Most parents cannot help but love their children. And most children are inclined to love their parents. This dynamic has been foundational to the formation of culture as documented in the histories of the world’s oldest civilizations. For the Romans, pietas was a basic organizing concept (which gives us our word for religious reverence, “piety”). For the Chinese, xiao, translated as “filial piety,” has preserved a sense of stability through generational respect. Those in the Abrahamic traditions have been instructed to honor their parents. But kinship practices rooted in the biological fact of natural reproduction are constant throughout the anthropological record around the world. Our indebtedness to those who have raised us is so deeply patterned in human consciousness that it reaches beyond our memories, deep into mythological time, nurturing a sense of transcendental kinship as a common religious instinct.[1]
Before the arrival of our post-religious world, the violence of colonization and global empire had long since put the indigenous into exile. Following industrialization and the advent of consumer culture, the materialist vanguard has sought to exorcize the lingering spirits of our forebears. But our souls still yearn to know their genealogy. Glib slogans like “tradition is peer pressure from dead people” circulate on shallow social platforms. But the stain of “kinship” and “family” cling to the popular consciousness. Even those who would seek the abolition of family itself[2] invoke family and kinship as metaphors for deeper sociality. Cloning, friendship, collegiality, surrogacy, fan community, and, even, pet ownership have all been offered as proxies for biological relation in our lonely age of diminished opportunity. The desperation with which we seek family speaks loudly to the aggression of its erasure by a larger social order that reduces everything to instrumental means. But unlike these postmodern gestures, family is no mere accessory to life—a narrative remedy affixed to the banal materiality of living in the jaws of the machine—it is essential to the rhythms of vital bodies. The utter necessity of mating, gestation, child-rearing, and its repetition forms a fecund humus in which the spirit grows. So strong is this correlation that many traditions see (correctly) no difference between the biological fact and its spiritual component, positing a spiritual essence to the material expression of family.
To better understand the current misanthropic trend, we can look at some key aspects of American cultural identity. As a country founded on the transcendence of history itself—as a revolt against England, an escape from Europe, a pioneer people pushing new frontiers, a melting pot for waves of immigrants, a global moral agent after WWII, the last man standing at the “end of history”—the only steady tradition is the myth of perpetual renewal. A daily life without obligation or apology. As an increasingly pluralistic society, the common denominator of efficiency rises to reconcile the conflicting worldviews, settling on a generic faith in innovation that sees outlaws as heroes and proof in disruption.
But regardless of the arrogant fantasies of the posthumanists and their schemes, creative destruction runs up against family as a constraining factor. Yes, the needs of children demand our toil, but the end of this labor often tends towards virtue, giving a productive shape to leisure, both as an object of pursuit and a practice once attained. As any responsible parent knows, free time becomes a potentially precious interval for the maintenance of home, the practice of care, the cultivation of knowledge, of playful refreshment, and restful sleep. Whether we like it or not, parenting often demands we rescue leisure from the banality of modern life (consumerism) and pursue its more classical sense (otium).
Furthermore, family provides a foundation upon which social trust depends, because it trains us to honor obligations that we do not choose and often suffer to fulfill. As links in a great chain, we are formed by relationships that we do not determine. Historically, these relationships develop psychological, social, and cultural forms that can help or hinder the survival of this biological chain, lending it greater or lesser resiliency, and thus increasing the odds of its survival into the future. In this respect, the pioneering tradition of the family in flight towards a place to settle (even as it colonizes, develops, consumes, transforms, disrupts, etc.) must contend with the reality of sustainable stability that grows roots (family, the home, the community, the local, etc). This is not to say that such families sought their own deconstruction, far from it, rather it is to say that the family is the tip of the spear for forces far beyond their control.[3]
The strategy, it would seem, is to subject the routines of everyday life to the pressure of constant deconstruction into ever more granular units. We have historical antecedents for genealogical destruction in plantation slavery and the reservation, which exist as grim laboratories for the creation of identity without history. More recently, the “prison-industrial complex” can be said to perform a similar role. But the colonization of people in more subtle forms is widely distributed: The percentage of children born to single parent households has increased while family size has decreased, people are pressured to migrate away from extended families, and young people struggle to afford housing and find stable relationships. This backdrop of pressure can make the home itself into a kind of nightmare or an object of resentment, against which the prospect of solo parenting or not parenting at all can seem preferable alternatives. The net effect is that everyone suffers where families suffer, but because the suffering is often experienced in the context of injured relationships themselves, families are often blamed. The fundamental locus of the injury makes it difficult to critique and inclines us towards the acceptance of the social mythology that seems to explain it. The pervasive trauma has become so consistent, that it has become a kind of common cliché to blame mental illness on family itself, on relationships rather than their absence. The family is the victim of injury by our culture and is subsequently blamed for injuring its members. In other words, family has become a scapegoat for the failure of progress.
