Conservative, green and feminist visions and the slow life: post-liberalism and the rejection of individual social and spatial hyper-mobility
An essay from December 2019 - Immediately prior to Catholic conversion, Xmas day 2019.
I remember my mum waving me off at Newcastle Central Station. The year was 1985. Just eighteen years old, I was about to get on a plane and fly to India. The idea was to learn about rural development in an electricity-free village, deep in the heart of Utah Pradesh. The experience was life-changing. But since my mum died, my reflections on that year often circle round to that moment of departure. What the hell was she doing? How could she wave goodbye to her first-born son with such equanimity? I wasn’t a particularly bad kid. She loved me. And yet, it was taken for granted that flying the nest was the thing to do.
In hindsight, it was quite clear to both of us that I was leaving home for good. India, to be followed by a brief stint, cleaning toilets at the Quaker International Centre in London and then Cambridge University – this had been a well-trodden path for middle and upper middle-class children for a century. With four children of my own, all home-schooled, I find the quiescent and even enthusiastic way in which my mum sent me into the world rather baffling. And yet, particularly in the Anglosphere, this has become the norm. Education is the route by which children break loose not only of parents and family, but attachments to place and childhood friends. Children are schooled to become uber-flexible individual citizens, able to slot into an increasingly complex array of occupational roles and cultural identities and lifestyles. In our society, education serves to accentuate and accelerate individual spatial and social mobility which has become our defining value.
During the university expansion of the 1950s and 1960s this model of individual liquidity was institutionalised for the middle classes. European Inter-rail cards and the culture of hitchhiking normalised a cosmopolitan culture and expectation of hyper-mobility. The era of mass automobility, air travel and package tourism all accelerated this ‘era of unhingment’. From the 1980s the process of deindustrialization saw the rapid decline of traditional manufacturing industries. Infamously heartless, conservative minister Norman Tebbit advised unemployed workers in the North of England to ‘get on their bikes’. This throw- away line captured an important side-effect of the dynamic neo-liberal market economy – namely the dissolution of place-bound communities and extended families. Under the Blair government, the massive expansion of higher education, compounded this cultural trajectory, institutionalizing as a societal imperative, the Thatcherite imperative that there was no such thing as society – only self-seeking, self- actualising individuals, following their dreams.
Of course, even construed positively, the only way this dance of the dream-led masses towards a state of anti-viscosity and individual mobility depended upon two institutions (survival units): the State and the Market. As a ‘survival unit’ of last resort, the state provides housing, social insurance, means tested benefits, student grants and now loans – the vital mechanisms which allow eighteen-year-old kids to move out of the orbits of their family and childhood communities. And the market of course provides an increasingly complex and differentiated array of occupations, careers and training opportunities which allow individuals to make a life without reference to that web of reciprocity that sustained them in their childhood. And by taking responsibility for old and sick people, the combination of state and market institutions (social and private insurance + means tested benefits, seniors’ homes, long stay hospitals) relieves those same individuals of the obligation to care for parents, grandparents and siblings – let alone cousins or neighbours.
The final piece of this story about individual mobility relates to feminism. The removal of social and legal prohibitions against women working and fault free divorce, combined with control of fertility and contraception paved the way for a sexual revolution which construed women as self-actualizing individuals. As recreational sex became a transaction between individuals, there was a gradual decline in the salience and durability of marriage. As the age of first-time parents has increased and social taboo against single parents has declined, men have retreated from parental responsibility. As a matter of choice and compulsion, child-rearing has become an increasingly solitary and female affair. But this has only been possible in the context of the elaboration of those market and state ‘survival units’ referred to above. Most significantly, state and commercial childcare services have made it possible for women to combine children with work or unemployment, without dependence on the lattice of place and family-bound reciprocity upon which all previous have depended for thousands of generations.
Clearly there are many who have understood and continue to read this as narrative of emancipation. Women are in charge of their own bodies and lives. They can have sex without the permission of parents or society. They can control their own fertility, get an education, earn their own money, live in their own houses, bring up their own children – all without depending on the participation of husbands, boyfriends or fathers and mothers.
The case against hyper-mobility
And let’s be clear, this is a reasonable and understandable perspective. But it ignores as much as it reveals. This new reality is problematic from a range of mutually antagonist perspectives.
