Thanks Mary, for a much needed article. Working in adult social services, I have seen directly the unsustainable nature of our society having. In law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family. As a society, we have somehow come to demand that we and our loved ones are cared for by the state, at the lowest possible cost to ourselves. The economic costs of this are no longer sustainable. It’s been depressing to watch over the last five years the only policy issue that seems to interest politicians is: “How can one keep as much of their own money while having their care needs met by a low-paid stranger?”. There is a chronic shortage of social care staff and good social care services. This is the obvious outcome when we have chosen collectively to marketise care, pay the lowest bidder, and import our care from abroad.
There are a myriad of reasons for how we ended up in this state, some of which you touch on above. It becomes very difficult (though not impossible with willingness and creativity) to care for our families and neighbours when everyone in the family is at work, and many families can no longer afford to stay at home to care for their relatives. I believe we have also seen a “professionalisation of care”. Often people feel they don’t have the skills, strength or the knowledge to care for their family because we have made care something technocratic, rather than a fundamental aspect of human relations.
That we still have writers and academics postulating the abolition of the family and a greater socialisation of care belies their lack of experience of how terrible the social care system is functioning; it is often worse than a neglectful family. The only way we will resolve the crisis that has engulfed our hospitals is if we find a solution to those needing care following discharge; we are now, as a society, living with a chronic deficit of care. But I am pessimistic of this possibility while we insist on looking to the market and the state to find a solution to this inconvenient problem. As the working age to retirement ratio grows, the costs of care, even if paying care staff minimum wage, will not cover the costs of caring for all of us in our old age. Like most utopian systems, the bigger it gets, the closer it gets to collapse. Perhaps such a collapse will force us to return to familial and local relationships of lifelong, reciprocal love, duty and care. I hope so.
It may very well turn out that families will be thrown together again by circumstances and that they will have to operate along communal ideas where everything us shared, each has what they need and each contributes where they can. There’s nothing radical about that. But the problem could also be that people aren’t used to sharing and giving up something of themselves for others, but they may learn along the way. There is certainly strength in family structures and I can’t see people finding this anywhere else but in their family.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, the Marx saying you’ve re-phrased here, is a different idea at a family or duty-bound-but-voluntary level than when imposed by the State.
I agree that more love and care, within and extending beyond our families, can be learned in the doing, through the practice of caring for one another. And the care that an orphan, widow, outcast, or stranger (to use biblical language) might receive when “taken in” by volunteering families will have a different strength and character than anything Society in the abstract can offer.
But we certainly don’t do enough of that, even for children, so the State has a necessary role and always will, barring the realization of some libertarian (or other) utopia. For now, there is no true substitute for families, even “chosen” or extended ones.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, the Marx saying you’ve re-phrased here, is a different idea at a family or duty-bound-but-voluntary level than when imposed by the State.
I agree that more love and care, within and extending beyond our families, can be learned in the doing, through the practice of caring for one another. And the care that an orphan, widow, outcast, or stranger (to use biblical language) might receive when “taken in” by volunteering families will have a different strength and character than anything Society in the abstract can offer.
But we certainly don’t do enough of that, even for children, so the State has a necessary role and always will, barring the realization of some libertarian (or other) utopia. For now, there is no true substitute for families, even “chosen” or extended ones.
My father-in-law died this year after a decade suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. My mother-in-law (herself now in her early 80s) cared for him at home until the end. She never had a home help, carer, nurse or social worker visit the house. She saw their GP once or twice a year during this period when he had an accident or was in obvious pain. She also visited the hospital once a year for a specialist to check his medication. He died in his own bed surrounded by his family.
She was often begged to get help in or even to put him in a care home but she wouldn’t have it. She loved her husband and believed she had committed to caring for him in sickness and health. She is also of the generation that is uncomfortable with any strangers coming into her house.
Luckily her family lives round the corner and we’re able to help out. Her son uncomplainingly bathed his dad once a week and trimmed his beard, hair and nails. We cooked for them twice a week. My wife ran errands. And my Mother-in-law knew she could call us in an emergency – which became quite frequent towards the end (falls and the like).
It’s hard work but I find this natural way of caring for family much preferable to putting your old parents in some nursing home.
Your father-in-law, despite the horror of Alzheimer’s, was a very fortunate man to have a truly loving wife and family. My husband’s grandfather had a similar experience.
I’d rather jump off a bridge than be incarcerated in a nursing home.
I cared for my Mum as prime carer fir the last ten years of her life,a great privilege and joy. And it freed up my siblings to get on with their careers and caring for their families,paying their mortgages etc otherwise one of my siblings would have been under intolerable pressure. The other two being uninvolved and indifferent. It was so lucky that I was available,or was it God’s Plan. Only I did not have a career having been designated by the society around me from a young age the local “village idiot”,the odd one out,the “we don’t like you,you’re not like us,you’re different ” one so I was right there when the time came. For decades my Mum protected and provided a caring life for me so I was there when the tables got turned. Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away but life as the rejected one out of the society around you is a very pleasant way to live,free of all the dross and crap most of society prizes like in this era reality tv shows like,in the 1970s some other dross,1980s likewise. Apart from the absence of any sexual intimacy which is an actual human psychological need,a solitary life has a lot going for it.
But doesn’t make good tv ads.
.
Your father-in-law, despite the horror of Alzheimer’s, was a very fortunate man to have a truly loving wife and family. My husband’s grandfather had a similar experience.
I’d rather jump off a bridge than be incarcerated in a nursing home.
I cared for my Mum as prime carer fir the last ten years of her life,a great privilege and joy. And it freed up my siblings to get on with their careers and caring for their families,paying their mortgages etc otherwise one of my siblings would have been under intolerable pressure. The other two being uninvolved and indifferent. It was so lucky that I was available,or was it God’s Plan. Only I did not have a career having been designated by the society around me from a young age the local “village idiot”,the odd one out,the “we don’t like you,you’re not like us,you’re different ” one so I was right there when the time came. For decades my Mum protected and provided a caring life for me so I was there when the tables got turned. Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away but life as the rejected one out of the society around you is a very pleasant way to live,free of all the dross and crap most of society prizes like in this era reality tv shows like,in the 1970s some other dross,1980s likewise. Apart from the absence of any sexual intimacy which is an actual human psychological need,a solitary life has a lot going for it.
But doesn’t make good tv ads.
.
The social care system is not functioning because its underfunded. But the thing is, the money is there. It’s just in the pockets of the top 1%. If didn’t have that 1% and redistributed that money care and health could be funded properly. That is socialism.
That is indeed socialism – a system that has been tried from time to time and does not work as its naive adherents expect.
The problem with social care compared with family care is not because the money of the rich 1% can’t be stolen from them but the old biblical story of the good shepherd and the hireling shepherd.
Families on the whole care for and about their own relatives (of course there are plenty of exceptions) whereas the hireling carer does not usually have the same emotional and connectional ties with the cared for (again there are exceptions). All too often spouses and children struggle to care for months or years but when exhausted they take a break and social care takes over within a short time death follows.
My wife kept her demented and diabetic mother alive for a number of years at our home, albeit with some help from carers that she had a relationship with whereas whenever her mother went into hospital her insulin regime was never properly maintained because the nurses worked by formula and food was delivered at the convenience of the hospital schedule not the needs of the patient. In addition the nurses could not recognise when her mother was low in the way that my wife could.
The problem with families is that today the old model of family life – staying together for life and care for one’s vulnerable members – has irretrievably broken down; step-families, cohabitees, serial monogamy, single parenthood and so on. This makes caring for an elderly or sick relative much more complicated.
The problem with families is that today the old model of family life – staying together for life and care for one’s vulnerable members – has irretrievably broken down; step-families, cohabitees, serial monogamy, single parenthood and so on. This makes caring for an elderly or sick relative much more complicated.
It is not really a matter of money. Even supposing the rich 1% could be stripped of their wealth by selling off their houses, property, land, shareholdings, yachts and other possessions supposing they did not transfer much of it out of the jurisdiction much less money would be realised than calculated because the fire sale of their their possessions would, in the absence of the 1% buying, crash the prices of all these possessions which would in turn affect the wealth of others.
Supposing that that the money realised could somehow be directed solely to providing care for the elderly rather than being leached off elsewhere the net effect would be to bid up the cost of providing such welfare. The administrative cost and individual carers would benefit and some more people would be attracted by the extra money into providing care but would the overall level of care rise given that the carers would still be hireling carers? Not much I believe. Certainly much less than Jane Eyre’s fantasy would suggest.
In the meantime in the absence of a rich 1% investing in business enterprises and buying goods and services the economy of the country would decline and many would be worse off.
The 1% have been making these great investments of yours for 30 years and I can’t help but notice most of us have been getting poorer while they only get richer. But sure, stick to trickle down economics as a comfort blanket against the evils of “socialism”.
The 1% have been making these great investments of yours for 30 years and I can’t help but notice most of us have been getting poorer while they only get richer. But sure, stick to trickle down economics as a comfort blanket against the evils of “socialism”.
Whatever it is, it’s never enough. There are providers in this world, and there are leeches who will suck every ounce of blood dry. Sadly, this is an article from and about the latter.
I do think there’s a case to get the mega corps to pay the tax they are supposed to. Not talking of stripping wealth, just that if they don’t pay their tax, at the rate the rest of us without access to tax havens do, they have hmrc on the doorstep with hefty consequences for tax evasion. Tax evasion gives big business an edge over small businesses too. In the UK now sunak has upped the corporation tax to 25%, their advantage is even greater. Its not really cricket.
I do think there’s a case to get the mega corps to pay the tax they are supposed to. Not talking of stripping wealth, just that if they don’t pay their tax, at the rate the rest of us without access to tax havens do, they have hmrc on the doorstep with hefty consequences for tax evasion. Tax evasion gives big business an edge over small businesses too. In the UK now sunak has upped the corporation tax to 25%, their advantage is even greater. Its not really cricket.
In NYC, the top 2% pay 54% of taxes – which is why the city is having fiscal problems now. Many of the 2% left during Covid and never returned. On the national level, almost half the population pays little or no federal taxes at all – a Progressive system indeed!
It is not really a matter of money. Even supposing the rich 1% could be stripped of their wealth by selling off their houses, property, land, shareholdings, yachts and other possessions supposing they did not transfer much of it out of the jurisdiction much less money would be realised than calculated because the fire sale of their their possessions would, in the absence of the 1% buying, crash the prices of all these possessions which would in turn affect the wealth of others.
Supposing that that the money realised could somehow be directed solely to providing care for the elderly rather than being leached off elsewhere the net effect would be to bid up the cost of providing such welfare. The administrative cost and individual carers would benefit and some more people would be attracted by the extra money into providing care but would the overall level of care rise given that the carers would still be hireling carers? Not much I believe. Certainly much less than Jane Eyre’s fantasy would suggest.
In the meantime in the absence of a rich 1% investing in business enterprises and buying goods and services the economy of the country would decline and many would be worse off.
Whatever it is, it’s never enough. There are providers in this world, and there are leeches who will suck every ounce of blood dry. Sadly, this is an article from and about the latter.
In NYC, the top 2% pay 54% of taxes – which is why the city is having fiscal problems now. Many of the 2% left during Covid and never returned. On the national level, almost half the population pays little or no federal taxes at all – a Progressive system indeed!
Everything is ALWAYS underfunded Jane. Just precisely why has this oh so obvious socialist nirvana ever been obtained anywhere in the real world? Marxist Leninist regimes simply created far more brutal and equally unequal societies where the apparatchiks and nomenklatura got all the privileges. Of course they didn’t hesitate to shoot the workers in whose name these terrible states had been founded, when they got too uppity
Utopians who have absolutely no understanding of human nature always end up creating hell on Earth.
It’s worth remembering that you only get one chance to redistribute the money in the pockets of the 1%. After that it will never be created again to redistribute.
The problem is that a lot of the 1% haven’t been involved in the production of wealth, or in investing in other people’s production. So much of it is rent seeking, pure and simple, and manipulating the stock price estimates without changing underlying value. This means, in theory, you could confiscate _that_ money and have no effect on wealth creation.
See Roger Martin *Fixing the Game* for some of the reasons we got into this state and what we could do about it. https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game
The problem is that a lot of the 1% haven’t been involved in the production of wealth, or in investing in other people’s production. So much of it is rent seeking, pure and simple, and manipulating the stock price estimates without changing underlying value. This means, in theory, you could confiscate _that_ money and have no effect on wealth creation.
See Roger Martin *Fixing the Game* for some of the reasons we got into this state and what we could do about it. https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game
That is indeed socialism – a system that has been tried from time to time and does not work as its naive adherents expect.
The problem with social care compared with family care is not because the money of the rich 1% can’t be stolen from them but the old biblical story of the good shepherd and the hireling shepherd.
Families on the whole care for and about their own relatives (of course there are plenty of exceptions) whereas the hireling carer does not usually have the same emotional and connectional ties with the cared for (again there are exceptions). All too often spouses and children struggle to care for months or years but when exhausted they take a break and social care takes over within a short time death follows.
My wife kept her demented and diabetic mother alive for a number of years at our home, albeit with some help from carers that she had a relationship with whereas whenever her mother went into hospital her insulin regime was never properly maintained because the nurses worked by formula and food was delivered at the convenience of the hospital schedule not the needs of the patient. In addition the nurses could not recognise when her mother was low in the way that my wife could.
Everything is ALWAYS underfunded Jane. Just precisely why has this oh so obvious socialist nirvana ever been obtained anywhere in the real world? Marxist Leninist regimes simply created far more brutal and equally unequal societies where the apparatchiks and nomenklatura got all the privileges. Of course they didn’t hesitate to shoot the workers in whose name these terrible states had been founded, when they got too uppity
Utopians who have absolutely no understanding of human nature always end up creating hell on Earth.
It’s worth remembering that you only get one chance to redistribute the money in the pockets of the 1%. After that it will never be created again to redistribute.
Two harmful trends undermining human and societal well being: Parental estrangement/Grandparent alienation and Institutionalization of disabled and elderly people.
I do agree with most of what you say about care in Nritain. But I also feel, as do most people I talk to, that voluntary euthanasia must happen. Keeping eldrrly, sick people alive to the point where they and their loved ones suffer and nobody benefits doesn’t make sense.
No one is going to euthanize me ever and I intend to be totally objectionable,in fact most people think I already am,and no way am I going to capitulate to the Satanic Nazi worshippers. Anyway being so objectionable I don’t have any loved ones,nobody even likes me,so no problem there. I intend to be a right nasty piece of work ,in fact aged 67 I already am and no one is going to come at me with a needle and a load of patronizing cant.
Jane – you sound lovely (the modern expression is ‘feisty’). You should be honoured as a national treasure (we have a few odd’uns in this list I would be happy to be rid of.)
Jane – you sound lovely (the modern expression is ‘feisty’). You should be honoured as a national treasure (we have a few odd’uns in this list I would be happy to be rid of.)
I am 65 year old guy with stage 4 cancer and two genes (and a family history) that predispose me to Alzheimers. I am predictably interested in euthanasia, but my oh my that slope is slippery. Here in Canada, people working in the “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) field have been dispatching people for reasons including poor mental health, depression, allergies and poverty. Soldiers seriously wounded in battle have been encouraged to die rather than receive the expensive (and inadequate) care that is available. The government is very interested in the financial savings that might be realized if only more people could be persuaded to stop making demands on the health care system. It is unclear to me how a government that charges from ethics scandal to ethics scandal can ever be trusted to manage a system of euthanasia without turning it into death cult.
Absolutely. As a healthy 77-year old, I sometimes think that when my time comes – and if I am compos mentis – I would welcome cancer, as I could exercise my right not to be treated and thus know, more or less, my ‘exit date’. That would not be a bad thing: I was reading Dr Johnson’s sayings last night and one of his famous ones goes: ‘If a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ And as a Christian, I would like that concentration of mind, to prepare myself to meet my Maker.
Absolutely. As a healthy 77-year old, I sometimes think that when my time comes – and if I am compos mentis – I would welcome cancer, as I could exercise my right not to be treated and thus know, more or less, my ‘exit date’. That would not be a bad thing: I was reading Dr Johnson’s sayings last night and one of his famous ones goes: ‘If a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ And as a Christian, I would like that concentration of mind, to prepare myself to meet my Maker.
Sorry I can’t agree with you re euthanasia. That is a slippery slope for humanity, just look at abortion and how that began. What I do believe – and I’ve talked with nurses and carers about it – is that we shouldn’t keep old people (of which I am one) alive too long with medication. Let nature take its course and then help people die with dignity.
Yes indeed. Not ‘strive officiously to keep alive’ those whose bodies are naturally failing. The trouble is, medics sometimes keep on ‘treatment’ when they know it is bad medicine for fear of being sued by relatives if they don’t.
Yes indeed. Not ‘strive officiously to keep alive’ those whose bodies are naturally failing. The trouble is, medics sometimes keep on ‘treatment’ when they know it is bad medicine for fear of being sued by relatives if they don’t.
You realise you are advocating a form of murder: self-slaughter or aided by others? The optics of this don’t look good, given German history in the mid-20th century.
No one is going to euthanize me ever and I intend to be totally objectionable,in fact most people think I already am,and no way am I going to capitulate to the Satanic Nazi worshippers. Anyway being so objectionable I don’t have any loved ones,nobody even likes me,so no problem there. I intend to be a right nasty piece of work ,in fact aged 67 I already am and no one is going to come at me with a needle and a load of patronizing cant.
I am 65 year old guy with stage 4 cancer and two genes (and a family history) that predispose me to Alzheimers. I am predictably interested in euthanasia, but my oh my that slope is slippery. Here in Canada, people working in the “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) field have been dispatching people for reasons including poor mental health, depression, allergies and poverty. Soldiers seriously wounded in battle have been encouraged to die rather than receive the expensive (and inadequate) care that is available. The government is very interested in the financial savings that might be realized if only more people could be persuaded to stop making demands on the health care system. It is unclear to me how a government that charges from ethics scandal to ethics scandal can ever be trusted to manage a system of euthanasia without turning it into death cult.
