Notes on Father’s Day

Recently, in Parade Magazine, a writer whom I admire, Larry King, described the rigors of Fatherhood at 50. It is, he concluded, both a wonder and a grind. Family life is both sublime and prosaic. Other writers as dissimilar to King as to each other, like Hannah Arendt and Graham Greene, have written of the comforting yet deadening quality of domestic life. Monastic and celibate traditions and vows are probably rooted not so much in abstinence from sex, as in renouncement of the warmth and tranquility of the home. Domestic life — the reality of it — is conceivably at the basis of the whole concept of privacy, which (although we do not in many cases honor it) has been elevated to the level of Right, and is now the basis of much American Law. Domesticity is also the basis of bourgeoisie culture; it is not so much middle class or what we today think of as suburban life, as that peculiar and solicitous barbarism that is apolitical man.

Fatherhood, new Fatherhood at 30, is also both a joy and a trial. It is entrancing in a kind of impersonal way: one sees a child grow into the first stages of awareness, communication, and sociability — personhood. And though one may invoke maxims such as “nature is for man not man for nature,” no one of my generation experiencing parenthood for the first time can fail to consider, if only in passing, the reality of abortion in America. If a nation so anxious about the possibility of extended life for Barney Clark were to devote equal or similar energies to the possibility of life for those yet to be born, I venture to say that our nation would now have a nuclear arms control agreement, and safe effective birth control would replace the shame of millions of yearly abortions.

The hours of watching and playing that occupy any father (and I think fathers did take and share responsibility for babies prior to the 1970’s) are pure and easy. A colleague (recently a father for the third time) called the baby stage “An honest to goodness existential high.”

The labor of new parenthood, the hardship if you will, comes from its effect on the parents’ time. It is not just that she and he have less of it, what is also altered is the nature and quality of the parent’s time. Privacy, defined here not only as the pursuit of individual interests, but as the routine of solitude, becomes most difficult and sometimes near impossible to find and maintain. Social life, in the sense that we now use the term, prospers. A young couple with a new, handsome, and exceptionally gifted baby shall not want for engagements. But the couples’ identities as socio-political beings, in all likelihood faint prior to parenthood, will become even more slight after it.

The essence of the “good (read bad) bourgeoisie” is precisely that he is engulfed in the joys and demands of domesticity. It is easy to become immersed. Nature has a good deal to do with this — particularly for the mother. Also, size of the brood, and (far more than we care to admit) wealth. But beyond the natural and pseudo-natural forces which tend to lend family demands an overbearing and suffocation quality, are cultural, social, and political realities. In a corporate, capitalistic economy, individuals become or are from the beginning, segmented. A man’s or woman’s work is seldom an extension of her- or himself and his own creative capacities. Unless, of course, he is lucky enough to be an artist, a writer, or an athlete. In a large, theoretically representative but increasingly corporate democracy, a man’s standing as a citizen and as an equal before his fellow citizens (as well as his God) is seldom an important or even inwardly articulated part of his self image.

Ironically, the haven of family life within the context of the contemporary West, and America in particular, may render the enthralled and loving young parent of the 1980’s and 90’s more insular, and neither acutely individuated nor civilized nor social. One might go so far as to posit that this depoliticized and de-privatized man is also, in many instances, a thoughtless man. For a person steeped in nature and survival and beyond this consumption — the animal essence of domestic life and the rat race — a person who is neither retreating into a private space nor in common with others creating public space, is in some basic way no longer a man. Roughly, this would be Hannah Arendt’s description of the decline of the West, or what G.K. Chesterton called “the abolition of man.”

Given that such decline is always more total in the schemata of historians and theorists than is the day-to-day life of people, what smaller and more humble puzzles might ordinary mortals, new and old parents, discern? And what simple lessons and resolutions might be gleaned? Granted that domesticity may overwhelm us and leaves us lesser men and women in our own and our children’s eyes, granted the problem, what can we learn from it? How can we live?

One lesson might be that family life as an end in itself (a large part of consumerism, I think) is really one root of Fascism and Totalitarianism. George Orwell, in the early days of Hitler’s rise to power, observed that Hitler understood man’s need to be not too comfortable or contented. Orwell says that secretly, inwardly, we all long for a cause which will demand sacrifice and dedication. Too much comfort — leisure without direction or focus — first brings decadence and hedonism, and then reaction. A sort of violent breaking away from the mundane. We have seen this dynamic on a small scale in our own country. (And this is one instance where the multifarious plurality of so large a nation has been a good thing.)

A more immediate and concrete lesson and more to the point of my original concern here, has to do with the way we raise our children. A friend wrote recently that we in America overemphasize family and under-emphasize community. I do not much like the word community and I think my friend means by this term what I mean by citizenship. Nor do I think it is family that we spend so much time on in America, as family arrangements and family pragmata. But I think one of the things my friend may have been saying to me as a new parent, is that “love is not enough.” Just as today’s swinging single or divorcee worries about self knowledge and esteem, the modern parent worries about nothing so much as his child’s love quotient. Does the kid feel secure? Has he developed basic trust? Is he too trusting? We have assimilated the triumph of psychological man, and such triumph leaves as crippled as we might be had Freud never lived. One may be and feel loved; one may be and feel self actualized, and also be quite shallow and opaque. The young people I come in contact with today are in most causes pleasant, well mannered, and contented. They seem quite secure; they seem at home in the world. There is the worry.

Many young people see little of note or familiarity in the novels of Camus or Walker Percy. This would perhaps not be the case if they saw the world plainly. What the young today need to see and have shown them, I think more desperately than security and self actualization, is that there is an outer, other, objective world. That world consists of Earth, that in many if not most places is being gutted and spoiled. Children who are suffering — in the millions — from malnutrition and disease. And tyrants and dictators who each day assault man’s craving for liberty and imprison, defame, or assassinate those who champion that cause. Today we are raising psychic speed readers, but worldly illiterates. What we ought to say to our children is not only, “You are loved,” but, “Discover the world, and do what you can to love it.” Finally, we must teach our children about that more distant inner space — the world within — which is not psychic but mental. The life of the mind and of the spirit are not akin to the great psychic search for self. The search, which privacy is meant to protect, is not for happiness but for meaning and understanding.

One last complaint. It is the complaint of a teacher. The schools and universities today do not teach citizenship, nor do they teach mental discipline or the joys of the life of the mind. Schooling in America is unworldly and anti-intellectual. This is because teachers themselves care little for culture, society, or politics, and hardly a wit for ideas. In place of a sense of vocation — a kind of secular priesthood — we have guilds (the high school teachers) and technicians (the college professors . . . the laugh here is that in the fields of humanities and social sciences, the machines the academics might fix is illusory).

Parents matter more than the schools of course, but what both ought to strive to give their charges is a sense of the world beyond themselves: moral, social, and political. And a world further in: mental and conceptual. The pursuit of private happiness in America needs a good long rest.

Domestic life must be balanced with man’s political, intellectual and spiritual capabilities. Let us have, for a change, some attention to public happiness and philosophical perplexity.

 

Author

  • Keith Burris

    In 1983, Keith Burris was with Washington and Jefferson, Washington, PA

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