Even aspiring “traditionalists” are stymied. The temptation to look back to the 1950s (or the 1800s) for nostalgic versions of the American family seems appealing. The so-called “nuclear family” (mom and dad, with 2.5 kids, sequestered in a suburb) dominated as the ideal fundamental modular unit of kinship for decades during the postwar era. Or the “pioneer family” (with ma and pa, with many more kids plus grandma, surviving on the frontier) which served as an ideal for the rugged individualism upon which the country was founded. But what are we looking for? Mere nostalgia? Woven into much of this nostalgia is the idealization of power, autonomy, and material self-sufficiency. This is not to say that there is much to be desired in the lives our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents might have lived, or that dreams of intergenerational affection are not a part of this, only that we should be leery of pastiche and the pseudo-traditions that are equally treacherous.[4]
Reciprocally, the “avant-gardists,” even as they reject tradition in the name of liberation, are forced to address the consequences of progress for an increasingly alienated public. Why are young families struggling? Housing costs exploding? Mental health collapsing? Faith in institutions cratering? Displaced populations growing? Literacy declining? Polarization spiking? In a world of constant beta-testing, where systemic failure is cybernetically recuperated as feedback for future prototyping, the massive disasters of social experimentation merely become further opportunities for the solutionists of tomorrow.[5] Especially as it is aggressively deconstructed, the vestiges of family remain a central motivator for social action.
From Father Knows Best to The Simpsons, there is an arc of deconstruction and deterritorialization which leads to the present proliferation of quantum configurations in the new millennium, (DINKs, Single-parent households, open marriages, etc.). As we continue to elaborate on the American tradition of frontier living, each type forces an act of essentialization (even though this process produces contradictions): Is family a parent-child relationship? Is it two (or more) people living in a single dwelling? Is it defined by genetic relation? Is it defined by the things a person professes to love? Is it everything? Or nothing? An agreement among different parties? Is it the process of revolt against influence? It’s as if the old Modernist trope of the “one best way” were married to the post-digital trope of “on-demand” consumption, to create a plethora of overly simplified definitions of family made to order.
Still, kinship persists, projected into thin air. Even as generational affection has been totally cut off from its sources, the “youth” serve a sacred role, proxies by which those in positions of industrial and social authority can tug at the heartstrings of those who bear nostalgia for love. These opportunists project obligation onto dying elders to adapt to the world that is ever-changing as a last ditch chance to restore the bonds of social affection.[7] This sentiment has served as a great motivator for social action in the United States. You will hardly find any social movement that is not undertaken “for the children” and, consequently, does not project adult desires onto them, desires which can then be conveniently mistaken for unadulterated purpose.[6] Indeed, in the absence of a cohesive unifying national myth, child welfare continues to enjoy a strong rhetorical presence in our otherwise collapsing social contract.
