The idea of talking about the subject
called "family" always puts me in mind of a line from the ancient Greek
playwright Euripides. "Whom the Gods would destroy," he said, "they first
make mad." Now, to be sure, there are no gods—there is only God—and even if
there were, you would have to think that, far from destroying us, they are busily
arranging things very nicely for us. Nor do I think that American society has gone mad,
exactly. Look around you at this magnificent country: You would have to say that somebody
is surely doing something right.
Nevertheless, the ghost of that ancient Greek keeps whispering his words of
ageless experience in my ear. If we Americans cannot be said to have gone mad, we have
certainly been getting nuttier by the day.
Take one example of our nuttiness. We are healthier than people have ever been in
all of human history. Just to list the possibly debilitating diseases that American
children need never again experience—measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, smallpox,
scarlet fever, polio—is to understand why we have begun to confront the issue of how
to provide proper amenities to the fast-growing number of people who are being blessed
with a vigorous old age.
And yet, as it seems, from morning until night we think of nothing but
our health and all the potential threats to it. We measure and count and think
about everything we put into our mouths. While we are speculating about which of the many
beautiful places there will be for us to retire to, we are at the same time obsessed with
all the substances and foodstuffs that are lying in wait to kill us, and try out each new
magical prescription for the diet that will keep us ever young and beautiful. This has
gone so far that, for example, not long ago a group of pediatricians had to issue a
warning to new mothers that, far from beneficial, a low-fat diet was in fact quite
injurious to infants and toddlers.
And as if an obsession with nutrition were not enough, every day millions upon
millions of us whom life has seen fit to save from hard labor find ourselves instead, like
so many blinded horses of olden times, daily enchained to our exercise treadmills.
So we treat our health as if it were a disease and the benign conditions of our
lives as if they were so many obstacles to our well-being.
And if that is nutty, what shall we say about finding ourselves engaged in
discussing something called the family? How on earth, if the gods are not out to destroy
us, have we got ourselves into this fix? Talking about the family should be like talking
about the earth itself: interesting to observe in all its various details—after all,
what else are many if not most great novels about?—but hardly up for debate. And yet
people just like you and me nowadays find themselves doing precisely that: Is it good for
you? Is it necessary, especially for children? And—craziest of all—what is it?
In our everyday private lives, of course, we drive around in, or fly around in,
and otherwise make household use of the products of various technologies of a complexity
that is positively mind-boggling without giving it a second thought. Yet at the same time,
millions among us who have attended, or who now attend, universities find it useful to
take formal courses in something called "family relations," as if this were a
subject requiring the most expert kind of technical training. And in our lives as a
national community we call conferences, engage in public programs, create new
organizations, and beyond that publish and read several libraries of books devoted
entirely to questions about the family—not to speak of the fact that here I am as
well this evening, offering you some further conversation on the subject.
I look around this room and wonder, how on earth have we come to this place, you
and I? How did the wealthiest, healthiest, and luckiest people who have ever lived get to
such a point? It is as if, in payment for our good fortune, we had been struck by some
kind of slow-acting but in the long run lethal plague. This plague is a malady we must
diagnose and put a name to if we are ever as a nation to return to our God-given senses.
Where did the idea that the family might somehow be an object of debate and choice
come from? It is never easy, as epidemiologists will tell you, to trace the exact origin
of a plague. Who exactly is our Typhoid Mary?
I can’t say I know, precisely, but I knew we were in trouble back in the late
1950s when I picked up Esquire magazine one day and read an essay about his
generation written by a young man still in university. The writer concluded with the
impassioned assertion that if he thought he might end up some day like his own father,
working hard every day to make a nice home for the wife and kids, he would slit his throat.
Slit his throat. Those were his exact words.
Now, I might not have paid close attention to the sentiment expressed by this
obviously spoiled and objectionable brat were it not for two things: First, we were in
those days hearing a lot from their teachers about just how brilliant and marvelous was
the new generation of students in the universities, and second, Esquire was in
those days known for its claim to have its finger on the cultural pulse. Thus, this was a
young man whose mountainous ingratitude was worth paying a little attention to.
And sure enough, not too much later, what we know as the 1960s began to happen.
Enough said. Should it, then, have come as a surprise that in short order that young
author’s female counterparts began in their own way to declare that throat-cutting
would be the proper response to the prospect of ending up like their mothers? Well,
surprise or no, the plague was now upon us for fair.
The End of Responsibility
Am I trying to suggest that the only course of social health is to live exactly as
one’s parents did? Of course not. The United States is a country whose character and
achievements have depended precisely on people’s striking out for new
territories—actual territories and territories of the mind as well. We have not lived
as our parents did, and we do not expect our children—or, anyway, our
grandchildren—to live as we do.
