The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "September When It Comes"

September When It Comes

There's a cross above the baby's bed,
A Savior in her dreams.
But she was not delivered then,
And the baby became me.
There's a light inside the darkened room,
A footstep on the stair.
A door that I forever close,
To leave those memories there.

So when the shadows link them,
Into an evening sun.
Well first there's summer, then I'll let you in.
September when it comes.

I plan to crawl outside these walls,
Close my eyes and see.
And fall into the heart and arms,

Of those who wait for me.
I cannot move a mountain now
I can no longer run.
I cannot be who I was then
In a way, I never was.

I watch the clouds go sailing
I watch the clock and sun.
Oh, I watch myself, depending on,
September when it comes.

So when the shadows link them,
And burn away the clouds.
They will fly me, like an angel,
To a place where I can rest.
When this begins, I'll let you know,
September when it comes.

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Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: John Leventhal / Rosanne Cash / Roseanne Cash

September When It Comes lyrics © Downtown Music Publishing, Hipgnosis Songs

Johnny Cash and Rosanne Cash - September When It Comes (youtube.com)

Rosanne Cash - "September When It Comes" - Live From Zone C (youtube.com)

Welcome, Evelyn!

“Welcome here from outer space / The milky way still in your eyes” (Chrissie Hynde)

In a world that needs all the good news it can get--my son Brian and daughter-in-law Rachael (who, it must be said, did most of the work) have just brought into the world an adorable daughter named Evelyn Victoria! I'm not sure when I'll get to meet Evelyn, who has chosen for now to live with her parents in Buffalo NY; but I am so happy for Brian and Rachael and their other daughters, Katie and Sophia: what a wonderful family, and how lucky I am to be part of it (even at a distance)...welcome to the world, Evelyn Victoria!

For those who ask and for those who wonder—yes, this is a scary time to bring a child into existence: but when is it not? As Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders) sang, “Welcome to the human race, with its war, disease, and brutality”; but she added, “You with your innocence and grace, restore some pride and dignity to a world in decline…”

Every newborn child seems a miracle, a blessing, and a savior of sorts; or, at least, a renewal of hope that this often dreary world can yet be saved and is worth trying to save. In fact, if it weren’t for the confusion it would cause, every baby should be named “Hope”.

Brian and Rachael are wonderful parents, wonderful people, and I trust them to keep Evelyn (and Katie and Sophia) safe. Selfishly, I find myself frustrated by the ongoing travel ban, the social distancing, and all the precautions that, taken together, mean that it will be a while before I meet my newest grandchild.

But that’s certainly something to look forward to, isn’t it?

Until then, my thoughts, prayers, love, and deepest, most heartfelt wishes are with Brian, Rachael, Katie, Sophia, and Evelyn: be safe, be healthy, be happy, and know that there are so many people in the world who love and care about you all.

And again, Evelyn: welcome to the world. It's a good place, and you've just made it better.

The Benign Panopticon

While Christopher Lasch's HAVEN IN A HEARTLESS WORLD focused primarily on the (mostly) unwitting undermining of the American family in the 20th century, the same "helping professions" invaded other realms of society:

[In the workplace too] therapeutic modes of thought and practice predominated. Industrial psychologists and personnel managers sought to eliminate labor-management conflicts by translating collective grievances into personal ones, the sense of injustice into personal "problems," ideology into technique. They insisted that friction between workers and owners originated not in irreconcilable conflicts of interest but in the psychology of the individual worker. Therapy replaced politics as the way to "effect improvements" in the worker's condition. When other methods failed, the experts recommended the universal cure-all of consumption, urging the worker to look on consumption as the consolation for deprivations suffered at work.

The evolution of the word "consumption" is instructive. It originally referred to "a wasting disease" (tuberculosis, in particular) which caused the "spending" of a person's strength and health; in the last hundred years, it has come to mean the voluntary spending of money: shopping, that is, and the American way of life. The "wasting" part of "wasting disease" has been transferred to the world of nature, to which we lay waste; and nature itself has been reconceived as "natural resources"--that is,  something not so much valuable in itself but only as a source of sustenance for human prosperity.

The change from preaching prudence and thrift to encouraging spending was facilitated by the  advertising industry, armed with insights taken from the developing science of human psychology:

Industrialists began to understand the importance of the worker in his capacity as consumer. The more farsighted among them preached the need to integrate the working class into moderns society and culture by means of improved education, mass culture, and advertising. According to a spokesman for the advertising industry, advertising exercised a "civilizing influence comparable to its cultural effects to those of other great epoch-making developments in history." Calvin Coolidge put it more succinctly: advertising, he said, "is the method by which the desire is created for better things."

What Lasch called "the propaganda of commodities" would have far-reaching repercussions. "Like the helping professions," he wrote, "[advertising] undermined puritanical morality and patriarchal authority, [creating a society of full-fledged consumers, perpetually restless and dissatisfied."

As early as the 1920s the writing was on the wall:

The combined influence of advertising and the "helping professions" had liberated people from old constrictions only to expose them to more subtle forms of control. These agencies freed personal life from the repressive scrutiny of church and state only to subject it to medical and psychiatric scrutiny or the manipulation of the advertising industry...upholding the family as the last stronghold of spontaneity, they sought to expel from marriage, love, and sex precisely the irregular, the unpredictable, the unmanageable. The "repeal of reticence" lifted the shroud of sexual ignorance but imposed the new constraint of an allegedly scientific technique, in the light of which sexual "performance" would be tried and generally found wanting. Lawgiver and priest [made] way for the doctor, whose supervision was far more thorough. The older authorities had proscribed acts that threatened the stability of the community; the rest they left to discretion. ¹ Doctors, on the other hand, sought to shore up the psychic stability of the individual and therefore omitted nothing from their gaze. 

