. She could hardly believe, at that moment, that she would live on after they did or they would continue after she had ended. If such an unimaginable phenomenon could take place, then surely they would remain flawed, damaged for life. The wholeness of the pattern, its perfection, would be gone.

(Here we should remember Eliot’s references throughout the Quartets to “the pattern,” the shifting weave, and ongoing rebalancing, of forces in a human life.)

Bim’s relevation continues:

Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect, and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies, and did not extend to all equally. She did not feel enough for her dead parents, her understanding of them was incomplete, and she would have to work and labour to acquire it. Her love for Raja had taken too much of a battering … Her love for Baba was too inarticulate, too unthinking: she had not given him enough thought, her concern had not been keen, acute enough. All these would have to be mended, these rents and tears, she would have to mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.

Trying to think through what she has experienced, Bim “reache[s] out towards her bookshelf for a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and place them into a composed and concentrated whole after a day of fraying and unraveling.” The book that she takes up is one Raja had long ago urged her to read: an early biography of Aurangzeb.

This is what she reads in it:

Alone he had lived and alone he made ready to die … He wrote to Prince A’zam … ‘Many were around me when I was born. But now I am going alone. I know not why I am or wherefore I came into the world … Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back … When I have lost hope in myself, how can I hope in others? Come what will, I have launched my bark upon the waters …’

To his favourite Kam-Baksh he wrote: ‘Soul of my soul … Now I am going alone. I grieve for your helplessness, but what is the use? Every torment I have inflicted, every sin I have committed, every wrong I have done, I carry the consequences with me. Strange that I came with nothing into the world, and now go away with this stupendous caravan of sin!’

Reading this, Bim realizes that she has finally taken the right path: not the path of anger or resentment or the accusation of others, but the path of self-cleansing, which is the only path by which she can “mend and make her net whole so that it would suffice her in her passage through the ocean.”

For a long time Bim has simmered with anger over a crassly arrogant letter Raja had written to her. Now she takes it out and tears into pieces. “Having torn it, she felt she had begun the clearing of her own decks, the lightening of her own bark.”

Surely this is also what the newly-married Mary Ann Cross felt when she got a letter from her brother Isaac, not a dictatorial one but a condescending one, a reaching-out that he could have managed at any time in the previous quarter-century but, being a “Rhadamanthine personage,” made a point of refusing. She could have denounced and repiudiated him, and if she had, one could not say that he deserved anything better. But Mary Ann kept what I have called the calculator of Deserving locked away in a drawer. Instead, as we have seen, she wrote,

It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross

Like Bim, she lightens her bark by casting resentment overboard. She achieves what she calls “the wider vision.” It’s an astonishing thing to manage. I don’t really know how people do it. It is a marvelous grace.

December 16, 2024

unforgiven

A continuation of this post

~ 1 ~

I don’t suppose that there’s a sadder book in all the world to me than George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Though there are tragic elements and tragic characters in Eliot’s other novels, this book only is simply and straightforwardly a tragedy – and I scarcely know a darker one. It is like Hardy before Hardy; in many ways it prefigures Tess of the d’Urbervilles, though I find Maggie Tulliver a far more appealing figure than Tess Durbeyfield. And while Hardy can seem cold and passionless in his disposition of his dramatis personae, almost the icy voice of Fate itself, the manifest tenderness which Eliot shows to so many of her characters – even unappealing ones like Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch – makes poor Maggie’s downfall especially hard to bear. George Eliot herself, her husband reported, wept ceaselessly as she wrote the book’s final pages; and how could she not have done so?

I speak of Maggie, though two people die at the book’s end: Maggie and her brother Tom. But Tom’s death, while it does not please me, causes me no pain or grief; Tom, to me, is one of the great villains of literature. He does not cause Maggie’s death, but he blights her life.

The tenderness that Eliot habitually extends to her characters she offers also to her readers, when she presents this as the epigraph to her book: “In death they were not divided.” In this way she gently suggests to us that at least two of the book’s major characters will die; and we don’t have to read very far into the book before we can make a very good guess about the identity of those who are doomed. We are thus given the opportunity to prepare ourselves for what is to come. It doesn’t really help, though; or anyway it doesn’t help me. But I appreciate the gesture.

There’s something else noteworthy about this epitaph: it’s a quotation, but a deliberately truncated one. The original appears in the biblical book of 2 Samuel, and is part of the song of lamentation that King David sings for two men fallen in battle: Saul, the first king of Israel, whom David replaced, and Saul’s son Jonathan, David’s dearest friend. David sings of them,

Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives,
and in their death they were not divided:
they were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.

