part 2: the destabilization of family

by Nic Gibson
(Read Part 1: "The Destabilization of Career")
The destabilization and inversion of work is further strengthened by the destabilization of the family. Half of all young adults have experienced divorce in their own families. Those who haven’t are constantly hearing marriage-failure narratives in film, TV, personal relationships and so on. Today it seems like the amount of trust extended in truly interdependent marriage is out of step with the low likelihood of actual family success and it’s attending benefits. And the exclamation point on this concern is the shell shocking weight of the Idea of Children (as distinguished from an actual child) now fully detached from our conception of sex, but present enough to tell every woman that divorce could be attended by single motherhood.

The Idea of Children prohibits us from writing real children into our stories, because we can anticipate all the negative considerations children will bring to our personal freedoms and resources, while we usually lack the emotional imagination or experiential capacity necessary to anticipate the real joys of real children and actual parenthood.

Parenthood, and more specifically, motherhood, is further crushed under the weight of ‘Impact Ratio’ algebra. When we imagine our own ‘potential’ in social impact calculated by ‘breadth’, we virtually always imagine our potential career impact to be more than ‘two kids worth’. And work’s influence of being something to everyone overcomes the imagined influence of being everything to someone. We generally cannot see our prejudiced preference for the specialization of the worker over the omni-competence of the wife. And this prejudice further tramples the professional mother underfoot. Since as a former worker, she sets her standards as a specialist. Then in her many diverse tasks as a mother, she never lives up to the normal standards of a specialized worker. A generalist never can. As G.K. Chesterton once noted in different words: She cooks, drives, teaches and loves. But she feels constantly a failure because she does not cook as well as a chef, does not drive like a chauffeur, nor does she teach like a professor or love like a paramour. And she easily overlooks that she cooks better than a professor, drives better than a chef, loves better than a chauffeur and teaches better than a prostitute. The contemporary problem for the modern mother is not that she is not a good generalist, it is that she doesn’t know how to feel good as a generalist.

It is these very destabilizations of work, family, wifery, marriage, specialization and domesticity that plague the modern adult in the maze of decisions they face concerning career, marriage, children and family. And this list of new or intensified pressures is far from exhaustive.

Part 3: the new professional mom
I know between 20 and 40 stay-at-home-moms of elementary and pre-elementary age children. My wife Alexi leads many of them in bible studies, and so the psychology of the younger mom is really important to us. What we have experienced is that the majority of these women are silently desperate, restless and feeling like they are not living up to their potential. Most, an actual majority, are on some form of pharmaceutical anti-depressant.

Now I have no doubt that this is a complex phenomenon. But neither do I doubt that the newer ideas about work, potential, and impact have greatly effected these younger women’s ability to embrace their role with an inner contentment and a sense of real peace. It feels to them that their lives are slipping away, and they are squeezed between this anxiety about their evaporating potential impact and the added guilt that non-domestic anxiety produces- causing them to feel twice a failure. She feels a failure for missing her career and than also a failure for not being content being with her children and supporting her husband. And this is only exacerbated by the emotional isolation that often comes when young moms end up cut off from the mental speed and exhilaration of adult work life to the maddening irrational boredom of life with an infant.

Part 4: Autonomous selves and interdependence aversion
It would be too easy to say that I blame Feminism for this. And though I do, I also don’t. Our culture needed to really show we believe in the full equal worth of women in order to really reflect Christ’s plan for us as humans. And we, the church, had little track record of doing that willingly, without the power movement of female liberation that was Feminism. But Feminism slowly became a grenade taking off a pair of handcuffs. And as our belief in the ontological equality of the sexes waxed, our ability to actually apply the distinctives of the genders waned. And, as it waned, we younger adult generations found ourselves on our own to form a personal vision of interdependence and dependence between the genders. As Feminism imagined the woman as an independent absolute individual, their liberation was a liberation into the identity of being an individual who is an absolute independent self. Independent selves don’t make families as independent selves, and they don’t become mothers until they become something else. This is the Catch 22 of the modern female, and really of all emerging adulthood. By moving essentially out of families into peer groups, emerging adults psychologically stabilize their adult identities as autonomous independent selves. This actually helps them grow to be ill suited to family life, both for the interdependence of marriage and the intra-dependence of parenting.
Emerging adults then ends up trying to use the resources of absolute individualism to embrace submissive interdependence, which is, at best, a tricky game. And since our understanding of relatedness is dominated by independent freedoms and rights, the more we see that a role requires interdependence or intra-dependence, the more we naturally see the role as unstable, undesirable, or immorally oppressive. The result of this is that we are good at being local friends, workers, and sexual partners; but are relatively unprepared and skeptical that roles like spouse and parent will lead to our real flourishing and happiness as people. And this is especially true of marriage and family since such intense roles eliminate the all-important safety valve of perpetual choice. The loss of choice and ever open self-determination always makes the modern adult a bit anxious.

