Quote:
parents/guardians or "gatekeepers" as he comically referred to them, had any control over the exposure of consumerism to children
They don't, but they should. I see no way to accomplish that other than the restoration of traditional family values, and by that I don't mean gaybashing. I think there needs to be a fundamental restructuring of American society so as to discourage two-wage households and encourage parents to spend more time with their children.
Recent interactions with my parents and other Baby Boomers has led me to fundamentally re-examine my views about Social Security and family life.
As everyone knows, I despise my parents. Many people find my lack of respect for my parents appalling; my response is that they have never shown me any respect and give no thought to my future. People often try to guilt-trip me over the Fifth Commandment - "honor thy mother and thy father". But there is no reciprocal commandment to honor one's son. So I started to think about why that is so.
Everyone knows the story of Jacob. The man was blessed by God because he had ten sons. But why was this considered a blessing? The answer is, because his sons could do what they were doing in the Bible when they decided to throw their father's favorite down the well: tend his flocks and help him survive lean times.
This paradigm is culturally universal. The Romans, for example, practiced patrias potestas (man of house as absolute authority over household), yet they were also known to highly honor their children and strive to push them through life. Hence the story of the Aeneid: how Aeneas fled the destruction of Troy, leading his son by the hand and carrying his father on his back. Loyalty and conservatism were virtues on which the Romans built a mighty empire.
During the Middle Ages, Europeans strove to have as many male children as possible, because young men could work the fields and be expected to protect their father and advance his interests. Social evolution - survival of the fittest social arrangements - eventually gave rise to male primogeniture, the tradition of bequeathing the whole of one's estate to the firstborn son. This was so because if fathers distributed their holdings equally amongst their sons, the incentive to have as many sons as possible would quickly Balkanize estates and make them easy pickings for other families with fewer children.
Those disenfranchised younger men, being unable to lord over the family estate, did the only thing they could: they took up the sword and became knights. When there were no wars to fight, they started their own, and when they couldn't do that either, they beat people up and took their stuff. The social need to get rid of all these angry young men running around with swords, was the true cause of the Crusades - not Christianity.
Going back to the Ten Commandments, I agree with the Protestants that they are the basis of all Western moral law. However, like many things the Protestants are at least partly correct about, they lack the intellectual training and personal depth to truly understand the topic in question.
The Ten Commandments are moral law because they are all impositions on our personal gratification, designed to ensure that people can get along.
Take, for example, the Second Commandment: to "honor the Sabbath". This commandment is very wise, for reasons that are now becoming eminently apparent. Obviously the man who is able and willing to till his fields seven days a week has the advantage over the man who tills for only six, either because he likes having a day free of labor, or because he has to spend time caring for a sick mother, a pregnant wife, and a crippled son. Obviously if the former is allowed to till as much as he pleases, he shall soon be able to buy the latter out of his farm, by producing more crops at a lower price. We are no longer a land of small farmers, but the wisdom of this commandment is more apparent than ever - and completely lost on those Protestants who talk about it but don't understand it. We cannot allow people to work as hard as they want, keep all their gains and lead society down a race to the bottom.
Then there's the Fifth Commandment. "Honor thy parents". There is no reciprocal commandment to "honor thy son", because prior to the advent of Social Security, it wasn't necessary. One need not be commanded to "honor thy son" any more than the need to "honor thy horse", for the same reason, which is that they are investments ensuring towards one's own livelihood. Again, it must be remembered: every one of the Ten Commandments is a restriction on personal gratification. For a son, there was a strong incentive to let the parents starve in their waning years and monopolize the fruits of one's labor. The Ten Commandments and similar traditional laws put a check on this, and in doing so, made society stable.
Social Security disrupted this paradigm by creating a strong disincentive for parents to ensure their sons' livelihood - after all, Social Security will be paid for, by other people's sons, no matter how much you suck at parenting. The result was what is now emerging as a serious social problem, parental apathy, seeing children as an economic burden and viewing their future with relative indifference.
There are some who say Social Security is just plain wrong and should be scrapped. Those people are also ignorant, for the reason that they forget why Social Security came about: the pre-existing status quo wasn't good enough, and really it never was. Hence the Crusades, or the Fall of the Republic. The Ten Commandments only ever worked in stable, homogenous societies, where those who fell through the cracks were seen as everyone's problem. This is why absolute democracy works in countries like Switzerland or Scandinavia, but not here: because they are highly stable, homogenous societies with no concept of individuality as we understand it. Conversely, it's no coincidence that the Bible-Thumper who parrots a book he does not understand is also a racist bigot.
My paternal grandmother was a Jewish Socialist. The secular movement, which grew out of Jewish ethnic experiences as scapegoats for all the failings of the Czarist regime (something still within living memory at the time, as the reason we came to America), being discriminated against by WASPs, longing for the sense of purpose and belonging of the traditional
shtetl way of life, and the traditional Jewish notions of
tzedakah and
mitzvot, was dying out by the time my father was born. When my grandmother was asked why the movement died out, she replied, "It needed more. It needed God."
My life experiences have led me to see the wisdom in those words. I have come to believe that consumerism, psychology and pop science are the result of what I call
frustrated secularism. The inability of moral relativism and self-interest to provide order and purpose for human existence. I have come to believe that religion and spiritual life must have a place in society, for man's own sake.