Thus his commendation of two men, one his sometime enemy, the other his dearest friend. This perhaps is meant to tell us a little about Eliot’s views of her two chief characters.

But also: by saying of Tom and Maggie that “in death they were not divided,” she allows the correct inference that in life they very much were divided. And what divides them is Tom’s relentless cruelty to Maggie. Now, to be sure, Tom would say that it Maggie’s sins that divide them, that he merely does his duty. But this is untrue. Tom is in fact not reliably dutiful. His self-image is false. When the call of duty conflicts with the impulse to be cruel, his cruelty always wins.

Very early in the novel, Tom quarrels with his scruffy friend Bob Jakin – a few rungs down the social ladder from middle-class Tom – and calls him a cheat. “I hate a cheat. I sha’n’t go along with you any more.” And thus he ends his friendship with Bob. Though many years later Bob will re-appear in Tom and Maggie’s life, Tom never would have sought Bob again, nor questioned the wisdom of his judgment against Bob. As Eliot comments at the conclusion of that chapter,

Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s justice in him, – the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts. Maggie saw a cloud on his brow when he came home, which checked her joy at his coming so much sooner than she had expected, and she dared hardly speak to him as he stood silently throwing the small gravel-stones into the mill-dam. It is not pleasant to give up a rat-catching when you have set your mind on it. [Rat-catching is what Tom had planned to do with Bob.] But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, “I’d do just the same again.” That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.

(Re: the “Rhadamanthine personage,” Rhadamanthus, in Greek mythology, was a king of Crete who became a judge of the dead, and a strict and inflexible judge too.) And thus it always is. Again and again Maggie acts in ways that she comes to regret; again and again what she desires more than anything else is Tom’s forgiveness; again and again he denies it to her. Sometimes he forgets her sins, or grows tired of punishing her for them; but he never once forgives. In this he exaggerates the tendencies of his father, who not only refuses to forgive his greatest enemy but, when he thinks he is near death, commands Tom to write that refusal in the family Bible: “I don’t forgive Wakem for all that; and for all I’ll serve him honest, I wish evil may befall him.” Mr. Tulliver can think of nothing more sacred than a Bible, though he has no interest in practicing anything that might be taught therein.

Tom is his father’s son in this sense, though in others he is even stricter than his father. For instance, even when Mr. Tulliver is in great need of money he cannot make himself call in a debt his poor and unlucky brother-in-law owes him, because he he knows the pain it would cause his sister. In such a circumstance Tom would never hesitate. In the greatest crisis of Maggie’s life, when she has just barely escaped an elopement with her seducer, Tom turns her away: “You will find no home with me…. You have disgraced us all. You have disgraced my father’s name. You have been a curse to your best friends. You have been base, deceitful; no motives are strong enough to restrain you. I wash my hands of you forever. You don’t belong to me.” Further: “I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have found my comfort in doing my duty.”

You will find no home with me, no haven in a heartless world. You had to come to me — but I do not have to take you in, and I won’t.

~ 2 ~

This I think is the one truly essential point: Tom has not done his duty. He portrays himself as a man of filial piety; he prides himself on having worked hard to rescue his father from debt; he makes his father’s enemies his own. Yet here he refuses to obey the very last commandment his father gave him, in the minutes before his death: “You must take care of her, Tom – don’t you fret, my wench – there’ll come somebody as’ll love you and take your part – and you must be good to her, my lad.” (Mr. Tulliver always refers to Maggie, in the most affectionate tones, as “the little wench.”) This, when Maggie’s suffering is at its worst, Tom refuses to do — even though she had given years of her youth to caring for Mr. Tulliver, while Tom was out making a career for himself. But Tom thinks he has done his duty and Maggie has failed to do hers. This is because “duty” for Tom is a matter of public respectability, and the ascent of the social ladder. That we have a duty to charity and kindness never crosses his mind.

As I have said: Tom’s cruelty is his treasure, and where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. He delights to feel himself morally strong, and from that strength to judge those he feels to be weaker than he. When he repudiates Maggie, as he often does, it is hard not to feel that those are to him the best moments of his life: the ones in which he condemns, not his enemy, as his father had condemned Wakem, but his own flesh and blood, his own sister, who loves him more than she loves anyone and has all her life craves his approval. Tom Tulliver is not a good and responsible man who is sometimes overly strict; he is an absolute monster of cold-blooded savagery. His cruelty is limited only by the scope of his power; alas for his ego, he has only poor Maggie to tyrannize over.