Sorry I can’t agree with you re euthanasia. That is a slippery slope for humanity, just look at abortion and how that began. What I do believe – and I’ve talked with nurses and carers about it – is that we shouldn’t keep old people (of which I am one) alive too long with medication. Let nature take its course and then help people die with dignity.
You realise you are advocating a form of murder: self-slaughter or aided by others? The optics of this don’t look good, given German history in the mid-20th century.
I love the way you put this “in law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family.”
That is the essence of the problem right there. It isn’t that the state shouldn’t be there; it’s that they can’t be the first line of defense.
Reforming this will require positive actions to strengthen and empower extended families through tax laws and other things. It also means conferring obligations on families to care for their own and disciplining those that don’t. That’s where many people start to have problems, but it’s a necessary part of any reform.
Your comment resonates with me. I my professional capacity I deal with children’s social services more than adults but also many who are crossing over from one to the other as they turn 18. The day to day is spent trying to help parents and young people find some support as they move into the next stage of their lives and move forward to independent living best as possible and so on and so forth. It is essentially all about funding. It would appear standard for EHCP’s and reports submitted to social services and CAMSH/AMSH to be deliberately negative so as to influence the level of support needed in hope that this will translate into more funding.
The Equalities Act has meant that in order to level the playing field for anyone with any kind of disability (medical, mental, whatever) and to put on the state and schools and institutions and private bodies the responsibility that the factual disadvantages of their disability are compensated for to avoid discrimination of any kind.
An example where in my opinion this leads to strange situations is in Exams Access Arrangements. In examinations about 1/3 or even more of the cohort of young people (where I am anyway) now have the right to take extra time (usually 25%), rest breaks, type where others have to handwrite Etc. This to level the playing field. I think we have reached the point where it renders the examination less valid and at times even pointless. What happens later when one of these students applies for a job as a flight controller or some other job where the employer needs quick data interpretation and executive functioning? Because we can’t discriminate against all these invisible disabilities.. I think it has gone too far and every middle class parent is now going out to get an anxiety or dyslexia or processing disorder diagnosis to advance their child’s GCSE and A-level outcomes to the point where the ‘normies’ rapidly becoming a disadvantaged minority.
To be clear; never would I want to be in the shoes of parents with seriously disabled children and never would I argue that their load isn’t heavy nor that the young person doesn’t require and deserve support. I am also not saying that those with milder conditions such as learning difficulties are not deserving of help. I am merely pointing out a strange entitlement seems to exist: the expectation that one cannot possibly be allowed to actually experience any detriment from their own afflictions.
A voice in the back of my head sometimes pops up wondering why the tax payer/gov/society should pay for the costs of your misfortune when in essence life is and has always been a game of risk. Having a child is a huge risk and you took that risk. Then there is the part where many of the problems are of the not truly objectively diagnosable spectrum afflictions which often likely are based in the parenting and family setting these children grow up in than with an actual medical need, thus again the adults own choices. A negative, socially unacceptable and dark voice which I try to ignore..
It may very well turn out that families will be thrown together again by circumstances and that they will have to operate along communal ideas where everything us shared, each has what they need and each contributes where they can. There’s nothing radical about that. But the problem could also be that people aren’t used to sharing and giving up something of themselves for others, but they may learn along the way. There is certainly strength in family structures and I can’t see people finding this anywhere else but in their family.
My father-in-law died this year after a decade suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. My mother-in-law (herself now in her early 80s) cared for him at home until the end. She never had a home help, carer, nurse or social worker visit the house. She saw their GP once or twice a year during this period when he had an accident or was in obvious pain. She also visited the hospital once a year for a specialist to check his medication. He died in his own bed surrounded by his family.
She was often begged to get help in or even to put him in a care home but she wouldn’t have it. She loved her husband and believed she had committed to caring for him in sickness and health. She is also of the generation that is uncomfortable with any strangers coming into her house.
Luckily her family lives round the corner and we’re able to help out. Her son uncomplainingly bathed his dad once a week and trimmed his beard, hair and nails. We cooked for them twice a week. My wife ran errands. And my Mother-in-law knew she could call us in an emergency – which became quite frequent towards the end (falls and the like).
It’s hard work but I find this natural way of caring for family much preferable to putting your old parents in some nursing home.
The social care system is not functioning because its underfunded. But the thing is, the money is there. It’s just in the pockets of the top 1%. If didn’t have that 1% and redistributed that money care and health could be funded properly. That is socialism.
Two harmful trends undermining human and societal well being: Parental estrangement/Grandparent alienation and Institutionalization of disabled and elderly people.
I do agree with most of what you say about care in Nritain. But I also feel, as do most people I talk to, that voluntary euthanasia must happen. Keeping eldrrly, sick people alive to the point where they and their loved ones suffer and nobody benefits doesn’t make sense.
I love the way you put this “in law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family.”
That is the essence of the problem right there. It isn’t that the state shouldn’t be there; it’s that they can’t be the first line of defense.
Reforming this will require positive actions to strengthen and empower extended families through tax laws and other things. It also means conferring obligations on families to care for their own and disciplining those that don’t. That’s where many people start to have problems, but it’s a necessary part of any reform.
Your comment resonates with me. I my professional capacity I deal with children’s social services more than adults but also many who are crossing over from one to the other as they turn 18. The day to day is spent trying to help parents and young people find some support as they move into the next stage of their lives and move forward to independent living best as possible and so on and so forth. It is essentially all about funding. It would appear standard for EHCP’s and reports submitted to social services and CAMSH/AMSH to be deliberately negative so as to influence the level of support needed in hope that this will translate into more funding.
The Equalities Act has meant that in order to level the playing field for anyone with any kind of disability (medical, mental, whatever) and to put on the state and schools and institutions and private bodies the responsibility that the factual disadvantages of their disability are compensated for to avoid discrimination of any kind.
An example where in my opinion this leads to strange situations is in Exams Access Arrangements. In examinations about 1/3 or even more of the cohort of young people (where I am anyway) now have the right to take extra time (usually 25%), rest breaks, type where others have to handwrite Etc. This to level the playing field. I think we have reached the point where it renders the examination less valid and at times even pointless. What happens later when one of these students applies for a job as a flight controller or some other job where the employer needs quick data interpretation and executive functioning? Because we can’t discriminate against all these invisible disabilities.. I think it has gone too far and every middle class parent is now going out to get an anxiety or dyslexia or processing disorder diagnosis to advance their child’s GCSE and A-level outcomes to the point where the ‘normies’ rapidly becoming a disadvantaged minority.
To be clear; never would I want to be in the shoes of parents with seriously disabled children and never would I argue that their load isn’t heavy nor that the young person doesn’t require and deserve support. I am also not saying that those with milder conditions such as learning difficulties are not deserving of help. I am merely pointing out a strange entitlement seems to exist: the expectation that one cannot possibly be allowed to actually experience any detriment from their own afflictions.
A voice in the back of my head sometimes pops up wondering why the tax payer/gov/society should pay for the costs of your misfortune when in essence life is and has always been a game of risk. Having a child is a huge risk and you took that risk. Then there is the part where many of the problems are of the not truly objectively diagnosable spectrum afflictions which often likely are based in the parenting and family setting these children grow up in than with an actual medical need, thus again the adults own choices. A negative, socially unacceptable and dark voice which I try to ignore..
Last edited 1 year ago by Iris Violet
James Sharpe
1 year ago
Thanks Mary, for a much needed article. Working in adult social services, I have seen directly the unsustainable nature of our society having. In law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family. As a society, we have somehow come to demand that we and our loved ones are cared for by the state, at the lowest possible cost to ourselves. The economic costs of this are no longer sustainable. It’s been depressing to watch over the last five years the only policy issue that seems to interest politicians is: “How can one keep as much of their own money while having their care needs met by a low-paid stranger?”. There is a chronic shortage of social care staff and good social care services. This is the obvious outcome when we have chosen collectively to marketise care, pay the lowest bidder, and import our care from abroad.
There are a myriad of reasons for how we ended up in this state, some of which you touch on above. It becomes very difficult (though not impossible with willingness and creativity) to care for our families and neighbours when everyone in the family is at work, and many families can no longer afford to stay at home to care for their relatives. I believe we have also seen a “professionalisation of care”. Often people feel they don’t have the skills, strength or the knowledge to care for their family because we have made care something technocratic, rather than a fundamental aspect of human relations.
That we still have writers and academics postulating the abolition of the family and a greater socialisation of care belies their lack of experience of how terrible the social care system is functioning; it is often worse than a neglectful family. The only way we will resolve the crisis that has engulfed our hospitals is if we find a solution to those needing care following discharge; we are now, as a society, living with a chronic deficit of care. But I am pessimistic of this possibility while we insist on looking to the market and the state to find a solution to this inconvenient problem. As the working age to retirement ratio grows, the costs of care, even if paying care staff minimum wage, will not cover the costs of caring for all of us in our old age. Like most utopian systems, the bigger it gets, the closer it gets to collapse. Perhaps such a collapse will force us to return to familial and local relationships of lifelong, reciprocal love, duty and care. I hope so.
Last edited 1 year ago by James Sharpe
Peter Strider
1 year ago
As usual Mary depresses me by identifying clearly the degree of decay and decadence which is destroying our society. But the fact that Mary is so educated, eloquent, rational, emotionally integrated and is supported by this platform with a host of readers who are appreciative, considerate, calm and engaged gives me greater hope for my children’s future.
Indeed. Best to avoid the increasingly woke university culture. Thankfully there are many online platforms available for self education, such as the Michael Sandel Harvard Justice lectures and, most relevant in this article’s context, Jordan Peterson’s ‘Maps of Meaning’ series.
Indeed. Best to avoid the increasingly woke university culture. Thankfully there are many online platforms available for self education, such as the Michael Sandel Harvard Justice lectures and, most relevant in this article’s context, Jordan Peterson’s ‘Maps of Meaning’ series.
Society is being destroyed – but individuals cannot be silenced. We have to keep speaking out on whatever platform has influence.
Peter Strider
1 year ago
As usual Mary depresses me by identifying clearly the degree of decay and decadence which is destroying our society. But the fact that Mary is so educated, eloquent, rational, emotionally integrated and is supported by this platform with a host of readers who are appreciative, considerate, calm and engaged gives me greater hope for my children’s future.
Matt Sylvestre
1 year ago
Holly Shite – Harrington cannot be stopped and thank god!
Matt Sylvestre
1 year ago
Holly Shite – Harrington cannot be stopped and thank god!
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Bottomline is, the future of marriage in Western countries is bleak. And with that, the future of Western civilization itself.
There were certain key elements of marriage.
– Bringing up children properly being a key objective, and the idea that spending time on home and kids was desirable.
– Division of labour: willingness of one participant (invariably the man) to take sole responsibility for finances, allowing the wife to take care of those kids
– Acceptance of the the importance of both parents to the family unit.
Each and every one of those ideas have been broken.
Spending time on kids and home is a burden, what feminists call “unpaid work”
The importance of the father to the family unit is diluted, thanks to 50% divorce rates and how fathers are treated by family courts.
And the concept of one parent taking a hit on personal life and family time, to become a breadwinner, is going to vanish. Men capable of or willing to take this role will shrink, because of fewer well paid men, and the demonisation of traditional father roles. Interestingly, despite all the whining about men supposedly unfairly monopolising the breadwinner role historically – few well paid modern women agree to pick up the breadwinner role, or marry a man far lower on the income scale. Invariably it’s a couple where both are high earning, or no marriage at all.
So, much smaller pool of candidates, usually ending up in double income and either no kids or kids growing up with inadequate parental time, often ending in divorce anyway – that’s the future.
And ironically, given the feminist theories driving a lot of these changes, those filling up the population vacuum would be genuinely patriarchal immigrant families or children where men take no responsibility at all for their offspring.
How true this is and lets call it what it is, the removal of fathers from the family.
Go to any inner city black neighborhood here in the US and let me know how things are going with that. 70% of black kids live in households with no father. Fortunately, in the name of equality, white families are catching up. How’s that going?
Our society is already in shambles without fathers around as this increase over the past 50 years has shown. Now people are suggesting to remove the mothers as well? What more could possibly go wrong?
I’ll point out that current divorce rates are near 1961 levels, pre-dating The Pill. The bigger issue is lower overall marriage rate now. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s and have fallen every decade since. The notion that 50% of marriages end in divorce is false and has been for some time.
Fair enough and good point. It’s an interesting trend in both the US and UK, if I am not wrong divorce rates did spike and come back. So it’s probably just a bit higher than the 50s – 60s.
And I would agree completely with you that the primary issue is marriages not happening in the first place, but I would still maintain the divorce rate is high enough still to act as one of the deterrents to marriage.
That’s because people don’t marry. Situationships and dependent single motherhoods are much more prevalent, as they should be given current divorce law.
Why would people bother to marry these days when they can have commitment-free sex outside it? We need to educate young people to understand that true love requires a permanent public commitment – marriage – for them to be truly content and not to struggle with a long history of broken relationships.
Why would people bother to marry these days when they can have commitment-free sex outside it? We need to educate young people to understand that true love requires a permanent public commitment – marriage – for them to be truly content and not to struggle with a long history of broken relationships.
Fair enough and good point. It’s an interesting trend in both the US and UK, if I am not wrong divorce rates did spike and come back. So it’s probably just a bit higher than the 50s – 60s.
And I would agree completely with you that the primary issue is marriages not happening in the first place, but I would still maintain the divorce rate is high enough still to act as one of the deterrents to marriage.
That’s because people don’t marry. Situationships and dependent single motherhoods are much more prevalent, as they should be given current divorce law.
yes. And the author quotes a Marxist saying, “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women”.
Childbearing to men? Sounds interesting. Completely against nature and the biology of the human body, but only leftists can get away with saying such profound drivel and not be cancelled.
I think you make a good point but you only emphasise the narrow nuclear family, which only became the norm since the 1950s in the US, especially with the growth of sprawling suburbs. Because of its isolation it could only provide a limited amount of support and could indeed be stifling for women expected to be at home full time and cut off from much contact a lot of the time. I don’t think we are going to go back to that any time soon.
Yoram Hazony in his book “Conservatism – A Rediscovery” instead emphasises the importance of the much richer extended family in all stable traditional societies. This is able to command greater resources, knowledge and wisdom between its members of several generations. (He also strongly advocates the need for some form of shared public religion, which one depending on the context and history of the society in question. He himself is an Orthodox Jew). I feel anyway he makes a convincing intellectual case. Whether his prescriptions are any longer even possible or not in wider society I don’t know. However Hazony also emphasises the need for self styled ‘conservatives’ to actually make a full commitment to living this way and not just writing about it and telling other people to, which rather too often seems to be the case!
In any case as a gay man I’m not sure I’m personally able to make any such commitment and I do fear that most people like their freedoms too much, however damaging to wider society in the longer run. I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society
“I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society”
I hope for the best but I also think there’s no going back. As far as I know no one has. Individual freedom in its contemporary form is going to create something new, but also something that will dominate the way things work in a way that is chaotic and not really a functioning society in a way we’re used to.
This idea that the “nuclear ” family is a myth is itself a myth.A lot of academic research over the last 50 years into old records,not just church parish records,but taxes of all sorts shows that way back in the 14th century (maybe earlier even) in England,the much romanticized mixed age extended household was rare,and only in cases of dire poverty. It was more common in Europe. But in England the “nuclear” family was the preferred form very early on. A lot of Wills show this as it’s obvious from the wording that elderly parents lived in a separate household to the adult children they were bequeathing stuff to,who all had seperate homes. We like to romanticize ideas of children,the family,and poverty ,the latter can be very picturesque,a very insidious danger. Or I could use the word “sentimentalist” and the psychologist Dorothy Rowe says in one of her books that what we sentimentalist we feel no compunction in killing,which is a scary but true thought.
Yes, the ‘Age of Narcissism’ is upon us, the ‘poster children’ of which are Harry & Meghan Markle, the Kardashians, the Hilton sisters, Hollywood-at-large….
And yes, Republicans are correct is encouraging family formation, community participation and developing a commitment to a greater cause in religion. Years ago, when I voted Democrat I used to think Republicans were ‘old-fashioned, antediluvian, etc. but now I think they have the answer to living a good and satisfying human life.
I agree with Jewish Orthodoxy that extended families – uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins and so on – are much healthier and more supportive than the model of the ‘nuclear family’. This latter model puts too much pressure on the individual couple to make their marriage work. The Jews had the wisdom to see that this places to great an emotional burden on the couple. Those of all religions who share this vision of family life need to work together to make it a reality – Christians and Jews and so on. I hesitate to include Muslims as they allow polygamy.
“I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society”
I hope for the best but I also think there’s no going back. As far as I know no one has. Individual freedom in its contemporary form is going to create something new, but also something that will dominate the way things work in a way that is chaotic and not really a functioning society in a way we’re used to.
This idea that the “nuclear ” family is a myth is itself a myth.A lot of academic research over the last 50 years into old records,not just church parish records,but taxes of all sorts shows that way back in the 14th century (maybe earlier even) in England,the much romanticized mixed age extended household was rare,and only in cases of dire poverty. It was more common in Europe. But in England the “nuclear” family was the preferred form very early on. A lot of Wills show this as it’s obvious from the wording that elderly parents lived in a separate household to the adult children they were bequeathing stuff to,who all had seperate homes. We like to romanticize ideas of children,the family,and poverty ,the latter can be very picturesque,a very insidious danger. Or I could use the word “sentimentalist” and the psychologist Dorothy Rowe says in one of her books that what we sentimentalist we feel no compunction in killing,which is a scary but true thought.
Yes, the ‘Age of Narcissism’ is upon us, the ‘poster children’ of which are Harry & Meghan Markle, the Kardashians, the Hilton sisters, Hollywood-at-large….
And yes, Republicans are correct is encouraging family formation, community participation and developing a commitment to a greater cause in religion. Years ago, when I voted Democrat I used to think Republicans were ‘old-fashioned, antediluvian, etc. but now I think they have the answer to living a good and satisfying human life.
