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The Fragility of Modern Families

Girlhood

December 29, 2017

It’s all of 7:30 a.m. and the sun still hasn’t made an appearance. The outside temperature is 3 degrees below zero. I’ve been sitting here watching my photos scroll past on the laptop. It’s a slideshow that picks photos from my hard drive at random—the kids when they were tweens; the kids when they were toddlers; the trip to Wyoming, Christmas 2010. . . . . They are all good times and almost all family times. You don’t take pictures when the car breaks down, and you rarely take them at work, even if you spend more of your time and energy there. Also, raising a family is difficult—sometimes there is stress. Sometimes there is shouting. Sometimes you can’t believe what you’ve gotten yourself into. None of that makes its way into the photos.

As I watch our family history flash by, I'm grateful the kids are all home this holiday, but feeling a little wistful that in about a month, our oldest will turn 24; our youngest will be off at college, half a day’s drive away. When we dropped the twins off at their dorms this summer it felt like the end of something—was it the end our modern family?

Well, no, of course not. We've had a lovely holiday, with lots of time together. My friend Tom’s only daughter had just two days off, so she flew in from Chicago for just a brief visit. Our girls are here for a number of weeks. So we’re lucky, but I do wonder how our family will evolve down the road. I’m hoping that we end up more like one of the many families you see on TV.

In "Modern Family," for instance, everyone ended up living close by, just a few minutes’ drive away from each other. In that show, cousins are like siblings. Aunts and uncles and grandparents babysit. They’re always popping in on each other and they get together in every episode. Most sitcoms are like that. Somehow, extended families stick together. I wonder how they managed to work that out. Frankly, it doesn’t seem all that modern.

I’ve been lucky. My siblings and I all live within an hour or so of each other. But we don’t live in the same town and that hour drive means there’s not much “popping in” or babysitting. Still, we’re way better off than most of my cosmopolitan acquaintances, like Tom, who have to get on a plane to see members of their extended family.

Working class folks have a better shot, it seems, at ending up close by. If you work in the factory, you might get your son or daughter a job there. But then all the factories are closing. If you send them off to college in some distant state, as in the recent film, Lady Bird, chances are, they aren’t going to come back to live in your town. College educated professionals have to go where the jobs are for the most part. Maybe that’s why the mother in that film freaks out when she drops her college-bound daughter off at the airport. The mother in Boyhood also has the realization that her family life, as she’s known it, is coming to an abrupt end on the day her son, Mason, leaves for college. “This is the worst day of my life,” she sobs. “I just thought there would be more.”

What are the odds that Mason or Lady Bird will end up living nearby, within a short drive? And in what sense are you any kind of a family if you see each other just two or three, or even five or six times a year. How many plane tickets can you afford? Is electronic communication enough?

The tenuousness of family life, it seems to me, is one of the things included in what Richard Hofstadter called the “tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament” (42). The loss of profound family “communion across generations”—and the feelings of social and psychological security that come with it—leaves us with a deep sense of anomie, what Mark S. Weiner refers to as a persistent “ache for everything that is lost” in the transition from traditional clan-based societies to modern individualistic societies (167-8). I’ve been reading Weiner’s book, The Rule of the Clan and Hofstadter’s book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, over the holidays.

Hofstadter shows, in part, that intellectuals are seen as responsible for imposing modernism on everyone else, and so have attracted the hatred of all.

Through most of our history, Weiner argues, humans have lived in big extended families, tied to a particular geographical area. Those societies are characterized by “communal warmth,” intense social bonds, solidarity and security. For modern liberal societies to form, “it is necessary to ‘cut the ties of kinship’—to create a cultural identity that, while not replacing family bonds, trumps their significance, and that displaces the authority of the extended family with the revolutionary, individuating power of the nuclear family.”

It’s a complicated story, but when you think about it, there are an awful lot of obstacles to the maintenance of family ties beyond (and even within) the nuclear family. Weiner argues that at the center of our modern societies is an ethos of individualism that is at odds with the ethos of solidarity at the heart of traditional clan-based societies that keeps families together. The individualistic ethos was on full display in Lady Bird. When asked if Lady Bird is her given name, the title character answers yes, “I gave it to myself, it was given to me by me.” Weiner argues that the ache for solidarity is always with us, though, and the film ends with Lady Bird in her dorm room in New York City recalling her hometown with fondness and introducing herself to new acquaintances as “Christine,” the name her parents gave her.