Several years ago I was privileged to attend my grandfather’s hundredth
birthday party. When we asked him what, looking back, was the most important thing that
had ever happened to him, without a moment’s hesitation he astonished us by answering
that the most important thing that ever happened to him was being privileged to witness
the introduction of the use of electricity into people’s homes. And now I see my own
grandchildren, even the youngest of them, sitting hunched over their keyboards, fingers
flying, communing with unseen new-found friends in far-flung places and giving this new
possibility not a second thought.
In the 1960s, young men began
to cut out their responsibilities,
while young women began to fall
under the influence of a movement
that was equating marriage
with chattel slavery.
So of course we do not live as our parents lived, but that young man writing in Esquire
was saying something else: Underneath the posturing, he was saying that he did not wish
ever to become a husband and father. And the raging young women who came along soon after
him were saying they, for their part, would be all too happy to be getting along without
him.
And what, finally, when the dust of all these newfound declarations of
independence began to settle, was the result of this new turmoil? The young men began to
cut out—cut out of responsibility, cut out of service to their country, and cut out
of the terms of everyday, ordinary life. They said they were against something they called
"the system." But what, in the end, did they mean by that? Insofar as the system
was represented by business and professional life, most of them after a brief fling as
make-believe outcasts cut back into that aspect of the system very nicely; but insofar as
it meant accepting the terms of ordinary daily life, of building and supporting a home and
family, they may no longer have been prepared to slit their throats, but they would for a
long time prove to be at best pretty skittish about this last act of becoming grown men.
And their girlfriends and lovers? They, on their side, were falling under the
influence of a movement that was equating marriage and motherhood with chattel slavery.
"We want," said Gloria Steinem, one of this movement’s most celebrated
spokeswomen ("a saint" is what Newsweek magazine once called her),
"to be the husbands we used to marry."
Let us ponder that remark for a moment: "We want to be the husbands we used
to marry." Underlying the real ideology of the women’s movement, sometimes
couched in softer language and sometimes in uglier, is the proposition that the
differences between men and women are merely culturally imposed—culturally imposed,
moreover, for nefarious purposes. That single proposition underlies what claims to be no
more than the movement’s demands for equal treatment, and it constitutes the gravamen
of the teaching of women’s studies in all our universities.
And need I say that it has been consequential throughout our society? I
don’t, I think, have to go through the whole litany of the women’s complaints.
Nor do I have to go into detail about their huge political success in convincing the
powers that be that they represented half the country’s population, and thus
obtaining many truly disruptive legislative remedies for their would-be sorrows.
Among the remedies that follow from the proposition that the differences between
men and women are merely culturally imposed has been that of letting women in on the
strong-man action. Why, it was successfully argued, should they not be firemen, policemen,
coal miners, sports reporters—in many ways most significant of all—combat
soldiers?
The Soldier and the Baby-Tender
At the outset of the Gulf War, early in that first phase of it called Desert
Shield, the New York Post carried on its front page a newsphoto—it may have
appeared in many papers, or at least it should have—illustrating a story about the
departure for Saudi Arabia of a group of reservists. The picture was of a young woman in
full military regalia, including helmet, planting a farewell kiss on the brow of an infant
at most three months old being held in the arms of its father. The photo spoke volumes
about where this society has allowed itself to get dragged to and was in its way as
obscene as anything that has appeared in that cesspool known as Hustler magazine.
It should have been framed and placed on the desk of the president, the secretary of
defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and every liberal Senator in the United States
Congress.
What could be a more radical idea than
that there is no natural difference between men and women?
That photo was not about the achievement of women’s equality; it was about
the nuttiness—in this case, perhaps the proper word is madness—that has
overtaken all too many American families. For the household in which—let’s use
the social scientists’ pompous term for it—"the sexual differentiation of
roles" has grown so blurry that you can’t tell the soldier from the baby-tender
without a scorecard is a place of profound disorder. No wonder we are a country with a low
birthrate and a high divorce rate.
We see milder forms of this disorder all over the place, especially in cases where
young mothers have decreed that mothers and fathers are to be indistinguishable as to
their—my favorite word—roles. Again, you cannot tell—or rather, you are not
supposed to be able to tell—the mommy from the daddy. The child, of course, knows who
is what. No baby or little kid who is hungry or frightened or hurting ever calls for his
daddy in the middle of the night. He might get his daddy, but it is unlikely that
that would have been his intention.
Everybody has always known such things: What is a husband, what is a wife; what is
a mother, what is a father. How have we come to the place where they are open for debate?
