As someone who has developed my own (notably childless) alt micro-community, I think a lot about how hard it is to build community networks in the face of shattered cultural norms & skills, and how I would not have it in me to build what is necessary for healthy childrearing. I grant that the broad right are pointing to real problems emergent from lost shared-community-capacity, while the broad left whom I align myself with shy away from even recognizing it.
But of course the right are confused about the roots & remedies. They want to blame feminism and The Queers and so forth for screwing things up. They think that we can just return to the 1950s dream of the suburban nuclear family if we just Try Harder and punish deviance enough. But that is not just an ugly dream because of its intolerance. It is also doubling down on the very thing which ate the seed grain of our shared-community-capacity: the atomization inherent in suburban life and the nuclear family.
Addressing our need for shared-community-capacity aligned with left cultural sensibilities requires a radical vision of what we want the social order to look like, exploring genuinely novel social forms. I tremble with dread at attempting society-wide transformation of that profundity; history is rich in cautionary tales about unintended consequences. But pursuit of the Suburban Nuclear Family Dream •is one of those cautionary tales•. The only way out is THROUGH to something new.
Yeah, I agree that the only way out is through in this area.
My impression is that the 1950s dream had more problems than just atomization. There were intertwined communities, but they were unbearable for many members, and people began having the ability to opt out in huge numbers, especially if they were smart and talented. For example, in the interview I used my mom and her Ohio village as an example of a certain kind of community health. But my mom also ran away from that community in the mid-1960s, when she was in her early twenties, after being pushed into a marriage that made her miserable. From my mother’s stories I get the impression of enormous shared pain in those 1950s communities… not just repression of alt lifestyles, for instance, but widespread infidelity and emotional/physical abuse.
I can see that if I want both liberals and conservatives to be free to comment here, I'm going to need some kind of comments policy :) or maybe I just let it be a free for all...
I think about this "roots and remedies" issue quite a bit. What is the issue? Whatever it is, I think it's a strange, perhaps a protean thing. I don't feel like either political side has the answer about what the problem is, or about what to do next. I have been so frustrated with the left wing over the years, but at this point I'm just as frustrated with the right wing movements that I've become familiar with. And of course there is a lot of personal heartbreak for me in this area.
I tried so many different things and I tried so hard. Now I'm walking this path of being a single mother, which wasn't what I wanted. I didn't even decide to do it this way. Some of my friends choose single parenthood, and that option was available to me, but in the end I did not even choose it up front, it was simply what ended up happening in my life. And the whole experience has been so revealing.
In theory, everyone on both political sides thinks moms - especially single mothers - need support. In practice, we are so alone, and we are so tired. Not even tired in a "performative social media tired" way. We aren't tired in a way that wins us points in The Discourse. Just tired in the way where we barely have any idea what to do anymore, and can barely stay on top of the basics, and on our bad days, we feel like our lives are over. It has been such a huge realization for me that our society is doing this to moms, at scale. Which means we are also doing it to children, because (aside from some corner cases) no one is more important in a child's life than the mother. And if we are doing it to children then that is a guarantee that the cycle will just go on.
As you know, I have the inkling that the only possible approach can be a spiritual one. I remember noticing that of the people who stood by me when I was engaged to my ex-fiancé, many of them had a spiritual sense of what was happening, and many of them told me that they understood what I was trying to do, that there was a visceral sense of how I was trying to approach the culture war. I don't know how to put it into words. But that's the path I'm still trying to walk.
My experience is the political sides frequently offend each other without trying ;)
The problem you mention of the society hostile to children is interesting. In some ways yes, very much so. But as a mom I am incredibly aware that in fact child mortality is the lowest it’s ever been in history. My toddler got scarlet fever this week and we gave him antibiotics. This is actually an insane level of progress.
And this is often where I end up when I think about this. Yes, this society is amazingly hostile to mothers and children.., in some ways. In other ways, this society is the best humanity has ever had it.
The most maddening thing about our era may be that we have all of these utopian technologies already in place but cannot get our act together to exercise them in a humane society.
This is fraught across the political divide because ultimately we are asking what supports good childrearing, and we have very different ideas about •that• on every level — how the world works mechanically, what constitutes a Good Life to give to kids, what means are permissible, et cetera ad nauseam.
The world the right thinks of as “traditional” (which actually only existed in a small slice of history, geography, and culture) addressed this through sheer commitment of resources by disenfranchising half the adult population to serve as wives, moms, and schoolteachers. In fairness to reactionaries, their desire to wind the clock back recognizes the scale of the challenge, but there are a host of good reasons to reject their solution.
Even if it were not brutal to women to take away their chequing accounts, it would not be adequate. We have built a society hostile to children in almost every particular. We cannot even be bothered to stop running kids over with cars, gunning them down in schools, or abusing them at home.
So, again, nothing short of a frighteningly comprehensive social revolution will do.
I like to think that my crank leftist dreams support mothers and children. Dignified UBI would liberate parents from wage pressure. Urbanism and wholly new systems of justice would make kids’ lives safer and sane-er. Legal & institutional supports for domestic arrangements other than the nuclear family — like the kind of co-housing that got us talking here — would ease the pressure on the tiny, wobbly platform of the “family”. Et cetera.
But that is as detached from reality as turning back the clock to a past that never existed. Even if I could get everyone to agree on how sensible my dreams are, they leave a lot unanswered, they would have unintended consequences, they would take at least a generation to implement. That doesn’t answer how we can do right in the world we have.
As someone who has developed my own (notably childless) alt micro-community, I think a lot about how hard it is to build community networks in the face of shattered cultural norms & skills, and how I would not have it in me to build what is necessary for healthy childrearing. I grant that the broad right are pointing to real problems emergent from lost shared-community-capacity, while the broad left whom I align myself with shy away from even recognizing it.