Liberal societies will fail if we do not find decent substitutes for the solidarity of traditional clans, Weiner argues. We need unions, clubs, bowling leagues, organizations of various kinds, and above all, nation states to fulfill the functions of clans, to hold us together, and to reduce the sense of anomie that arises in the absence of strong extended families and traditional culture.

Other books I’m reading also address this problem in different ways. In More than Just Race, William Julius Wilson considers the relative importance of culture and social structure in causing poverty. Conservatives like J. D. Vance would have us believe that poverty could be solved if individuals would just act differently—according to more appropriate cultural norms. But Wilson references extensive social science research that shows structural factors (economics, demographics, public policy) have a much greater impact and in fact cause the dysfunctional cultural practices that Vance puts at the root of poverty. Wilson calls for the kinds of collectivist or state-sponsored structural adjustments that Weiner might say are necessary to preserve liberal modernity against that ache of individualism.

Finally, in her book, Radical Happiness, Lynne Segal, notes that as policy makers and yoga instructors, retailers and psychologists, HR departments and pharmaceutical companies promote ever more paths toward individual fulfillment and happiness, we see “precipitously rising rates of anxiety and depression” (Kindle version, location 80). The reason, she says, is that we are overemphasizing individual causes of unhappiness and underestimating social causes. We need to shift our focus from private happiness to what Hannah Arendt called “public happiness” (127). Segal's prescription calls for involvement in movements for social change and political activism. For one thing, only social change can address the structural and social causes of our depression and anxiety (which are perhaps a greater source of our misery than our own individual craziness), and at the same time the very act of bonding with others in a political crusade is psychologically therapeutic for the individuals involved.

Are We Powerless?

Some enterprising tech genius will invent a new device sometime in the future, and you will find yourself compelled to purchase one. Who knows, maybe it will look something like the cool machine depicted in the accompanying illustration by Emma and Lindsey.

This inventor will be motivated less to satisfy an actual human need or elevate the condition of human kind than by a compulsion to tinker and a desire to make a buck. See Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel, pages 242-243, on how “invention is the mother of necessity.” At first, lovers of new contraptions will buy them. Eventually a critical mass of people will own one and then the rest of us will begin to feel compelled to join the crowd even if we would rather abstain—even after it becomes clear that this new gizmo does more harm than good to human beings. I sadly find myself in the latter category now in the case of the “smart” phone. Some anthropologists have suggested that agriculture was one such invention that did more harm than good, but which we embraced anyway. James C. Scott’s new book makes this argument, as does Diamond. According to Scott, as recently as 400 years ago the holdouts had the advantage over the adopters.

Some years ago they started inventing telephones you could carry around outside the home. This seemed like a terrible idea to me, then and now. Bad enough you could be constantly interrupted by telemarketers at home, now they could follow you around all day. I resisted buying a cell phone as long as I could until not having one had become eccentric at best and irresponsible at worst. I bought the least expensive version I could find and used it as little as possible. I sometimes forgot to check it and this trained most people to avoid calling me. Around this time, spring of 2015, most other people had upgraded from mere cellphones to the mighty smartphone.

Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 I have felt, like this blogger, like a character in the film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which one by one, the people around him are replaced by aliens who look familiar but something is missing. “Every day, another friend, family member, or even stranger, succumbs to the inevitable, and becomes a blank-faced moron, staring into a tiny screen all day long,” he writes.

But it is hard to resist joining the pod people, even as evidence mounts that smart phones and digital technology in general are really bad for us (they are actually engineered to be addictive). In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle argues that smart phones and other modes of electronic communication are eroding our ability to communicate in person and generating feelings of alienation. Former Google product manager Tristan Harris contends that smart phones have destroyed a whole generation of American children.  There’s been a dramatic increase in depression and anxiety among our kids. Some blame the smart phones.   But we parents keep buying them for our kids, so as to spare them the fate of being a social non-conformist.

