where do culture and politics congeal and separate

or, hope ain't easy or free

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Hear me talk about Princess Mononoke on Agitator.

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Something someone sent my way that I want to say some things about: Why We Should Abolish the Family ❧ Current Affairs

Now, I like Current Affairs. I even subscribe! But I had a sequence of reactions to just the title of this piece:

1. Okay

2. lol-no

3. who is this for?

I’m not even saying I disagree here, but to me this is a good example of something that I’ve talked about at some point in the past, which I’ll metaphor thusly:

Society can be thought of as a tree. Many social ills or problems are structural in nature, which means the trunk or even roots are sick or rotting. However, the outcomes are most noticeable and varied at the branches and especially at the leaves. Most policy proposals attempt to fix the leaves while leaving the diseased trunk untreated.

This very long essay first lays out the foundation for the various problems with the family as it is currently defined. They use the personal and the statistical to make their point, but the reason I ask who this is for is because the family that we experience in our day to day lives out in the world beyond our computer screens is filled with so many permutations that using the Norman Rockwell painting just doesn’t reflect most people’s reality, assuming it ever did.

But what all this bricklaying of argumentation really presents is the problem with US politics and capitalism as an economic system and social engineer.

I think most people agree that the current manifestation of life sucks. We work too much for too little pay and have too little time and energy to do the things we want. Including be with our families. And because of various other confounding factors, our sense of family and community has shrunk over the last forty years to the point that many people no longer have a strong social or familial safety net.

This is obviously bad, but is the family really the problem?

Would changing the definition of the family (something that I’d argue has been well underway my entire life) really alleviate any of this?

I agree that we need a dramatic restructuring of society, but changing the family seems to be an outcome rather than the first building block.

The author basically says this is a project for a post-capitalist society. Which, yeah, sure. I mean, they’re sort of giving away the game right from this point: changing the definition of the family and nothing else in society will change almost nothing meaningful in most people’s lives.

But so let’s move to this post-capitalist society that we may someday achieve (and hopefully it’s not a dystopic hellscape clinging to a scorched planet full of the ghosts of millions of extinct species that once filled it) and ask ourselves, Does the definition of the family matter?

If people are given the freedom to freely organize and structure their social realms however they see fit, through collaborative and free association, will it actually be meaningful to tell each other that a family doesn’t have to include a husband or wife or even children?

My assumption is that it won’t matter at all.

I mean, I’ve written this society in five different novels (have you read Glossolalia yet?). I’m one of those truly annoying people that calls themselves an anarchist and means it. I write it into existence because it’s something I think is worth tackling seriously, even if only in my imagination. Because if you can’t imagine a different world, how is anyone meant to build it?

And so my reaction to this whole essay really does come down to: change politics first. Once people’s material needs are met, we can spend our time worrying and arguing about definitions.

I find this one of the most depressing aspects of what’s often described as Identity Politics. I think the way this term is now applied is almost useless, but I’ll just say, as a shorthand, that it’s an ideological perspective that elevates personal self-identification above all else.

I’m sure some or many of you will take issue with this definition. Believe me, I am not trying to encompass all the nuances of every iteration or manifestation of this ideological project.

It often seems, to me, that we end up playing endless language games, where arguments over manners take precedence over any agreement about what needs to be done to address the material conditions of people’s lives.

All this arguing over the proper names or correct ways to refer to this and that are not without importance, but, to me, they should be subordinate to treating the disease rotting the tree from the inside.

Which sort of leads me to this:

I don’t mean to pick on LaRocca¹ because he’s hardly the first or only person to post this kind of dumb shit. But this is basically the identical ideological perspective of people like Steven Crowder (if you don’t know who this is, just be happy; you don’t need to know everything) who say some horrible shit in public and then loudly ask if you’re triggered in hopes that some freaks will clap.

I remember first seeing this exact argument when I was eleven years old watching two idiots who were my friends fistfighting over something no one will ever remember. They weren’t talking about queerness in books, obviously, but this is the same type of argument people used to have over their preference for Sega over Nintendo.

When I see adults do this shit, I get so secondhand embarrassed that I want to throw up.

But for many people, this is politics. This isn’t even just the entrypoint or part of a grand political project or manifesto: this is the endpoint.

Standing in a room of your best friends while you hurl an insult at some imaginary person and then wait for your friends to applaud and tell you how brave you are probably feels pretty good, but it’s definitely not anything an adult should be proud of.

But that’s what the internet is for, yes? Tossing out pre-scripted arguments in opposition to imaginary people.

Listen - I want a better world. I want to believe it’s possible.

On the eve of the pandemic, my son and I had the flu. Up in the middle of the night, I put on David Attenborough’s Our Plant series on Netflix in hopes that it would soothe my feverish boy and maybe even lull him back to sleep.

I had to turn it off within five minutes because I could not stop crying over the knowledge that my son would grow up in a dying world. The pain of that loss of a future absolutely devastated me to the point that I needed comforting.

I want to believe in a better world. I need to believe in a future. Not only because I have children, but because I have loved this world. It’s my home. The thought of people living in its desiccated husk absolutely shatters me.

And, sure, maybe I’m asking for too much. Or maybe the reason why we spend so much time and energy and words fighting about words and manners is because we know how useless our attempts are to address these massive structural problems we’re facing.

Maybe our need to fight about definitions and pronouns is because we have lost hope in the future. Lost hope in a world that can meaningfully change. And so we cling to these little bits of culture and society that we can gently nudge this way and that, like children chasing windblown autumnal leaves.

1. His book does suck, though