Jeremy Bentham's proposed "panopticon" was realized not as a physical building (though our modern prisons approximate it) but as the benign "social control" asserted by social workers, medical professionals, psychologists, educators, etc. More and more aspects of individual and family life came under the critical scrutiny of "experts," a development which had the utterly unintended consequence of sapping our confidence and saddling us with uncertainty and doubts.

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¹ "Discretion" as in Mrs. Patrick Campbell's famous observation, "Does it really matter what affectionate people do--so long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses!"

Progressivism and Family Values

If only because I have just a few days left on a 14-day loan from the Internet Archive, I'm going to come back to Christopher Lasch's HAVEN IN A HEARTLESS WORLD, a book in which Lasch criticized "progressive" efforts at social reform, claiming that, well-intentioned as they were, such reforms undermined families and often hurt the people they were supposed to help.

Again, the intentions were good:

The progressive movement...sought to regulate anarchic business conditions, reduce social and economic inequality through educational reform and taxation, and promote "cooperation" between workers and capitalists, government and industry...

Who could be against such noble goals? The devil, however, was in the details and in the overreach that often accompanies reform :

American progressives hoped to eliminate selfish individualism by exposing children as early as possible to the influence of the school, the juvenile courts, and other agencies of socialized tuition. "There is no more brilliant hope today," wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her critique of the family, "than this new thought about the child...the recognition of 'the child,' children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state, instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal ownership--the unchecked tyranny, or unchecked indulgence, of the private home." The family institutionalized selfishness, in Gilman's view. "Civilization and Christianity teach us to care for 'the child,' [whereas] motherhood stops at 'my child'".

You can agree with the goals of the progressive movement and you can sympathize with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's desire to eliminate the "unchecked tyranny" of parents over children, but you may still want to ask: one hundred years on from the reform movement, are our families and children better off? Or have the wholesale outsourcing of education to the schools and the intrusion of "experts" into private life  had adverse, albeit unintended, consequences for us all?

20th-century reformers had, in addition to good intentions, perfectly plausible arguments:

Opponents of child labor proposed to transfer children from parental exploitation to the loving care of the school. "The best child-labor law," said Florence Kelley, "is a compulsory education law covering forty weeks of the year and requiring the consecutive attendance of all the children to the age of fourteen years." According to Ellen Richards, one of the founders of professional social work, the school was "fast taking the place of the home, not because it wishes to do so, but because the home does not fulfill its function." The family produced misfits, emotional cripples, juvenile delinquents, and potential criminals, according to this reasoning. "If the State is to have good citizens...we must begin to teach the children in our schools, and begin at once, that which we see they are no longer learning in the home."

Were families truly that inept at raising responsible children as to justify substituting the State's "loving care"?  Was there an actual social crisis, or did the reformers first exaggerate the problem and then, in the course of implementing reforms, help create the crisis to which it claimed to be responding?

The belief that the family no longer provided for its needs justified the expansion of the school and of social welfare services. "Social, political, and industrial changes," educators claimed, "have forced upon the school responsibilities formerly laid upon the home. Once the school had mainly to teach the elements of knowledge, now it is charged with the physical, mental, and social training of the child as well." "Breakdowns in family morale," according to social workers, underlay crime and "social disorganization." Through children's aid societies, juvenile courts, and family visits, they sought to counteract the widespread "lack of wisdom and understanding on the part of parents, teachers, and others," while at the same time reassuring the mother who feared, with good reason, that the social worker meant to take her place in the home.

In a pattern we will see again, progressive reformers, unable to cure the depredations of capitalism at their source--that is, unable to dismantle capitalism itself--settled for treating the social symptoms of capitalism. Unfortunately, in the process they helped undermine the families who were expected to offer refuge from the harshly competitive, unforgiving milieu of capitalism and its cash nexus.

Do not get me wrong: I am not saying that the Progressive movement is to blame for "destroying the traditional family" or for subverting "traditional values": those are the results of capitalism itself and of mass media (especially, at first, movies), the automobile, and the advertising industry, along with the corrosive, disillusioning impacts of world-wide war.

What I am saying is that we ought at least to evaluate the results of a full century of efforts to "socialize" the family and to "save" our children from what "experts" deem to be inadequate home environments. We have, I am sure, saved some children because of social reforms; but I suspect we may have inadvertently imperiled others in a myriad unintended ways, most especially by separating them psychologically from their parents. 

A World Without Pity or Tenderness

I have just started re-reading Christopher Lasch's HAVEN IN A HEARTLESS WORLD, thanks to the Internet Archive, a wonderful (and free!) online resource that provides access to all sorts of otherwise difficult to find books.

One of Lasch's main contentions in HAVEN IN A HEARTLESS WORLD was that modern life (beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) had conspired to separate the previously entwined functions of the family: i.e. education, discipline, and affection.  Mandatory public schooling undermined the first function, as did rapid technological change which made obsolete many of the skills previously passed down from parents to children; parental authority proved difficult to maintain when children were better able than their elders to navigate the new social and cultural environment. ¹

Family discipline, too, was eroded, both for better and for worse; teachers, social workers, and law enforcement increasingly intervened in what had previously been considered private family matters.  That such interventions often may have been necessary, appropriate, and even overdue should jnot blind us to the fact that they rendered parental authority more tenuous.