1. The environmental case:
For Greens who foreground biophysical limits to growth, the social democratic institutions of the welfare state present a real problem. Financed from fiscal transfers, the welfare state depends on capitalist modernization – the creaming of surplus from an expanding economy. The simple truth is that the expansion of the formal economy, the disembedding of economic life – the shift away from informal production, subsistence, reciprocity and livelihood – must, by definition, involve an increasing energy and material throughput. If small is beautiful, for greens, big must be ugly – and nothing is bigger than the welfare state. Only the Peoples Liberation Army employs more people than the UK’s National Health Service.
This has a direct implication for the society of individuals. By sundering the link between individuals and their families and place-bound communities, the trajectory of the welfare state increases the dependence of society on both the expanding formal market (for jobs, private pensions, commodified care services) and on the state (for care and welfare). The bigger the formal economy (state-market) and the greater the contraction of the informal domain of livelihood, the greater the ecological footprint – period. Greens can’t afford to embrace the welfare state and the society of individuals any more than they embrace neo-liberal market society. These things go together, hand in glove.
2. The Conservative case:
The conservative case against the fetish for individual autonomy is even clearer. Throughout the nineteenth century, conservatism centred on the defence of the ‘small platoons’ (Burke) – modes of association based not on contract but on status, inter-generational obligation, physical and social contiguity and a wattle structure of generalised reciprocity. Only during the cold-war did mainstream conservatism allow itself to become reduced to liberal market economics and an image of social life rooted in rational individualism.
Conservatives have always been torn between the economic, material and technological benefits brought by the unleashing of price-setting markets, and the concomitant erosion of social cohesion and the dangers of political and social disorder. From the end of the nineteenth century, in the face of this threat, there was a gradual acquiescence to the idea of state intervention – in areas such as planning, housing, education and eventually the NHS and the welfare state. Conservatives conceded the social democratic idea that the market should be balanced by the state. It was this binary zero sum that led Mrs Thatcher to declare eventually that there was ‘no such thing as society... only individuals.’ As Scruton argues, she didn’t really mean this literally. But ideological and social changes over the last century had made it difficult to imagine a world in which the creative-destructive forces of the market were balanced by a delicate, organic, and self- organizing connective tissue of mutual obligation and civil, communitarian commitment.
Even in the 1880s, this third domain of ‘livelihood’ was easier to envisage as the basis of politics – which in part explains the common ground between a conservative such as John Ruskin and a socialist such as William Morris. Since then the State-Market has obliterated everything in its path. Marriage, the established Church, village cricket, cooperative society shops and services, working men’s clubs, community-run schools, church schools, Working-men’s Educational Associations, the Freemasons, friendly societies, guild associations – and a raft of other forms of association that leavened the transition from medieval society with self-help, cooperation and community obligation, have all disappeared or are in a state of permanent decline.
And without this connective tissue, life has become increasingly meaningless for millions of people. Society is wracked by problems of crime, disease, mental instability, unhappiness, depression, addiction, poverty, youth violence and general helplessness – that require ever more directive interventions from an extending array of state and private sector agencies, whose purchase and traction seems inversely proportional to their budget.
Occasionally, as with Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ initiative, there is a lacklustre attempt to re-weave the tapestry of mutual connection. But invariably, this falls back on state-run organisations – mainly because Conservatives are not willing to challenge and curtail the logic of the market (the dominance of big corporations), the extent of the formal economy and have lost faith in their ability and even ethical sanction to push back in the culture war. Despite the fact that every serious sociological and criminological analysis has demonstrated the efficacy of traditional marriage and two-parent families in stemming social disorder and poverty, the conservative right, even under Thatcher and Reagan (and now Trump) unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary to heal society.