Eliot says of Maggie that “she had always longed to be loved,” and that is true, but I think she longs for forgiveness even more, if indeed those two things can be divided. Perhaps she craves forgiveness as a token of love. And while from some who are dear to her she indeed receives forgiveness – that is almost the only thing that sheds light on the dark, dark road she is forced to walk – she is never forgiven by the person whose forgiveness would have meant the most to her: her brother.

Late in the book, Maggie speaks with a pastor, one Dr. Kenn – a wise and compassionate man, as his name might suggest. (Kennen in German connotes personal knowledge, what we might even call wisdom, as opposed to Wissen, which is the knowledge of facts.) Having spoken with Maggie, and having read the penitent letter of her would-be seducer, he says,

“I am bound to tell you, Miss Tulliver, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of false imputations. The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you, because they will not believe in your struggle.”

This is of course a shrewdly accurate summation of Tom’s attitude. And Dr. Kenn knows how widespread such attitudes are, even if they rarely appear in such undiluted malignancy as they do in Tom.

After Maggie leaves, Dr. Kenn reflects on the intractable difficulties of her situation, in a passage that quietly harmonizes the voice of Dr. Kenn and that of the author. Eliot thinks (Kenn thinks? They think?) that “the shifting relation between passion and duty” – the very problem with which Maggie has struggled and with which Tom can never imagine there being any struggle, thinking as he does that his passions are his duties – is so complex that it can have no plain general answer. We remember the Jesuit casuists, who declined to be governed by largely-framed rules and could always, it was said, find a way of avoiding an unwelcome bondage to them. (The word casuist comes from the Latin casus, case – a rule that applies generally may not apply to this case.) Such men, Eliot says, “have become a byword of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed, – the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.”

It is good to despise casuistry in its usual pejorative sense, but not good to refuse the … well, let us say the duty to make discriminations according to different circumstances. We cannot live wisely by ”maxims”:

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, – without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.

~ 3 ~

But at this point I find myself under an unwelcome conviction. I must pause to note that Eliot says this: “Tom, like every one of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.” I shall strive to bear it in mind; but I am not confident of success.

The Mill on the Floss is Eliot’s most autobiographical novel. The scene is shifted from the West Midlands of her youth to Lincolnshire, but Tulliver family bears close affinities to that of the author, whose real name was Mary Ann (sometimes Marian) Evans. Kathryn Hughes:

Like her father and his brothers, she rose out of the class into which she was born by dint of hard work and talent. She left behind the farm, the dairy and the brown canal, and fashioned herself into one of the leading intellectual and literary artists of the day. But … she learned what it was like to belong to a family which regularly excluded those of whom it did not approve. When, at the age of twenty-two, she announced that she did not believe in God, her father sent her away from home. Fifteen years later, when she was living with a man to whom she was not married, her brother Isaac instructed her sisters never to speak or write to her again.

But though her father rejected her for her unbelief, in the last years of his life, when he could not care for himself, he expected Mary Ann to care for him. And she did. Hughes again:

At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, wanting her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May-June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’. Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next.

Nevertheless,

Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’. Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war [that is, during their conflict over her loss of religious faith and consequent refusal to attend church], Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge.

It became for a period, Hughes argues, Mary Ann’s vocation:

This makes sense of the puzzle that it was in the final few months of Robert Evans’s life that Mary Ann found her greatest ease. She was with him all the time now, worrying about the effect of the cold on his health, tying a mustard bag between his shoulders to get him to sleep, sending written bulletins to Fanny and Robert about his worsening condition. There are no surviving letters to Isaac and Chrissey, and no evidence that they shared the load with her. It was Mary Ann’s half-brother Robert who spent the last night of their father’s life with her, a fact she remembered with gratitude all her life. Yet although she declared that her life during these months was ‘a perpetual nightmare — always haunted by something to be done which I have never the time or rather the energy to do’, she accepted that she would have it no other way. To Charles Bray she reported that ‘strange to say I feel that these will ever be the happiest days of life to me. The one deep strong love I have ever known has now its highest exercise and fullest reward.’

So strong was her love for her father that, she wrote in a letter as his death neared, “What shall I be without my Father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone.” Nevertheless, Robert Evans, who had managed to offer some occasional words of kindness to his daughter in his final months, was ungenerous to her in his will. (It is I think no accident that wills, and second thoughts over wills, play a large part in some of her fiction, especially in Middlemarch.)

Mary Ann was more generous to her father than he ever was to her — and not least through her portrayal of Mr. Tulliver, whose repeated expressions of affection for “the little wench” are very likely more than Mary Ann ever received from Robert Evans. She gives to that fictional father a warmheartedness which she rarely if ever experienced from her real one.