"Untune that string," says Shakespeare, "and hark what discord
follows."
It is not all that remarkable, for instance, that there should have been the kind
of women’s movement that sprang up among us. There have from time to time throughout
recorded history been little explosions of radicalism, of refusal to accept the limits of
human existence, and what could be a more radical idea than that there is no natural
difference between the sexes? Just to say the words is to recognize that what we have here
is a rebellion not against a government or a society, but against the very constitution of
our beings, we men and women.
The question is, what caused such an idea to reverberate as it did among two
generations of the most fortunate women who ever lived? As for their men, what idea lay at
the bottom of their response to all this we do not quite know, for they giggled nervously
and for the most part remained silent. But it is not difficult to see that if the
movement’s ideas represented an assault on the age-old definition of their manhood,
it also relieved them of a great burden of responsibility: Seeing that their services as
protectors and defenders and breadwinners had been declared no longer essential, they were
now free—in some cases literally, in some cases merely emotionally—to head for
the hills.
Since the condition of families depends to a considerable degree on the condition
of marriages, small wonder, then, that the subject of family has been put up for debate.
Most recently, we are being asked to consider whether two lesbians or two male
homosexuals should not also be recognized as a family. Oftentimes the ostensible issue
centers on money; that is, spousal benefits for one’s homosexual mate. But actually,
as we know, what is being demanded is about far more than money.
Money is easy to think about; that’s why the homosexual-rights movement has
placed such emphasis on this particular legislative campaign. But what is really being
sought is that society should confer upon homosexual unions the same legitimacy as has
always been conferred upon heterosexual ones.
What comes next, of course, is the legal adoption of children. Why not a family
with two daddies? After all, some unfortunates among us don’t even have one.
(Lesbians, of course, suffer no such complications. All their babies require for a daddy
is a syringe. Thus, we have that little classic of children’s literature, to be found
in the libraries of the nation’s public schools, entitled Heather Has Two Mommies.)
In other words, when it comes to families, any arrangement is considered as good
as any other.
People don’t pick their professions that way; they don’t decide where to
live that way; they don’t furnish their lives or their houses that way; they
don’t even dress themselves that way . . . but families? Why not? Aren’t they,
after all, no more than the result of voluntary agreements between two private
individuals? And anyway, don’t people have rights? Who are their fellow citizens to
tell them how to live and decide that one thing is good and another is bad?
Such questions explain why it was that in the 1970s a famous White House
Conference on the Family, called primarily to discuss the crisis in the inner cities and
packed full of so-called family experts and advocates from all over the country, could not
even begin to mount a discussion, let alone provide a report, because from the very first
day they could not even reach agreement on the definition of the word "family."
You Can’t Fool Mother Nature
The question is, how did we as a society ever come to this disordered place?
For one thing, what has encouraged us to imagine that anything is possible if we merely
will it to be? And for another, how have we strayed this far from the wisdom so painfully
earned by all those who came before us and prepared the earth to receive us? I ask these
questions in no polemical spirit, because few of us have not in one way or another been
touched by them, if not in our own households, then in the lives of some of those near and
dear to us.
What is it, in short, that so many Americans have forgotten, or have never
learned, about the nature of human existence?
One thing they have forgotten—or perhaps never learned—is that you
can’t fool Mother Nature. If you try to do so, you sicken and die, spiritually
speaking—like those little painted turtles that used to be a tourist novelty for
children and, because their shells were covered in paint, could never live beyond a few
days.
The land of limitless freedom,
as so many among us are now
beginning to discover, turns out to be
nothing more than the deep muck
and mire of Self.
Well, we do not, like those novelty turtles, literally die: On the contrary, as I
have said, we have been granted the possibility of adding years to our lives; but far too
many of us, especially the young people among us, live what are at bottom unnatural lives.
Too many young women, having recovered from their seizure of believing that they were
required to become Masters of the Universe, cannot find men to marry them, while the men
on their side cannot seem to find women to marry. Both grope around, first bewildered and
then made sour by what is happening to them. And there is nothing in the culture around
them—that nutty, nutty culture—to offer medicine for their distemper.
What is it Mother Nature knows that so many of us no longer do? It is that
marriage and family are not a choice like, say, deciding where to go and whom to befriend
and how to make a living. Together, marriage and parenthood are the rock on which human
existence stands.
Different societies may organize their families differently—or so, at least,
the anthropologists used to take great pleasure in telling us (I myself have my
doubts)—and they may have this or that kinship system or live beneath this or that
kind of roof. But consider: In societies, whether primitive or advanced, that have no
doubt about how to define the word "family," every child is born to two people,
one of his own sex and one of the other, to whom his life is as important as their own and
who undertake to instruct him in the ways of the world around him.