3. The feminist case (that most don’t or won’t make – yet):
Most strands of feminism are predicated on the same kind of Enlightenment moral and rational individualism that takes what Bauman refers to as ‘liquid modernity’ for granted. These developments have certainly been experienced by most women, at least in part, as liberation, increasing the choices of millions of women over several generations. But it is not at all clear that radical individualism is serving women very well. For instance, just consider the issue of sexual freedom outside of marriage. An unintended and unforeseen side effect has been to reduce the ‘price’ of sex for men. In human biology, with an unlimited supply of gametes and bearing none of the costs of conception, males have a genetic interest in impregnating as many partners as possible. Females on the other hand, have a limited supply of eggs, the capacity for only a small number of pregnancies and bear a potentially enormous, decade-long physiological cost for a successful conception. In evolutionary and historical terms, males compete for a limited supply of sex; females provide sex in exchange for monogamous commitment, institutionalised in nearly all cultures as marriage. For men the price is the fidelity, commitment, hard work and material success required to prove themselves as potential marriageable partners. These kind of ‘calculations’ explain why men tend to be attracted to younger women; and women to older, wealthy and more powerful men. In this context, marriage as an institution functioned primarily to protect women and provide a context for childrearing. In most societies, the family not the individual is the base structural unit (Steven Kessler provides a great summary of the relation between human sexual biology and civilisation here).
Recreational sex, uncoupled from reproduction and familial, intergenerational and community-based structures of production, has reduced the price of sex for men almost to zero. The market and the state have combined to replace marriage and family allowing both men and women to function as individuals with terrible consequences for both.
As Jordan Peterson is fond of pointing out, the situation of men and women working alongside each other as relative strangers in an anonymous labour market detached from the place-bound economies of household and livelihood, is completely new. In all seriousness, we don’t really know how to do it. And when the underlying structures are changing so rapidly that it is, albeit in hindsight, perhaps inevitable that the slightly unhinged #MeToo movement has brought in its wake all kind of unintended consequences. Many men are reportedly withdrawing from willing collaboration with female co-workers. The off-site cultures of conviviality and collaboration are becoming chilly and, in some cases, completely frozen. Perhaps ironically, this reflects a wider withdrawal from sex on the part of young males – many of whom are withdrawing into online world of pornography, gaming and physical celibacy. First noticed in Japan, this culture of voluntary celibacy (and more self-conscious ‘involuntary celibacy’ or ‘Incel’) has become an oft-remarked feature of the sex culture of millennials and generation Z.
And what of women? Since the 1960s successively more emancipated generations of young women have enjoyed a less regulated culture of casual, episodic and transactional sex. Made possible by technologies of birth control, this culture has been driven most of all by the declining salience of the family as a survival unit of last resort. In more complex societies with burgeoning service sector employment, women could for the first time make their economic way in the world, independently from men but also from the sometimes cosy sometimes coercive regulation of (his or her) family.
An ever more complex service-led and consumer economy along with access to higher education, has certainly created opportunities and an unparalleled degree of autonomy for individual women. And in the dominant narratives of popular culture the disembedding of women from the ascriptive logic of family and place is construed as positive and non-negotiable (even when it ends in death and tragedy as in the classic feminist road movie Thelma and Louise). But what has always been missing from such narratives is the price that this liberation has extracted in terms of a new reliance on the survival units of the state and the market. Feminists have often pointed to the double burden of combining work and family. But they have generally sought to deny any deep-seated biological or psychological structures (the tabula rasa) whilst insisting on those ever more extensive commitments in terms of the welfare state – fertility treatment, childcare, welfare benefits – that undermine any dependence on marriage, family and men. This is applied now not only to universal childcare, but even to the biological process of conception. And equally, policy and activism targets ever more intrusive interventions in the market with respect to recruitment, the glass ceiling and a (largely non-existent) gender pay gap. In both cases, autonomy for women has been tied firmly to the ever more intrusive functioning of both State and Market as privileged survival units for individuals who are construed as necessarily and ethically ‘under-determined’ by and independent of biology, ancestry, family and attachment to an inter-generational and place-bound community.
Of course, the most egregious example of this trajectory has been the eruption of trans-politics – from the margins of campus counter-culture to the mainstays of public policy. The ideology of gender-fluidity and self-identification, with all its absurd consequences, represents the most coherent and complete expression of the tabula rasa – the most literal denial of biology as destiny. Radical feminists and a growing number of heretical lesbians and gay men – abused with the appellations of ‘TERF’ and ‘transphobe,’ and increasingly excluded from their privileged place on the institutional barricades of the war against the capitalist patriarchy – are now re-discovering the importance of human biology, of family and even, in some cases, of marriage. As conservatives have long argued, the hyper-individualization of sex, the rejection of any wider community interest in the business of reproduction, the de facto reliance on the state (and of course the market – a point on which conservatives have been less clear) and a transactional ethos that removes any particular sexual act from any long-term relationship – all of this has worked always to the profound disadvantage of women, and now increasingly to young men also.