I agree with Jewish Orthodoxy that extended families – uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins and so on – are much healthier and more supportive than the model of the ‘nuclear family’. This latter model puts too much pressure on the individual couple to make their marriage work. The Jews had the wisdom to see that this places to great an emotional burden on the couple. Those of all religions who share this vision of family life need to work together to make it a reality – Christians and Jews and so on. I hesitate to include Muslims as they allow polygamy.
Maybe things would improve if men stuck around when they fathered kids, thereby preventing aimless, delinquent young men who eschew the free education they are offered.
Maybe if men picked up more of the domestic chores and caring duties for their kids, parents and grandparents while their, female partners, by necessity, do some more stimulating paid work, there would be less divorce.
The future of Western civilisation is indeed bleak. But it is not yet quite dead. The Christian churches need to speak out strongly on the subject of marriage between a man and a woman, open to new life and until death do them part. They need to emphasise that this is God’s loving wisdom for the stable and enduring continuation of the human race. The Churches – including my own, the Catholic Church – have been too silent on this subject for too long. They must bear some responsibility for the current state of affairs.
How true this is and lets call it what it is, the removal of fathers from the family.
Go to any inner city black neighborhood here in the US and let me know how things are going with that. 70% of black kids live in households with no father. Fortunately, in the name of equality, white families are catching up. How’s that going?
Our society is already in shambles without fathers around as this increase over the past 50 years has shown. Now people are suggesting to remove the mothers as well? What more could possibly go wrong?
I’ll point out that current divorce rates are near 1961 levels, pre-dating The Pill. The bigger issue is lower overall marriage rate now. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s and have fallen every decade since. The notion that 50% of marriages end in divorce is false and has been for some time.
yes. And the author quotes a Marxist saying, “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women”.
Childbearing to men? Sounds interesting. Completely against nature and the biology of the human body, but only leftists can get away with saying such profound drivel and not be cancelled.
I think you make a good point but you only emphasise the narrow nuclear family, which only became the norm since the 1950s in the US, especially with the growth of sprawling suburbs. Because of its isolation it could only provide a limited amount of support and could indeed be stifling for women expected to be at home full time and cut off from much contact a lot of the time. I don’t think we are going to go back to that any time soon.
Yoram Hazony in his book “Conservatism – A Rediscovery” instead emphasises the importance of the much richer extended family in all stable traditional societies. This is able to command greater resources, knowledge and wisdom between its members of several generations. (He also strongly advocates the need for some form of shared public religion, which one depending on the context and history of the society in question. He himself is an Orthodox Jew). I feel anyway he makes a convincing intellectual case. Whether his prescriptions are any longer even possible or not in wider society I don’t know. However Hazony also emphasises the need for self styled ‘conservatives’ to actually make a full commitment to living this way and not just writing about it and telling other people to, which rather too often seems to be the case!
In any case as a gay man I’m not sure I’m personally able to make any such commitment and I do fear that most people like their freedoms too much, however damaging to wider society in the longer run. I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society
Maybe things would improve if men stuck around when they fathered kids, thereby preventing aimless, delinquent young men who eschew the free education they are offered.
Maybe if men picked up more of the domestic chores and caring duties for their kids, parents and grandparents while their, female partners, by necessity, do some more stimulating paid work, there would be less divorce.
The future of Western civilisation is indeed bleak. But it is not yet quite dead. The Christian churches need to speak out strongly on the subject of marriage between a man and a woman, open to new life and until death do them part. They need to emphasise that this is God’s loving wisdom for the stable and enduring continuation of the human race. The Churches – including my own, the Catholic Church – have been too silent on this subject for too long. They must bear some responsibility for the current state of affairs.
Samir Iker
1 year ago
Bottomline is, the future of marriage in Western countries is bleak. And with that, the future of Western civilization itself.
There were certain key elements of marriage.
– Bringing up children properly being a key objective, and the idea that spending time on home and kids was desirable.
– Division of labour: willingness of one participant (invariably the man) to take sole responsibility for finances, allowing the wife to take care of those kids
– Acceptance of the the importance of both parents to the family unit.
Each and every one of those ideas have been broken.
Spending time on kids and home is a burden, what feminists call “unpaid work”
The importance of the father to the family unit is diluted, thanks to 50% divorce rates and how fathers are treated by family courts.
And the concept of one parent taking a hit on personal life and family time, to become a breadwinner, is going to vanish. Men capable of or willing to take this role will shrink, because of fewer well paid men, and the demonisation of traditional father roles. Interestingly, despite all the whining about men supposedly unfairly monopolising the breadwinner role historically – few well paid modern women agree to pick up the breadwinner role, or marry a man far lower on the income scale. Invariably it’s a couple where both are high earning, or no marriage at all.
So, much smaller pool of candidates, usually ending up in double income and either no kids or kids growing up with inadequate parental time, often ending in divorce anyway – that’s the future.
And ironically, given the feminist theories driving a lot of these changes, those filling up the population vacuum would be genuinely patriarchal immigrant families or children where men take no responsibility at all for their offspring.
Lucy Beney
1 year ago
It is precisely because of the devaluing of the family – and real bonds of love and commitment – that we are in the mess that we are in. For millennia, we had to live in families in order to survive – this is why secure attachment is so necessary for children. Human beings don’t do very well entirely on their own.
All the latest research (Harvard Center on the Developing Child) points to the importance of a baby building a meaningful and consistent bond with responsive, responsible and loving adult or adults (usually the parents, but just one such adult makes a huge difference). Being “raised” by a variety of teenagers with a Level One childcare qualification because they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else is not a suitable alternative in any way.
Funnily enough, the state, “society” or whatever you want to call it, is not very good at looking after people, precisely because those bonds of love and duty are not there. We wouldn’t have the elderly waiting in agony for hours for an ambulance if the state really cared. Sometimes the social worker is sick, so the visit gets cancelled – this doesn’t generally happen in families. Making everyone responsible means that nobody is responsible. And yet, increasingly we seem to want to abdicate personal “privatised” care to the anonymous and heartless powers-that-be. “Social care”, “child care”… all of this used to be part and parcel of family life. Now we have an epidemic of loneliness, children with acute emotional distress (conveniently diagnosed and labelled as “mental illness)… and we think this is progress?
Communism hates the traditional family, precisely because it can be self-sustaining, does not need any input from the state and is more resilient to interference – it breeds freedom and is therefore dangerous.
You’re using outdated ideas to try and answer present and future issues. Families are not magically happy and people were never automatically tied emotionally to them. What has changed somewhat is that people are no longer physically tied either, although abandonment was always possible and did happen. Women were much more vulnerable and had few options but to marry, have kids and stay that way. Is society at fault for changing that lack of choice? Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause. It’s not responsible for the need for one. Marriages that work now are where both partners work at keeping it together. If society deserves families then men are going to have to put in a lot more effort than they used to.
Religious pressure. Lack of sex outside marriage. Women having no way of earning a living, such that they could literally starve to death. Women sometimes/often endured horrendous conditions because there was no alternative. Rich women might enter a nunnery but that wasn’t available to all or even particularly enticing.
“Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause.”
Socialism never created those conditions, Capitalism did. Feminism grew out of those opportunities. It’s difficult to be sure just what Feminism did for women, but choices became available: they could chose to have children or not. The Pill contributed to that, another Capitalist contribution. It’s difficult to know exactly what you’re unhappy with, but it seems to be the attitude of men. The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences: if you can’t find the right partner and you want children then you’ll miss out. Maybe that might reduce the number of families in a community. Less families, more single, unattached people than families, would that be a good thing? Families probably have a positive effect on community stability. What happens if they’re the minority? Many men might have poor attitudes about responsibilities, but without marriage things may be no better, with nothing to bring men and women together. Men have definitely improved over the years in their contribution to families. Maybe it will continue, but not if they’re treated as pariahs. They too can chose not to take part.
Err, the article is blaming feminists and socialists for the decline in family. Yes, capitalism is very much part of it but socialism is a safety net that allows women exist outside marriage and to have children but not risk absolute poverty. For many women that’s not enough. “The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences”, which is exactly what is happening and yet people like you and Mary whine about it. So does society want to change things? I think it needs to. That means accepting that women need and deserve a lot of tangible encouragement to have kids. Since men can’t/won’t be forced to provide it then there needs to be another way.
Err, the article is blaming feminists and socialists for the decline in family. Yes, capitalism is very much part of it but socialism is a safety net that allows women exist outside marriage and to have children but not risk absolute poverty. For many women that’s not enough. “The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences”, which is exactly what is happening and yet people like you and Mary whine about it. So does society want to change things? I think it needs to. That means accepting that women need and deserve a lot of tangible encouragement to have kids. Since men can’t/won’t be forced to provide it then there needs to be another way.
Until the Industrial Revolution which the Luddites were absolutely right in opposing,many women could work as “spinsters ie spinning wool which was not some quaint niche cottage industry but in the medieval days the source of great wealth for England but of course not for everyone,as usual. But a lot more women who were not married back in history had a lot more independence and ability to earn than our current patronizing age recognizes. Widows had the best deal of course,they could buy and sell on their own account,and vote too and they often took over their late husband’s business so they had an advantage their over their spinster sisters. Being a governess or having to become a “sex worker” wasn’t so great for those single women who couldn’t find other work as later centuries destroyed the family unit as the primary production unit,so they had plenty of “sex outside marriage” but I doubt they found it very pleasant or contributory to their satisfaction with life.
“Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause.”
Socialism never created those conditions, Capitalism did. Feminism grew out of those opportunities. It’s difficult to be sure just what Feminism did for women, but choices became available: they could chose to have children or not. The Pill contributed to that, another Capitalist contribution. It’s difficult to know exactly what you’re unhappy with, but it seems to be the attitude of men. The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences: if you can’t find the right partner and you want children then you’ll miss out. Maybe that might reduce the number of families in a community. Less families, more single, unattached people than families, would that be a good thing? Families probably have a positive effect on community stability. What happens if they’re the minority? Many men might have poor attitudes about responsibilities, but without marriage things may be no better, with nothing to bring men and women together. Men have definitely improved over the years in their contribution to families. Maybe it will continue, but not if they’re treated as pariahs. They too can chose not to take part.
Until the Industrial Revolution which the Luddites were absolutely right in opposing,many women could work as “spinsters ie spinning wool which was not some quaint niche cottage industry but in the medieval days the source of great wealth for England but of course not for everyone,as usual. But a lot more women who were not married back in history had a lot more independence and ability to earn than our current patronizing age recognizes. Widows had the best deal of course,they could buy and sell on their own account,and vote too and they often took over their late husband’s business so they had an advantage their over their spinster sisters. Being a governess or having to become a “sex worker” wasn’t so great for those single women who couldn’t find other work as later centuries destroyed the family unit as the primary production unit,so they had plenty of “sex outside marriage” but I doubt they found it very pleasant or contributory to their satisfaction with life.
Religious pressure. Lack of sex outside marriage. Women having no way of earning a living, such that they could literally starve to death. Women sometimes/often endured horrendous conditions because there was no alternative. Rich women might enter a nunnery but that wasn’t available to all or even particularly enticing.
It’s not about being happy. Life is not about being happy. Believing in God (of whatever form,dont start chuntering about dinosaurs,baby Jesus and spaghetti whatever) is not about being happy. Nothing about life,sex,existence is about being happy. It just is. Stop watching Hollywood movies written by nine year olds.
Life isn’t ‘about’ anything other than what the individual wants it to be. You can work towards being happy, whether or not you succeed. Free will and all that. Smart people take advice on life but one person’s truth isn’t necessarily universal.
Life isn’t ‘about’ anything other than what the individual wants it to be. You can work towards being happy, whether or not you succeed. Free will and all that. Smart people take advice on life but one person’s truth isn’t necessarily universal.
It’s not about being happy. Life is not about being happy. Believing in God (of whatever form,dont start chuntering about dinosaurs,baby Jesus and spaghetti whatever) is not about being happy. Nothing about life,sex,existence is about being happy. It just is. Stop watching Hollywood movies written by nine year olds.
You’re using outdated ideas to try and answer present and future issues. Families are not magically happy and people were never automatically tied emotionally to them. What has changed somewhat is that people are no longer physically tied either, although abandonment was always possible and did happen. Women were much more vulnerable and had few options but to marry, have kids and stay that way. Is society at fault for changing that lack of choice? Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause. It’s not responsible for the need for one. Marriages that work now are where both partners work at keeping it together. If society deserves families then men are going to have to put in a lot more effort than they used to.
Lucy,you have said exactly what I’ve said,or tried to say,but much better
Lucy Beney
1 year ago
It is precisely because of the devaluing of the family – and real bonds of love and commitment – that we are in the mess that we are in. For millennia, we had to live in families in order to survive – this is why secure attachment is so necessary for children. Human beings don’t do very well entirely on their own.
All the latest research (Harvard Center on the Developing Child) points to the importance of a baby building a meaningful and consistent bond with responsive, responsible and loving adult or adults (usually the parents, but just one such adult makes a huge difference). Being “raised” by a variety of teenagers with a Level One childcare qualification because they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else is not a suitable alternative in any way.
Funnily enough, the state, “society” or whatever you want to call it, is not very good at looking after people, precisely because those bonds of love and duty are not there. We wouldn’t have the elderly waiting in agony for hours for an ambulance if the state really cared. Sometimes the social worker is sick, so the visit gets cancelled – this doesn’t generally happen in families. Making everyone responsible means that nobody is responsible. And yet, increasingly we seem to want to abdicate personal “privatised” care to the anonymous and heartless powers-that-be. “Social care”, “child care”… all of this used to be part and parcel of family life. Now we have an epidemic of loneliness, children with acute emotional distress (conveniently diagnosed and labelled as “mental illness)… and we think this is progress?
Communism hates the traditional family, precisely because it can be self-sustaining, does not need any input from the state and is more resilient to interference – it breeds freedom and is therefore dangerous.
Julian Pellatt
1 year ago
Marx’s impact on the entire world has been lethal and enduring. He may have precipitated more human deaths than any single individual in history by virtue of his hateful philosophy.
His egregious attack on the nuclear family has been promulgated and developed by ruthless feminists. Much of the ills in the West today may be ascribed to this assault on the bedrock of societies for thousands of years. Destroy the nuclear family and the way is opened for total revolution and the obliteration of the established order.
But if it hadn’t been Marx it would have been somebody else. He was only extrapolating Rousseau past the industrial revolution. It’s really a form of romanticism, a desire to revert to the communal life of tribes. Sadly, this organization only works in human nature when everyone knows and is known to everybody else, and generally highly related.
Let us not forget that ‘somebody else’ was Plato – circa 400BC. Followed by a long list of others before we got to Rousseau.
The trouble with Marx is he fundamentally misunderstood economics; fundamentally misunderstood humans; was incapable of working for a living; incapable of looking after his wife and children; and being a mendicant (Engels) wanted everybody else to be the same.
Remember Thatcher’s comment about socialism (read communism) “eventually you run out of other peoples’ money”.
Let us not forget that ‘somebody else’ was Plato – circa 400BC. Followed by a long list of others before we got to Rousseau.
The trouble with Marx is he fundamentally misunderstood economics; fundamentally misunderstood humans; was incapable of working for a living; incapable of looking after his wife and children; and being a mendicant (Engels) wanted everybody else to be the same.
Remember Thatcher’s comment about socialism (read communism) “eventually you run out of other peoples’ money”.
The problem with Marxism isn’t his incredibly damaging ideology. It is the willingness of so many groups of people to embrace the ideology and pretend to be “victims”
The COVID time calls to distrust other people,keep away from other people especially your most vulnerable relatives,to voluntarily close social isolation and to offer no sort of human caring contact and to reject hugs from others makes me know with a bit of shock that not only does Satan exist (not necessarily in an embodied humanoid form) but he is behind all this. He is the boss of Klaus Schwab. I got my comment taken off YouTube for saying that! It’s those Powers and Principalities that St Paul mentioned,dark forces in the air.
The COVID time calls to distrust other people,keep away from other people especially your most vulnerable relatives,to voluntarily close social isolation and to offer no sort of human caring contact and to reject hugs from others makes me know with a bit of shock that not only does Satan exist (not necessarily in an embodied humanoid form) but he is behind all this. He is the boss of Klaus Schwab. I got my comment taken off YouTube for saying that! It’s those Powers and Principalities that St Paul mentioned,dark forces in the air.
But if it hadn’t been Marx it would have been somebody else. He was only extrapolating Rousseau past the industrial revolution. It’s really a form of romanticism, a desire to revert to the communal life of tribes. Sadly, this organization only works in human nature when everyone knows and is known to everybody else, and generally highly related.
The problem with Marxism isn’t his incredibly damaging ideology. It is the willingness of so many groups of people to embrace the ideology and pretend to be “victims”
Julian Pellatt
1 year ago
Marx’s impact on the entire world has been lethal and enduring. He may have precipitated more human deaths than any single individual in history by virtue of his hateful philosophy.
His egregious attack on the nuclear family has been promulgated and developed by ruthless feminists. Much of the ills in the West today may be ascribed to this assault on the bedrock of societies for thousands of years. Destroy the nuclear family and the way is opened for total revolution and the obliteration of the established order.
Malcolm Webb
1 year ago
Thank you for such an intelligent, informative and thought provoking essay. James Sharpe’s comment further exemplified why I value Unherd.
Malcolm Webb
1 year ago
Thank you for such an intelligent, informative and thought provoking essay. James Sharpe’s comment further exemplified why I value Unherd.
Richard Hopkins
1 year ago
“But the reality is that wanting both care and liberation is a bit like wanting somewhere to be both a nature reserve and a golf course.” – a razor sharp sentence. The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy, that doesn’t bear much sceptical consideration.
“The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy”
Indeed. Socialism is evil masquerading as compassion.
No, it’s a silly sentence. Men have enjoyed both care and liberation for a lot of the time there has been such a thing as family. What’s not working is that women want some or all of the same freedom. Two self centred people in the same group is hard to reconcile.
I don’t want “that freedom”. I’ve got the freedom I need. Maybe you didn’t mean by “the same freedom as men” ,drinking and whoring. I dont want to work down a mine. I don’t want to fight fires. I don’t want to man the dustcart. I don’t want to drive heavy machinery. I did want to buy a house to live in but because I was a girlie on my own society,feminism not withstanding said no. Most of what we are told is the “right way” to think is a load of rubbish.