Consider this again for a moment: Every child is born to two people, one of his
own sex and one of the other, to whom his life is as important as their own and who
undertake to instruct him in the ways of the world around him. Can you name the social
reformer who could dream of a better arrangement than that?
The Swamp of Self
Are there, then, no violations of this arrangement? Among the nature-driven
families I am talking about are there no cruel fathers or selfish and uncaring mothers? Of
course there are. I have said that family is a rock, not the Garden of Eden; and a rock,
as we know, can sometimes be a far from comfortable place to be. Off the coast of San
Francisco there used to be a prison they called "the rock," and that is not
inapt imagery for some families I can think of.
But even in benign families there are, of course, stresses and strains. To cite
only one example, it takes a long time, if not forever, for, say, a late-blooming child,
or a child troubled or troublesome in some other way, to live down his past with his own
family, even should he become the world’s greatest living brain surgeon. Families are
always, and often quite unforgivingly, the people Who Knew You When. So, as I said, the
rock of family can sometimes have a pretty scratchy surface.
But there is one thing that living on a rock does for you: It keeps you out of the
swamps. The most dangerous of these swamps is a place of limitless and willfully defined
individual freedom.
The land of limitless freedom, as so many among us are now beginning to discover,
turns out to be nothing other than the deep muck and mire of Self. And there is no place
more airless, more sunk in black boredom, than the land of Self, and no place more
difficult to be extricated from. How many among us these days are stuck there, seeking for
phony excitements and emotions, flailing their way from therapy to therapy, from pounding
pillows to primal screaming to ingesting drugs to God knows what else, changing their
faces and bodies, following the dictates first of this guru and then of that, and all the
while sinking deeper and deeper into a depressing feeling of disconnection they cannot
give a name to?
The only escape from the swamp of Self is the instinctual and lifelong engagement
in the fate of others. Now, busying oneself with politics or charity—both of which
are immensely worthy communal undertakings involving the needs and desires of
others—cannot provide the escape I am talking about. For both, however outwardly
directed, are voluntary. The kind of engagement I mean is the involuntary discovery that
there are lives that mean as much to you as your own, and in some cases—I am
referring, of course, to your children and their children and their children after
them—there are lives that mean more to you than your own. In short, the discovery
that comes with being an essential member of a family.
To become a family is to lose
some part of one’s private existence
and to be joined in what was brilliantly
called "the great chain of being."
I do not think it is an exaggeration to use the word "discovery." No
matter how ardently a young man and woman believe they wish to spend their lives with one
another, and no matter how enthusiastically they greet the knowledge that they are to have
a baby, they do not undertake either of these things in full knowledge of the commitment
they are undertaking. They nod gravely at the words "for richer or poorer, in
sickness and in health," but they do not know—not really, not deep
down—that they are embarked upon a long, long, and sometimes arduous and even
unpleasant journey.
I think this may be truer of women than of men. A woman holding her first-born in
her arms, for instance, is someone who for the first time can truly understand her own
mother and the meaning of the fact that she herself had been given life. This is not
necessarily an easy experience, especially if her relations with her mother have been in
some way painful to her; but even if they have not, this simple recognition can sometimes
be quite overwhelming. That, in my opinion, is why so many first-time mothers become
temporarily unbalanced.
I cannot, of course, speak for the inner life of her husband; his experience is
bound to be a different one. But the panic that so often and so famously overtakes a
first-time expectant father is surely related to it. To become a family is to lose some
part of one’s private existence and to be joined in what was so brilliantly called
"the great chain of being."
In short, being the member of a family does not make you happy; it makes you
human.
One Choice Among Many?
All this should be a very simple matter; God knows, it’s been going on long
enough. So why have we fallen into such a state of confusion?
The answer, I think, lies in the question. By which I mean that we Americans
living in the second half of the 20th century are living as none others have lived before.
Even the poor among us enjoy amenities that were once not available to kings. We live with
the expectation that the babies born to us will survive. The death of an infant or a child
is an unbearable experience. Yet go visit a colonial graveyard and read the gravestones:
Our forefathers upon this land lived with the experience, year after year after year, of
burying an infant—lived two weeks, lived four months, lived a year. How many burials
did it take to be granted a surviving offspring?
I am not speaking of prehistoric times, but of 200 years ago. Two hundred years,
my friends, is but a blink of history’s eye. Could any of us survive such an
experience? I doubt it.