I’m old enough to know that life was better before email, that gigantic to-do list that anyone in the whole world can add to at any moment. Before email, you could come home sometimes and leave work behind. You could even go on vacation from work. Do we control technology, or does technology control us?  Apple has figured out how to annoy me into upgrading my Ipad’s operating system every other time I turn it on, it seems, even though I ever asked for an upgrade. Somehow, Ralph Waldo Emerson did not own an Apple product or know about artificial intelligence when he wrote “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

It’s not just technology. Every high school math teacher I’ve talked to thinks that the vast majority of students should not take calculus until college. I’m told that the college professors agree. Yet some mysterious force called “college admissions” insists that every ambitious student take calculus before they graduate from high school.

That same force seems to be responsible for degrading childhood in a number of other ways in recent years. From competitive day care admissions to professional college counseling and SAT test prep, childhood has turned into one long exercise in competitive resume building. A parent once told me that summer is the time for school kids to do extraordinary things—internships, global travel, solving the world’s problems—so as to build the narrative that will get them into a “good” college or university. Surely all of this is another source of all the anxiety our children are suffering.

I remember a time when sports was a thing you did with your friends after school just for fun. Now, middle class families shuttle their kids to games and practices and summer camps, often in the same sport year-round. Sports, and it seems childhood, has become a job. I don’t know any reasonable person, including the coaches and PE teachers I talk to, who thinks this is a good thing. It would seem, contra Martin Luther King, Jr., that change DOES roll in on the wheels of inevitability. Resistance is futile. We are sheep. As John Stuart Mill put it:

Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. (On Liberty)

Somehow, in the face of all this, I continue to cling to a vague notion that humans aren't just helpless pawns altogether, or that, as Marx put it, “Men [and women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Some years ago I did a directed studies course on utopian thought and utopian living experiments with my friend and student Shannon Hou. In the old days—as recently as the 1960s—a lot of Americans spent a lot of time thinking about how we could perfect or at least dramatically improve our unsatisfactory societies. Novelists, communards, and philosophers put a lot of effort into that project. Utopian thinking seems to be out of style these days, replaced mostly by dystopian imagining—how things will inevitably turn out if current trends continue. Think: Hunger Games, a story about what we are doing to childhood. Dystopianism, however, may be a self-fulfilling prophecy if it breeds a sense of helplessness and nihilism.

As a teacher and a historian I feel an obligation to point to examples of people in the past who were agents of their own salvation, or paved the way for improvements to society—dreamers who imagined and brought about a better world.  King is one example. The long struggle for black equality, along with the labor movement, proves that regular people can take action and succeed spectacularly in making their own history—and our own present.  It's hard to feel a sense of historical agency in the dystopian present.  History needs to be taught in a way that counters the fatalistic narratives that are flooding the public mind and conveys a sense of optimism about what is possible and what good people can achieve when they work together. As James Baldwin put it, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive.” It is up to us who are still living to dream hopeful dreams and fight to make them come true.

James Baldwin on History and Optimism and Agency

"History is not the past. It is the present.  We carry our history with us. We are our history.  To pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. . . . I can't be a pessimist because I am alive.  To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.  So I'm forced to be an optimist.  I'm forced to believe we can survive. . . .  The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.  It is entirely up to the American people . . ."  From the film, I am Not Your Negro.  Photo by Allen Warren.

Exonians: Let’s Depolarize America

This is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Exonian, our school newspaper, and which appeared in the Nov. 16, 2017 print edition.

During Tuesday’s assembly, I moderated a political conversation between Amy Schwartz and Townley Chisholm (Teachers at Phillips Exeter Academy). One complaint I’ve heard from some students is that their views weren’t far enough apart. Students may have been expecting something like the political arguments we see on TV every day, between shouting pundits and party functionaries with diametrically opposing views. The networks have found that these kinds of conversations drive up ratings and bring in ad revenue (I recommend the film “Best of Enemies” to see the origins of this phenomenon).

But that is not how most people talk about politics. Think about it. The networks hire people to represent a particular point of view. Their livelihood depends on being able to stick to the party line. They are not paid to be moderate or change their minds. In real life people have all kinds of doubts and change their minds all the time and we don’t go through life with one rigid, fully formed ideology to guide us. We listen to what others are saying and consider new evidence. Political scientists and psychologists who study how people think about politics have found that when we talk to others with different viewpoints, our political positions become more moderate. When we talk only to like-minded people, our ideas become more extreme.