~ 4 ~

But Isaac Evans was a different story. As noted above, when Mary Ann started living with George Henry Lewes — who was unable to divorce his wife for complicated reasons you can read about here — Isaac cut her off completely and demanded that other members of the family do the same. Despite her attempts at reconciliation, he maintained her silence until, a quarter-century later, Lewes died and Mary Ann married a man twenty years her junior named John Cross. When he learned of this marriage, Isaac wrote to her:

My dear Sister

I have much pleasure in availing myself of the present opportunity to break the long silence which has existed between us, by offering our united and sincere congratulations to you and Mr Cross….

Your affectionate brother Isaac P Evans

The “opportunity” being her marriage — nothing less respectable could have induced him to write. Like the bank-director brother of Silas in Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” he looks upon a disreputable sibling as “just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.”

The generosity of Mary Ann’s reply is, to me, immensely moving: “It was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones…. Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross.”

This is of course far better that Isaac deserves, Isaac with his own calculus of Deserving, Isaac with his indifference to any moral excellence he himself does not care to practice — Mary Ann’s faithful care for their dying father (like that of Maggie’s care for Mr Tulliver) earned her no points from her brother. It is hard for me not to hate him, as it is hard for me not to hate Tom Tulliver. But then I hear the voice of George Eliot: “If you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.”

December 10, 2024

family matters

~ 1 ~

When Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged appeared in 1977, some critics on the Right denounced it as Marxist, while other critics on the Left denounced it as reactionary. On both sides there was, I think, a failure to understand what Lasch was primarily trying to do, which was to demonstrate the woeful inadequacy of then-current social-scientific thinking about the family — and to indicate some of the dire consequences of that inadequacy.

But the anger from the Left is certainly understandable, since Lasch really was goring some of their sacred cows. He had little patience with the then-widespread belief that women could achieve complete and completely equal integration into the workplace at no cost to anyone. (Such integration should happen, Lasch thought, but the costs needed to be inventoried and addressed.) He had even less patience with the tendency among many feminists to blame the “traditional family” for the subordinate social position of women.

In his preface to the paperback edition of his book, Lasch asks his critics, especially his feminist critics, to consider two major points. First, that “indifference to the needs of the young has become one of the distinguishing characteristics of a society that lives for the moment, defines the consumption of commodities as the highest form of personal satisfaction, and exploits existing resources with criminal disregard of the future.” And second, that “the problem of women’s work and women’s equality needs to be examined from a perspective more radical than any that has emerged from the feminist movement. It has to be seen as a special case of the general rule that work takes precedence over the family.”

By “work” here Lasch means work outside the home, work that someone else pays you to do. This is a point that Wendell Berry would later make repeatedly: that when Americans today talk about work, we always mean work that happens in the marketplace in exchange for money, and no other kind.

That second point was one that he had emphasized in the final paragraph of the book:

Today the state controls not merely the individual’s body but as much of his spirit as it can preempt; not merely his outer but his inner life as well; not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination. The citizen’s entire existence has now been subjected to social direction, increasingly unmediated by the family or other institutions to which the work of socialization was once confined. Society itself has taken over socialization or subjected family socialization to increasingly effective control. Having thereby weaken the capacity for self direction and self control, it has undermined one of the principal sources of social cohesion, only to create new ones more constricting than the old, and ultimately more devastating in their impact on personal and political freedom.

For Lasch, the Left and the Right alike consider the family largely sentimentally — the sentiments from the Right being positive, those from the Left negative — rather than analytically. And Haven in a Heartless World, while being in part a contribution to that analytical task, is more fundamentally a plea to Lasch’s fellow scholars to get to work to provide a deeper understanding of the extraordinarily complex situation of the modern family.

Here again I want to invoke Wendell Berry, who made this very point at some length in his seminal 1992 essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”:

The conventional public opposition of “liberal” and “conservative” is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The “conservatives” promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the main stages of family life. Under the sponsorship of “conservative” presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home – a development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of “liberals,” who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as “liberated” – though nobody has yet seen the father’s thus forced away as “liberated.” Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

This is effectively the conclusion that Lasch came to by the end of his book: that the conservation of the family is something that can only be achieved by politically and economically radical means. (Related: that’s why Lasch, like Berry, can’t be accurately described as a liberal or a conservative. That binary opposition is useless in many contexts.)