It is impossible to observe with equanimity the ubiquitous sexualization of young women, the casual objectifying culture of Tinder and Grindr, the unhappily delayed onset of childbirth and child-rearing, the crisis of fertility; the declining role for (older and more infirm) grandparents; the disappearance of marriage as an institution from the lived experience of many communities, the normalization of violent and coercive sexual behaviour, the decline in breast-feeding, the cult of youth and beauty, the catastrophic preoccupation with a narcissistic culture of plastic surgery, the prevalence of an episodic and transactional approach to sex, the pervasive use of pornography, the startling and horrifying epidemic of sexual slavery and trafficking – and now, paradoxically, the retreat of many young people from any sex and any relationships. But all of these phenomena are a consequence of the dynamics of individualization, the break down in relational structures of mutual obligation, the victory of the State and Market over the domain of Livelihood, and the near total victory of the feminist left in the culture war.
Towards a society of families and communities: policies
Suppose we were to concede that the trajectory of individualization had gone too far? That in the interests of individual happiness and satisfaction but also societal integrity, individuals need to be re-embedded into ascriptive, involuntary relations of mutual obligation and reciprocity rooted in (extended) family, community and physical contiguity; but also a reenchanted ontological and cosmological framing of the individual life-course and its transitions, social life and the wider economy and polity –all affirmed through private, community and public rituals with varying degrees of formality and religiosity.
I know – this is fanciful, a tall order and perhaps unbelievable. But suspend disbelief for a while and let’s just consider what the necessary package of political and social interventions that would be necessary to nudge society into a different (reverse?) gear. The following suggestions taken together might be the kernel of such a strategy. Individual measures may or may not make sense in their own right.
I — Universities, colleges and post-secondary education:
i. Reduce the size of the university sector: Radically reduce the number of university places and close or repurpose many lower tier institutions. Universities are about a kind of academic and scholarly knowledge that not everyone is suited to or is capable of. By denigrating craft and trade professions, the Whitehall social democrats have, over many decades, made a university degree essential for personal esteem and social approbation. This has been a disaster. The value of academic study has been eroded. Grade inflation has seen the currency of the undergraduate increasingly Master’s degrees declining to such an extent that many employers are beginning to cast doubt on the validity or relevance of the system. The opportunities for online self-training and certification present a terminal threat to the university system.
ii. Reduce expectation of student mobility: Embrace an openly meritocratic and elitist distinction between top tier universities and local institutions designed to serve a local labour market. Focus resources on standardizing provision across local universities such that most students stay at home to study. This will have the effect of:
Consolidating familial relationships and reducing the propensity for higher education to break the lived, experiential capacity of children to live with parents and grandparents
Reducing the personal and public cost of higher education
Reducing the number of households – with all that implies about the replication of consumer spending, sharing of household consumables, car-sharing, energy consumption etc
Create families more able /likely to induce inter-generational sharing of childcare, elder care etc.
iii. Craft, guild, trade, apprentice: Redirect resources to local trade schools, craft colleges geared to the needs of local employers and industries. Ensure, though staff remuneration and myriad symbolic ways that this applied sector has equal status and esteem to the much smaller university sector.
In both sectors, ways should be found to create life-long obligational relationships along the lines of friendly societies, guilds, alumni associations which can nurture non-state forms of civic engagement, self-help, mutual aid etc. These relationships should be treated as similar to ‘marriage’ – which is to say ritualistic rites of passage with legal standing; memberships entailing certain moral and sometimes legal obligations, and that bring visible benefits; and relationships that can be dissolved through legal divorce – albeit with significant hurdles and inconvenience. Benefits could include:
networks of guild/association/university specific hostels or accommodations in various parts of the country
tiers of pension credit and entitlement
association specific facilities for parties, weddings, celebrations
II — Welfare system
As in the nineteenth century, revolutionary violence from the discontented and dispossessed masses always looms over Market society. Exchange in the context of market-places is older than civilisation. The kind of price-setting markets inaugurated by the process of enclosure in early modern England is corrosive and dangerous precisely because it destroys traditional forms of security associated with livelihood and leaves individuals at the mercy of labour markets. Hence the need for some kind of state intervention. In a modern society, the elimination of any state safety net is clearly undesirable and unfeasible – without great suffering and an existential risk of societal collapse. Nevertheless, the extension of welfare systems undermines family and community and introduces a species of moral hazard that has been associated with dependency, the loss of craft and household skills, the loss of independence and autonomy and the emergence of a structural underclass. The ‘culture of poverty’ phenomenon is real. What is in dispute is how a modern state can and should respond.