Umm, you have a very warped view of what most men do in the 21st century. There is no rule that they have to drink to excess, go ‘whoring’ or even work down a mine. How old are you? Those women who do do those things do so because they want to, not because they’ve been told to. There are plenty of refined male preserves where some women do want to be but are hampered by biology and society’s prehistoric attitude to it. There is huge resentment about their differences and women suffer because of that. So women are having to choose and increasingly they choose not to have many or any children. That is a problem for society. Does society want to solve it or just moan about modern women?
Umm, you have a very warped view of what most men do in the 21st century. There is no rule that they have to drink to excess, go ‘whoring’ or even work down a mine. How old are you? Those women who do do those things do so because they want to, not because they’ve been told to. There are plenty of refined male preserves where some women do want to be but are hampered by biology and society’s prehistoric attitude to it. There is huge resentment about their differences and women suffer because of that. So women are having to choose and increasingly they choose not to have many or any children. That is a problem for society. Does society want to solve it or just moan about modern women?
I don’t want “that freedom”. I’ve got the freedom I need. Maybe you didn’t mean by “the same freedom as men” ,drinking and whoring. I dont want to work down a mine. I don’t want to fight fires. I don’t want to man the dustcart. I don’t want to drive heavy machinery. I did want to buy a house to live in but because I was a girlie on my own society,feminism not withstanding said no. Most of what we are told is the “right way” to think is a load of rubbish.
“The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy”
Indeed. Socialism is evil masquerading as compassion.
No, it’s a silly sentence. Men have enjoyed both care and liberation for a lot of the time there has been such a thing as family. What’s not working is that women want some or all of the same freedom. Two self centred people in the same group is hard to reconcile.
Richard Hopkins
1 year ago
“But the reality is that wanting both care and liberation is a bit like wanting somewhere to be both a nature reserve and a golf course.” – a razor sharp sentence. The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy, that doesn’t bear much sceptical consideration.
Bronwen Saunders
1 year ago
Thank you, Mary, for this eloquent and uplifting essay on a matter close to my heart. I suspect that Sophie Lewis has not yet become a mother and that should that ever happen, she might feel a twinge of shame over her juvenile expostulations.
Indeed she does not. In fact she has a genetic condition which means that she cannot have children. I think that explains the most (sadly) about why she has written such ideas (and advocates for cyborg wombs).
Indeed she does not. In fact she has a genetic condition which means that she cannot have children. I think that explains the most (sadly) about why she has written such ideas (and advocates for cyborg wombs).
Bronwen Saunders
1 year ago
Thank you, Mary, for this eloquent and uplifting essay on a matter close to my heart. I suspect that Sophie Lewis has not yet become a mother and that should that ever happen, she might feel a twinge of shame over her juvenile expostulations.
Jake Prior
1 year ago
I don’t have a family so imagine myself writing, or at least thinking, a note along the lines of those of Laura Marx, which I thought is more a comment on the ravages of age than the feeling of being a burden. Perhaps it’s just that I’m still looking at it from some distance, but the knowledge that, when age has stripped life of most of it’s joy, I’ll be able to end it without worrying about hurting loved ones, so avoiding a lot of suffering in old age, brings me a lot of comfort.
I’m not sure why you assume that agedness will strip the joy out of life. My Grandma retained a vibrant, joyful spirit even as her bodily existence became quite grim–not that she was the norm. When you say you have no family, are you also without connections, totally alone in this world so to speak? If not, I hope you’ll consider whether an early exit might not in fact hurt some other people. If so, I hope that changes for you.
Hopefully as you age you’ll gain the wisdom that allows you to see how fruitful and rewarding the experience of getting older can be, especially in providing counsel to the younger people you care for, whether part of your family or not.
Can for many, but clearly isn’t for many more. I was talking to my brother awhile back about loss of friends as we aged (not due to death). He – an extremely gregarious man – opined that “friendship is overrated.” I took this as his way of dealing with the relative poverty in friendships he has come to feel. He has many children and grandchildren now and, though independent, they are his world. These people who advocate destruction of families are already so impoverished the give nothing up themselves, but wish to begrudge others.
Can for many, but clearly isn’t for many more. I was talking to my brother awhile back about loss of friends as we aged (not due to death). He – an extremely gregarious man – opined that “friendship is overrated.” I took this as his way of dealing with the relative poverty in friendships he has come to feel. He has many children and grandchildren now and, though independent, they are his world. These people who advocate destruction of families are already so impoverished the give nothing up themselves, but wish to begrudge others.
Aw,no. I’ve got nephews and nieces and now great etc… but that’s not all that can be a source of joy in your life,that’s a narrow way to see the value of life. One of the greatest joys in life is being able to piss off the society around you,young and old,male and female,ethnic all kinds by being content and happy despite not fitting any of their paradigms for ok-ness.
Aw,no. I’ve got nephews and nieces and now great etc… but that’s not all that can be a source of joy in your life,that’s a narrow way to see the value of life. One of the greatest joys in life is being able to piss off the society around you,young and old,male and female,ethnic all kinds by being content and happy despite not fitting any of their paradigms for ok-ness.
I’m not sure why you assume that agedness will strip the joy out of life. My Grandma retained a vibrant, joyful spirit even as her bodily existence became quite grim–not that she was the norm. When you say you have no family, are you also without connections, totally alone in this world so to speak? If not, I hope you’ll consider whether an early exit might not in fact hurt some other people. If so, I hope that changes for you.
Hopefully as you age you’ll gain the wisdom that allows you to see how fruitful and rewarding the experience of getting older can be, especially in providing counsel to the younger people you care for, whether part of your family or not.
Maybe you won’t have any loved ones ha ha. Maybe they won’t care.
Jake Prior
1 year ago
I don’t have a family so imagine myself writing, or at least thinking, a note along the lines of those of Laura Marx, which I thought is more a comment on the ravages of age than the feeling of being a burden. Perhaps it’s just that I’m still looking at it from some distance, but the knowledge that, when age has stripped life of most of it’s joy, I’ll be able to end it without worrying about hurting loved ones, so avoiding a lot of suffering in old age, brings me a lot of comfort.
Jonas Moze
1 year ago
I gave up 1/3 the way in, just not in the mood for all that right now, this time of year – and also because that paragraph where it all become so clear that I could point right to the problem, so did not need to read further:
”anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”.”
See – what you have there is raw evil – that is Satan using her as a sock puppet….that is the problem with anti-Family, it is evil. Also Mary calls it Neo-Liberal, it is really postmodernism – Neo-Marxism, a philosophy only C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape could push, and thus any arguing for it are just speaking his words from their mouth…. pawns.
And Mary – I did read these lines and felt sad..
”I’ve written plenty about the transformative nature of motherhood, the value of interdependence and care,”’
that you two did not also have the love of a good man as well.
Jonas Moze
1 year ago
I gave up 1/3 the way in, just not in the mood for all that right now, this time of year – and also because that paragraph where it all become so clear that I could point right to the problem, so did not need to read further:
”anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”.”
See – what you have there is raw evil – that is Satan using her as a sock puppet….that is the problem with anti-Family, it is evil. Also Mary calls it Neo-Liberal, it is really postmodernism – Neo-Marxism, a philosophy only C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape could push, and thus any arguing for it are just speaking his words from their mouth…. pawns.
And Mary – I did read these lines and felt sad..
”I’ve written plenty about the transformative nature of motherhood, the value of interdependence and care,”’
that you two did not also have the love of a good man as well.
James Wills
1 year ago
Well, they’ve done a pretty good job. I came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. Although reared among the mountain families of rural American Appalachia, in trying to lift myself out of that culture I got myself all educated-up – acquiescing to, even embracing, much of Toxic Feminism. I even managed to find myself a feminist wife. Quite an experience, let me tell you – my marital home was very different from that of MY childhood. She primarily viewed me as a pack-mule whose life should be dedicated to doing MY duty – providing for the family and seeing to it that all her needs and wants were met, while hers was – what? Mostly supervising the three hired women who raised our two sons, reading books and taking notes on them, the most important of which was, “How to Manage Your Anger at Your Husband.” I wish I were kidding.
I should have said that was my ex-wife. You can even ride a good horse to death, as my father used to say, and I finally could tolerate no more and filed for divorce. Then I learned why 80%+ of American divorces are filed by the woman. My reward for decades of brutal work was that I got to keep half of my assets and see my children half of the time. Hers for 26 years of idleness? The other half of my assets, the family home, and a lifetime pension. Thus are the wages of the plow-horse who is too busy in his furrow to take off his blinders and see the landscape.
Fast forward. Men are a lot smarter now. “Man-o-sphere” Websites dot the Internet. “Red Pill” thinking predominates, men know the legal risks of wife-ing up a Western woman – who has a 50% likelihood of divorcing him – with all the above consequences – and they are not marrying – at least not Western women. The Western nuclear family is in shambles.
Congratulations, Mssrs. Marx and Engels – your work is nearly complete.
Back in the 1980s my brother and my cousin both married a young woman who(different ones,not the same one,lol) had taken on board the feminist ideas of ,I’m not a household drudges,I’m better than that. Only morons enjoy cooking. (Funny how once women had bought the idea that cooking was dull,the men took it up and got to be tv stars,lol)
Anyway the result was that both my brother and my cousin spent a few years getting the kids breakfasts and often taking them to school,doing a tough days work,coming home,doing housework,cooking the evening meal,putting the kids to bed while the liberated,emancipated wife lay on the sofa watching tv.
And I had a very non feminist male relative who systematically beat his wife and raped his daughter. Does that define men? No. You can’t judge a group based on its worst individuals.
And I had a very non feminist male relative who systematically beat his wife and raped his daughter. Does that define men? No. You can’t judge a group based on its worst individuals.
Wow, seems like you should have put your foot down earlier than you did. Sounds like an abusive relationship. Women can be manipulative and even harmful- as a woman, I know; I have learned over the years to pick my female friends wisely as many can be destructive. Bereft of charity and often self-involved and not community oriented, Feminists and Progressives are the absolute worst – very opinionated and they are more than happy to tell you how to live your life. Here’s wishing you a more peaceful life!
Back in the 1980s my brother and my cousin both married a young woman who(different ones,not the same one,lol) had taken on board the feminist ideas of ,I’m not a household drudges,I’m better than that. Only morons enjoy cooking. (Funny how once women had bought the idea that cooking was dull,the men took it up and got to be tv stars,lol)
Anyway the result was that both my brother and my cousin spent a few years getting the kids breakfasts and often taking them to school,doing a tough days work,coming home,doing housework,cooking the evening meal,putting the kids to bed while the liberated,emancipated wife lay on the sofa watching tv.
Wow, seems like you should have put your foot down earlier than you did. Sounds like an abusive relationship. Women can be manipulative and even harmful- as a woman, I know; I have learned over the years to pick my female friends wisely as many can be destructive. Bereft of charity and often self-involved and not community oriented, Feminists and Progressives are the absolute worst – very opinionated and they are more than happy to tell you how to live your life. Here’s wishing you a more peaceful life!
Last edited 1 year ago by Cathy Carron
James Wills
1 year ago
Well, they’ve done a pretty good job. I came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. Although reared among the mountain families of rural American Appalachia, in trying to lift myself out of that culture I got myself all educated-up – acquiescing to, even embracing, much of Toxic Feminism. I even managed to find myself a feminist wife. Quite an experience, let me tell you – my marital home was very different from that of MY childhood. She primarily viewed me as a pack-mule whose life should be dedicated to doing MY duty – providing for the family and seeing to it that all her needs and wants were met, while hers was – what? Mostly supervising the three hired women who raised our two sons, reading books and taking notes on them, the most important of which was, “How to Manage Your Anger at Your Husband.” I wish I were kidding.
I should have said that was my ex-wife. You can even ride a good horse to death, as my father used to say, and I finally could tolerate no more and filed for divorce. Then I learned why 80%+ of American divorces are filed by the woman. My reward for decades of brutal work was that I got to keep half of my assets and see my children half of the time. Hers for 26 years of idleness? The other half of my assets, the family home, and a lifetime pension. Thus are the wages of the plow-horse who is too busy in his furrow to take off his blinders and see the landscape.
Fast forward. Men are a lot smarter now. “Man-o-sphere” Websites dot the Internet. “Red Pill” thinking predominates, men know the legal risks of wife-ing up a Western woman – who has a 50% likelihood of divorcing him – with all the above consequences – and they are not marrying – at least not Western women. The Western nuclear family is in shambles.
Congratulations, Mssrs. Marx and Engels – your work is nearly complete.
laurence scaduto
1 year ago
There’s a degree of comedy in how easily certain aspects of Marxist thought have been co-opted by modern capitalist economist-think. The “transactional”, “cold logic of the market” has over-whelmed nearly every aspect of our culture. Even Marxism.
And now they want us to eat bugs!#?!!
Last edited 1 year ago by laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
1 year ago
There’s a degree of comedy in how easily certain aspects of Marxist thought have been co-opted by modern capitalist economist-think. The “transactional”, “cold logic of the market” has over-whelmed nearly every aspect of our culture. Even Marxism.
And now they want us to eat bugs!#?!!
Last edited 1 year ago by laurence scaduto
Jim Stanton
1 year ago
Perhaps the problem isn’t the family but the structure in which our society outside the family is constructed.
We would be a lot happier if we could revert back to the pre industrial revolution world that the Luddites quite rightly objected to being taken away.
Jim Stanton
1 year ago
Perhaps the problem isn’t the family but the structure in which our society outside the family is constructed.
Frank McCusker
1 year ago
Great article. The reality is that “carers” who are not parents by choice (whether adoptive or biological hardly matters) are much more likely to brutalise and abuse children in their care. Surely to goodness we have enough experience of what happens when vulnerable kids are left to the “care” of strangers, be they step-parents, or members of a hippy commune, or members of a cult, or staff in an orphanage, or staff in a boarding school, or whatever. In every case, it’s petty cruelty and coldness at best, buggery and murder at worst. The hard left’s position on this is utopian nonsense which, as usual, derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity.
Frank McCusker
1 year ago
Great article. The reality is that “carers” who are not parents by choice (whether adoptive or biological hardly matters) are much more likely to brutalise and abuse children in their care. Surely to goodness we have enough experience of what happens when vulnerable kids are left to the “care” of strangers, be they step-parents, or members of a hippy commune, or members of a cult, or staff in an orphanage, or staff in a boarding school, or whatever. In every case, it’s petty cruelty and coldness at best, buggery and murder at worst. The hard left’s position on this is utopian nonsense which, as usual, derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity.
Derek Smith
1 year ago
I get the feeling that Sophie Lewis has serious Daddy issues.
Derek Smith
1 year ago
I get the feeling that Sophie Lewis has serious Daddy issues.
AJ Mac
1 year ago
As usual, Harrington makes a well-informed, well-stated, and persuasive case. But is “abolish the family” a widespread movement now, something more than the the title and subject matter of a few bad books? I hope not. It sounds a bit like Peter Singer’s extreme notion of ethics: “Why care more about your own child than someone you’ve never met on the other side of the world?” Scary, but not popular.
An important and incisive point comes in the last paragraph of the article: “the heartless, lonely, atomised world of technocapital we already have” is unwittingly served by a cold ideological utopianism that seeks to “improve” humanity through the denial of anything non-material, and the attempted removal of natural bonds. In this sense, the neo-Marxists and the “move fast and break things” Tech Bros have more in common than they’d likely admit.
It’s a good question and I feel that Harrington addresses only the loudest voices who hold an extremely unpopular position. I see no mass movements to deconstruct the family into a nebulous, no-obligations-based form because it is so preposterously ridiculous. I think a much more interesting subject would to explore the forces that break familial bonds and ask if these forces are stronger, weaker, or about the same as they were in the past. Does blood relation supersede all other duties? Where should the state support care services and where should families answer the call of duty? How do we balance society’s need for children and personal fulfillment? These are timeless questions with no broad stroke answers. I would prefer to see Harrington tackle some of these complex subjects than address a few obscure scholars far removed from median opinions.
I concur. Harrington is among my favorites to read here, but perhaps fewer articles, with more scope and depth would be the thing. I certainly see her as capable of more searching work. She could still mix in a rhetorical slam-dunk or two.
Then again, that’s rather easy for me to say from the un-rigorous sidelines. And I don’t guess they pay more per word for scope and depth. I’ll continue to read her and hope for even more.
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Thanks Mary, for a much needed article. Working in adult social services, I have seen directly the unsustainable nature of our society having. In law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family. As a society, we have somehow come to demand that we and our loved ones are cared for by the state, at the lowest possible cost to ourselves. The economic costs of this are no longer sustainable. It’s been depressing to watch over the last five years the only policy issue that seems to interest politicians is: “How can one keep as much of their own money while having their care needs met by a low-paid stranger?”. There is a chronic shortage of social care staff and good social care services. This is the obvious outcome when we have chosen collectively to marketise care, pay the lowest bidder, and import our care from abroad.
There are a myriad of reasons for how we ended up in this state, some of which you touch on above. It becomes very difficult (though not impossible with willingness and creativity) to care for our families and neighbours when everyone in the family is at work, and many families can no longer afford to stay at home to care for their relatives. I believe we have also seen a “professionalisation of care”. Often people feel they don’t have the skills, strength or the knowledge to care for their family because we have made care something technocratic, rather than a fundamental aspect of human relations.
That we still have writers and academics postulating the abolition of the family and a greater socialisation of care belies their lack of experience of how terrible the social care system is functioning; it is often worse than a neglectful family. The only way we will resolve the crisis that has engulfed our hospitals is if we find a solution to those needing care following discharge; we are now, as a society, living with a chronic deficit of care. But I am pessimistic of this possibility while we insist on looking to the market and the state to find a solution to this inconvenient problem. As the working age to retirement ratio grows, the costs of care, even if paying care staff minimum wage, will not cover the costs of caring for all of us in our old age. Like most utopian systems, the bigger it gets, the closer it gets to collapse. Perhaps such a collapse will force us to return to familial and local relationships of lifelong, reciprocal love, duty and care. I hope so.