Finally: the eviction of what Lasch called "pity and tenderness" from public life in general and from the workplace in particular, along with the sanctification of competitive self-interest as the foundation of the economic order, shifted the entire burden of affection, compassion, and empathy from the community to the self-same family whose expertise and authority were simultaneously being thus undercut. Not surprisingly, this proved both an overwhelming burden and an impossible task, as the diminished family was expected to sustain the emotional needs of all its members. 

Here, then, is how Lasch set out the gravamen of his argument:

The concept of the family as a haven in a heartless world took for granted a radical separation between work and leisure and between public life and private life. The emergence of the nuclear family as the principal form of family life reflected the high value modern society attached to privacy, and the glorification of privacy in turn reflected the devaluation of work. As production became more complex and efficient, work became increasingly specialized, fragmented, and routine. Accordingly, work came to be seen as merely a means to an end--for many, sheer physical survival; for others, a rich and satisfying personal life. No longer regarded as a satisfying occupation in its own right, work had to be redefined as a way of achieving satisfactions or consolations outside work. Production, in this view, is interesting and important only because it enables us to enjoy the delights of consumption. At a deeper level of mystification, social labor--the collective self-realization of mankind through its transformation of nature--appears merely as the satisfaction of private wants.

The degradation of work was a theme that had been touched on by Paul Goodman, among others, but Lasch saw the wider repercussions:

Mechanization and the introduction of routine [further] degraded the act of work. The products of human activity, especially the higher products of that activity such as the social order itself, took on the appearance of something external and alien to mankind. No longer recognizably the product of human invention, the man-made world appeared as a collection of objects independent of human intervention and control. Having objectified himself in his work, man no longer recognized it as his own. [Under capitalism] the relation between men, as Marx observed, assumed the fantastic shape of relations between things. Thus labor-power became a commodity, measurable in abstract monetary terms, and was bought and sold on the market like any other commodity.

Family, then, albeit idealized and romanticized, was expected to provide a balance to the impersonal public world:

At bottom, the glorification of private life and the family represented the other side of the bourgeois perception of society as something alien, impersonal, remote, and abstract--a world in which pity and tenderness had fled in horror. Deprivations experienced in the public world had to be compensated in the world of privacy. Yet the very conditions that gave rise to the need to view privacy and the family as a refuge from the larger world made it more and more difficult for the family to serve in that capacity.

At the same time they exalted the family as the last refuge of privacy in a forbidding society, the guardians of public health and morality insisted that the family could not provide for its own needs without expert intervention. Some of them, indeed, had so little confidence in the family that they proposed to transfer its socializing functions to other agencies; others wanted merely to improve the quality of family life through ambitious programs of "parent education," marriage counseling, and psychiatric social work. [Such] programs intensified the very "crisis" to which they claimed to hold out the solution...public policy, sometimes conceived quite deliberately not as a defense of the family but as an invasion of it, contributed to the deterioration of domestic life.

It is crucial to realize that Christopher Lasch was not glorifying the pre-modern family. Rather, he was pointing out that the ethos of the modern family had been crafted in response to the pressures of modernity, especially capitalist modernity; only to have that ethos undermined by capitalism itself and by progressive reforms intended to ameliorate capitalism's baleful effects.    

Social conservatives rightly emphasize the importance of the family; what they fail to understand is both the breadth and the depth of the social and economic forces arrayed, however unwittingly, against it. It's not "cultural Marxism" or the "Frankfurt School" that threatens our families and our communities; it's the insatiable demands of our economic order.  
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¹ The increasing specialization of work, wherein assembly-line workers spent endless hours performing simple rote tasks, also limited the skills passed on from parent to child. So too did the separation of work and home; as cottage industries and farms gave way to factories and offices, children no longer actually observed the work performed by their fathers (and, gradually, by their mothers as well) and could therefore not appreciate or admire the skills they possessed.  What modern children knew, and all capitalism needed them to know, was that Dad and/or Mom brought home a paycheck.

Family Matters

In ONE NATION, TWO CULTURES, as in much of her other work, Gertrude Himmelfarb emphasizes and mourns the fragmentation of modern families. Her explanation of why families matter is worth quoting: 

The family, even more than civil society, is the 'seedbed of virtue,' the place where we receive our formative experiences, where the most elemental, primitive emotions come into play and we learn to express and control them, where we come to trust and relate to others, where we acquire habits of feeling, thinking, and behaving that we call character—where we are, in short, civilized, socialized, and moralized. 

It may be objected that Ms. Himmelfarb's description is prescriptive rather than descriptive, and that she presents an idealized bourgeois vision of family rather than the much more complicated reality that has always existed. You do not have to look very far in the book of Genesis, for instance, to find evidence of family dysfunction, exemplified in fratricide (Cain and Abel) and incest (Lot's daughters); biblically, if not historically, the very nation of Israel was founded upon Jacob's theft of his brother Esau's blessing and birthright and upon the trickery of Jacob's uncle Laban, who foisted his older daughter Leah upon an unwitting Jacob in place of the younger daughter Rachel, Jacob's intended. Genesis does not cast a kind light on "family values," and anyone familiar with Scripture knows that the picture does not improve much as the narrative goes on.* 

Whatever the actual strengths and shortcomings of "traditional" families, there is no question that modern families leave much to be desired. Himmelfarb turned to the economist Joseph Schumpeter for an understanding of the forces at work in modernity: 

When Joseph Schumpeter warned his readers of the self-destructive effect of capitalism, its tendency to subvert the bourgeois ethos upon which its economic success depends, he also warned of the "disintegration of the bourgeois family". Writing in 1942, long before the rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and single-parenthood had started their steep ascent, he pointed out that statistics did not tell the whole story: "It does not matter how many marriages are dissolved by judicial decree—what matters is how many lack the content essential to the old pattern."   