This is a massive topic. All I can do here is to intimate some lines of travel and basic parameters.
The means-tested elements of the welfare state should be less generous because cash benefits with strict eligibility criteria are APPALLINGLY expensive to administer and create poverty traps that penalise self- help, self-motivation and personal autonomy/integrity.
Universal benefits recovered through the tax system (basic income, child benefit, negative income tax) are much cheaper to administer (no bureaucrats policing who gets over the line with a complex industry of litigants and special cases) and have higher levels of political legitimacy because they go to all citizens qua citizenship. On this basis a partial universal basic income paid to all individual citizens would be a good place to start. This individual entitlement would be generally insufficient to cover the costs of living. However, individuals could work, beg, busk or receive a private income on top of his payment without penalty (i.e. universal and automatic). Together with the loosening and complete deregulation of domestic economic activity, this would mean that almost no one would need or indeed could be completely unemployed – and nearly everyone would be spared the debilitating cost of enforced idleness. Cash benefits should be replaced partially with measures that enhance ability of people to make money for themselves using minimal household means of production. This point is linked to the wider need to inverse the regulatory costs of economic activity such that they are proportional to scale (family/individual production of goods and services unregulated, little taxed; franchises and corporations taxed/regulated the most).
Welfare entitlements in addition to the partial basic income should gradually be partially linked to in- kind, member benefits of the expanding range of civil associations, and tied to obligations associated with such memberships.
Local benefits could be tied to a universal non-discretionary obligation for participation (voting, volunteering) and local service – for example one day a month. This labour could be used to reduce the financial costs of running public infrastructure (cleaning hospitals, schools, road maintenance etc) Targeted and punitive taxation of websites such as Tinder which promote transactional promiscuity and undermine social cohesion. The rationale would relate to the harms caused to and costs incurred by society.
Much greater emphasis in schools on traditional sexual morality focusing on relationships, fidelity and childrearing.
This goes against all the new common sense of diversity and ‘respect’. It would involve an almighty battle with schools, teachers, academia and mainstream media. But fighting the culture war is imperative to any sustainable pattern of culture and economy.
III — Sport:
In the nineteenth century organised sport became the archetypal means through which both urbanising industrial communities and rural towns and villages expressed attachments to place and community. This place-attachment has weakened as professionalization has led to a flow of players between clubs and TV and Internet broadcasting has created national and global audiences. From the perspective of viscosity, mobility and place-attachment, professionalization and commercialization of sport have been a negative influence. One straightforward way for the state to use its leverage would be consistently to reward sports and clubs that consolidate the relation between place-bound communities, work-places, the audience and players. This could include member share-schemes that reward inter-generational and heritable memberships; public celebrations and secular rituals; the restriction of player selection to those born in the area or resident for a length of time.
IV — Architectural choices and planning laws
Domestic architecture in the 1950s enshrined the isolated nuclear family as a unit of consumption separate from production. Contemporary house design continues to atomise families whilst enshrining the growing expectation of single person households. Aside from the social costs of these development and the increased burden on the state and the increased dependence on vigorous labour markets in the formal economy, these developments have consistently stripped away the capacity of individuals and families to produce the means of their own living, to build their own accommodation.
Self-build housing should be almost completely deregulated, allowing self-builders to compete with corporate house builders. This would involve allowing such families to disregard housing regulations (as long as the house is not sold on the open market) maximising the capacity for individuals and families to start small and upgrade gradually.
Such moves would require a complete change of mindset extending the remit of ‘buyer beware’ and allowing individuals to opt out of well-meaning paternalist regulatory arrangements intended to protect them from avaricious developers and unscrupulous landlords. In the environment, I would be able to choose to risk buying unpasteurised milk, meat from a backyard butcher, or coffee from an unlicensed vendor. I would also be able to jerry rig accommodation on by own land with a view to learning skills and improving, upgrading as I went.