One of the difficult questions Lasch raises is this: Why had parents, in the decades preceding the writing of the book, so often acquiesced in being sidelined? Why had they agreed to allow schools and institutions linked to schools — primarily clinical counseling of various kinds — usurp the role of formation that had once been essential to the family? Perhaps realizing that he had not clearly addressed this issue in the book proper, Lasch uses the Preface to the paperback edition to venture this idea:

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.

— the idea being, Lasch thinks, to eliminate conflict from the home. A fruitless notion, says Lasch, in his quasi-Freudian mode: “The attempt to get rid of conflict succeeds only in driving it underground.”

My purpose in this post (and subsequent ones, when I can get them written) is to indicate some of the ways in which Lasch’s half-century-old book illuminates current ideas about the family — for the trends he identified in 1978 have continued to this day. And much can learned by juxtaposing the family’s complicity in its own marginalization with another point, one raised by one of Lasch’s critics from the Left. That critic, Mark Poster, rejects Lasch’s argument for the necessity of the family in these terms: “The only way to [ensure] democracy for children is to provide them with a wide circle of adults to identify with, the ability to select their sources of identification, and a separation between authority figures and nurturant figures.” (Poster published a book in the same year, 1978, that the paperback edition of Haven appeared: it is called Critical Theory of the Family and its argument is pretty much what you would expect from that title.)

There’s much that could be said about each of Poster’s criteria for ensuring “democracy for children,” but I think the key one is this: “the ability to select their sources of identification.” I believe that for Poster — and this is true of many, if not most, leftist critics of the family — the ineradicable failing of the family is simply that it is given, not chosen. From this point of view, only what the individual chooses for him- or herself can be valid for that individual. (Except in the case of race, which, as we learned some years ago from the cases of Rachel Dolezal and Rebecca Tuvel, simply though mysteriously cannot be chosen.) Poster’s user of the term “identification” is prescient, especially when one thinks of people who who say things like “I was assigned male at birth, but I identify as female.” I reject what was given and I choose otherwise. And the value of what I choose is determined wholly by the fact that I choose it. It is not something that anyone else has a right to an opinion about. (I find myself here thinking of Roger Scruton’s comment in The Meaning of Conservatism that the primary goal of liberalism is “the satisfaction of as many choices as short time allows.”)

This mode of conceiving the person can shape how people think about their families as well, something readily seen in a recent New York Times article about people who end all contact with their families. One woman interviewed in that article — who cut off her father because he demonstrated “a lack of interest in my life as I got older” — articulates the key principle of this movement: “It is not a child’s responsibility to maintain a relationship with their parent(s).” In family matters, there are no responsibilities — at least none that bind me; there — again, for me — are only free choices. It would be interesting to know whether people who adhere to this principle think that parents have any responsibilities to their adult children.

~ 2 ~

I was effectively raised by my paternal grandmother, because my mother worked long hours to keep a roof over our heads and my father was in and out of prison. He was a drunkard, and a violent one, so for me things were better when he was locked up. Not that we didn’t have good moments; you just never knew when the pivot to darkness would come. But you did know that it was coming. My mother was in a bad situation and did the best she could; but she was never an emotionally demonstrative woman, and at the end of the working day she didn’t have much energy left. Almost all of the demonstrated affection I received came from Grandma. Often she and she alone kept my head above water.

At age twenty-one, when I married the woman who has now been my wife for forty-four years, I entered a new family. I was not then merely rough around the edges — all my surfaces were abraded and abrasive, and I quiver slightly whenever I think about the conversations Teri’s parents must have had about the boy their daughter had determined to marry. Lord knows they had hoped for, and expected, someone much better than I was. But here’s the thing: once Teri’s father had said Yes to my request for his daughter’s hand in marriage — and yes, that’s how Teri wanted it: not just to give her consent, but to ask for and abide by the consent of her parents — I was his and his wife’s son. From that day forward I belonged to them just as securely and unquestionably as the children of their own marriage. I was not what they had chosen; I was handed to them not on a silver platter but on a chipped dinner plate; but they welcomed me into their home, into their life, into their hearts, and they never looked back. They could have said No; instead they said Yes, to me and all that I was and wasn’t.

It is impossible for me to overstress how much that welcome meant to me, and how determinative that was for my future. Gradually I became someone not unlike the person they would have chosen if they had been the ones choosing, and one of the most gratifying moments of my life came when I was around fifty years old, and my father-in-law — a working man from Columbiana, Alabama, a simple man with a high-school education and a great big heart — gave me one of his characteristic bone-cracking hugs, looked me right in the eye, and said: “Alan, I’m so proud of the man you’ve turned out to be.” A Nobel Prize wouldn’t have meant so much to me as that word of praise from that man.