Part 5: no steps forward, two steps back
This is made more problematic because we are programmed to respond to the stress of unhappiness by reverting to individualist categories, namely reinstating independence and choice. This makes our normal and natural reaction to difficulties in interdependent roles reverting to independence instead of pressing into our new interdependent identity. Hence we are not only less likely to enter into truly interdependent relationships, but we are much more likely to get out of an unhappy marriage or leave a church or quit a difficult job. This is because choice affords us both new opportunities and independent control over our success and happiness. These pillars of self-determination are central to the mind of the Late West. And this obsession with the need to maintain the safety of detachment and choice constantly accelerates as our cultural identity is further dominated by our economics.

Consumption, choice and upgrade
In the middle 2oth century Reinhold Neihbur could lament that we were the first society in history in which economics have come to dominate culture, instead of culture defining the meaning of commerce. Our culture’s economic success has exponentially increased our options of choice and upgrade. This logic has, not so subtly, made its way into the family with the conception of a ‘starter wife’- someone to be consumed and then upgraded. This logic may not have been so destructive to the marriage enterprise if only other people were mere commodities- like slaves of the ancient world. But the ethic, or non-ethic, of choice and upgrade is a sword that cuts both ways. For although I may somewhat savor the idea of ‘upgrading’ or firing a spouse if it is required in my happiness enterprise, I do not savor the possibility of being fired or upgraded. And so the comodification of the family is self-subverting in an egalitarian society. And if the family is incompatible with the rules of comodification, it is so much the worse for the family- since commerce is culture. Marriage is only relevant as a whole to be looted for its independently bought and sold parts- like the shared cost of co-habitation and the pleasure of regular sex.

The unhealing therapy
These ‘commodicfication’ dynamics are made more difficult because the New Spirituality of therapeutic and managed happiness can only reflect (not reform) the commodification of life, family and culture. With only the resources of the ‘inner turn’ within, there are no moral or non-pragmatic resources from the outside to bring as a rebuttal to the New Materialism. The New Spirituality and the New Materialism turn out to be the same thing. There is no Revelation or doctrine given by a wholly other God as prophetic moral correction- that people are not commodities and covenants are not returnable. The outside God, though we may pay lipservice to the idea has become weightless. He is there, even discussed, but he has no cash value, no clout, no directing power to reform the self actualization Juggernaut of the New Materialism and the New Spirituality.

New moment, new people
Since the New Spirituality believes we can redefine the inner ‘self’ however we choose, since the self is individual and unique, there is no longer any patience for a prophetic voice offered to all. That is because if revelation were given to all, that would assume we are not utterly unique self-defined individuals, but that were are made up of a quite static and universal Human Nature. And in our fragmented culture of fluidity, self-determination, and choice, a static and universal ‘Human Nature’ has intolerable ethical consequences. These consequences are namely: the likelihood of a unified moral imperative rooted in our shared nature that limits our self-determination, fluidity and choice.

This threefold convergence: 1. The destabilization of the family and family sustaining career 2. The economic dominance of culture that exhausts choice and the self 3. The prophetic and moral impotence of the New Spirituality of the inner turn- has created a near impossibility for emerging generations to embrace the cultural narrative of the procreative family as their own story. And worse, it has created a generation of adults who, at present, lack the relational disciplines and emotional furniture to be easily and consistently happy in such arrangements early on. This is especially so since young urban communities allow young adults to live entirely unto their own lifestyle in an impoverished, generationally single dimensional community.

The Law of Unintended Consequences
David Wells notes that the modern world, with it’s characteristics of the disappearance of God and human nature becomes necessarily characterized by a ‘bloated sense of Human capacity’ which includes our capacity to predict what chosen route will lead to our happiness. And when we proceed, over confident of our predictive capacities and oblivious to the blindness of our spiritual depravity, is it any wonder that our best plans are upended by the Law of Unintended Consequences? Or to say it in a more explicitly Christian way: Isn’t it obvious that when we ignore revelation and depravity, the latter is free to hurt us and the former unavailable to protect us, and we suffer loss?

In the second half of this essay, I want to explain the limitations of our predictive abilities and why this might lead us to see our need to re-hear the Christian message as a guide in our search for happiness in a world where most everything has been reduced to a commodity and is as unfulfilling as it is one dimensional.


(Read Part 1: "The Destabilization of Career")