Even a hundred years ago—half a blink of history’s
eye—people lived with kinds of hardship only rarely known among us now. Read the
letters of the Victorians (fortunately for our instruction in life, people used to write a
lot of letters; those who come after us, with our phone calls and e-mail, will know so
little about us). They were sick all the time. Or take a more pleasant example,
provided by my husband, the music nut: We can sit down in the comfort of home every
afternoon and listen to works of music their own composers may never have heard performed
and that not so long ago people would travel across Europe to hear a single performance
of.
So we live as no others who came before us were privileged to do. We live with the
bounties of the universe that have been unlocked by the scientists and engineers and then
put to use by those old swashbucklers with names like Carnegie and Edison and
Ford—and, yes, Gates—who were seeking their own fortunes and in the process made
ours as well. Moreover, not long from now, we are told, there will be nearly one million
Americans one hundred years old or more.
We live, too—and should not permit ourselves to forget it—with another
kind of bounty: We are the heirs of a political system that, despite a number of
threatened losses of poise and balance, has remained the most benign and just, and even
the most stable, in the world.
The truth is that precisely because we are living under an endless shower of
goodies, we are as a people having a profoundly difficult time staying in touch with the
sources of our being. That is why so many young women were so easily hoodwinked into
believing that marriage and motherhood were what they liked to call "options,"
just one choice among many. That is why so many young men were so easily convinced to
settle for the sudden attack of distemper afflicting the women whom fate intended for
them. That is why so many people of good will find it difficult to argue with the idea
that homosexual mating is no different from their own—everybody to his own taste, and
who’s to say, especially when it comes to sex, that anything is truer, or better, or
more natural than anything else?
In short, because God has permitted us to unlock so many secrets of His universe,
we are in constant danger of fancying that any limits upon us are purely arbitrary and we
have the power to lift them. In the past half-century, what has not been tried out, by at
least some group or other in our midst, in the way of belief and ritual or—horrible
word—lifestyle? We have watched the unfolding of catalogues-full of ancient and newly
made-up superstitions, the spread of fad medicines and "designer" drugs (each
year, it seems, produces a new one of these). Lately we have seen beautiful young
children, children living in the most advanced civilization on earth, painfully and
hideously mutilating their bodies in the name, they will tell you, of fashion.
All this, I believe, stems from the same profound muddle that has left us as a
society groping for a definition of the word "family." Maybe people are just not
constituted to be able to live with the ease and wealth and health that have been granted
to us.
But this would be a terrible thing to have to believe, and I do not believe it,
and neither do you, or you would not be here this evening. As Albert Einstein once said,
the Lord God can be subtle, but He is not malicious. What does seem to be a fair
proposition, however, is that given the whole preceding history of mankind, to live as we
do takes more than a bit of getting used to. It takes, indeed, some serious spiritual
discipline.
Wisdom and Gratitude
I believe that two things will help us to be restored from our current
nuttiness. The first is for us, as a people and a culture, to recapture our respect for
the wisdom of our forbears. That wisdom was earned in suffering and trial; we throw it
away—and many of us have thrown it away—at their and our very great peril. The
second is a strong and unending dose of gratitude: the kind of gratitude that people ought
to feel for the experience of living in freedom; the kind of gratitude the mother of a
newborn feels as she counts the fingers and toes of the tiny creature who has been handed
to her; the kind of gratitude we feel when someone we care about has passed through some
danger; the kind of gratitude we experience as we walk out into the sunshine of a
beautiful day, which is in fact none other than gratitude for the gift of being alive.
All around us these days, especially and most fatefully among the young women in
our midst, there are signs of a surrender to nature and the common sense that goes with
it. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead—a woman who in her own time managed to do
quite a good deal of damage to the national ethos—did once say something very wise
and prophetic. She said that the real crimp in a woman’s plans for the future came
not from the cries but from the smiles of her baby.
Being a member of a family
does not make you happy;
it makes you human.
How many young women lawyers and executives have been surprised to discover,
first, that they could not bear to remain childless, and second, that they actually
preferred hanging around with their babies to preparing a brief or attending a high-level
meeting? One could weep for the difficulty they had in discovering the true longings of
their hearts. Next—who knows—they may even begin to discover that having a real
husband and being a real wife in return may help to wash away all that bogus posturing
rage that has been making them so miserable to themselves and others.
When that happens, we may be through debating and discussing and defining and
redefining the term "family" and begin to relearn the very, very old lesson that
life has limits and that only by escaping Self and becoming part of the onrushing tide of
generations can we ordinary humans give our lives their intended full meaning. We have
been endowed by our Creator not only with unalienable rights but with the knowledge that
is etched into our very bones.
All we have to do is listen. And say thank you. And pray.