But all this began when they accepted me without question and without reservation, and committed themselves to my flourishing, as they were already committed to the flourishing of their biological children. I truly do not know what would have become of me if not for the constancy of their love. They loved their daughter; their daughter loved me; they were therefore called to love me too. So they did. To them it was as simple as that.

Everything I think about family arises from this experience.

~ 3 ~

The phrase “haven in a heartless world” is Lasch’s but it is adapted from Karl Marx, who (in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) wrote that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Lasch’s phrase is thus more ambivalent and ambiguous than it appears to those who do not know what it borrows from, and have not grasped his long argument. That argument is: The modern economic order simultaneously creates the need for family to be a haven and prevents it from serving as a haven. (To get Marx’s argument, substitute “religion” for “family” in the previous sentence.) Lasch:

The same historical developments that have made it necessary to set up private life — the family in particular — as a refuge from the cruel world of politics and work, an emotional sanctuary, have invaded this sanctuary and subjected it to outside control.

As our socio-economic order has extended itself into what I call metaphysical capitalism, its power to penetrate and demolish all would-be havens has only increased. It strives to render us all homeless, and then to sell us the goods and services that, it is claimed, compensate for any and all losses. And homelessness is a key concept here. The comforts intrinsic to family life are those that arise from what a family at its best does, which is to make a home.

When people are groping about for a good quote about home, they typically turn to a couple of lines from a poem by Robert Frost: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But the quoters rarely know the context.

Those lines come from a dialogue in verse called “The Death of the Hired Man” (1915). The participants in the dialogue are a farmer named Warren and his wife, Mary. When Warren returns from errands, Mary greets him with the news that Silas — a man who had worked for them but had departed at a time when Warren needed him — has returned. Warren had told him that if he left he could not come back; but he has come back. Silas “has a plan,” Mary says, he has ideas for how he can help them; but, she also and more pertinently says, “His working days are done; I’m sure of it.” In fact, “‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die.’”

Warren “mocked gently” the word “home.” To which Mary:

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

It is in reply to this that Warren says “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” In the context of this story it’s an ambiguous statement, leaving open the possibility that since “he’s nothing to us” they do not in fact have to take him in. Why does Silas not go to his brother, a wealthy man, “director in the bank”? What might have divided Silas from her brother is not made explicit, but Mary says, “Silas is what he is — we wouldn’t mind him — / But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.” That is, precisely because he is nothing to them, Warren and Mary can accept the shiftless and feckless Silas, but his “kinsfolk” are ashamed of him, reject him: should he ever go to them, he knows, they would not take him in. So, in extremis, to Warren and Mary’s farm he comes.

In any event, Mary’s reply — never cited by quote-hunters — dissents from Warren’s way of putting the matter. She says, instead, “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Thus Mary thinks that Silas’s brother “ought of right / To take him in,” regardless of what he deserves. Obligations to family are not, in Mary’s view, to be subjected to a calculus of deserving, even if that is precisely what “kinsfolk” tend to do.

The debate is ended when Warren, urged on by Mary, goes to check on Silas and finds him dead. The hired man has come home, or come to the nearest thing to home he could conceive. And Warren and Mary, however they may have quarreled with Silas, have become the nearest thing to family he could conceive.

Mary’s attitude towards Silas is rather like Teri’s parents’ attitude towards me: I was like a hound wandering in from the woods, nothing of theirs, but they fed me, they took me in. I was “nothing” to them until they took me in and by that very generosity made me something.

Silas’s brother, by contrast, resembles the woman I mentioned in the previous section of this essay, the one who cut off her father altogether for being insufficiently “interested” in her adult self. She has taken out the calculator of Deserving and found her father unworthy. She will not share a home, or anything of her life, with him. But we readers get the feeling, do we not, that she knows perfectly well that if she should ever have to go to her parents, they would have to take her in. They might well do so gladly, and strive to be for her a haven in a heartless world. Be that as it may, perhaps she thinks that she’ll never need such a haven — or that such a haven as she needs can be bought in the marketplace in the form of material possessions, or therapy, or even chatbot friends and companions.

About all that, time is the great teacher.

Let’s meditate on these matters for a while. I’ll return to this theme soon, I hope, in a post on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. It’s going to take me quite a few posts, I suspect, to put these various pieces together, but (IMO) that’s what a blog is for: tentative explorations, further developments, second and third thoughts, elaborations and corrections. Complex and difficult issues deserve such gentle treatment.