Idiosyncratic one-off self-build applications should be favoured automatically over corporate builders and be given greater latitude for development in the nooks and crannies that dot our cities and towns. Suburban planning regimes should be relaxed further to accommodate granny flats and arrangements suiting extended families. Planning regulations should be predicated on the contraction of the welfare state and a move back towards family, extended family and even new types of cooperative/shared housing. Corporate builders should be required to include extended family living in their schemes. Planning should also be predicated on the idea that many more households will be engaging in informal production of various kinds (i.e. a concerted shift from State-Market towards Livelihood)
V—Neighbourhoods: Annual national street party holiday
Easy. Automatic licencing for road closures and street parties on a designated day of the year (and facilitated permissions at other times) – linked to a national (Red Nose style) fundraising day linked to national charities. Street parties are one of the easiest ways to build neighbourhood trust, friendship and cooperation.
VI —Child labour laws:
Child labour was gradually outlawed in the nineteenth century for the explicit reason (a) that children were brutally exploited in the industrial factories and mills; and for the implicit reasons that the ongoing process of modernization required (b) an increasingly educated workforce and (c) what Gellner called formal exo- education (as opposed to informal acculturation and socialization) became an indispensable vehicle for inculcating a national culture and imagined community and for overcoming place-bound and familial tribalism.
‘Childhood’ and particularly teenage childhood is a recent innovation and a product of this exo-education in schools. With the expansion of higher education, infantile dependency continues for most children into their early and even late 20s. This is a marked contrast to all antecedent societies. Among hunter-gathers children learn skills alongside adults and rites of passage at puberty mark an early transition to adulthood. In agrarian societies, children always worked alongside their parents, learning family crafts and making an indispensable contribution to labour of subsistence.
In short there is nothing natural about contemporary arrangements for schooling and the regulation of wage labour. With the opportunities afforded by the Internet, the growth in and demonstrable effectiveness of home-schooling (relative to formal schooling), it is possible to imagine a very different relation between schooling and work. If a strategic priority is to reduce the automatic spatial and social mobility of individuals with a view to the emergence of a more viscous and embedded form of social life, then there is a strong argument for reconsidering the benefits of ‘child labour’ (see Ed Westhttps://unherd.com/2019/11/why-child-labour-beats-school/). Many children learn more and better ‘on the job.’ Working with parents or family members in the context of a small or medium sized business promotes inter-generational continuity and solidarity. Child-labour could also take the form of a re- emergence of apprenticeship systems and preferably guild forms of organization. Such innovations would foster place-bound attachments to landscape, local culture, family and community that are a prerequisite for the kind of ‘slow culture’ imagined by environmentalist proponents of ‘slow cities’ and ‘slow food’. But ‘slow families’, ‘slow communities’ and ‘slow work’ are also a necessary foundation for any conservative vision of bottom-up solidarity, embedded markets and more minimal states.
VII —Traditional marriage:
The sexual revolution, the prevalence of digital sexual imagery and pornography, the transactional ‘hook up’ culture, contraception, abortion on demand, the relaxation of prohibitions on pre-marital sex, the expansion of the labour market, the normalization of technical and professional career pathways involving extended periods of education and on the job training and ladder-climbing, delays in child rearing and the reduction in family size — all of these have acted to undermine traditional marriage. If, as has been argued above, the benefits of these developments in some individual circumstances are outweighed by their impact on poverty, household stability, the growth in the number of households, the loosening of social ties and the hypermobility of individuals – then policy should focus on re-establishing traditional marriage as the normal context for childrearing. Policies might include:
State bursaries for marriage to contribute to weddings. Actuarial analysis could set the subsidy to be revenue neutral over, say, a fifteen-year period. This is because even shot—gun weddings radically reduce the chances of a child ending up in poverty after ten years (and so reduce the likely need for state intervention down the line). There are also other benefits in terms of female poverty, male health, the effectiveness of schooling etc.
Making the process of divorce harder – not impossible, but harder.Social recognition of marriage landmarks (10 years, 20 years) and celebrations of children. Annual holidays and rites of passage. Secular and religious rituals of recognition.