It may very well turn out that families will be thrown together again by circumstances and that they will have to operate along communal ideas where everything us shared, each has what they need and each contributes where they can. There’s nothing radical about that. But the problem could also be that people aren’t used to sharing and giving up something of themselves for others, but they may learn along the way. There is certainly strength in family structures and I can’t see people finding this anywhere else but in their family.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, the Marx saying you’ve re-phrased here, is a different idea at a family or duty-bound-but-voluntary level than when imposed by the State.
I agree that more love and care, within and extending beyond our families, can be learned in the doing, through the practice of caring for one another. And the care that an orphan, widow, outcast, or stranger (to use biblical language) might receive when “taken in” by volunteering families will have a different strength and character than anything Society in the abstract can offer.
But we certainly don’t do enough of that, even for children, so the State has a necessary role and always will, barring the realization of some libertarian (or other) utopia. For now, there is no true substitute for families, even “chosen” or extended ones.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, the Marx saying you’ve re-phrased here, is a different idea at a family or duty-bound-but-voluntary level than when imposed by the State.
I agree that more love and care, within and extending beyond our families, can be learned in the doing, through the practice of caring for one another. And the care that an orphan, widow, outcast, or stranger (to use biblical language) might receive when “taken in” by volunteering families will have a different strength and character than anything Society in the abstract can offer.
But we certainly don’t do enough of that, even for children, so the State has a necessary role and always will, barring the realization of some libertarian (or other) utopia. For now, there is no true substitute for families, even “chosen” or extended ones.
My father-in-law died this year after a decade suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. My mother-in-law (herself now in her early 80s) cared for him at home until the end. She never had a home help, carer, nurse or social worker visit the house. She saw their GP once or twice a year during this period when he had an accident or was in obvious pain. She also visited the hospital once a year for a specialist to check his medication. He died in his own bed surrounded by his family.
She was often begged to get help in or even to put him in a care home but she wouldn’t have it. She loved her husband and believed she had committed to caring for him in sickness and health. She is also of the generation that is uncomfortable with any strangers coming into her house.
Luckily her family lives round the corner and we’re able to help out. Her son uncomplainingly bathed his dad once a week and trimmed his beard, hair and nails. We cooked for them twice a week. My wife ran errands. And my Mother-in-law knew she could call us in an emergency – which became quite frequent towards the end (falls and the like).
It’s hard work but I find this natural way of caring for family much preferable to putting your old parents in some nursing home.
Your father-in-law, despite the horror of Alzheimer’s, was a very fortunate man to have a truly loving wife and family. My husband’s grandfather had a similar experience.
I’d rather jump off a bridge than be incarcerated in a nursing home.
I cared for my Mum as prime carer fir the last ten years of her life,a great privilege and joy. And it freed up my siblings to get on with their careers and caring for their families,paying their mortgages etc otherwise one of my siblings would have been under intolerable pressure. The other two being uninvolved and indifferent. It was so lucky that I was available,or was it God’s Plan. Only I did not have a career having been designated by the society around me from a young age the local “village idiot”,the odd one out,the “we don’t like you,you’re not like us,you’re different ” one so I was right there when the time came. For decades my Mum protected and provided a caring life for me so I was there when the tables got turned. Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away but life as the rejected one out of the society around you is a very pleasant way to live,free of all the dross and crap most of society prizes like in this era reality tv shows like,in the 1970s some other dross,1980s likewise. Apart from the absence of any sexual intimacy which is an actual human psychological need,a solitary life has a lot going for it.
But doesn’t make good tv ads.
.
Sexual intimacy may be a human need – but it is not vital to human flourishing or happiness – as shown in the lives of several people I have known.
Sexual intimacy may be a human need – but it is not vital to human flourishing or happiness – as shown in the lives of several people I have known.
Your father-in-law, despite the horror of Alzheimer’s, was a very fortunate man to have a truly loving wife and family. My husband’s grandfather had a similar experience.
I’d rather jump off a bridge than be incarcerated in a nursing home.
I cared for my Mum as prime carer fir the last ten years of her life,a great privilege and joy. And it freed up my siblings to get on with their careers and caring for their families,paying their mortgages etc otherwise one of my siblings would have been under intolerable pressure. The other two being uninvolved and indifferent. It was so lucky that I was available,or was it God’s Plan. Only I did not have a career having been designated by the society around me from a young age the local “village idiot”,the odd one out,the “we don’t like you,you’re not like us,you’re different ” one so I was right there when the time came. For decades my Mum protected and provided a caring life for me so I was there when the tables got turned. Maybe I shouldn’t give this secret away but life as the rejected one out of the society around you is a very pleasant way to live,free of all the dross and crap most of society prizes like in this era reality tv shows like,in the 1970s some other dross,1980s likewise. Apart from the absence of any sexual intimacy which is an actual human psychological need,a solitary life has a lot going for it.
But doesn’t make good tv ads.
.
The social care system is not functioning because its underfunded. But the thing is, the money is there. It’s just in the pockets of the top 1%. If didn’t have that 1% and redistributed that money care and health could be funded properly. That is socialism.
That is indeed socialism – a system that has been tried from time to time and does not work as its naive adherents expect.
The problem with social care compared with family care is not because the money of the rich 1% can’t be stolen from them but the old biblical story of the good shepherd and the hireling shepherd.
Families on the whole care for and about their own relatives (of course there are plenty of exceptions) whereas the hireling carer does not usually have the same emotional and connectional ties with the cared for (again there are exceptions). All too often spouses and children struggle to care for months or years but when exhausted they take a break and social care takes over within a short time death follows.
My wife kept her demented and diabetic mother alive for a number of years at our home, albeit with some help from carers that she had a relationship with whereas whenever her mother went into hospital her insulin regime was never properly maintained because the nurses worked by formula and food was delivered at the convenience of the hospital schedule not the needs of the patient. In addition the nurses could not recognise when her mother was low in the way that my wife could.
The problem with families is that today the old model of family life – staying together for life and care for one’s vulnerable members – has irretrievably broken down; step-families, cohabitees, serial monogamy, single parenthood and so on. This makes caring for an elderly or sick relative much more complicated.
The problem with families is that today the old model of family life – staying together for life and care for one’s vulnerable members – has irretrievably broken down; step-families, cohabitees, serial monogamy, single parenthood and so on. This makes caring for an elderly or sick relative much more complicated.
The top 1% pay 27% of all tax.
It is not really a matter of money. Even supposing the rich 1% could be stripped of their wealth by selling off their houses, property, land, shareholdings, yachts and other possessions supposing they did not transfer much of it out of the jurisdiction much less money would be realised than calculated because the fire sale of their their possessions would, in the absence of the 1% buying, crash the prices of all these possessions which would in turn affect the wealth of others.
Supposing that that the money realised could somehow be directed solely to providing care for the elderly rather than being leached off elsewhere the net effect would be to bid up the cost of providing such welfare. The administrative cost and individual carers would benefit and some more people would be attracted by the extra money into providing care but would the overall level of care rise given that the carers would still be hireling carers? Not much I believe. Certainly much less than Jane Eyre’s fantasy would suggest.
In the meantime in the absence of a rich 1% investing in business enterprises and buying goods and services the economy of the country would decline and many would be worse off.
The 1% have been making these great investments of yours for 30 years and I can’t help but notice most of us have been getting poorer while they only get richer. But sure, stick to trickle down economics as a comfort blanket against the evils of “socialism”.
The 1% have been making these great investments of yours for 30 years and I can’t help but notice most of us have been getting poorer while they only get richer. But sure, stick to trickle down economics as a comfort blanket against the evils of “socialism”.
Whatever it is, it’s never enough. There are providers in this world, and there are leeches who will suck every ounce of blood dry. Sadly, this is an article from and about the latter.
And just imagine how much they’d pay if they didn’t hide most of it away in tax havens.
I do think there’s a case to get the mega corps to pay the tax they are supposed to. Not talking of stripping wealth, just that if they don’t pay their tax, at the rate the rest of us without access to tax havens do, they have hmrc on the doorstep with hefty consequences for tax evasion. Tax evasion gives big business an edge over small businesses too. In the UK now sunak has upped the corporation tax to 25%, their advantage is even greater. Its not really cricket.
I do think there’s a case to get the mega corps to pay the tax they are supposed to. Not talking of stripping wealth, just that if they don’t pay their tax, at the rate the rest of us without access to tax havens do, they have hmrc on the doorstep with hefty consequences for tax evasion. Tax evasion gives big business an edge over small businesses too. In the UK now sunak has upped the corporation tax to 25%, their advantage is even greater. Its not really cricket.
In NYC, the top 2% pay 54% of taxes – which is why the city is having fiscal problems now. Many of the 2% left during Covid and never returned. On the national level, almost half the population pays little or no federal taxes at all – a Progressive system indeed!
It is not really a matter of money. Even supposing the rich 1% could be stripped of their wealth by selling off their houses, property, land, shareholdings, yachts and other possessions supposing they did not transfer much of it out of the jurisdiction much less money would be realised than calculated because the fire sale of their their possessions would, in the absence of the 1% buying, crash the prices of all these possessions which would in turn affect the wealth of others.
Supposing that that the money realised could somehow be directed solely to providing care for the elderly rather than being leached off elsewhere the net effect would be to bid up the cost of providing such welfare. The administrative cost and individual carers would benefit and some more people would be attracted by the extra money into providing care but would the overall level of care rise given that the carers would still be hireling carers? Not much I believe. Certainly much less than Jane Eyre’s fantasy would suggest.
In the meantime in the absence of a rich 1% investing in business enterprises and buying goods and services the economy of the country would decline and many would be worse off.
Whatever it is, it’s never enough. There are providers in this world, and there are leeches who will suck every ounce of blood dry. Sadly, this is an article from and about the latter.
And just imagine how much they’d pay if they didn’t hide most of it away in tax havens.
In NYC, the top 2% pay 54% of taxes – which is why the city is having fiscal problems now. Many of the 2% left during Covid and never returned. On the national level, almost half the population pays little or no federal taxes at all – a Progressive system indeed!
Everything is ALWAYS underfunded Jane. Just precisely why has this oh so obvious socialist nirvana ever been obtained anywhere in the real world? Marxist Leninist regimes simply created far more brutal and equally unequal societies where the apparatchiks and nomenklatura got all the privileges. Of course they didn’t hesitate to shoot the workers in whose name these terrible states had been founded, when they got too uppity
Utopians who have absolutely no understanding of human nature always end up creating hell on Earth.
It’s worth remembering that you only get one chance to redistribute the money in the pockets of the 1%. After that it will never be created again to redistribute.
The problem is that a lot of the 1% haven’t been involved in the production of wealth, or in investing in other people’s production. So much of it is rent seeking, pure and simple, and manipulating the stock price estimates without changing underlying value. This means, in theory, you could confiscate _that_ money and have no effect on wealth creation.
See Roger Martin *Fixing the Game* for some of the reasons we got into this state and what we could do about it. https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game
The 1% are not going to make that money again just to let you take it off them again, hence you can only do it once then it’s gone.
The 1% are not going to make that money again just to let you take it off them again, hence you can only do it once then it’s gone.
The problem is that a lot of the 1% haven’t been involved in the production of wealth, or in investing in other people’s production. So much of it is rent seeking, pure and simple, and manipulating the stock price estimates without changing underlying value. This means, in theory, you could confiscate _that_ money and have no effect on wealth creation.
See Roger Martin *Fixing the Game* for some of the reasons we got into this state and what we could do about it. https://rogerlmartin.com/lets-read/fixing-the-game
Sorry Jane, too many aspiring 1%ers in this crowd for that kind of talk.
That is indeed socialism – a system that has been tried from time to time and does not work as its naive adherents expect.
The problem with social care compared with family care is not because the money of the rich 1% can’t be stolen from them but the old biblical story of the good shepherd and the hireling shepherd.
Families on the whole care for and about their own relatives (of course there are plenty of exceptions) whereas the hireling carer does not usually have the same emotional and connectional ties with the cared for (again there are exceptions). All too often spouses and children struggle to care for months or years but when exhausted they take a break and social care takes over within a short time death follows.
My wife kept her demented and diabetic mother alive for a number of years at our home, albeit with some help from carers that she had a relationship with whereas whenever her mother went into hospital her insulin regime was never properly maintained because the nurses worked by formula and food was delivered at the convenience of the hospital schedule not the needs of the patient. In addition the nurses could not recognise when her mother was low in the way that my wife could.
The top 1% pay 27% of all tax.
Everything is ALWAYS underfunded Jane. Just precisely why has this oh so obvious socialist nirvana ever been obtained anywhere in the real world? Marxist Leninist regimes simply created far more brutal and equally unequal societies where the apparatchiks and nomenklatura got all the privileges. Of course they didn’t hesitate to shoot the workers in whose name these terrible states had been founded, when they got too uppity
Utopians who have absolutely no understanding of human nature always end up creating hell on Earth.
It’s worth remembering that you only get one chance to redistribute the money in the pockets of the 1%. After that it will never be created again to redistribute.
Sorry Jane, too many aspiring 1%ers in this crowd for that kind of talk.
A worthy and eloquent follow-on from Mary’s article. Thank you for contributing!
The welfare state delusion
Two harmful trends undermining human and societal well being: Parental estrangement/Grandparent alienation and Institutionalization of disabled and elderly people.
I do agree with most of what you say about care in Nritain. But I also feel, as do most people I talk to, that voluntary euthanasia must happen. Keeping eldrrly, sick people alive to the point where they and their loved ones suffer and nobody benefits doesn’t make sense.
No one is going to euthanize me ever and I intend to be totally objectionable,in fact most people think I already am,and no way am I going to capitulate to the Satanic Nazi worshippers. Anyway being so objectionable I don’t have any loved ones,nobody even likes me,so no problem there. I intend to be a right nasty piece of work ,in fact aged 67 I already am and no one is going to come at me with a needle and a load of patronizing cant.
What if you’re in severe, intractable pain though?
Jane – you sound lovely (the modern expression is ‘feisty’). You should be honoured as a national treasure (we have a few odd’uns in this list I would be happy to be rid of.)
What if you’re in severe, intractable pain though?
Jane – you sound lovely (the modern expression is ‘feisty’). You should be honoured as a national treasure (we have a few odd’uns in this list I would be happy to be rid of.)
I am 65 year old guy with stage 4 cancer and two genes (and a family history) that predispose me to Alzheimers. I am predictably interested in euthanasia, but my oh my that slope is slippery. Here in Canada, people working in the “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) field have been dispatching people for reasons including poor mental health, depression, allergies and poverty. Soldiers seriously wounded in battle have been encouraged to die rather than receive the expensive (and inadequate) care that is available. The government is very interested in the financial savings that might be realized if only more people could be persuaded to stop making demands on the health care system. It is unclear to me how a government that charges from ethics scandal to ethics scandal can ever be trusted to manage a system of euthanasia without turning it into death cult.
Absolutely. As a healthy 77-year old, I sometimes think that when my time comes – and if I am compos mentis – I would welcome cancer, as I could exercise my right not to be treated and thus know, more or less, my ‘exit date’. That would not be a bad thing: I was reading Dr Johnson’s sayings last night and one of his famous ones goes: ‘If a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ And as a Christian, I would like that concentration of mind, to prepare myself to meet my Maker.
Absolutely. As a healthy 77-year old, I sometimes think that when my time comes – and if I am compos mentis – I would welcome cancer, as I could exercise my right not to be treated and thus know, more or less, my ‘exit date’. That would not be a bad thing: I was reading Dr Johnson’s sayings last night and one of his famous ones goes: ‘If a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ And as a Christian, I would like that concentration of mind, to prepare myself to meet my Maker.
Sorry I can’t agree with you re euthanasia. That is a slippery slope for humanity, just look at abortion and how that began. What I do believe – and I’ve talked with nurses and carers about it – is that we shouldn’t keep old people (of which I am one) alive too long with medication. Let nature take its course and then help people die with dignity.
Yes indeed. Not ‘strive officiously to keep alive’ those whose bodies are naturally failing. The trouble is, medics sometimes keep on ‘treatment’ when they know it is bad medicine for fear of being sued by relatives if they don’t.
Yes indeed. Not ‘strive officiously to keep alive’ those whose bodies are naturally failing. The trouble is, medics sometimes keep on ‘treatment’ when they know it is bad medicine for fear of being sued by relatives if they don’t.
You realise you are advocating a form of murder: self-slaughter or aided by others? The optics of this don’t look good, given German history in the mid-20th century.
No one is going to euthanize me ever and I intend to be totally objectionable,in fact most people think I already am,and no way am I going to capitulate to the Satanic Nazi worshippers. Anyway being so objectionable I don’t have any loved ones,nobody even likes me,so no problem there. I intend to be a right nasty piece of work ,in fact aged 67 I already am and no one is going to come at me with a needle and a load of patronizing cant.
I am 65 year old guy with stage 4 cancer and two genes (and a family history) that predispose me to Alzheimers. I am predictably interested in euthanasia, but my oh my that slope is slippery. Here in Canada, people working in the “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) field have been dispatching people for reasons including poor mental health, depression, allergies and poverty. Soldiers seriously wounded in battle have been encouraged to die rather than receive the expensive (and inadequate) care that is available. The government is very interested in the financial savings that might be realized if only more people could be persuaded to stop making demands on the health care system. It is unclear to me how a government that charges from ethics scandal to ethics scandal can ever be trusted to manage a system of euthanasia without turning it into death cult.
Sorry I can’t agree with you re euthanasia. That is a slippery slope for humanity, just look at abortion and how that began. What I do believe – and I’ve talked with nurses and carers about it – is that we shouldn’t keep old people (of which I am one) alive too long with medication. Let nature take its course and then help people die with dignity.
You realise you are advocating a form of murder: self-slaughter or aided by others? The optics of this don’t look good, given German history in the mid-20th century.
I love the way you put this “in law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family.”
That is the essence of the problem right there. It isn’t that the state shouldn’t be there; it’s that they can’t be the first line of defense.