Trauma, Blame, and Hope
In the majority of actual households, parents continue to make significant and obvious sacrifices for their children. And the well-being of children is truly dependent on the ability and degree of such sacrifices. This is undeniable. But the primordial urge to provide abundantly exists in dynamic tension with practical possibility and ethical potentiality. Historically, the pursuit of flourishing was constrained by practical possibility. This continues to be true in the “underdeveloped” sectors of the world population. Among the privileged, responsible parents try to triangulate what they want for their children, what they can provide for their children, and what is best for their moral and spiritual development. Into this roil of competing tendencies, the parent, with an assortment of psychological, cultural, and spiritual inclinations, must also reckon with themselves. Here it becomes possible for all sorts of distortions to confound the idyllic fantasy of the selfless parent. Obviously, parents are far from perfect. They can be too withholding or too indulgent. As access to consumer goods expanded with the American middle class, the application of generosity became a choice, rather than a product of effort or sacrifice. It can never happen by accident, for even haphazard parenting in this context is guilty of negligence. And children, being children, will tend to find fault. In affluent societies, parents spoil their kids through leniency, discipline, apathy, or ignorance. Hence there is need for strong institutional supports, ethical norms, social networks, spiritual values, and the like. But in the absence of grandparents, local communities, and organic institutions, our society offers technocratic “best practices,” experts, therapies, and institutions, which introduce estrangement between parent and child, because these constructed practices and their ideal outcomes are themselves a myth. All parents will fail to provide according to shifting sands of pop-psychology and all children will fail to respond appropriately. The optimization of parenting sets the stage for endless failures and endless remedies, rendering parent and child dependent on therapeutic assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, we have come to believe that a good life must go according to plan.
Ironically, in a society such as ours, where power coheres around managerial elites, the expression of freedom and responsibility is a two-edged sword. Organic, unstructured expressions of freedom, such as those expressed in family life, means that non-conforming parents are held responsible for failure. Against this, experts, agencies, and bureaucrats provide normative best practices and basic needs, which provide counter-examples of appropriately intentional responsibilities. Children aren’t any happier, healthier, smarter, or less traumatized for it—when it comes to hope, resiliency, and practical intelligence, the opposite is often the case—but the structured intention that institutional care represents is never blamed for the dysregulated care of the unplanned life. Who can be blamed for “trusting the science”?
As parenting has become increasingly liable, increasing social and economic pressures have converged to discourage the young from creating their own families. Career demands force people to delay reproduction to make time for education and career advancement (oftentimes, under the cloud of therapeutic rumination on the parental failures induced by our disrupted society). Rising costs of living create added pressures (inflamed, again, by resentful memories of parental indulgence, restraint, carelessness, or stupidity). Narratives about overpopulation and ecological collapse predict a tragic future for those who do. Various subcultures have taken up the idea that parenthood itself is a kind of evil trick meant to enslave. The sprawling narcissism of consumer culture has infantilized many with dreams of perpetual helplessness, dependence, and self-care. Various lifestyle trends seek to recast the family as a kind of affinity group bound by desire rather than duty, drawing in everything from pets to acquaintances to friends and demographic peers. Taken altogether, we can see the reality of the generational family is in something of a freefall. So much so that we will have to reach to cultures outside of our own and/or hope for robots to replenish our vitality and sustain ourselves into advanced age.[8]
It is tempting to blame the youth for getting caught up in the world we have passed to them. But my generation (Gen x), and the ones that came before, are just as much to blame, even if the degree of the crisis has accelerated. Really, we have all been bitten by the myth of progress that has promised triumph over nature, the satiation of our desires, and the hope of something other than death. Like vampires, the humanity in the mirror progressively vanishes as we revolt against the fading connections to a lifeworld that we would do anything to cling to.
Thus children and their parents are situated at different intervals in this process. Boomers, the “me generation,” spoiled consumers raised on self-actualization become the incomplete parents of Gen X. Gen Xers, agnostic and cynical, raised on diminishing opportunities and postmodern media become the broken parents of Millennials or Zoomers. So each generation of youth witnesses the narcissism of its own parents with both a kind of jealous envy and spirit of revolt. And as they collapse into adulthood, they in turn, see the youth as both ungrateful and disobedient. Thus piety is short-circuited by unchecked narcissism that sees generations as rivals, parasites, and eventually scapegoats.[9]
On both ends, the young and the old are increasingly administered medically, coming into and out of being through planned processes. And this administered character means that we frame life at the beginning and end as the intentional product of some decision. Thus responsibility gives way to blame, as nothing is left to chance, and the young and old alike are at “fault” in a world where their very existence appears only as a frustration.
It takes a kind of courage to consider the situation we are in without sentimentality. At a more complicated level, many parents nurture the hope that the generational enmity leveled against them can be avoided. Perhaps they even feel guilt for rebelling against their parents, in many cases, having even abandoned them to senile loneliness. “It’s just a phase,” they say. “Other children may hate their parents, but I am cool and things will work out differently.” Or, maybe, at a moment of self-reflection, we say, “I’ve made my bed, time to sleep in it.”