Increasing the child benefit available to married as opposed to unmarried mothers. This is unfair and unpalatable but reflects the need to balance individual costs and harms against long term social goods and benefits. A smaller scale society needs to move away from the habit of the state functioning as husband/father in absentia.
Much more generous marriage tax allowance.
Scrapping of all childcare subsidies but compensated by a greater increase in universal child benefit.
Much greater state and societal recognition of mothers and motherhood as well as fathers and fatherhood. Social innovation in relation to parades, holidays, rituals, pension credits. Parents and good parenting is necessary for societal health and continuity. Western societies have forgotten this wisdom of all ages.
Contractual/transactional relations versus life-long memberships and associations
Marriage provides an interesting model for the problem of viscosity. It is a contract of sorts, but not a transaction. Rather the lifelong membership of a family team requires an unconditional commitment to make and remake multipolar relationships on a daily basis. Few would want to reverse the divorce laws and recreate marriage as a potential trap for unhappy and dependent women (and men). But the significant benefit of marriage as opposed to co-living, is that the public ritual and legal-administrative impediments to dissolution make it more likely that parents will strive to sustain a relationship. Marriage codifies commitment; and commitment has become unfashionable and, with the expansion of state and market society, unnecessary – at least for individuals. But to the extent that individual men and women can evade their obligations and construct individual and purely self-actualizing life plans and trajectories, it is society (and ecology) that picks up the tab. From a feminist, conservative and ecological perspective, the problem that we face is how to re-establish commitment as a prime virtue, without completely losing the benefits of individual freedom and choice i.e. how to increase the viscosity of society without creating inertia and social immobility.
VIII— Life-long associations
Elsewhere, I have explored the Basque cooking club or ‘Txoko’ as an example of an inter-generational, membership association defined by rites of passage and providing a combination of life-long support and mutual obligation for members (https://navigatorsoftheanthropocene.com/one-vote-one-club- communitarian-demos-proposal-based-on-txoko-basque-cooking-club/) . The Txoko is in many ways like a secular group marriage. It involves a one-off contract that establishes a life-long relation and that is breakable only in the context of a breakdown in the relationship (or a move away from the region). The Txoko emerged as a response to the stresses of urbanization and the experience of individual vulnerability in the context of the loss of familial and community support characteristic of village life. It was in many ways a self-conscious social innovation.
Perhaps what is needed now, is the formulation of new institutions that share these characteristics of membership, autonomy, rites of passage and ritualised relations, mutual obligations, shared identity, feasting and place. And to use such forms of association to re-embed social life and informal economic activities. Such principles could be used in the context of schools, churches, seniors’ homes, hospitals and sports clubs etc.
Conclusion
I just can’t imagine seeing my kids off at the station. My mum was part of the boomer generation who just couldn’t get enough mobility. University-educated, she felt stifled by home life with four kids. Her part-time career as a teacher of the deaf was not sufficiently fulfilling. She and my dad put their time into the Society of Friends, eventually running the Quaker presence in Belfast during a critical decade of the peace process (we have a personalised bottle of whisky from their friend, the late Mo Mowlem to prove it). When I eventually got around to getting married and having children, both Nikki and I were keen to create an extended family and throw in our lot with either or both sets of parents. We were rebuffed on both sides – and for the same reasons. Our parents had come to value autonomy and freedom of action above all things. Mum was wary of becoming a professional grandmother. When they came back from Ireland, they moved not to Newcastle where both my sisters lived, with young families of their own. But to Richmond in Yorkshire – close enough for emergencies but not too close.
Having fledged that day on the platform at Newcastle Central Station, living with my parents was never an option. We grew apart. We jealously guarded our privacy and lost the context and habit of intimate sharing. They too consolidated a private life, about which we knew little – partly because it was all about the ‘bloody Quakers’ and our inner toddler still raged against this interloper and competitor for our parent’s time and affections. And although admirable and replete with significant personal achievement and contribution, their Quakerism was always abstract and bloodless. There were clearly no rituals binding a sense of communion in place and in community. There was little visceral obligation. The intellectual premium placed on choice was most compatible with a world in which young Quakers ‘went out into the world’ – and perhaps or perhaps not, did great worthy things. Reflecting on my own achievements in middle age, this emphasis on individual deeds functions unconsciously to licence the prioritising of self-actualization and achievement over the simpler and more truthful obligation to family and community.