Reforming this will require positive actions to strengthen and empower extended families through tax laws and other things. It also means conferring obligations on families to care for their own and disciplining those that don’t. That’s where many people start to have problems, but it’s a necessary part of any reform.
Your comment resonates with me. I my professional capacity I deal with children’s social services more than adults but also many who are crossing over from one to the other as they turn 18. The day to day is spent trying to help parents and young people find some support as they move into the next stage of their lives and move forward to independent living best as possible and so on and so forth. It is essentially all about funding. It would appear standard for EHCP’s and reports submitted to social services and CAMSH/AMSH to be deliberately negative so as to influence the level of support needed in hope that this will translate into more funding.
The Equalities Act has meant that in order to level the playing field for anyone with any kind of disability (medical, mental, whatever) and to put on the state and schools and institutions and private bodies the responsibility that the factual disadvantages of their disability are compensated for to avoid discrimination of any kind.
An example where in my opinion this leads to strange situations is in Exams Access Arrangements. In examinations about 1/3 or even more of the cohort of young people (where I am anyway) now have the right to take extra time (usually 25%), rest breaks, type where others have to handwrite Etc. This to level the playing field. I think we have reached the point where it renders the examination less valid and at times even pointless. What happens later when one of these students applies for a job as a flight controller or some other job where the employer needs quick data interpretation and executive functioning? Because we can’t discriminate against all these invisible disabilities.. I think it has gone too far and every middle class parent is now going out to get an anxiety or dyslexia or processing disorder diagnosis to advance their child’s GCSE and A-level outcomes to the point where the ‘normies’ rapidly becoming a disadvantaged minority.
To be clear; never would I want to be in the shoes of parents with seriously disabled children and never would I argue that their load isn’t heavy nor that the young person doesn’t require and deserve support. I am also not saying that those with milder conditions such as learning difficulties are not deserving of help. I am merely pointing out a strange entitlement seems to exist: the expectation that one cannot possibly be allowed to actually experience any detriment from their own afflictions.
A voice in the back of my head sometimes pops up wondering why the tax payer/gov/society should pay for the costs of your misfortune when in essence life is and has always been a game of risk. Having a child is a huge risk and you took that risk. Then there is the part where many of the problems are of the not truly objectively diagnosable spectrum afflictions which often likely are based in the parenting and family setting these children grow up in than with an actual medical need, thus again the adults own choices. A negative, socially unacceptable and dark voice which I try to ignore..
It may very well turn out that families will be thrown together again by circumstances and that they will have to operate along communal ideas where everything us shared, each has what they need and each contributes where they can. There’s nothing radical about that. But the problem could also be that people aren’t used to sharing and giving up something of themselves for others, but they may learn along the way. There is certainly strength in family structures and I can’t see people finding this anywhere else but in their family.
My father-in-law died this year after a decade suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. My mother-in-law (herself now in her early 80s) cared for him at home until the end. She never had a home help, carer, nurse or social worker visit the house. She saw their GP once or twice a year during this period when he had an accident or was in obvious pain. She also visited the hospital once a year for a specialist to check his medication. He died in his own bed surrounded by his family.
She was often begged to get help in or even to put him in a care home but she wouldn’t have it. She loved her husband and believed she had committed to caring for him in sickness and health. She is also of the generation that is uncomfortable with any strangers coming into her house.
Luckily her family lives round the corner and we’re able to help out. Her son uncomplainingly bathed his dad once a week and trimmed his beard, hair and nails. We cooked for them twice a week. My wife ran errands. And my Mother-in-law knew she could call us in an emergency – which became quite frequent towards the end (falls and the like).
It’s hard work but I find this natural way of caring for family much preferable to putting your old parents in some nursing home.
The social care system is not functioning because its underfunded. But the thing is, the money is there. It’s just in the pockets of the top 1%. If didn’t have that 1% and redistributed that money care and health could be funded properly. That is socialism.
A worthy and eloquent follow-on from Mary’s article. Thank you for contributing!
The welfare state delusion
Two harmful trends undermining human and societal well being: Parental estrangement/Grandparent alienation and Institutionalization of disabled and elderly people.
I do agree with most of what you say about care in Nritain. But I also feel, as do most people I talk to, that voluntary euthanasia must happen. Keeping eldrrly, sick people alive to the point where they and their loved ones suffer and nobody benefits doesn’t make sense.
I love the way you put this “in law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family.”
That is the essence of the problem right there. It isn’t that the state shouldn’t be there; it’s that they can’t be the first line of defense.
Reforming this will require positive actions to strengthen and empower extended families through tax laws and other things. It also means conferring obligations on families to care for their own and disciplining those that don’t. That’s where many people start to have problems, but it’s a necessary part of any reform.
Your comment resonates with me. I my professional capacity I deal with children’s social services more than adults but also many who are crossing over from one to the other as they turn 18. The day to day is spent trying to help parents and young people find some support as they move into the next stage of their lives and move forward to independent living best as possible and so on and so forth. It is essentially all about funding. It would appear standard for EHCP’s and reports submitted to social services and CAMSH/AMSH to be deliberately negative so as to influence the level of support needed in hope that this will translate into more funding.
The Equalities Act has meant that in order to level the playing field for anyone with any kind of disability (medical, mental, whatever) and to put on the state and schools and institutions and private bodies the responsibility that the factual disadvantages of their disability are compensated for to avoid discrimination of any kind.
An example where in my opinion this leads to strange situations is in Exams Access Arrangements. In examinations about 1/3 or even more of the cohort of young people (where I am anyway) now have the right to take extra time (usually 25%), rest breaks, type where others have to handwrite Etc. This to level the playing field. I think we have reached the point where it renders the examination less valid and at times even pointless. What happens later when one of these students applies for a job as a flight controller or some other job where the employer needs quick data interpretation and executive functioning? Because we can’t discriminate against all these invisible disabilities.. I think it has gone too far and every middle class parent is now going out to get an anxiety or dyslexia or processing disorder diagnosis to advance their child’s GCSE and A-level outcomes to the point where the ‘normies’ rapidly becoming a disadvantaged minority.
To be clear; never would I want to be in the shoes of parents with seriously disabled children and never would I argue that their load isn’t heavy nor that the young person doesn’t require and deserve support. I am also not saying that those with milder conditions such as learning difficulties are not deserving of help. I am merely pointing out a strange entitlement seems to exist: the expectation that one cannot possibly be allowed to actually experience any detriment from their own afflictions.
A voice in the back of my head sometimes pops up wondering why the tax payer/gov/society should pay for the costs of your misfortune when in essence life is and has always been a game of risk. Having a child is a huge risk and you took that risk. Then there is the part where many of the problems are of the not truly objectively diagnosable spectrum afflictions which often likely are based in the parenting and family setting these children grow up in than with an actual medical need, thus again the adults own choices. A negative, socially unacceptable and dark voice which I try to ignore..
Thanks Mary, for a much needed article. Working in adult social services, I have seen directly the unsustainable nature of our society having. In law, the primary duty of care for people over 18 rests with the state, above the family. As a society, we have somehow come to demand that we and our loved ones are cared for by the state, at the lowest possible cost to ourselves. The economic costs of this are no longer sustainable. It’s been depressing to watch over the last five years the only policy issue that seems to interest politicians is: “How can one keep as much of their own money while having their care needs met by a low-paid stranger?”. There is a chronic shortage of social care staff and good social care services. This is the obvious outcome when we have chosen collectively to marketise care, pay the lowest bidder, and import our care from abroad.
There are a myriad of reasons for how we ended up in this state, some of which you touch on above. It becomes very difficult (though not impossible with willingness and creativity) to care for our families and neighbours when everyone in the family is at work, and many families can no longer afford to stay at home to care for their relatives. I believe we have also seen a “professionalisation of care”. Often people feel they don’t have the skills, strength or the knowledge to care for their family because we have made care something technocratic, rather than a fundamental aspect of human relations.
That we still have writers and academics postulating the abolition of the family and a greater socialisation of care belies their lack of experience of how terrible the social care system is functioning; it is often worse than a neglectful family. The only way we will resolve the crisis that has engulfed our hospitals is if we find a solution to those needing care following discharge; we are now, as a society, living with a chronic deficit of care. But I am pessimistic of this possibility while we insist on looking to the market and the state to find a solution to this inconvenient problem. As the working age to retirement ratio grows, the costs of care, even if paying care staff minimum wage, will not cover the costs of caring for all of us in our old age. Like most utopian systems, the bigger it gets, the closer it gets to collapse. Perhaps such a collapse will force us to return to familial and local relationships of lifelong, reciprocal love, duty and care. I hope so.
As usual Mary depresses me by identifying clearly the degree of decay and decadence which is destroying our society. But the fact that Mary is so educated, eloquent, rational, emotionally integrated and is supported by this platform with a host of readers who are appreciative, considerate, calm and engaged gives me greater hope for my children’s future.
I would say “perceptive and intelligent in spite of being educated” in this day and age.
Indeed. Best to avoid the increasingly woke university culture. Thankfully there are many online platforms available for self education, such as the Michael Sandel Harvard Justice lectures and, most relevant in this article’s context, Jordan Peterson’s ‘Maps of Meaning’ series.
Indeed. Best to avoid the increasingly woke university culture. Thankfully there are many online platforms available for self education, such as the Michael Sandel Harvard Justice lectures and, most relevant in this article’s context, Jordan Peterson’s ‘Maps of Meaning’ series.
Society is being destroyed – but individuals cannot be silenced. We have to keep speaking out on whatever platform has influence.
I would say “perceptive and intelligent in spite of being educated” in this day and age.
Society is being destroyed – but individuals cannot be silenced. We have to keep speaking out on whatever platform has influence.
As usual Mary depresses me by identifying clearly the degree of decay and decadence which is destroying our society. But the fact that Mary is so educated, eloquent, rational, emotionally integrated and is supported by this platform with a host of readers who are appreciative, considerate, calm and engaged gives me greater hope for my children’s future.
Holly Shite – Harrington cannot be stopped and thank god!
Holly Shite – Harrington cannot be stopped and thank god!
Bottomline is, the future of marriage in Western countries is bleak. And with that, the future of Western civilization itself.
There were certain key elements of marriage.
– Bringing up children properly being a key objective, and the idea that spending time on home and kids was desirable.
– Division of labour: willingness of one participant (invariably the man) to take sole responsibility for finances, allowing the wife to take care of those kids
– Acceptance of the the importance of both parents to the family unit.
Each and every one of those ideas have been broken.
Spending time on kids and home is a burden, what feminists call “unpaid work”
The importance of the father to the family unit is diluted, thanks to 50% divorce rates and how fathers are treated by family courts.
And the concept of one parent taking a hit on personal life and family time, to become a breadwinner, is going to vanish. Men capable of or willing to take this role will shrink, because of fewer well paid men, and the demonisation of traditional father roles. Interestingly, despite all the whining about men supposedly unfairly monopolising the breadwinner role historically – few well paid modern women agree to pick up the breadwinner role, or marry a man far lower on the income scale. Invariably it’s a couple where both are high earning, or no marriage at all.
So, much smaller pool of candidates, usually ending up in double income and either no kids or kids growing up with inadequate parental time, often ending in divorce anyway – that’s the future.
And ironically, given the feminist theories driving a lot of these changes, those filling up the population vacuum would be genuinely patriarchal immigrant families or children where men take no responsibility at all for their offspring.
How true this is and lets call it what it is, the removal of fathers from the family.
Go to any inner city black neighborhood here in the US and let me know how things are going with that. 70% of black kids live in households with no father. Fortunately, in the name of equality, white families are catching up. How’s that going?
Our society is already in shambles without fathers around as this increase over the past 50 years has shown. Now people are suggesting to remove the mothers as well? What more could possibly go wrong?
I’ll point out that current divorce rates are near 1961 levels, pre-dating The Pill. The bigger issue is lower overall marriage rate now. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s and have fallen every decade since. The notion that 50% of marriages end in divorce is false and has been for some time.
Fair enough and good point. It’s an interesting trend in both the US and UK, if I am not wrong divorce rates did spike and come back. So it’s probably just a bit higher than the 50s – 60s.
And I would agree completely with you that the primary issue is marriages not happening in the first place, but I would still maintain the divorce rate is high enough still to act as one of the deterrents to marriage.
That’s because people don’t marry. Situationships and dependent single motherhoods are much more prevalent, as they should be given current divorce law.
Why would people bother to marry these days when they can have commitment-free sex outside it? We need to educate young people to understand that true love requires a permanent public commitment – marriage – for them to be truly content and not to struggle with a long history of broken relationships.
Why would people bother to marry these days when they can have commitment-free sex outside it? We need to educate young people to understand that true love requires a permanent public commitment – marriage – for them to be truly content and not to struggle with a long history of broken relationships.
Fair enough and good point. It’s an interesting trend in both the US and UK, if I am not wrong divorce rates did spike and come back. So it’s probably just a bit higher than the 50s – 60s.
And I would agree completely with you that the primary issue is marriages not happening in the first place, but I would still maintain the divorce rate is high enough still to act as one of the deterrents to marriage.
That’s because people don’t marry. Situationships and dependent single motherhoods are much more prevalent, as they should be given current divorce law.
yes. And the author quotes a Marxist saying, “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women”.
Childbearing to men? Sounds interesting. Completely against nature and the biology of the human body, but only leftists can get away with saying such profound drivel and not be cancelled.
Apparently some women have a p#nis and some men have a uterus, so sounds entirely possible to me….
Apparently some women have a p#nis and some men have a uterus, so sounds entirely possible to me….
I think you make a good point but you only emphasise the narrow nuclear family, which only became the norm since the 1950s in the US, especially with the growth of sprawling suburbs. Because of its isolation it could only provide a limited amount of support and could indeed be stifling for women expected to be at home full time and cut off from much contact a lot of the time. I don’t think we are going to go back to that any time soon.
Yoram Hazony in his book “Conservatism – A Rediscovery” instead emphasises the importance of the much richer extended family in all stable traditional societies. This is able to command greater resources, knowledge and wisdom between its members of several generations. (He also strongly advocates the need for some form of shared public religion, which one depending on the context and history of the society in question. He himself is an Orthodox Jew). I feel anyway he makes a convincing intellectual case. Whether his prescriptions are any longer even possible or not in wider society I don’t know. However Hazony also emphasises the need for self styled ‘conservatives’ to actually make a full commitment to living this way and not just writing about it and telling other people to, which rather too often seems to be the case!
In any case as a gay man I’m not sure I’m personally able to make any such commitment and I do fear that most people like their freedoms too much, however damaging to wider society in the longer run. I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society
“I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society”
I hope for the best but I also think there’s no going back. As far as I know no one has. Individual freedom in its contemporary form is going to create something new, but also something that will dominate the way things work in a way that is chaotic and not really a functioning society in a way we’re used to.
This idea that the “nuclear ” family is a myth is itself a myth.A lot of academic research over the last 50 years into old records,not just church parish records,but taxes of all sorts shows that way back in the 14th century (maybe earlier even) in England,the much romanticized mixed age extended household was rare,and only in cases of dire poverty. It was more common in Europe. But in England the “nuclear” family was the preferred form very early on. A lot of Wills show this as it’s obvious from the wording that elderly parents lived in a separate household to the adult children they were bequeathing stuff to,who all had seperate homes. We like to romanticize ideas of children,the family,and poverty ,the latter can be very picturesque,a very insidious danger. Or I could use the word “sentimentalist” and the psychologist Dorothy Rowe says in one of her books that what we sentimentalist we feel no compunction in killing,which is a scary but true thought.
Yes, the ‘Age of Narcissism’ is upon us, the ‘poster children’ of which are Harry & Meghan Markle, the Kardashians, the Hilton sisters, Hollywood-at-large….
And yes, Republicans are correct is encouraging family formation, community participation and developing a commitment to a greater cause in religion. Years ago, when I voted Democrat I used to think Republicans were ‘old-fashioned, antediluvian, etc. but now I think they have the answer to living a good and satisfying human life.
I agree with Jewish Orthodoxy that extended families – uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins and so on – are much healthier and more supportive than the model of the ‘nuclear family’. This latter model puts too much pressure on the individual couple to make their marriage work. The Jews had the wisdom to see that this places to great an emotional burden on the couple. Those of all religions who share this vision of family life need to work together to make it a reality – Christians and Jews and so on. I hesitate to include Muslims as they allow polygamy.
“I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society”
I hope for the best but I also think there’s no going back. As far as I know no one has. Individual freedom in its contemporary form is going to create something new, but also something that will dominate the way things work in a way that is chaotic and not really a functioning society in a way we’re used to.
This idea that the “nuclear ” family is a myth is itself a myth.A lot of academic research over the last 50 years into old records,not just church parish records,but taxes of all sorts shows that way back in the 14th century (maybe earlier even) in England,the much romanticized mixed age extended household was rare,and only in cases of dire poverty. It was more common in Europe. But in England the “nuclear” family was the preferred form very early on. A lot of Wills show this as it’s obvious from the wording that elderly parents lived in a separate household to the adult children they were bequeathing stuff to,who all had seperate homes. We like to romanticize ideas of children,the family,and poverty ,the latter can be very picturesque,a very insidious danger. Or I could use the word “sentimentalist” and the psychologist Dorothy Rowe says in one of her books that what we sentimentalist we feel no compunction in killing,which is a scary but true thought.
Yes, the ‘Age of Narcissism’ is upon us, the ‘poster children’ of which are Harry & Meghan Markle, the Kardashians, the Hilton sisters, Hollywood-at-large….
And yes, Republicans are correct is encouraging family formation, community participation and developing a commitment to a greater cause in religion. Years ago, when I voted Democrat I used to think Republicans were ‘old-fashioned, antediluvian, etc. but now I think they have the answer to living a good and satisfying human life.
I agree with Jewish Orthodoxy that extended families – uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins and so on – are much healthier and more supportive than the model of the ‘nuclear family’. This latter model puts too much pressure on the individual couple to make their marriage work. The Jews had the wisdom to see that this places to great an emotional burden on the couple. Those of all religions who share this vision of family life need to work together to make it a reality – Christians and Jews and so on. I hesitate to include Muslims as they allow polygamy.
