The Future of American Family
Another David Brooks column, another thought-provoking foray into our mixed-up, crazy American lives:
In America, we have been taught to admire the lone free agent who creates new worlds. But for the person leading the Summoned Life, the individual is small and the context is large. Life comes to a point not when the individual project is complete but when the self dissolves into a larger purpose and cause. The first vision is more American. The second vision is more common elsewhere. But they are both probably useful for a person trying to live a well-considered life.
I'm not sure we really have been taught to admire that lone free agent -- at least, not as an end in himself. One of my favorite lines from Robert Nisbet's famous book The Quest for Community is actually a quote from Joseph Schumpeter:
the family and the family home used to be the mainspring of the typically bourgeois kind of profit motive. Economists have not always given due weight to this fact. [...] Consciously or unconsciously, they analyzed the behavior of the man whose motives are shaped by such a home and who means to work and save primarily for wife and children. As soon as these fade out from the moral vision of the business man, we have a different kind of homo economicus before us who care for different things and acts in different ways.
It's misleading to suggest that we have two choices -- either a worldview in which I make THE WORLD disappear into ME, or one in which I let ME disappear into THE WORLD. A life in which family is a foundational project makes room for a bigger me than a life ruled by community, and for a bigger world than a life ruled by what Christopher Lasch and other communitarian critics described as a selfish, minimal, narcissistic individual.
Some Christian critics today worry that an idolatry of the family can cause us to care, at the expense of our communities and even the world, way too much about the money and prestige accumulated by our gene pool. Maybe wife-and-kids is too narrow a world. But we can open that up by taking a longer view of family. As we hear every day, nobody really relates to anyone in their own bloodline farther away than grandchildren. At that point, they're mostly a lot of strangers and hardly at all you. Darwinianism doesn't give us a very generous understanding of how the personal project of an enduring family feeds harmoniously into the broader well-being of our communities and our world.
True, Darwinianism is a pretty (small-d) democratic way of viewing the world. It's more aristocratic, by contrast, to think of your great-great-great grandchildren as people who are just as much a part of your family as you are. I hardly expect or recommend a popular resurgence of family crests and other aristocratic trappings of pride in one's lineage. But the popularity of sites like Ancestry.com seems to me to reflect a deep-seated and very natural pushback against the culture of divorce and illegitimacy that's spreading more widely than many generations of Americans are used to. Our ancestors would've blanched at the idea that democratic life was somehow incompatible with a view of family that saw way beyond the nuclear.
Not long ago, the world-creating or nature-tackling agent of our romantic legends would've likely been a man who could only be understood in a family context. What could be more American than that?
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Jun '10
Re: The Future of American Family
About a hundred years ago, where my maternal grandparents lived in Northern Minnesota, their contact with county or state government was paying property taxes, casting a ballot, or once in a blue moon, jury duty. They used the US Post Office, but aside from the naturalization process, and the occasional draft notice, I don't know that they had much contact with the federal government. Not until later in life. They farmed. They gardened. They sold milk all year around, turkeys and grain in the Fall. In the Winter, the men worked in far off lumber camps. They earned a little here and there, and took care of themselves pretty well. The only welfare system they had, or knew about, was their church. That's what you call LOCAL government.
May '10
Re: The Future of American Family
Three interesting essays, yours, Brooks' and Christenson's, but I feel that you are all three circling around one another.
Brooks has a habit of drawing conclusions that are at odds with the body of his piece. You hit upon the odd paragraph in your quote. The idea of a "Summoned Life", is intriguing, but the observations about a "lone free agent" and the dissolving self seem to come from a different essay. And as for the observation that one is distinctly American and the other not, he's really reaching.
Brooks has tacked a discordant note onto what was a nice counterpoint to Christenson's paean to perfect planning. The professor gives good advice on what parts of life to give priority when "allocating resources" but suggests a level of deliberate life planning that is certainly foreign to me. I like Brooks' model better.
And I'll be honest James, your points about fixation on family, interesting as they are, also feel like a sharp turn from the other essays. Both the "Well-Planned" and "Summoned" life can accommodate either a small or a long view of the family. Perhaps even a "broad" view? (200wds approaches. Argh!)
Jul '10
Re: The Future of American Family
Well said, G.A.
We are fascinated with creating unnecessary distinctions. It's not either/or. What could be more natural than a strong, individual man, who is part of and committed to a strong nuclear family, whch is part of a well-connected extended family, and which has parallel attachments - individually and collectively - to other communal organizations (churches, fraternal organization, book clubs, the State, etc). Even, today, to virtual commmunities like ricochet.
These are not exclusive categories. A life lived in full is a life that gives proper space to all of these instantiations of the indiviual. The relative weight given to to the various social components will customize itself to the social realities of a given culture. Why must we set up straw man arguments that seek to pit one against the other?
I am afraid that David Brooks has made a nice career out of this sort of false argumentation.
Re: The Future of American Family
As is often, alas, the case, I can't figure out what in the Sam Hill our friend David Brooks thinks he's talking about. But Schumpeter--now that man is onto something. As Dr. Johnson put it a couple of centuries earlier:
Jun '10
Re: The Future of American Family
There was no greater proponent and defender of the "individual" than Frank Meyer. Yet even he, while reverencing the individual, had great reverence for the family, and recognized the solid link between the one and the family.
Here are a couple of short quotes from Meyer's In Defense of Freedom and Other Essays:
“The family as an institution cannot guarantee the raising of the young in the paths of virtue, although the family is a necessary form; only individual persons, acting through the form of the family, can do so.”
"[A]ny marriage worthy of that exalted name is an unbreakable compact and through the family, proceeding from marriage, creates morally indissoluble bonds of perpetual obligation.”
When families create those kinds of bonds, they create the fertile grounds from which the great ones emerge.
May '10
Re: The Future of American Family
Be truthful. Who among your friends do you like better: 1) the choleric, tightly-wound, totally planned, perfectly orchestrated life-engineer, or the 2) more other-directed, relaxed, spontaneous person who may approach the goal in a more roundabout manner? Mr. Christensen does strike me a little bit as one who only stop sto smell the roses if he has it down in his daytimer for today. Maybe I'm just overreacting to my own meandering, adult-ADD shortcomings.
And I also get the sense that David Brooks either writes about half of his columns in a state of melancholic, "dark night of the soul" depression or he always wanted to be a philosopher instead of a commentator, so he gives in to his inner Schopenhauer. But, eloquent and thoughtful though they may be, I get a distinct sense that the shirt is a trifle over-stuffed.