Even functioning two-parent families are undermined: 

The disintegration of the family, [Schumpeter] argued, is caused by the inveterate habit of rationalization that characterizes capitalism and that has been extended to private life. By "a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting," people have come to believe that the advantages of a family fail to compensate for the disadvantages—not only the economic costs of maintaining the family but "the loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety." 

It should be noted that the modern affluent West presents far more in the way of "alternatives" than did the pre-modern world. Human beings have never been particularly good at resisting temptation, and we now have created, and live in, a society awash in it. 

Himmelfarb continues to summarize Schumpeter: 

What is forgotten is the great contribution of parenthood to physical and moral health—"to 'normality' as we might express it." Focused on the immediate and the visible, we tend to be impatient with the demands of family life because we ignore the "hidden necessities of human nature or of the social organism." It was not always so, Schumpeter reminds us. For "homo economicus," the original bourgeois man, the family was the mainspring of the profit motive. He was moved "to work and to save primarily for his wife and children"...for the future of his family rather than his present wants or needs. Modern man, by contrast, tends to have a "time-horizon" limited to his own life expectancy, as a result of which he loses the incentive not only to work, save, and invest but also to raise and nurture a family. 

If Schumpeter and Himmelfarb considered the capitalist ethos to be at the heart of modern family upheaval, Christopher Lasch (in HAVEN IN A HEARTLESS WORLD) focused on the "reign of experts" that was ushered in, with the best of intentions, by early 20th century Progressives. As Kieran Bonner observed: 

For Lasch, this...is the story of the evolutionary separation of love and discipline. It is the story of the enervation of familial authority, from the untenable version that the late 19th century bourgeois form maintained to its complete absence in the permissive relations that characterize most of modern child-rearing theory and practice. In this process, parenting has changed from a training and nurturance, which both protected family members and endowed them with the resources to sustain the harsh rigors of outside industrial life...to a companionship of friendliness and openness, which echoes the kind of relations that infect life outside the home. As a result the tension between outside and inside, embodied in the unity of love and discipline, is lost.  

Lasch argues that this degenerative process is directly due to the intervention of the helping professions in family life. The nature and, at the same time, justification of the intervention arises from an investment of everyday practices with a magnitude of consequences. This creates a climate of guilt and distrust which undermines the naturally confident relation between parents and children. Parents, in turn, seek to absolve themselves of this burdensome and self-defeating responsibility by delegating “discipline to someone else so that they themselves can pose as friendly helpers”.  

Lasch's analysis can be, and has been, challenged; whatever its shortcomings, however, it reminds us that "the family" does not exist in a vacuum—it is variously defined, shaped, buffered, nurtured, sustained, challenged, assaulted, and undermined by the culture in which it exists. It takes a village to raise (or to break) a child, in part because it takes a village to make (or to break) a family. ¹

To cite but two examples: first, the invention of the automobile changed our habits of living, working, and mating; second, the institution of universal mandatory schooling separated children from parents and, importantly, revealed the limits of parental expertise and authority. Technology, in the first instance, and human agency, in the second, have unsettled the traditional relationship between generations; if the older generation was once envied (by the young) for its wisdom, its capability, and its success in navigating a difficult world, today it is pitied both for its aping of youth culture and for its ineptitude with the latest technology. 

In assessing Lasch's work, commentators too often focus on his dual critique of the modern family and the modern Self; they miss, or at least minimize, the fact that Lasch's critiques were embedded in his larger analysis of the baleful effects of capitalism. In Lasch's view of history, families frequently buckled under the strain of providing a "haven in a heartless world"; the Progressive solutions (universal schooling, social workers, licensed experts, etc.) have had unintended consequences, but Lasch never lost sight of the fact that the problems stemmed originally from the creation of a "heartless world," a world governed by the profit motive and the Invisible Hand.^ In that recognition, he was certainly allied with Joseph Schumpeter and Gertrude Himmelfarb, among others: capitalism, they have understood, is an astonishingly productive economic engine that has the unfortunate tendency of deforming human beings and subverting human relationships. 

Economists, particularly the more conservative breed, like to remind us that There's no such thing as a free lunch: everything, that is, comes at a cost, and there are always trade-offs. Let us by all means then praise capitalism and the prosperity it has bestowed upon us; but let us also remember the trade-offs that capitalism entails, and let us ask, from time to time, Is it worth it? 

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* Jesus' contentious relationship with his own family, and his and Paul's preference for the unmarried life, may be considered the prime cases in point.

¹ It is the village, for instance, that grants legitimacy to marriage--or that refuses it. Conservatives claim to be defending the "traditional" (or "natural") family when they denounce same-sex marriages and same-sex adoptions; that may be their intent, but in fact they simply serve to re-emphasize that "family" is a social construct about which it is possible to argue and to disagree.

