The Land of Opportunity : A Parent's View

Christopher Lasch (1991)

The question I took up in the mid-Seventies - the question of whether changing patterns of family life had not brought about long-term changes in personality structure - grew out of a belief that the social order no longer required the informed consent of citizens. Every form of authority, including parental authority, seemed to be in serious decline. Children now grew up without effective parental supervision or guidance, under the tutelage of the mass media and the "helping professions." Such a radical shift in the pattern of "socialisation," as sociologists called it, could be expected to have important consequences on personality, the most disturbing of which would presumably be a weakening of the capacity for independent judgement, initiative and self-discipline, on which democracy had always been understood to depend. 

Such were the theoretical concerns, if I can dignify them with that name, that informed my studies in culture and personality; but those studies also grew more deeply out of my own experiences as a husband and a father. Like so many of us born in the Depression, my wife and I married early, with the intention of raising a large family. We were part of the post-war "return to domesticity," as it is so glibly referred to today. No doubt we hoped to find some kind of shelter in the midst of general insecurity. But this formulation hardly does justice to our hopes and expectations, which included much more than refuge from the never-ending international emergency. In a world dominated by suspicion and distrust, a renewal of the capacity for loyalty and devotion had to begin, it seemed, at the most elementary level, with families and friends. My generation invested personal relations with an intensity they could hardly support, as it turned out; but our passionate interest in each other's lives cannot very well be described as a form of emotional retreat. We tried to recreate in the circle of our friends the intensity of a common purpose, which could no longer be found in politics or the workplace. 

We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of "significant others." A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-handed music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing children and adults - this was our idea of a well-ordered household, and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools. We knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by - joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship - they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the "nuclear family." Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit. 

None of this was thought out, self-consciously, as a pedagogical program, and it would have destroyed trust and spontaneity if it had been. But some such feelings, I believe, helped to shape the way we lived, along with much else that was not only not thought out, but purely impulsive. Like all parents, we gave our young less than they deserved. At least we did not set out to raise a generation of perfect children, as many middle-aged parents are trying to do today; nor did we undertake to equip them with all the advantages required by the prevailing standard of worldly achievement. Our failure to educate them for success was the one way in which we did not fail them - our one unambigous success. Not that this was deliberate either - it was only gradually that it became clear to me that  none of my children - having been raised not for upward mobility but for honest work, could reasonably hope for any conventional kind of success. None of them could hope for abundant, readymade opportunities, in other words, in some honourable line of work that would make best use of their abilities, provide them with the satisfaction that comes from the exercise of responsibility, and bring them some measure of financial security and public appreciation. Success was no longer to be had on such terms. The "best and brightest" were those who knew how to exploit institutions for their own advantage, and to make exceptions for themselves instead of playing by the rules. Raw ambition counted more heavily, in the distribution of worldly rewards, than devoted service to a calling - an old story, perhaps, except now that it was complicated further by the further consideration that most of the available jobs and careers did not inspire devoted service in the first place.
 
Politics, law, teaching, medicine, architecture, journalism, the ministry - they were all too compromised by a concern for the bottom line to attract people who simply wanted to practice a craft, or, having attracted them by some chance, to retain their ardent loyalty in the face of experiences making for discouragement and cynicism. If this was true of the professions, it was also true - it hardly need be said - of factory work, and even of the various crafts and trades. At every level of American society, it was becoming harder and harder for people to find work that self-respecting men and women could throw themselves into with enthusiasm. The degradation of work represented the most fundamental sense in which institutions no longer commanded public confidence. 

It was the most important source of the "crisis of authority" so widely deplored but so little understood. The authority conferred by a calling, with all its moral and spiritual overtones, could hardly flourish in a society in which the practice of a calling had given way to a particularly vicious kind of careerism, symbolised unmistakably in the eighties, by the rise of the Yuppie. 
The unexpectedly rigorous business of bringing up children exposed me, as it exposes almost any parent, to our "child-centred" society's icy indifference to everything that makes it possible for children to flourish and grow up to be responsible citizens. To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light. This perspective unmistakably reveals the unwholesomeness, not to put it more strongly, of our way of life: our obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of "making it;" our addictive dependence on drugs, "entertainment," and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and family ties; our preference for "non-binding commitments;" our third-rate educational system; our third rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we "impose" our morality on others and thus invite others to "impose" their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destructiveness and a deteriorating environment; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only children born to success ought to be allowed to be born at all. 

Having come to see America in this way, I could understand why the family issue had come to play such a large part in the politics of the seventies and eighties, and why so many Democrats had drifted away from their party. Liberalism now meant sexual freedom, women's rights, gay rights; denunciation of the family as the seat of all oppression; denunciation of "patriarchy;" denunciation of "working class authoritarianism." Even when liberals began to understand the depth of dissatisfaction amongst former Democrat voters, and belatedly tried to present themselves as friends of the family, they had little to offer other than "national policy on families" - more welfare services, more day-care centres, more social workers and guidance councellors and child development experts. None of these proposals addressed the moral collapse that troubled so many people - troubled many liberals, although they refused to admit it publically. Liberals and social democrats showed their true colours when they pronounced the family "a legitimate object of concern," their words dripping with condescension.

Chrisopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, 1991