November 9, 2021

Gladden Pappin:

Many conservatives tend to assume that economic outcomes in capitalist economies are “natural.” Yet there is nothing less natural than severing the connection between economic growth and family formation. For millennia, human beings have viewed children as an asset, not a cost, for the simple reason that children provided additional labor and looked after their parents in old age. It is only in the last century that this link has been severed.

We now have a system that forces would-be parents to think of their children as a cost and not an asset. Yet these children are quite literally the most valuable asset that any country could possibly possess. Without children, a society withers and dies while its economy is converted into something resembling a chaotic nursing home, where a shrinking workforce slaves away to service a growing pool of retirees (as the specter of forced euthanasia lurks in the background).

June 23, 2021

Little Platoons

Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age is a fascinating and provocative book that, in my judgment anyway, cries out for a sequel.

Before I go any further I should say that I’ve known Matt for years – we used to be co-conspirators at The American Scene – and we’ve corresponded occasionally since then, though not recently.

If there is any one idea that conservatives are thought to share, it’s the belief that a healthy society needs healthy mediating institutions. This is the burden of Yuval Levin’s recent book A Time to Build, and Yuval (also a friend) makes this argument about as well as it can be made. We do not flourish either as individuals or as a society when there is nothing to mediate between the atomized individual and the massive power of the modern nation-state. That’s why it’s always, though especially now, “a time to build” those mediating institutions that collectively are known as “civil society.”

The really brilliant thing about Matt’s book — written by someone who, like me, possesses a conservative disposition but might not be issued a card by the people who authorize “card-carrying conservatives” — is its claim that in some areas of contemporary American life the mediating institutions are not too weak but rather too strong. And what he demonstrates with great acuity is the consistency with which those institutions, from youth soccer organizations to college admissions committees, have conscripted the “little platoon” of the family to serve their needs — indeed, to get families to compete with one another to serve those institutions’ needs:

What happens, though, when citizens direct their suspicion not at a coercive government but at their peers, with whom they find or feel themselves, as parents and families, in competition? I join a chorus of scholars and writers in observing that such a competitive mood abides among parents today. Less noticed is how such competition creates new forms of subservience and conformity among families. In this environment, the intermediate bodies of civil society, cornerstone of the conservative theory of republican liberty, sometimes become demanding bosses, taskmasters, and gatekeepers in the enterprise of winning advantage for our children in a system of zero-sum competition.

As a result,

Under these conditions, the anxious and competitive citizen-parent looks to certain “voluntary associations,” certain institutions within “civil society,” not as bulwarks against coercive government but as ways to gain advantage over other families, exclusive paths to better futures. From boutique preschools to competitive sports clubs to selective colleges and universities, desirable institutions become bidding objects for future-worried and status-conscious families.

Thus, “the era of intensive parenting is defined by the rise of a sort of hybrid entity, an institutional cyborg that is part organization and part family.”

Matt is not by any means opposed to these mediating institutions as such — there’s a wonderful section on how he learned, through walking his kids to school every day and then hanging out for a while with teachers and other parents, how a school really can be the locus of genuine community — but looks with a gimlet eye, a Foucauldian gimlet eye, on the ways that, right now, in this country, a few such institutions form, sustain and disseminate their power over families.

He’s scathing about college admissions, especially the turn towards “holistic” admissions processes which serve to transform mid-level administrators into eager shapers of souls. He mentions a Vice Provost at Emory who laments the imperfection of his knowledge of the inner lives of applicants, and continues:

If you recall that, twenty or thirty years ago, admissions departments weren’t even mentioning authenticity, were not treating the therapeutic search for true voices and true selves as the goal of their investigations, and if you devote a moment’s thought to the absurdity of this search, you will be tempted to laugh at Vice Provost Latting’s hysterical protest against imperfect knowledge. But, laughable as this and other admissions testimony is, on its merits, I would like to present a good reason not to laugh. Setting up a yearslong, quasi-therapeutic process in which you goad young people to lay bare their vulnerable selves to you, when this process is actually a high-value transaction in which you use your massive leverage to mold those selves to your liking, is actually a terrible thing to do.

Yes, it is. And I am glad to hear someone say it so bluntly.