Maybe things would improve if men stuck around when they fathered kids, thereby preventing aimless, delinquent young men who eschew the free education they are offered.
Maybe if men picked up more of the domestic chores and caring duties for their kids, parents and grandparents while their, female partners, by necessity, do some more stimulating paid work, there would be less divorce.
The future of Western civilisation is indeed bleak. But it is not yet quite dead. The Christian churches need to speak out strongly on the subject of marriage between a man and a woman, open to new life and until death do them part. They need to emphasise that this is God’s loving wisdom for the stable and enduring continuation of the human race. The Churches – including my own, the Catholic Church – have been too silent on this subject for too long. They must bear some responsibility for the current state of affairs.
How true this is and lets call it what it is, the removal of fathers from the family.
Go to any inner city black neighborhood here in the US and let me know how things are going with that. 70% of black kids live in households with no father. Fortunately, in the name of equality, white families are catching up. How’s that going?
Our society is already in shambles without fathers around as this increase over the past 50 years has shown. Now people are suggesting to remove the mothers as well? What more could possibly go wrong?
I’ll point out that current divorce rates are near 1961 levels, pre-dating The Pill. The bigger issue is lower overall marriage rate now. Divorce rates peaked in the early 1980s and have fallen every decade since. The notion that 50% of marriages end in divorce is false and has been for some time.
yes. And the author quotes a Marxist saying, “the diffusion of the childbearing and childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women”.
Childbearing to men? Sounds interesting. Completely against nature and the biology of the human body, but only leftists can get away with saying such profound drivel and not be cancelled.
I think you make a good point but you only emphasise the narrow nuclear family, which only became the norm since the 1950s in the US, especially with the growth of sprawling suburbs. Because of its isolation it could only provide a limited amount of support and could indeed be stifling for women expected to be at home full time and cut off from much contact a lot of the time. I don’t think we are going to go back to that any time soon.
Yoram Hazony in his book “Conservatism – A Rediscovery” instead emphasises the importance of the much richer extended family in all stable traditional societies. This is able to command greater resources, knowledge and wisdom between its members of several generations. (He also strongly advocates the need for some form of shared public religion, which one depending on the context and history of the society in question. He himself is an Orthodox Jew). I feel anyway he makes a convincing intellectual case. Whether his prescriptions are any longer even possible or not in wider society I don’t know. However Hazony also emphasises the need for self styled ‘conservatives’ to actually make a full commitment to living this way and not just writing about it and telling other people to, which rather too often seems to be the case!
In any case as a gay man I’m not sure I’m personally able to make any such commitment and I do fear that most people like their freedoms too much, however damaging to wider society in the longer run. I fear that liberalism and the idea that the only important thing is individual freedom and choice is indeed going to further erode the important but rarely acknowledged roots of a stable society
Maybe things would improve if men stuck around when they fathered kids, thereby preventing aimless, delinquent young men who eschew the free education they are offered.
Maybe if men picked up more of the domestic chores and caring duties for their kids, parents and grandparents while their, female partners, by necessity, do some more stimulating paid work, there would be less divorce.
The future of Western civilisation is indeed bleak. But it is not yet quite dead. The Christian churches need to speak out strongly on the subject of marriage between a man and a woman, open to new life and until death do them part. They need to emphasise that this is God’s loving wisdom for the stable and enduring continuation of the human race. The Churches – including my own, the Catholic Church – have been too silent on this subject for too long. They must bear some responsibility for the current state of affairs.
Bottomline is, the future of marriage in Western countries is bleak. And with that, the future of Western civilization itself.
There were certain key elements of marriage.
– Bringing up children properly being a key objective, and the idea that spending time on home and kids was desirable.
– Division of labour: willingness of one participant (invariably the man) to take sole responsibility for finances, allowing the wife to take care of those kids
– Acceptance of the the importance of both parents to the family unit.
Each and every one of those ideas have been broken.
Spending time on kids and home is a burden, what feminists call “unpaid work”
The importance of the father to the family unit is diluted, thanks to 50% divorce rates and how fathers are treated by family courts.
And the concept of one parent taking a hit on personal life and family time, to become a breadwinner, is going to vanish. Men capable of or willing to take this role will shrink, because of fewer well paid men, and the demonisation of traditional father roles. Interestingly, despite all the whining about men supposedly unfairly monopolising the breadwinner role historically – few well paid modern women agree to pick up the breadwinner role, or marry a man far lower on the income scale. Invariably it’s a couple where both are high earning, or no marriage at all.
So, much smaller pool of candidates, usually ending up in double income and either no kids or kids growing up with inadequate parental time, often ending in divorce anyway – that’s the future.
And ironically, given the feminist theories driving a lot of these changes, those filling up the population vacuum would be genuinely patriarchal immigrant families or children where men take no responsibility at all for their offspring.
It is precisely because of the devaluing of the family – and real bonds of love and commitment – that we are in the mess that we are in. For millennia, we had to live in families in order to survive – this is why secure attachment is so necessary for children. Human beings don’t do very well entirely on their own.
All the latest research (Harvard Center on the Developing Child) points to the importance of a baby building a meaningful and consistent bond with responsive, responsible and loving adult or adults (usually the parents, but just one such adult makes a huge difference). Being “raised” by a variety of teenagers with a Level One childcare qualification because they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else is not a suitable alternative in any way.
Funnily enough, the state, “society” or whatever you want to call it, is not very good at looking after people, precisely because those bonds of love and duty are not there. We wouldn’t have the elderly waiting in agony for hours for an ambulance if the state really cared. Sometimes the social worker is sick, so the visit gets cancelled – this doesn’t generally happen in families. Making everyone responsible means that nobody is responsible. And yet, increasingly we seem to want to abdicate personal “privatised” care to the anonymous and heartless powers-that-be. “Social care”, “child care”… all of this used to be part and parcel of family life. Now we have an epidemic of loneliness, children with acute emotional distress (conveniently diagnosed and labelled as “mental illness)… and we think this is progress?
Communism hates the traditional family, precisely because it can be self-sustaining, does not need any input from the state and is more resilient to interference – it breeds freedom and is therefore dangerous.
Exactly. The family provides a viable alternative in which the State plays no role.
You’re using outdated ideas to try and answer present and future issues. Families are not magically happy and people were never automatically tied emotionally to them. What has changed somewhat is that people are no longer physically tied either, although abandonment was always possible and did happen. Women were much more vulnerable and had few options but to marry, have kids and stay that way. Is society at fault for changing that lack of choice? Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause. It’s not responsible for the need for one. Marriages that work now are where both partners work at keeping it together. If society deserves families then men are going to have to put in a lot more effort than they used to.
“people were never automatically tied emotionally to them (families).”
So what was holding them together?
Religious pressure. Lack of sex outside marriage. Women having no way of earning a living, such that they could literally starve to death. Women sometimes/often endured horrendous conditions because there was no alternative. Rich women might enter a nunnery but that wasn’t available to all or even particularly enticing.
“Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause.”
Socialism never created those conditions, Capitalism did. Feminism grew out of those opportunities. It’s difficult to be sure just what Feminism did for women, but choices became available: they could chose to have children or not. The Pill contributed to that, another Capitalist contribution. It’s difficult to know exactly what you’re unhappy with, but it seems to be the attitude of men. The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences: if you can’t find the right partner and you want children then you’ll miss out. Maybe that might reduce the number of families in a community. Less families, more single, unattached people than families, would that be a good thing? Families probably have a positive effect on community stability. What happens if they’re the minority? Many men might have poor attitudes about responsibilities, but without marriage things may be no better, with nothing to bring men and women together. Men have definitely improved over the years in their contribution to families. Maybe it will continue, but not if they’re treated as pariahs. They too can chose not to take part.
Err, the article is blaming feminists and socialists for the decline in family. Yes, capitalism is very much part of it but socialism is a safety net that allows women exist outside marriage and to have children but not risk absolute poverty. For many women that’s not enough. “The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences”, which is exactly what is happening and yet people like you and Mary whine about it. So does society want to change things? I think it needs to. That means accepting that women need and deserve a lot of tangible encouragement to have kids. Since men can’t/won’t be forced to provide it then there needs to be another way.
Err, the article is blaming feminists and socialists for the decline in family. Yes, capitalism is very much part of it but socialism is a safety net that allows women exist outside marriage and to have children but not risk absolute poverty. For many women that’s not enough. “The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences”, which is exactly what is happening and yet people like you and Mary whine about it. So does society want to change things? I think it needs to. That means accepting that women need and deserve a lot of tangible encouragement to have kids. Since men can’t/won’t be forced to provide it then there needs to be another way.
Until the Industrial Revolution which the Luddites were absolutely right in opposing,many women could work as “spinsters ie spinning wool which was not some quaint niche cottage industry but in the medieval days the source of great wealth for England but of course not for everyone,as usual. But a lot more women who were not married back in history had a lot more independence and ability to earn than our current patronizing age recognizes. Widows had the best deal of course,they could buy and sell on their own account,and vote too and they often took over their late husband’s business so they had an advantage their over their spinster sisters. Being a governess or having to become a “sex worker” wasn’t so great for those single women who couldn’t find other work as later centuries destroyed the family unit as the primary production unit,so they had plenty of “sex outside marriage” but I doubt they found it very pleasant or contributory to their satisfaction with life.
“Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause.”
Socialism never created those conditions, Capitalism did. Feminism grew out of those opportunities. It’s difficult to be sure just what Feminism did for women, but choices became available: they could chose to have children or not. The Pill contributed to that, another Capitalist contribution. It’s difficult to know exactly what you’re unhappy with, but it seems to be the attitude of men. The answer, then, would be for women to chose carefully and themselves be responsible for the consequences: if you can’t find the right partner and you want children then you’ll miss out. Maybe that might reduce the number of families in a community. Less families, more single, unattached people than families, would that be a good thing? Families probably have a positive effect on community stability. What happens if they’re the minority? Many men might have poor attitudes about responsibilities, but without marriage things may be no better, with nothing to bring men and women together. Men have definitely improved over the years in their contribution to families. Maybe it will continue, but not if they’re treated as pariahs. They too can chose not to take part.
Until the Industrial Revolution which the Luddites were absolutely right in opposing,many women could work as “spinsters ie spinning wool which was not some quaint niche cottage industry but in the medieval days the source of great wealth for England but of course not for everyone,as usual. But a lot more women who were not married back in history had a lot more independence and ability to earn than our current patronizing age recognizes. Widows had the best deal of course,they could buy and sell on their own account,and vote too and they often took over their late husband’s business so they had an advantage their over their spinster sisters. Being a governess or having to become a “sex worker” wasn’t so great for those single women who couldn’t find other work as later centuries destroyed the family unit as the primary production unit,so they had plenty of “sex outside marriage” but I doubt they found it very pleasant or contributory to their satisfaction with life.
Religious pressure. Lack of sex outside marriage. Women having no way of earning a living, such that they could literally starve to death. Women sometimes/often endured horrendous conditions because there was no alternative. Rich women might enter a nunnery but that wasn’t available to all or even particularly enticing.
It’s not about being happy. Life is not about being happy. Believing in God (of whatever form,dont start chuntering about dinosaurs,baby Jesus and spaghetti whatever) is not about being happy. Nothing about life,sex,existence is about being happy. It just is. Stop watching Hollywood movies written by nine year olds.
Life isn’t ‘about’ anything other than what the individual wants it to be. You can work towards being happy, whether or not you succeed. Free will and all that. Smart people take advice on life but one person’s truth isn’t necessarily universal.
Life isn’t ‘about’ anything other than what the individual wants it to be. You can work towards being happy, whether or not you succeed. Free will and all that. Smart people take advice on life but one person’s truth isn’t necessarily universal.
“people were never automatically tied emotionally to them (families).”
So what was holding them together?
It’s not about being happy. Life is not about being happy. Believing in God (of whatever form,dont start chuntering about dinosaurs,baby Jesus and spaghetti whatever) is not about being happy. Nothing about life,sex,existence is about being happy. It just is. Stop watching Hollywood movies written by nine year olds.
Lucy,you have said exactly what I’ve said,or tried to say,but much better
Exactly. The family provides a viable alternative in which the State plays no role.
You’re using outdated ideas to try and answer present and future issues. Families are not magically happy and people were never automatically tied emotionally to them. What has changed somewhat is that people are no longer physically tied either, although abandonment was always possible and did happen. Women were much more vulnerable and had few options but to marry, have kids and stay that way. Is society at fault for changing that lack of choice? Socialism doesn’t hate family but it does offer an exit clause. It’s not responsible for the need for one. Marriages that work now are where both partners work at keeping it together. If society deserves families then men are going to have to put in a lot more effort than they used to.
Lucy,you have said exactly what I’ve said,or tried to say,but much better
It is precisely because of the devaluing of the family – and real bonds of love and commitment – that we are in the mess that we are in. For millennia, we had to live in families in order to survive – this is why secure attachment is so necessary for children. Human beings don’t do very well entirely on their own.
All the latest research (Harvard Center on the Developing Child) points to the importance of a baby building a meaningful and consistent bond with responsive, responsible and loving adult or adults (usually the parents, but just one such adult makes a huge difference). Being “raised” by a variety of teenagers with a Level One childcare qualification because they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything else is not a suitable alternative in any way.
Funnily enough, the state, “society” or whatever you want to call it, is not very good at looking after people, precisely because those bonds of love and duty are not there. We wouldn’t have the elderly waiting in agony for hours for an ambulance if the state really cared. Sometimes the social worker is sick, so the visit gets cancelled – this doesn’t generally happen in families. Making everyone responsible means that nobody is responsible. And yet, increasingly we seem to want to abdicate personal “privatised” care to the anonymous and heartless powers-that-be. “Social care”, “child care”… all of this used to be part and parcel of family life. Now we have an epidemic of loneliness, children with acute emotional distress (conveniently diagnosed and labelled as “mental illness)… and we think this is progress?
Communism hates the traditional family, precisely because it can be self-sustaining, does not need any input from the state and is more resilient to interference – it breeds freedom and is therefore dangerous.
Marx’s impact on the entire world has been lethal and enduring. He may have precipitated more human deaths than any single individual in history by virtue of his hateful philosophy.
His egregious attack on the nuclear family has been promulgated and developed by ruthless feminists. Much of the ills in the West today may be ascribed to this assault on the bedrock of societies for thousands of years. Destroy the nuclear family and the way is opened for total revolution and the obliteration of the established order.
But if it hadn’t been Marx it would have been somebody else. He was only extrapolating Rousseau past the industrial revolution. It’s really a form of romanticism, a desire to revert to the communal life of tribes. Sadly, this organization only works in human nature when everyone knows and is known to everybody else, and generally highly related.
Indeed. At which point they are ready to start slaughtering the tribe next door.
Let us not forget that ‘somebody else’ was Plato – circa 400BC. Followed by a long list of others before we got to Rousseau.
The trouble with Marx is he fundamentally misunderstood economics; fundamentally misunderstood humans; was incapable of working for a living; incapable of looking after his wife and children; and being a mendicant (Engels) wanted everybody else to be the same.
Remember Thatcher’s comment about socialism (read communism) “eventually you run out of other peoples’ money”.
Indeed. At which point they are ready to start slaughtering the tribe next door.
Let us not forget that ‘somebody else’ was Plato – circa 400BC. Followed by a long list of others before we got to Rousseau.
The trouble with Marx is he fundamentally misunderstood economics; fundamentally misunderstood humans; was incapable of working for a living; incapable of looking after his wife and children; and being a mendicant (Engels) wanted everybody else to be the same.
Remember Thatcher’s comment about socialism (read communism) “eventually you run out of other peoples’ money”.
The problem with Marxism isn’t his incredibly damaging ideology. It is the willingness of so many groups of people to embrace the ideology and pretend to be “victims”
That’s quite a neat trick isn’t it?
I am not religious, but the existence of Marxism and the ease with which people follow it’s principles makes me think the Devil does exist.
The COVID time calls to distrust other people,keep away from other people especially your most vulnerable relatives,to voluntarily close social isolation and to offer no sort of human caring contact and to reject hugs from others makes me know with a bit of shock that not only does Satan exist (not necessarily in an embodied humanoid form) but he is behind all this. He is the boss of Klaus Schwab. I got my comment taken off YouTube for saying that! It’s those Powers and Principalities that St Paul mentioned,dark forces in the air.
The COVID time calls to distrust other people,keep away from other people especially your most vulnerable relatives,to voluntarily close social isolation and to offer no sort of human caring contact and to reject hugs from others makes me know with a bit of shock that not only does Satan exist (not necessarily in an embodied humanoid form) but he is behind all this. He is the boss of Klaus Schwab. I got my comment taken off YouTube for saying that! It’s those Powers and Principalities that St Paul mentioned,dark forces in the air.
I am not religious, but the existence of Marxism and the ease with which people follow it’s principles makes me think the Devil does exist.
That’s quite a neat trick isn’t it?
But if it hadn’t been Marx it would have been somebody else. He was only extrapolating Rousseau past the industrial revolution. It’s really a form of romanticism, a desire to revert to the communal life of tribes. Sadly, this organization only works in human nature when everyone knows and is known to everybody else, and generally highly related.
The problem with Marxism isn’t his incredibly damaging ideology. It is the willingness of so many groups of people to embrace the ideology and pretend to be “victims”
Marx’s impact on the entire world has been lethal and enduring. He may have precipitated more human deaths than any single individual in history by virtue of his hateful philosophy.
His egregious attack on the nuclear family has been promulgated and developed by ruthless feminists. Much of the ills in the West today may be ascribed to this assault on the bedrock of societies for thousands of years. Destroy the nuclear family and the way is opened for total revolution and the obliteration of the established order.
Thank you for such an intelligent, informative and thought provoking essay. James Sharpe’s comment further exemplified why I value Unherd.
Thank you for such an intelligent, informative and thought provoking essay. James Sharpe’s comment further exemplified why I value Unherd.
“But the reality is that wanting both care and liberation is a bit like wanting somewhere to be both a nature reserve and a golf course.” – a razor sharp sentence. The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy, that doesn’t bear much sceptical consideration.