At this point, maybe at every point, intergenerational respect and affection requires a miracle. The good news is that miracles, by nature, seem impossible. Like the very young and the very old among us, we must forget the learned delusion of independence that revolution prefers and accept the radical dependence of the human condition. For our ancestors, they knew that impiety towards one’s relations was gravely disordered. And they worked consistently to overcome it. And they knew that the dream of a peaceful life of happy flourishing for one’s offspring was only possible through a great deal of suffering and sacrifice. In the midst of this worry and toil, those who came before, imperfect as they might have been, consecrated the unseen future to hope. And for many, the key to this hope was found in a religious trust in destiny that some call grace.
Image Credit: Nicolas Mignard or Pierre Mignard I, “The Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist in a Classical Landscape” (c. 1650) via Wikimedia Commons
[1] Though this is obvious, it still needs to be said.
[2] As silly as it sounds, this might be one of those serious claims that internet gaslighters will deny (“Nobody wants to abolish the family!”). But it’s in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, and so widely referenced and outrageous that even its proponents feel the need to provide passable apologia. The abolition of the family comes up in Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, a slew of ‘70s Marxist and feminist writers, and most recently in Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family (Verso 2022). The most generous interpretation for such a sentiment might be to interpret it as a call to reform our notion of family outside of the 1950s ideal, which remains a popular object of both positive and negative nostalgia. But the reality is that the heritage of the occupied population has always been threatening to the occupying power. Family ties, with all the irrational sacrifice such love evokes, are always going to be resistant to those who seek to force rapid ideological transformation.
[3] While it might seem unfair to position Little House on the Prairie on this trajectory, my argument is that the pioneer families moved into the frontier to escape limited opportunities in the original 13 colonies. And though these families sought to preserve a largely peasant way of life, consistent with their sense of tradition, this undertaking itself was conducive to radical change. These families were separated from any local tradition or generational ties and their movement displaced existing cultures, their migration was followed by radical technological changes (railroads, telegraphs, and proliferating number of machines). A notable moment in this history is Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 declaration that Westward expansion had reached the coast, and that the frontier was closed. See: Frederick Jackson Turner, ”The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” reprinted in AHA Resource Library: https://www.historians.org/resource/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history/
[4] While there are many examples of this, the strongest example might be in the “manosphere” and self-help gurus who present highly performative masculinities to disaffected young men who are poorly served by the dominant culture. Often evoking nostalgia for the good old days before feminism, they often emphasize a hypersexual performative masculinity, degrading views of women, and a culture of hostility and belligerence that would be unrecognizable to our forebears.
[5] Consider the many disruptions that we have lived through. The collapse of social order in urban spaces, followed by capital flight, remedied by at-home delivery services, further disrupted by “porch piracy,” solved by surveillance services like “Ring.” Or consider the collapse of social connection and epidemic of loneliness, remedied by dating apps, followed by the gamification of romance, answered by therapy. Each of these crises, driving people into the digital realm, deepening people’s feeling of isolation, requiring great levels of therapeutic management. There is truly no end to the constant improvement needed as every piece of the social ecology is transformed.
[6] Youth might be seen as ironic “vestal virgins,” at once symbolically elevated and practically subjugated in their role as a post-religious priesthood. Though the job of adolescents in contemporary culture is to embody a kind of libidinous ideal as a social norm that is at odds with their ancient forbears’ ritual virginity, they also perform a kind of celibacy, a sexual and social sterility, removed from generational capacity, consecrating the home as a space of bounteous consumption.
[7] Ironically, the fashionable parenting styles of Silicon Valley elites have little to no correspondence with this popular construction. Elite families procreate and intermarry, pursue rigorously structured pedagogies, abstain from consumer culture, and generally engage in generational preservation.
[8] Ironically, the “underdeveloped” world is seen as the source of demographic renewal, with “excess” populations from Africa, Asia, and Latin America described as the solution to this situation. On the other hand, the “undeveloped” world is targeted for precisely this kind of disruption because of its lack of “progress,” fueling the migration to those advanced nations in demographic freefall.
[9] One might consider this social dynamic through Rene Girard’s perspective on “mimetic desire” and “scapegoating.”