In his conclusion, Matt admits his reluctance to give advice to parents in such a coercive and panoptic environment, and that’s perfectly understandable. In any case, the primary function of the the primary purpose of the book is diagnostic: he wants to show us the specific ways in which these various mediating institutions co-opt families, and even in some cases make the families hosts to which they are the parasites. I don’t think that the book would have held together as well if it had tried to include parenting advice in the midst of everything else. But it is obvious that Matt has thought quite a lot about what it means to be a responsible parent in our time – he has a great riff on why he’s okay with the fact that his oldest daughter is the only person in her class who doesn’t have a smartphone – and I would really like to hear more from him about how he conceives of the positive responsibilities of being a parent, the dispositions and actions which strengthen that little platoon. I don’t think he needs to do this in a pop-psychology self-help way; Matt is by training a philosopher and I think philosophical reflection on this topic, so essential to human flourishing, would be welcome from him.

But the book provides a great service simply by teasing out the ways in which families are not served by but rather are made to serve these parasitic institutions — and the ways in which we are manipulated to do so ever more intensely by our felt need to compete with other families. As we are always told, the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem.

March 18, 2020

extended families

I have written before about the experience I had growing up in the same house as my paternal grandparents. When I was very young, I had an inchoate sense that my mother and father and sister and I were living in Gran and Grandma’s house. But later, after my father got out of prison and after Gran was forced into retirement after a horrific automobile accident, the terms and conditions seemed gradually to shift, and I started to feel that the house was somehow now our house and Gran and Grandma were living with us. But in fact all along we were just a family living together, and never at any point was this an odd thing. It was common enough in our social class — working class, lower-lower-middle class — in those days that I don’t think either of my parents were ever the least bit ashamed of it, though surely they were at times frustrated by it.

These days, though, there can be great shame associated with living in extended families, because of the peculiar sense of independence that so many of us have. Young adults don’t feel independent unless and until they are living away from their parents; and as for the parents, as they age they dread the loss of independence that would accompany having to move in with their children.

There is at least the chance that the current crisis will change those feelings. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans are going to lose their jobs in the coming months. Not all of them will have homes to go to — “homes” in the Robert Frost sense of a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in — but those who do will have a chance to revisit our assumptions about the necessity, indeed the very value, of independence. And that may not be an altogether bad thing.

February 24, 2019

three stories to reflect on

Ross Douthat:

The sexual ethic on offer in our own era should make Catholics particularly skeptical. That ethic regards celibacy as unrealistic while offering porn and sex robots to ease frustrations created by its failure to pair men and women off. It pities Catholic priests as repressed and miserable (some are; in general they are not) even as its own cultural order seeds a vast social experiment in growing old alone. It disdains large families while it fails to reproduce itself. It treats any acknowledgment of male-female differences as reactionary while constructing an architecture of sexual identities whose complexities would daunt a medieval schoolman.

From the Economist, “An entrepreneur brings professional grieving to eastern Congo”:

Deborah Nzigere, a 65-year-old Congolese woman, is nervous when she sits down for her job interview. Her hands are clasped tightly together, her words are slow and deliberate; she is blinking too much. “What inspired you to pursue this career?” asks one of the two people on the interview panel. Her answer is garbled, she mentions money. When asked to give a demonstration, she giggles awkwardly and leaves the room. She comes back in crying.

“Bettina,” she howls and throws herself to the ground. “Bettina, Bettina, why did you leave us?” She thumps the floor with a flattened palm, her body convulses with sobs as she moans and wails. The interviewer’s eyes fill with tears. Mrs Nzigire has got the job.

Christopher Mims in the WSJ:

Through Papa, college-age young people can sign up to help seniors by going to the store, doing housework or just hanging out. For these “pals,” Papa works on the same gig-economy model as Uber or Postmates. Ten hours a week of Papa service is covered for members of Humana ’s Medicare Advantage insurance who are in a pilot program in and near Tampa.

Ms. Sumkin’s Papa pals take her on trips to the store since she can no longer drive, and they also help combat her loneliness. Ms. Sumkin says that, aside from occasional visits with her children and grandchildren, her only regular human contact is a bi-weekly stretching class and time with those insurer-provided friends. “They’re all very nice and, you know, I’ll converse with them and find out what they’re doing and studying and so forth,” she says. “It’s for me a very important service.”

June 1, 2018

members of the family

C. S. Lewis, from “Membership”:

The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the expression “members of a class.” It must be most emphatically stated that the items of particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity. Thus, in a club, the committee as a whole and the servants as a whole may both properly be regarded as “members”; what we should call the members of the club are merely units. A row of identically dressed and identically trained soldiers set side by side, or a number of citizens listed as voters in a constituency are not members of anything in the Pauline sense. I am afraid that when we describe a man as “a member of the Church” we usually mean nothing Pauline; we mean only that he is a unit – that he is one more specimen of some kind of things as X and Y and Z. How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter; she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply one unit in the class children; he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incomensurables.