“The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy”
Indeed. Socialism is evil masquerading as compassion.
No, it’s a silly sentence. Men have enjoyed both care and liberation for a lot of the time there has been such a thing as family. What’s not working is that women want some or all of the same freedom. Two self centred people in the same group is hard to reconcile.
I don’t want “that freedom”. I’ve got the freedom I need. Maybe you didn’t mean by “the same freedom as men” ,drinking and whoring. I dont want to work down a mine. I don’t want to fight fires. I don’t want to man the dustcart. I don’t want to drive heavy machinery. I did want to buy a house to live in but because I was a girlie on my own society,feminism not withstanding said no. Most of what we are told is the “right way” to think is a load of rubbish.
Umm, you have a very warped view of what most men do in the 21st century. There is no rule that they have to drink to excess, go ‘whoring’ or even work down a mine. How old are you? Those women who do do those things do so because they want to, not because they’ve been told to. There are plenty of refined male preserves where some women do want to be but are hampered by biology and society’s prehistoric attitude to it. There is huge resentment about their differences and women suffer because of that. So women are having to choose and increasingly they choose not to have many or any children. That is a problem for society. Does society want to solve it or just moan about modern women?
Umm, you have a very warped view of what most men do in the 21st century. There is no rule that they have to drink to excess, go ‘whoring’ or even work down a mine. How old are you? Those women who do do those things do so because they want to, not because they’ve been told to. There are plenty of refined male preserves where some women do want to be but are hampered by biology and society’s prehistoric attitude to it. There is huge resentment about their differences and women suffer because of that. So women are having to choose and increasingly they choose not to have many or any children. That is a problem for society. Does society want to solve it or just moan about modern women?
I don’t want “that freedom”. I’ve got the freedom I need. Maybe you didn’t mean by “the same freedom as men” ,drinking and whoring. I dont want to work down a mine. I don’t want to fight fires. I don’t want to man the dustcart. I don’t want to drive heavy machinery. I did want to buy a house to live in but because I was a girlie on my own society,feminism not withstanding said no. Most of what we are told is the “right way” to think is a load of rubbish.
“The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy”
Indeed. Socialism is evil masquerading as compassion.
No, it’s a silly sentence. Men have enjoyed both care and liberation for a lot of the time there has been such a thing as family. What’s not working is that women want some or all of the same freedom. Two self centred people in the same group is hard to reconcile.
“But the reality is that wanting both care and liberation is a bit like wanting somewhere to be both a nature reserve and a golf course.” – a razor sharp sentence. The social idealists’s lofty pronouncements seem to so often cover up their own darker misanthropy, that doesn’t bear much sceptical consideration.
Thank you, Mary, for this eloquent and uplifting essay on a matter close to my heart. I suspect that Sophie Lewis has not yet become a mother and that should that ever happen, she might feel a twinge of shame over her juvenile expostulations.
Indeed she does not. In fact she has a genetic condition which means that she cannot have children. I think that explains the most (sadly) about why she has written such ideas (and advocates for cyborg wombs).
Indeed she does not. In fact she has a genetic condition which means that she cannot have children. I think that explains the most (sadly) about why she has written such ideas (and advocates for cyborg wombs).
Thank you, Mary, for this eloquent and uplifting essay on a matter close to my heart. I suspect that Sophie Lewis has not yet become a mother and that should that ever happen, she might feel a twinge of shame over her juvenile expostulations.
I don’t have a family so imagine myself writing, or at least thinking, a note along the lines of those of Laura Marx, which I thought is more a comment on the ravages of age than the feeling of being a burden. Perhaps it’s just that I’m still looking at it from some distance, but the knowledge that, when age has stripped life of most of it’s joy, I’ll be able to end it without worrying about hurting loved ones, so avoiding a lot of suffering in old age, brings me a lot of comfort.
Sorry to hear that.
I don’t see any reason to disagree with you.
I’m not sure why you assume that agedness will strip the joy out of life. My Grandma retained a vibrant, joyful spirit even as her bodily existence became quite grim–not that she was the norm. When you say you have no family, are you also without connections, totally alone in this world so to speak? If not, I hope you’ll consider whether an early exit might not in fact hurt some other people. If so, I hope that changes for you.
Hopefully as you age you’ll gain the wisdom that allows you to see how fruitful and rewarding the experience of getting older can be, especially in providing counsel to the younger people you care for, whether part of your family or not.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The trick is, to find them at a receptive moment. Such moments can be few and far between!
Can for many, but clearly isn’t for many more. I was talking to my brother awhile back about loss of friends as we aged (not due to death). He – an extremely gregarious man – opined that “friendship is overrated.” I took this as his way of dealing with the relative poverty in friendships he has come to feel. He has many children and grandchildren now and, though independent, they are his world. These people who advocate destruction of families are already so impoverished the give nothing up themselves, but wish to begrudge others.
I suspect Stewart that you are one of those unfortunates “whom only a mother could love “ as the adage goes.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The trick is, to find them at a receptive moment. Such moments can be few and far between!
Can for many, but clearly isn’t for many more. I was talking to my brother awhile back about loss of friends as we aged (not due to death). He – an extremely gregarious man – opined that “friendship is overrated.” I took this as his way of dealing with the relative poverty in friendships he has come to feel. He has many children and grandchildren now and, though independent, they are his world. These people who advocate destruction of families are already so impoverished the give nothing up themselves, but wish to begrudge others.
I suspect Stewart that you are one of those unfortunates “whom only a mother could love “ as the adage goes.
Laura Marx’s note reminded me of a comment to another essay wherein someone’s mother had said, “old age isn’t for sissies.”
Agedness is only unfulfilling when you have no children and grandchildren to experience life and joy.
Love to hear a bit more about your understanding of this. For instance: unfulfilling in what way?
Aw,no. I’ve got nephews and nieces and now great etc… but that’s not all that can be a source of joy in your life,that’s a narrow way to see the value of life. One of the greatest joys in life is being able to piss off the society around you,young and old,male and female,ethnic all kinds by being content and happy despite not fitting any of their paradigms for ok-ness.
Love to hear a bit more about your understanding of this. For instance: unfulfilling in what way?
Aw,no. I’ve got nephews and nieces and now great etc… but that’s not all that can be a source of joy in your life,that’s a narrow way to see the value of life. One of the greatest joys in life is being able to piss off the society around you,young and old,male and female,ethnic all kinds by being content and happy despite not fitting any of their paradigms for ok-ness.
Maybe you won’t have any loved ones ha ha. Maybe they won’t care.
Sorry to hear that.
I don’t see any reason to disagree with you.
I’m not sure why you assume that agedness will strip the joy out of life. My Grandma retained a vibrant, joyful spirit even as her bodily existence became quite grim–not that she was the norm. When you say you have no family, are you also without connections, totally alone in this world so to speak? If not, I hope you’ll consider whether an early exit might not in fact hurt some other people. If so, I hope that changes for you.
Hopefully as you age you’ll gain the wisdom that allows you to see how fruitful and rewarding the experience of getting older can be, especially in providing counsel to the younger people you care for, whether part of your family or not.
Laura Marx’s note reminded me of a comment to another essay wherein someone’s mother had said, “old age isn’t for sissies.”
Agedness is only unfulfilling when you have no children and grandchildren to experience life and joy.
Maybe you won’t have any loved ones ha ha. Maybe they won’t care.
I don’t have a family so imagine myself writing, or at least thinking, a note along the lines of those of Laura Marx, which I thought is more a comment on the ravages of age than the feeling of being a burden. Perhaps it’s just that I’m still looking at it from some distance, but the knowledge that, when age has stripped life of most of it’s joy, I’ll be able to end it without worrying about hurting loved ones, so avoiding a lot of suffering in old age, brings me a lot of comfort.
I gave up 1/3 the way in, just not in the mood for all that right now, this time of year – and also because that paragraph where it all become so clear that I could point right to the problem, so did not need to read further:
”anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”.”
See – what you have there is raw evil – that is Satan using her as a sock puppet….that is the problem with anti-Family, it is evil. Also Mary calls it Neo-Liberal, it is really postmodernism – Neo-Marxism, a philosophy only C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape could push, and thus any arguing for it are just speaking his words from their mouth…. pawns.
And Mary – I did read these lines and felt sad..
”I’ve written plenty about the transformative nature of motherhood, the value of interdependence and care,”’
that you two did not also have the love of a good man as well.
I gave up 1/3 the way in, just not in the mood for all that right now, this time of year – and also because that paragraph where it all become so clear that I could point right to the problem, so did not need to read further:
”anti-family theorist Sophie Lewis: that the revolution must come for everyone. The family, she says, “is to be abolished even when it is aspired to, mythologised, valued, and embodied by people who are neither white nor heterosexual, neither bourgeois nor colonisers”. For it’s only in “collectively letting go of this technology of privatisation, the family, that our species will truly prosper”.”
See – what you have there is raw evil – that is Satan using her as a sock puppet….that is the problem with anti-Family, it is evil. Also Mary calls it Neo-Liberal, it is really postmodernism – Neo-Marxism, a philosophy only C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape could push, and thus any arguing for it are just speaking his words from their mouth…. pawns.
And Mary – I did read these lines and felt sad..
”I’ve written plenty about the transformative nature of motherhood, the value of interdependence and care,”’
that you two did not also have the love of a good man as well.
Well, they’ve done a pretty good job. I came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. Although reared among the mountain families of rural American Appalachia, in trying to lift myself out of that culture I got myself all educated-up – acquiescing to, even embracing, much of Toxic Feminism. I even managed to find myself a feminist wife. Quite an experience, let me tell you – my marital home was very different from that of MY childhood. She primarily viewed me as a pack-mule whose life should be dedicated to doing MY duty – providing for the family and seeing to it that all her needs and wants were met, while hers was – what? Mostly supervising the three hired women who raised our two sons, reading books and taking notes on them, the most important of which was, “How to Manage Your Anger at Your Husband.” I wish I were kidding.
I should have said that was my ex-wife. You can even ride a good horse to death, as my father used to say, and I finally could tolerate no more and filed for divorce. Then I learned why 80%+ of American divorces are filed by the woman. My reward for decades of brutal work was that I got to keep half of my assets and see my children half of the time. Hers for 26 years of idleness? The other half of my assets, the family home, and a lifetime pension. Thus are the wages of the plow-horse who is too busy in his furrow to take off his blinders and see the landscape.
Fast forward. Men are a lot smarter now. “Man-o-sphere” Websites dot the Internet. “Red Pill” thinking predominates, men know the legal risks of wife-ing up a Western woman – who has a 50% likelihood of divorcing him – with all the above consequences – and they are not marrying – at least not Western women. The Western nuclear family is in shambles.
Congratulations, Mssrs. Marx and Engels – your work is nearly complete.
Back in the 1980s my brother and my cousin both married a young woman who(different ones,not the same one,lol) had taken on board the feminist ideas of ,I’m not a household drudges,I’m better than that. Only morons enjoy cooking. (Funny how once women had bought the idea that cooking was dull,the men took it up and got to be tv stars,lol)
Anyway the result was that both my brother and my cousin spent a few years getting the kids breakfasts and often taking them to school,doing a tough days work,coming home,doing housework,cooking the evening meal,putting the kids to bed while the liberated,emancipated wife lay on the sofa watching tv.
And I had a very non feminist male relative who systematically beat his wife and raped his daughter. Does that define men? No. You can’t judge a group based on its worst individuals.
And I had a very non feminist male relative who systematically beat his wife and raped his daughter. Does that define men? No. You can’t judge a group based on its worst individuals.
Wow, seems like you should have put your foot down earlier than you did. Sounds like an abusive relationship. Women can be manipulative and even harmful- as a woman, I know; I have learned over the years to pick my female friends wisely as many can be destructive. Bereft of charity and often self-involved and not community oriented, Feminists and Progressives are the absolute worst – very opinionated and they are more than happy to tell you how to live your life. Here’s wishing you a more peaceful life!
Back in the 1980s my brother and my cousin both married a young woman who(different ones,not the same one,lol) had taken on board the feminist ideas of ,I’m not a household drudges,I’m better than that. Only morons enjoy cooking. (Funny how once women had bought the idea that cooking was dull,the men took it up and got to be tv stars,lol)
Anyway the result was that both my brother and my cousin spent a few years getting the kids breakfasts and often taking them to school,doing a tough days work,coming home,doing housework,cooking the evening meal,putting the kids to bed while the liberated,emancipated wife lay on the sofa watching tv.
Wow, seems like you should have put your foot down earlier than you did. Sounds like an abusive relationship. Women can be manipulative and even harmful- as a woman, I know; I have learned over the years to pick my female friends wisely as many can be destructive. Bereft of charity and often self-involved and not community oriented, Feminists and Progressives are the absolute worst – very opinionated and they are more than happy to tell you how to live your life. Here’s wishing you a more peaceful life!
Well, they’ve done a pretty good job. I came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. Although reared among the mountain families of rural American Appalachia, in trying to lift myself out of that culture I got myself all educated-up – acquiescing to, even embracing, much of Toxic Feminism. I even managed to find myself a feminist wife. Quite an experience, let me tell you – my marital home was very different from that of MY childhood. She primarily viewed me as a pack-mule whose life should be dedicated to doing MY duty – providing for the family and seeing to it that all her needs and wants were met, while hers was – what? Mostly supervising the three hired women who raised our two sons, reading books and taking notes on them, the most important of which was, “How to Manage Your Anger at Your Husband.” I wish I were kidding.
I should have said that was my ex-wife. You can even ride a good horse to death, as my father used to say, and I finally could tolerate no more and filed for divorce. Then I learned why 80%+ of American divorces are filed by the woman. My reward for decades of brutal work was that I got to keep half of my assets and see my children half of the time. Hers for 26 years of idleness? The other half of my assets, the family home, and a lifetime pension. Thus are the wages of the plow-horse who is too busy in his furrow to take off his blinders and see the landscape.
Fast forward. Men are a lot smarter now. “Man-o-sphere” Websites dot the Internet. “Red Pill” thinking predominates, men know the legal risks of wife-ing up a Western woman – who has a 50% likelihood of divorcing him – with all the above consequences – and they are not marrying – at least not Western women. The Western nuclear family is in shambles.
Congratulations, Mssrs. Marx and Engels – your work is nearly complete.
There’s a degree of comedy in how easily certain aspects of Marxist thought have been co-opted by modern capitalist economist-think. The “transactional”, “cold logic of the market” has over-whelmed nearly every aspect of our culture. Even Marxism.
And now they want us to eat bugs!#?!!
There’s a degree of comedy in how easily certain aspects of Marxist thought have been co-opted by modern capitalist economist-think. The “transactional”, “cold logic of the market” has over-whelmed nearly every aspect of our culture. Even Marxism.
And now they want us to eat bugs!#?!!
Perhaps the problem isn’t the family but the structure in which our society outside the family is constructed.
Indeed. It’s hard to believe that virtually all mammals are evil and misogynistic and need to be re-educated by Marxists.
We would be a lot happier if we could revert back to the pre industrial revolution world that the Luddites quite rightly objected to being taken away.
Indeed. It’s hard to believe that virtually all mammals are evil and misogynistic and need to be re-educated by Marxists.
We would be a lot happier if we could revert back to the pre industrial revolution world that the Luddites quite rightly objected to being taken away.
Perhaps the problem isn’t the family but the structure in which our society outside the family is constructed.
Great article. The reality is that “carers” who are not parents by choice (whether adoptive or biological hardly matters) are much more likely to brutalise and abuse children in their care. Surely to goodness we have enough experience of what happens when vulnerable kids are left to the “care” of strangers, be they step-parents, or members of a hippy commune, or members of a cult, or staff in an orphanage, or staff in a boarding school, or whatever. In every case, it’s petty cruelty and coldness at best, buggery and murder at worst. The hard left’s position on this is utopian nonsense which, as usual, derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity.
Great article. The reality is that “carers” who are not parents by choice (whether adoptive or biological hardly matters) are much more likely to brutalise and abuse children in their care. Surely to goodness we have enough experience of what happens when vulnerable kids are left to the “care” of strangers, be they step-parents, or members of a hippy commune, or members of a cult, or staff in an orphanage, or staff in a boarding school, or whatever. In every case, it’s petty cruelty and coldness at best, buggery and murder at worst. The hard left’s position on this is utopian nonsense which, as usual, derives from a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity.
I get the feeling that Sophie Lewis has serious Daddy issues.
I get the feeling that Sophie Lewis has serious Daddy issues.
As usual, Harrington makes a well-informed, well-stated, and persuasive case. But is “abolish the family” a widespread movement now, something more than the the title and subject matter of a few bad books? I hope not. It sounds a bit like Peter Singer’s extreme notion of ethics: “Why care more about your own child than someone you’ve never met on the other side of the world?” Scary, but not popular.
An important and incisive point comes in the last paragraph of the article: “the heartless, lonely, atomised world of technocapital we already have” is unwittingly served by a cold ideological utopianism that seeks to “improve” humanity through the denial of anything non-material, and the attempted removal of natural bonds. In this sense, the neo-Marxists and the “move fast and break things” Tech Bros have more in common than they’d likely admit.
It’s a good question and I feel that Harrington addresses only the loudest voices who hold an extremely unpopular position. I see no mass movements to deconstruct the family into a nebulous, no-obligations-based form because it is so preposterously ridiculous. I think a much more interesting subject would to explore the forces that break familial bonds and ask if these forces are stronger, weaker, or about the same as they were in the past. Does blood relation supersede all other duties? Where should the state support care services and where should families answer the call of duty? How do we balance society’s need for children and personal fulfillment? These are timeless questions with no broad stroke answers. I would prefer to see Harrington tackle some of these complex subjects than address a few obscure scholars far removed from median opinions.
I concur. Harrington is among my favorites to read here, but perhaps fewer articles, with more scope and depth would be the thing. I certainly see her as capable of more searching work. She could still mix in a rhetorical slam-dunk or two.
Then again, that’s rather easy for me to say from the un-rigorous sidelines. And I don’t guess they pay more per word for scope and depth. I’ll continue to read her and hope for even more.