^ Was the world any less "heartless" before capitalism? It almost certainly was not, but it at least made gestures in the direction of human values like compassion, mercy, and gentleness. Capitalism dismissed such gestures as meaningless and even counter-productive, enshrining instead material self-interest as the only important motive for human activity. Thanks to capitalism's bounty, we are all better able to provide for our own material needs; and thanks to capitalism's priorities, we are all forced to do so.

Book Preview: THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT, by Senator Ben Sasse

I swear that I am not going to pre-judge Senator Ben Sasse's (R-Nebraska) THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT, in part because the book's first chapter is titled "Stranded in Neverland"; I'll be the first to admit that, for much of my life, Peter Pan was one of my role models. But neither am I going to read the book uncritically (much less take it lying down when Senator Sasse calls Peter Pan "selfish and shortsighted"; have you no sense of decency, Senator?); I'll try to keep the snark to a minimum, but I may slip now and then. 

What is THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT all about? It is about the fact that the kids are not alright, and here is how Senator Ben explains the book's origin: 

The idea for this book came when I began serving as president of a liberal arts college in my home state of Nebraska eight years ago. Early in my tenure at Midland University, a group of students in the athletic department was tasked with setting up a twenty-foot Christmas tree in the lobby of our basketball arena. These were hearty and healthy kids, 18- and 19-year-olds. They got the tree up, took out some decorations, dressed the tree and began to leave, concluding that the job was done. That was when one of the university's vice presidents happened by and noticed something odd. The Christmas tree was decorated only on the bottom seven or eight feet, on the branches the kids could easily reach. 

Why, she asked, was the work only half-done? 

The head of a sorority replied, "We couldn't figure out how to get the ornaments on the top." 

"Was there not a ladder in the gym?" the vice president queried. "Was maintenance unwilling to bring one?" 

She was met with shrugs. No one had bothered to look or thought to ask. 

This day's failure wasn't at all about lacking brains; it was about will. It was about ownership. It was about not having much experience or interest in seeing tasks through to completion. 

By cracky, by gum, and goldurn it, Andy Hardy wouldn't have quite until he had that whole tree decorated, even if he had to stand on the shoulders of his school chums in order to reach those tallest branches while adoring cheerleaders looked on. What is wrong with kids today? ¹ 

But it's not just college slackers who lead Senator Sasse to despair—it's his own "pampered" daughters! Gather round for the frightening tale: 

One day last summer, my family had returned from a brief trip to Colorado. My daughters and I had taken some eye-opening runs in the Rockies, where it was only forty degrees in the early mornings. When we returned to Nebraska, an air conditioning unit at our house had broken, but fortunately it was cool for August—only high seventies. Nonetheless, our teen and nearly teen daughters arrived in my wife Melissa and my bedroom in the middle of the first night home to announce that they could not possibly sleep in their room, since the A/C was able to cool it down to only seventy-two.   

Oh, the humanity! ² 

Regardless of its somewhat flimsy anecdotal foundations, Senator Sasse's case is a serious one: 

Coming of age has always been hard, in every society in every century. But today's challenge is particularly acute, and especially for Americans. America is a creedal nation—that is, it depends on a shared creed or belief set about dignity and freedom. It depends not on the expert rule of a small, faraway elite class, but rather on the virtue and self-reliance of an entire republican (small-r) populace. And in the midst of a radical economic disruption from single lifelong jobs to the demands of lifelong learning for flexible and changing work, solving the riddle of transmitting anew a culture of self-reliance is more urgent than ever before. 

We are not ready. Our kids are not ready for the world are soon going to inherit. 

Though my solutions and suggestions may differ from Senator Sasse's, I agree that we are not prepared for the world we have made, much less are we preparing our children for the world of their future. Of course, given that "change" is now the accepted default setting of our culture, it's hard to know what exactly any of us need to be prepared for: flying cars or self-driving cars? The problem of leisure time or the problem of overwork? Robots or demagogues? Pornography on demand or peak oil, peak water, and global warming?   

SPOILER ALERT: In the book's introduction, Sasse offers a five-point plan for raising kids right, a plan the rest of the book is intended to flesh out. The five points are: 

1. Overcome peer culture. (Kids shouldn't be age-segregated as much as they currently are.) 

1. Work hard. (Kids shouldn't be shielded from hard labor; it builds character: "Suffering in our work is actually a character-building virtue.") 

1. Resist consumption. ("Consumption is not the key to happiness; production is.") 

1. Travel to experience the difference between "need" and "want". (I.e. learn about "subsistence living, connection to food acquisition, nature, and necessity.") 

1. Become truly literate. (Learn "how to read critically—and therefore to think critically...") 

Off-hand, I can't think of a thing to criticize with that agenda; I suppose I might question the notion that "suffering" necessarily builds character--character can be built without suffering, and sometimes suffering has negative consequences. That, however, is a quibble, and I will therefore dive into THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT with an open mind, albeit one cognizant of the fact that (a) Paul Goodman's 1960 GROWING UP ABSURD already stands as an indictment of our society's failure to nurture young people to maturity, and (b) Bob Dylan echoed Goodman's complaint, back in 1965, when he sang I've got nothing, ma, to live up to.  

I'm just saying that Senator Ben Sasse is a bit late to this particular lamentation³ ;better late than never, though, and he deserves a fair hearing. ⁴ 

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¹ Snark. 

² More snark. 

³ He's also a bit off when he writes "We know that literacy has been in absolute decline since the 1960s". Senator Ben may not be aware that the scandalous and best-selling book WHY JOHNNY CAN'T READ was published in 1955. 