As Americans increasingly separate themselves into red and blue enclaves, they speak to fewer people with different views and the nation becomes ever more polarized. Consider just one of many headlines on the topic: this one from Vox: “We need political parties. But their rabid partisanship could destroy American democracy. We’re trapped in a frightening ‘doom loop’ of mutual distrust.”

In preparing for Tuesday’s assembly, Mr. Chisholm and Ms. Schwartz and I had a number of conversations over two or three weeks. The views you heard expressed on Tuesday were somewhat different than what I heard them saying at different times earlier in the process. Their opinions converged a bit. Like most thoughtful people, these two do not have opinions that are set in stone. They are open minded, intellectually flexible, and open to new evidence. Most importantly, they know that their own knowledge and perspectives are limited, that on any given question, they could be wrong. That’s something Harkness teaches us every day if we are doing it right.

Maybe we would become less polarized if Americans saw more of these kinds of political conversations and fewer of the politics-as-combat and politics-as-entertainment spectacles that the media and the two-party system offer up every day. Perhaps the home of the Harkness method has something to teach the country about how to conduct those better conversations.

A teacher’s confession: There ARE stupid questions

We teachers try to encourage our students to ask questions by telling them this lie: there are no stupid questions.  Here is proof that stupid questions exist:

TEACHER: The paper is due on Friday.
STUDENT: When is the paper due?

It's important to encourage questioning in our students, but lying to them will not help. It patronizes them and undermines our credibility.

Here's what we should say instead: Sure, there are stupid questions and we all ask them sometimes, because let’s face it, it’s hard to pay attention all day long, and it’s hard to pick up every important (and obvious) point in all the readings we did last night. We all have surprising gaps in our knowledge of this complicated world. One person’s valid question is another’s stupid question.  So go ahead and ask that stupid question so you get that paper in on on time.

Instead of pretending that all questions are equally smart, acknowledge that we all need to ask a lot of questions to banish ignorance, some are better than others, and if I tolerate your occasional stupid question you'll tolerate mine and at some point we'll share some really brilliant questions with each other.

The Future is Ours to Make

This week, Ta-Nehisi Coates said he has no hope for the future of America

Historians are sometime asked to predict the future. Surely, the thinking goes, all that study of cause-and-effect in the past must give you insights into what present conditions will lead to in the future. The wisest among the tribe of historians will demure. They know two things for certain about the future.

1. It is hopelessly unpredictable. Historians have such a hard time pinning down the causes of things that have already happened that they know it is foolish to identify effects for which the conditions and causes are still in flux. There are too many variables and factors, unknowns and unknowables, even in the distant past. The course of history is marked by radical contingency.

2. The decisions and actions of human beings will play a major role in shaping the future, and these are the most unpredictable factors of all. 

But if historians can’t predict the future, they can play a role in shaping it.

It is not yet determined which human individuals and groups will play the biggest role in shaping the future, but it is likely that those who feel a sense of efficacy will be more likely to act. Certainly the presidents of countries and corporations, governors, legislators, bankers and billionaires will continue to feel a great sense of empowerment, and will in the future as in the past, have an out-sized impact on the course of events.

Less certain is whether the great mass of people will play a role, and whether people motivated by greed and prejudice or a sense of fairness and justice will get the upper hand. And here, the historians can possibly have an effect.

Most historians have ignored the role of average people in shaping their own history. Part of the problem is that while leaders left behind endless written records, most others did not. Since the 1960s, however, a revolution has taken place among professional historians who have found creative ways to uncover the historical roles of ordinary folks.

Historians who ignore or downplay or dismiss this new history perpetuate the great lie that only “great men” will shape the future. That fosters a feeling of cynicism and defeatism among the good people living today who might bend the arc of history toward a better and more just world, if only they believe it is possible.  They need historians to tell them inspiring stories from the past to show them how it is possible.

2020 UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coates has found reason for optimism. More recently, he expressed a feeling of hope after watching the George Floyd protests. When asked to compare them to the urban riots of the 60s, he noted that the people participating in those events were exclusively black but the riots of 2020 represent a giant interracial mix of people.  See Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is Hopeful.

As if to illustrate Coates' point, the Mayor of Washington DC had city workers paint, in gigantic yellow letters, "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on a street leading to the White House.