There is the story of the Golden Calf. Moses went up to Mt Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God. While he was up there, the Jews, nervous and upset that their charismatic and assertive leader was away, decided that they needed a God they could see and touch, to make them feel comfortable with their lives. So they convinced Aaron to create the Golden Calf. When Moses returned, he was furious, and smashed the Ten Commandments against the idol, destroying both. God, in his infinite generosity, provided another set of the Commandments.
Some fools would ask whether one really believes God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, or Moses just spent 40 days on top of that mountain agonizingly carving them into stone by his own hand. Those people are fools, because they do not understand that one need not believe in God at all to understand the story. The wisdom of the story is, man's need for a higher power is a constant, and if a God based on truth is not in evidence, he will create one based on falsehood.
I developed an excellent rhetorical exercise to use against people who are atheists not because they are sceptical, but because they are arrogant and foolish. Ask them if they believe in God. When they say no, feign scepticism and ask them where God came from. When they reply that it was made up, ask why. When they say that it was because man needed God, then point out that is the central hypocrisy of the trendy atheist argument, it blames religion and God for man's problems while simultaneously attributing the existence of those things to man's character, without offering any real answers.
It is at this juncture that religious idiots leap up to blame atheists for the decline in public morality. In reality, the blame is properly laid not with atheists, but with religious people.
Religion ceased to be a positive force in American society because it became corrupted by forces it did not have the moral strength to stand against - racism, bigotry, self-interest, jimboism, pollution. Religious proponents should have observed the moral imperative to stand against the Vietnam War, against poverty, against destruction of the environment, against Jim Crow, against self-interest as a way of life. Rather than take a moral stand, they allowed themselves to fall victim to their own prejudices, or even worse, turned to demagoguery. This is why today, for all the talk of Protestant and Conservative Jewish hypocrites about God,
God is very much Dead. With God clearly dead and buried, atheism becomes rational. And that is why society is starkly divided between smug, ignorant atheists and bigoted Tea Party mega-churches.
I am a firm believer in dialectics and synthesis as a valid interpretation of history. I also agree with the Marxist premise that history is fundamentally the history of class warfare, with other issues such as national rivalry and technological progress as secondary issues.
All of this is why I am a Reform Jew, and why it is that tradition that guides my political vision. I see no contradiction between being an atheist and being motivated by strong religious convictions. Unlike most atheists, I do not
believe that God doesn't exist, rather, I
know why God doesn't exist.
So back to the initial question: what to do about family life and consumerism?
The answer is, there has to be a synthesis between the new and the old. We must seek to capture the wisdom and compassion of traditional religious laws in modern society, find the moral strength to see beyond arbitrary divisions in race, lifestyle and faith, and redefine religion not as an arbitrary set of commandments, but as a wisdom that transcends day-to-day concerns, man's imperative to look beyond his own self-interest and observe a moral purpose greater than himself.
To that end, we should restructure Social Security to provide greater returns to families that raise 1-3 children to productive adulthood, while ensuring nominal returns for parents with fewer or more children. Parents that raise their children to their same income bracket or higher should be richly rewarded, and those who fail to do so should find the last years of their life meager, but not impossible. At the same time, Social Security taxes on the very successful should be dramatically increased to fund other social programs, ensuring meritocratic social churn without too much ambition-driven instability, and incentivizing parents to keep close watch on their children.
We should massively increase deductions for housewives and allow stipends for mothers, scaling with the academic performance of their children. Two-wage earner households should face much higher taxes than they currently do. At least one parent must have the means and the incentive to spend time with their children. The work week should be capped at five days, and the workday capped at eight hours. Paternal and maternal leave should be enforced by law.
To this end, we must restructure American society to make it easier to get by on less. How, is the topic of another chapter in this book.
But before we can do any of that, I believe America must have a moral awakening. Americans of all cultures must understand the need for a return of the ancient wisdom, to give us a sense of moral direction to the future. Although this may seem idealistic and far-fetched, I would say it is not so.
Religious organizations, struggling to survive in a world in which they are increasingly irrelevant and without credibility, must revitalize by reclaiming their ancient purpose, not as dogmatists, but as humanitarians, reinforcing the universal moral laws that make society work. They must form a united front with other faiths, and rediscover the true meaning of both Passover and the Eucharist: as reminders of man's imperative to know his history and what is expected of him. Religious people must see themselves as allies, not enemies, of secular scholars who look to a literal interpretation of history.
Religious organizations must come to support space exploration, environmentalism, secular education and public services, for the same reason, they must define those agendas as part of their mandate to pay homage to a world bigger than petty material self-interest. And if existing faiths will not do it...new faiths will. Christians gab about Jesus, but they do not really appreciate who he was and what he did: he challenged cynical dogmatism with a way of thinking based on genuine compassion. A historical inevitability.
Americans will hear the call to a new way of life, based on ancient wisdom fused with modern industrial secularism, when the current one, based on consumerism and wanton self-interest, finally is revealed as the fraud it is, when Americans grow tired of the chaos, debauchery, and despair of our current social order. It happened in the past, when Romans turned to Christianity for answers, and when later Christians in turn turned to the Classical past for answers. Each time, a slightly more perfect wisdom gradually emerged, taking the best of the old and new. The wheel of history is turning again.