⁴ By coincidence, I'm beginning THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT at the same time as I'm pondering a recent essay by Gracy Olmstead, the title of which is "We Need Fewer World Leaders, And More Good Neighbors" and the thesis of which is we are educating our children to be hypercompetitive, high-achieving, rootless cosmopolitans—something to which only a few can realistically aspire, assuming it's an aspiration at all--rather than to be decent human beings, something for which all of our children possess the capacity and something which is undeniably beneficial both to individuals and to the community at large. I'll blog about Ms. Olmstead's essay (which borrows from Wendell Berry and from a new book titled WENDELL BERRY AND HIGHER EDUCATION: CULTIVATING VIRTUES OF PLACE) when I've had more time to ponder it.

Let Our Children Go!

According to Pratik Chougule (The American Conservative) the kids aren't alright in 21st-century America, but don't blame them: it's their mums and dads who have fucked them up. They didn't mean to, but they have.¹ 

It's not exactly news that "free-range childhood" has long been a thing of the past, but Mr. Chougule believes that overprotective parenting may have consequences more dire than previously suspected: 

American childhood has taken an authoritarian turn. An array of trends in American society are conspiring to produce unprecedented levels of supervision and control over children’s lives. Tracing the effects of childrearing on broad social outcomes is an exercise in speculation. But if social scientists are correct to posit a connection between childrearing and long-term political outcomes, today’s restrictive childhood norms may portend a broader regression in our country’s democratic consensus.  

In addition to spending more hours in school or in structured extracurricular activities than previous generations, today's kids can barely get off the couch, for pete's sake, much less be allowed to cross the street by themselves or ride their bike more than a block from home: 

Even the toys parents are choosing to buy for their kids betray a skepticism of childhood independence. As the National PTA observes, parents since the mid-1980s have purchased fewer multi-purpose, unstructured toys like clay and blocks that “encourage play that children can control and shape to meet their individual needs over time.” Today’s bestselling toys like action figures and video games “promote highly-structured play.” 

The irony is that regulatory and disciplinary overkill itself poses a more serious threat to children than such perennial fears as crime, “stranger danger,” and playground safety. 

Consider that practically every declining health outcome in children can be traced to the sedentary, indoor, micromanaged lives that now define American childhood. In a 2005 Pediatrics study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that children with mothers fearful of neighborhood safety are more likely to watch over two hours of TV per day, instead of playing outside. When American students are moving for only 18 minutes per day at school, it’s hardly a surprise that we’ve seen since the 1970s a more than threefold increase in the number of overweight 6 to 11 year olds. 

Experts meanwhile are linking increasing rates of anger, aggression, and severe behavior problems to a lack of free play. These outcomes are consistent with evolutionary psychology theories that consider play to be a critical part of child development, teaching children to cope with, and ultimately master, fears and phobias. 

So why has childhood as we used to know it (which was itself, of course, a transient product of the mid-20th century) disappeared? Well, you might look for answers in Neil Postman's 1982 THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD, but if you don't have time for that, here are some suggestions from Mr. Chougule: 

Myriad explanations—psychological, ideological, and economic—have been proffered to explain this paradigm shift in American childhood. Among them: 

• Parental fear in reaction to the crime wave of the 1970s, as well as high-profile televised incidents of abducted children. 
• An “ethos of socialization,” in sociologist Frank Furedi’s words, that is “increasingly reliant on therapeutic techniques,” and encourages children to interpret everyday problems as psychological in nature—all of which disrupt the process of maturity. 
• Environmental impacts on serotonin levels which, according to biologist Raymond Peat, are increasing “traits of the authoritarian personality” throughout the population. 
• Problematic parent-child relationships that are fostering an “anxiety-ridden worldview.” 
• Commercial development that limits children’s opportunities for unstructured play (the number of sandboxes in New York City, for example, is at an historic low.) 
• Angst over hypercompetitive college admissions. 

You know who else overprotected and over-managed childhood? The Germans, that's who, in the years right before Hitler: 

Social scientists have long argued that the origins of authoritarian societies can be discerned in childhood pathologies.  

Among the most far-reaching adherents of this view was the late psychologist Alice Miller, a student of authoritarian regimes. Through her study of Nazism and Soviet communism, Miller concluded that dictatorships emerge when an entire generation of children is raised under authoritarian conditions replete with excessive forms of control and discipline. In the case of Nazi Germany, Miller is convinced that Hitler would not have come to power but for turn-of-the-century German childrearing practices that emphasized “unthinking obedience” and discouraged creativity. The millions of Germans who ultimately supported Nazism, in Miller’s views, were coping with the legacy of a “hidden concentration camp of childhood”—one enforced by the “clean, orderly citizens, God-fearing, respectable churchgoers” who comprised the ranks of Germany’s authority figures. 

The versatility of the Hitler card never ceases to amaze. 

So what must we do to avoid Hitlerism and blind obedience? We must set our children free from their "hidden concentration camp" and let them roam free: 

The antidote to authoritarianism, Miller argued, is childhood autonomy. The reason, in Miller’s telling, that young people were able to bring down Soviet communism in the nonviolent revolutions of 1989—and do so without succumbing to the “blind, uncontrolled destructiveness” of 1960s radicals—was that this generation, as children, “were allowed more freedom than the older generation,” which provided them with “a concept of what freedom and respect for life are.”  

