Words&Dirt

“No one could look at Peter, who had become a nearly unbearable sight on grounds of posture alone: shoulders drawn together, body trembling, back of neck brilliant red.  Sokolov was favorably impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants.  Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress.  Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control.  Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion.  Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him.  In any case, Peter had done neither of these things yet.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 193-4

“Without the ballast provided by the public sphere, the family began its long slide toward subjectivism, feeding the very individualism that family morality was supposed to counter.  It is not that the spread of individualism threatens to destroy the traditional privacy and intensity of family life, as is sometimes claimed; as we have seen, familial privacy and intensity were in many ways created by the spread of individualism.  But it is certainly true that individualism constantly undermines the very family life that it originally fostered.

When obligation and reciprocity were banished from public life and confined to the nuclear family, their continued existence became very problematic, especially once the same-sex networks and community associations that formerly defused the tensions of family life began to disintegrate.  The effective adult, at work and in public, is independent, individualistic, rational, and calculative.  The effective family member, by contrast, shares, cooperates, sacrifices, and acts nonrationally.  The character traits that keep families together are associated in all other areas of life with immaturity or nonrationality; family interdependence is now the only thing that stands in the way of ‘self-actualization.’  At the same time, the family becomes overburdened with social expectations as well as psychological and moral ones.  If the family  would just do its job, we wouldn’t need welfare, school reform, or prisons.  And if my family would just do its job, I would be perfectly happy.  The obvious next step, of course, is that if I am not perfectly happy, it’s my family’s fault.

Figuring out whether a family is doing its job, however, becomes progressively more difficult when external moral and political reference points for judging the quality of love or parenting disappear.  ‘The world of intimate feeling,’ remarks Richard Sennet, ‘loses any boundaries’––and therefore loses any core.  Where is the center of infinity?  As education professor Joseph Featherstone argues: ‘A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.’

The triumph of private family values discourages us from meeting our emotional needs through mutual aid associations, political and social action groups, or other forms of public life that used to be as important in people’s identity as love or family.  So we must rely on love.  If we fail to attain love, or even if we do attain it and still feel incomplete, we blame our parents for not having helped us outgrow such neediness––as though it is only ‘the child within’ who could be needy.  We may postpone confronting the shallowness of our inner life by finding one special person to love us or for us to love, yet when the love disappears, and our needs, inevitably, do not, we feel betrayed.  Many palimony battles and bitter divorce brawls, for example, seem to be over social needs that right now can be expressed only in personal terms.  They are disputes over what people owe each other after love is gone, what altruism is ‘worth’ in our society if it does not earn you love.

These private feuds over family-type relations and obligations fascinate us, at least in part, because we have such a truncated sense of larger social obligations and commitments.  At a recent dinner party, I asked a group of men and women if they didn’t find some of these palimony demands and damage suits distastefully greedy.  They unanimously responded that since the movie stars and entrepreneurs being sued had such inflated incomes, why blame anyone for trying to cut off a piece of the cake?  Taking sides in divorce battles or sexual charges and countercharges seems to be a distorted way of registering our disgust with economic, social, or gender trends that we have no other way of debating.

The ‘turn toward home,’ then, in both the first and second Gilded Age, not only impoverished public life but also made private relations more problematic than ever.  Consequentially, as historian Eli Zaretsky has pointed out, ‘a certain kind of alienated public life and a certain kind of alienated private life have expanded together.'”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 119-21