But of course the right are confused about the roots & remedies. They want to blame feminism and The Queers and so forth for screwing things up. They think that we can just return to the 1950s dream of the suburban nuclear family if we just Try Harder and punish deviance enough. But that is not just an ugly dream because of its intolerance. It is also doubling down on the very thing which ate the seed grain of our shared-community-capacity: the atomization inherent in suburban life and the nuclear family.
Addressing our need for shared-community-capacity aligned with left cultural sensibilities requires a radical vision of what we want the social order to look like, exploring genuinely novel social forms. I tremble with dread at attempting society-wide transformation of that profundity; history is rich in cautionary tales about unintended consequences. But pursuit of the Suburban Nuclear Family Dream •is one of those cautionary tales•. The only way out is THROUGH to something new.
Yeah, I agree that the only way out is through in this area.
My impression is that the 1950s dream had more problems than just atomization. There were intertwined communities, but they were unbearable for many members, and people began having the ability to opt out in huge numbers, especially if they were smart and talented. For example, in the interview I used my mom and her Ohio village as an example of a certain kind of community health. But my mom also ran away from that community in the mid-1960s, when she was in her early twenties, after being pushed into a marriage that made her miserable. From my mother’s stories I get the impression of enormous shared pain in those 1950s communities… not just repression of alt lifestyles, for instance, but widespread infidelity and emotional/physical abuse.
Oh yes. That dream was a nightmare. AND it did not even have the virtues the right believes it did.
I can see that if I want both liberals and conservatives to be free to comment here, I'm going to need some kind of comments policy :) or maybe I just let it be a free for all...
I think about this "roots and remedies" issue quite a bit. What is the issue? Whatever it is, I think it's a strange, perhaps a protean thing. I don't feel like either political side has the answer about what the problem is, or about what to do next. I have been so frustrated with the left wing over the years, but at this point I'm just as frustrated with the right wing movements that I've become familiar with. And of course there is a lot of personal heartbreak for me in this area.
I tried so many different things and I tried so hard. Now I'm walking this path of being a single mother, which wasn't what I wanted. I didn't even decide to do it this way. Some of my friends choose single parenthood, and that option was available to me, but in the end I did not even choose it up front, it was simply what ended up happening in my life. And the whole experience has been so revealing.
In theory, everyone on both political sides thinks moms - especially single mothers - need support. In practice, we are so alone, and we are so tired. Not even tired in a "performative social media tired" way. We aren't tired in a way that wins us points in The Discourse. Just tired in the way where we barely have any idea what to do anymore, and can barely stay on top of the basics, and on our bad days, we feel like our lives are over. It has been such a huge realization for me that our society is doing this to moms, at scale. Which means we are also doing it to children, because (aside from some corner cases) no one is more important in a child's life than the mother. And if we are doing it to children then that is a guarantee that the cycle will just go on.
As you know, I have the inkling that the only possible approach can be a spiritual one. I remember noticing that of the people who stood by me when I was engaged to my ex-fiancé, many of them had a spiritual sense of what was happening, and many of them told me that they understood what I was trying to do, that there was a visceral sense of how I was trying to approach the culture war. I don't know how to put it into words. But that's the path I'm still trying to walk.
And heck, I wasn’t even trying to be mean to the right! 🙃
I respect wanting to build a space in which we can talk across the Great Divide. I don’t imagine that my approach delivers what you want …
https://miniver.blogspot.com/2015/01/discussion.html
… but it stands to reason that you do need •something•.
My experience is the political sides frequently offend each other without trying ;)
The problem you mention of the society hostile to children is interesting. In some ways yes, very much so. But as a mom I am incredibly aware that in fact child mortality is the lowest it’s ever been in history. My toddler got scarlet fever this week and we gave him antibiotics. This is actually an insane level of progress.
And this is often where I end up when I think about this. Yes, this society is amazingly hostile to mothers and children.., in some ways. In other ways, this society is the best humanity has ever had it.
The most maddening thing about our era may be that we have all of these utopian technologies already in place but cannot get our act together to exercise them in a humane society.
This is fraught across the political divide because ultimately we are asking what supports good childrearing, and we have very different ideas about •that• on every level — how the world works mechanically, what constitutes a Good Life to give to kids, what means are permissible, et cetera ad nauseam.
The world the right thinks of as “traditional” (which actually only existed in a small slice of history, geography, and culture) addressed this through sheer commitment of resources by disenfranchising half the adult population to serve as wives, moms, and schoolteachers. In fairness to reactionaries, their desire to wind the clock back recognizes the scale of the challenge, but there are a host of good reasons to reject their solution.
Even if it were not brutal to women to take away their chequing accounts, it would not be adequate. We have built a society hostile to children in almost every particular. We cannot even be bothered to stop running kids over with cars, gunning them down in schools, or abusing them at home.
So, again, nothing short of a frighteningly comprehensive social revolution will do.
I like to think that my crank leftist dreams support mothers and children. Dignified UBI would liberate parents from wage pressure. Urbanism and wholly new systems of justice would make kids’ lives safer and sane-er. Legal & institutional supports for domestic arrangements other than the nuclear family — like the kind of co-housing that got us talking here — would ease the pressure on the tiny, wobbly platform of the “family”. Et cetera.
But that is as detached from reality as turning back the clock to a past that never existed. Even if I could get everyone to agree on how sensible my dreams are, they leave a lot unanswered, they would have unintended consequences, they would take at least a generation to implement. That doesn’t answer how we can do right in the world we have.