Where this particular argument stumbles is on the comparison of Soviet youth to American youth in the 1960's; the latter surely had more freedom than the former (and possibly more freedom than preceding American generations) and yet succumbed to "blind, uncontrolled destructiveness". As parents have bemoaned from time immemorial, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; restrictive parenting is bad but so is permissive parenting: Dr. Spock, after all, was the founder, for all intents and purposes, of SDS, or so conservatives have long argued. 

Mr. Chougule concludes with a plea for some national soul-searching on the topic of child-rearing: 

I am not advancing here a simplistic, causal claim that schools are cutting recess and therefore dictatorship is coming to America. But there does seem to be at least anecdotal evidence of an authoritarian paradigm shift in the childhood realm—one that forebodes a broader challenge to the country’s liberal, democratic norms. 

Current indicators call, at a minimum, for hard thinking on why American adults are finding such resonance in authoritarian childrearing practices, and whether we, as a society, are preparing young people to thrive in a free country. 

I think it's always a good idea to consider the impact of our basic social and cultural practices. How we raise and educate our children is incontestably important, for the child is mother to the woman. While we're at it, we might also examine the employment opportunities we provide for adults and the way grown-up work is organized, the role money plays in our society, how our communities and our lives have been fashioned around  and distorted by the automobile and cheap fossil fuel, etc. 

I don't think we're on the road to Hitlerism, but I would be the first to agree that a nation that elects Donald Trump to the highest office in the land needs to engage in serious introspection about (as Trump himself would say) what the hell is going on. Let's do whatever it takes to make sure that such a travesty never happens again. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/will-american-childhood-create-an-authoritarian-society/ 

¹ Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse"

Taking Parenthood Seriously

At Aeon, Laurie Shrage proposes legally enforceable contracts for parenting (“co-parenting,” as Ms. Shrage specifies):

Akin to a public marriage contract, we need an official ‘co-parenting agreement’ and associated civil status, which not only enshrines the rights and responsibilities of each parent in respect of their children, but also sets out the principles by which they relate to one another and make decisions.

Like marriage, entering and continuing a public, formal co-parenting agreement should be voluntary; parents should always be free to enter into private or informal arrangements, if they wish to do so. But without an institutionalised public option, we expose families to the risk of nightmarish conflict, especially when relationships break down.

I’m all in favor of this.¹ Co-parenting agreements need not, and shouldn’t be expected to, micro-manage parenting decisions or the day-to-day division of parental labor; but they do need to recognize the responsibilities that parenthood entails.

Because marriage generally does not cover the terms of shared childrearing, public co-parenting contracts would offer a social insurance scheme for both ‘traditional’ and non-traditional families.² An official contract would help to safeguard parents’ basic entitlements, such as the right to be involved in the lives of one’s children and to appropriate forms of child support from each co-parent. If and when cooperation among the co-parents breaks down, the existence of an agreement can guide courts or mediators in negotiating new agreements for shared parental responsibility.

I’d suggest that “the right to be involved” should be amended to “the right and responsibility to be involved”.

Ms. Shrage concludes:

The process of formalising one’s status as a parent would also encourage people to think through and communicate their expectations right from the start. When we cross the threshold to parenthood, surely it’s sensible for society to nudge parents to reflect on and discuss who will make career sacrifices to be at home with the children, how the children will divide their time if the parents have separate households, and how important decisions will be made that affect a child’s future.

We hear a lot of complaints about the supposed plague of “broken homes” and “dysfunctional families,” but we rarely hear any practical suggestions for dealing with it (aside from, “Honor your wedding vows and don’t get divorced,” which is the marital version of “Just say no” and equally ineffective). Laurie Shrage is to be commended for putting forth a practical, and practicable, idea, and I hope her idea gets wide circulation.

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https://aeon.co/ideas/we-need-a-contract-for-co-parenting-not-just-for-marriage

¹ I also think that parenting classes should be mandatory for first-time parents, though I recognize the difficulty of enforcing such a mandate: Nope, you can’t take the baby home until you complete the class and pass the exam.

² It’s certainly odd that, although traditionalists tell us that procreation is the true purpose of marriage, marriage vows traditionally don’t mention children at all.

Bifurcated America

To continue and complete my reflections on Peter Lawler’s “Our Country Split Apart”: writing at National Affairs, Professor Lawler analyzes the divisions that plague our society and speculates as to how our new President can best address them.¹ 

Here, he summarizes the progressive view of history and modernity:

Human history is the freeing of consciousness from the constraints of the uncontrollable or alien machine. Machines, all of nature, become increasingly subject to conscious manipulation. Life, as a result, gets longer, more comfortable, and more about choice and less about chance. Life also gets less cruel. Nature itself is, from the point of view of the free human person, a cruel and random mother, with no respect for particular human lives. The liberation from nature also causes human beings to surrender their own cruel impulses, most of which can be rooted in revenge against a nature that does not, in fact, provide what we most need. People, for example, get less religious, and their religions become less a source of violence over nothing. People become more cosmopolitan, liberated from the tribalism that inspires wars rooted in monstrous combinations of love and hate. The global marketplace, as Marx predicted, tears down the walls that separated one people from another, creating a world without borders.

As Lawler sees it (and he’s hardly alone), this “progress” has come at an enormous cost.  Lawler here frames his argument by borrowing from Charles Murray’s distinction between “a cognitive elite living in its bubble and a class that lacks the wherewithal — productive and relational — to live a dignified life.” According to Lawler (and Murray), “progress” and capitalism have resulted in important elements of American life being hollowed out:

“What's fading away are the intermediary institutions shared by all Americans, from the church to citizenship to the public schools to the workplace. One way of thinking of the "middle" is the mixture of mind and body that produces the relational person, the person able to think in terms of his responsibilities not only to those in his immediate circle but to all his fellow citizens and creatures.”

