Legal Commentary

Atomizing Ourselves

By Kevin Funnell

One the frustrating experiences of my daily existence is reading some of the pronouncements (some even by extended family members and friends) on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media that blithely denigrate conservative principles and traditional values with declarative sentences that are neither empirically nor logically sound. The other day, an adult relative declared on Facebook that opposition to gay marriage was unsupportable because heterosexuals such as Tiger Woods and Jesse James have notoriously cheated on their spouses and half of heterosexual marriages end in divorce. I didn't (and I'm not going to) address the obvious lack of intellectual coherence in this "argument," because I'm concerned about a larger issue (at least, it's "larger" to me, personally).

While this relative's Blue State family members and friends cheered her on, I was again struck by how few and weak are the ties that bind me to these "close" relatives, other than blood relationship. It's not that blood relations count for nothing, but they don't mean to me today what they meant to me when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, and they mean even less than they did to members of my parents' generation when they were growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. My father grew up in an "Irish" ghetto in New York during the Great Depression who fought in World War II. He grew up in an Irish Catholic family in the days when "Irish," "Catholic," and family were terms that encompassed a great number of shared values, values that were unconsciously absorbed and that were commonly held--tightly--by members of a "tribe." He tried to pass along the same values to his sons, but they grew up as part of the most narcissistic generation in the history of humanity up to that point: The Baby Boomers. Many of us thought that when we reached late puberty, we were "liberated" from such ties. We rejected those "traditional values" and "created" our own, or borrowed, often weakly, a smorgasbord of "values" we found personally attractive, for the most part those "values" that made us feel good about ourselves without being too "heavy," oppressive," "repressive," or, in fact, meaningful. We then proceeded to sire and raise a generation of children even more self-absorbed and unbridled by the prescriptions or prejudices of the "Democracy of the Dead."

I've tried to have discussions with relatives who don't share the traditional religious beliefs of Christians and Jews, the respect for traditional definitions of such institutions "marriage" and "family," or, for that matter, traditional standards of "right and wrong," and to explore what common beliefs we can share and why we should share them. I find that when we try to drill down to the foundation of their "nontraditional,  "self-created" beliefs, we find they are built upon sand, yet held to by fierce emotion, rather than intellectual coherence. You can't drill down very far with them through the Socratic method without eliciting a strong, negative, emotional reaction from them, and often one-sided yelling occurs (amazingly for those who know me, the yelling is directed at me, not by me). So, I've given up that quest.

Irving Babbitt, a conservative thinker of the early twentieth century who's little remembered today, wrote about the problem of the rejection of traditional values at a time when that rejection was not nearly as widespread as it's become today. His words are prophetic.

With the progressive weakening of traditional standards, the inability of the humanitarian to supply an adequate substitute is becoming apparent. The whole of the Occident seems to be at an impasse. The mere rationalist and the mere emotionalist are about equally bankrupt. It may be that our only hope is a return to the truths of an inner life. If we ourselves are unable to see the need for such a return, it is perhaps because we have reached the stage of the decadent Romans who, according to Livy, were unable to endure the evils from which they were suffering and also the remedies for those evils.

I suppose my sense of frustration and alienation is also fueled by the fact that whether or not you believe in the "truths" to which people like Babbitt (and me) think we must return, there is no recognition that living your life by the slogan "whatever floats your boat" is a recipe for the disintegration of our society. We must have strong foundational values that bind us to one another or we're doomed.

As philosopher Francis Fukyama squarely puts the problem:

Contemporary Americans, and contemporary Europeans as well, seek contradictory goals. They are increasingly distrustful of any authority, political or moral, that would constrain their freedom of choice, but they also want a sense of community and the good feelings that flow from community, like mutual recognition, participation, belonging, and identity. Community has to be found elsewhere, in smaller and more flexible groups and organizations where loyalties and memberships can be overlapping, and where entry and exit entail relatively low costs. People might thus be able to reconcile their contradictory desires for community and autonomy. But in this bargain, the community they get is smaller and weaker than most that have existed in the past. Each community shares less with neighboring ones, and the ones to which they belong have relatively little hold. The circle of people they can trust is necessarily narrower. The essence of the shift in values that is at the center of the Great Disruption is, then, the rise of moral individualism and the consequent miniaturization of community."

Pardon me for thinking we're screwed. Pardon me, also, if I'm sad because I realize how utterly estranged I am from people I was once close to, or at least thought I was. 

"Community has to found elsewhere."

Indeed.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on May 09, 2010 (boomark / email).