Even worse, claims Lawler, having lost sight of “the relational person” we are now in an “age of irresponsibility”:

As Murray points out, both of our classes are now irresponsible. The members of our cognitive elite, it's true, have deployed their resources to live sensible lives in child-centered marriages that produce stable families. Their irresponsibility is their indifference to the lives of their fellow citizens. That includes, in Murray's eyes, their condescending conclusion that they have no right to expect all Americans to share middle-class values — those of the self-sufficient being who works to take care of his own ²…What the intellectual class says, after all, does still often set the tone for society as a whole. It is certainly setting the tone for what is taught in our schools, which has little to do with the rights and duties shared by American citizens and all free beings who work, much less all children of God.

Modern irresponsibility goes hand in hand with modern individualism:

This elitist irresponsibility Tocqueville called individualism. Individualism, for Tocqueville, is a kind of "heart disease" or an emotional deficit.³ The individual is locked up in a bubble or gated community of his immediate family and friends, and he is indifferent to or experiences no real connection with the larger world of citizens and creatures. For the individualist, religion, for example, becomes a kind of non-judgmental spirituality that detaches "me" from real concern with particular people; the duties of personal charity are dissolved into an amorphous empathy. For our cognitive elite, individualism might be best explained as generated by the complacent thought that earned privileges — those of the hugely productive — don't generate corresponding responsibilities.

Lawler knows better than to claim too much for the ways of pre-modern societies, but he still feels that we suffer today from our narrow focus on the “cash nexus”:

The aristocrats of old, by contrast, were "paternalistically" oriented toward those over whom they assumed responsibility; that relationship veiled exploitation in some large measure, of course, but it also meant that human beings were linked together in more than a contractual or "cash nexus" way.⁴ Our elitist indifference, we might also say, is rooted in part in a failure of higher education to be about more than competency and diversity, and in the replacement of virtue with niceness.

If the elites bear the brunt of the blame, Lawler doesn’t let others off the hook:

Still, those Americans living less than middle-class lives are also irresponsible. There are way too many single moms and deadbeat dads, as way too many young men are lost to the virtual world of the screen. There are too many who have concluded that the jobs available to them aren't worth their effort.

Lawler recognizes that the working class is not entirely at fault:

It really is true that many jobs available to ordinary Americans don't pay enough to make dignified relational life possible. It really is true that the withering away of unions, the disappearance of employer and employee loyalty, the meticulous scripting of ordinary tasks with the values of conscientiousness and compliance in mind, and, more generally, the centralization of intellectual labor has stagnated wages, reduced the number of jobs available, and made work both less lucrative and more repulsive.

That pretty much sums up the trajectory of work in the Industrial and Post-Industrial eras; we have gone, in modernity, from a world where life was nasty, brutish, and short to a world where work is scarce, unrewarding, and repulsive.

Lawler then returns to his previously explored categories of “brutish” and “nice,” dismissing them both as inadequate:

Neither being nice nor being brutal is being virtuous. And moral virtue is, after all, the foundation of the common life shared by all political beings inhabiting a particular part of the world. Both niceness and brutality are forms of domination and control. Both work against the consent of the governed who rule and are ruled in turn. We should, in fact, expect all Americans to be ladies and gentlemen, and to treat each other with equal dignity, free from condescension and contempt.

Eventually, Lawler offers, without much enthusiasm, some boilerplate conservative political advice—“our courts and our bureaucrats should do less and our legislatures should do more”—and then concludes on what I can only characterize as a note of supreme hopefulness about our immediate future under Dear Leader:

Trump could trim his populism with the humane intention of preserving the true moral and religious diversity that is one saving grace of our country. He could tutor Americans angrily stuck on both sides of our national divide.

Donald Trump could do that? The most uncivil and brutish individual ever to reach the White House, whose temperament and behavior is about nothing but “domination and control,” is going to “tutor Americans” about how to “treat each other with equal dignity, free from condescension and contempt”?  With all due respect to Peter Augustine Lawler: you have got to be freaking kidding me.

Lawler ends with these wistful words:

Maybe Trump will receive the grace to be better than he's ever been before.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that there is sufficient grace in the universe to enact this miracle; I for one, however, am not about to bet on it.

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http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/our-country-split-apart

¹ For my thoughts on the first part of Professor Lawler's essay, see my previous post.

² I am unclear as to why a “self-sufficient individual [who can] take care of his own” would have needed all those “intermediary institutions”. One of the problems of modern conservatism has long been the tension between its nostalgic longing for community and its insistence on self-sufficiency; Lawler clearly hasn’t resolved that tension, at least not in this particular essay.

³ As much as I love the notion of “individualism” as a “heart deficit”: again, it’s difficult (though not impossible) to understand why “individualism” in this case is wielded as an epithet but immediately prior the same word was ennobled by the modifier “self-sufficient”.  One could argue that modern “bad” individualism is entirely self-centered (“‘I’ am first and foremost for myself”) while old-fashioned “good” individualism was about being for others and taking care of one’s own (“one’s own” included not just immediate family but also neighbors and fellow citizens); one could argue that, but I’m not sure the argument would be persuasive. 

⁴ It seems to me that “exploitation” is not mitigated by a veil of paternalism: a rose by another name…