Parental Wrongs

Parental Wrongs (statistical reality and immoral panic)

            Let it be said straight away that the family household is in fact the most dangerous place for any child. Given that upwards of 95% of all abuse, and in all four major types – that emotional, physical, psychological, and sexual – occur in the home and are perpetrated by those the child knows or knows well, almost all them family members, no other social context even comes close. I have had numerous therapeutic professionals remind me of this statistic, and to this they add that almost all of the remaining five percent occurs in educational settings such as schools, churches or training facilities of various kinds; places wherein coaches, tutors, mentors, teachers and the like are, by definition, gathered. These numbers put the utter lie to any suggestions that children are most at risk either by themselves, on the street, on the internet, or in the company of strangers. Does this mean that we should let any possible vigilance over these other spaces completely lapse? No, but what it does mean is that such same vigilance needs be applied to the family first, and then the formal educational scenes second, if a very distant second. The question which remains is precisely why the family home is the most dangerous place, given that every ideal thereof speaks the opposite.

            It is reasonable to suggest that no modern institution has, and from its very inception, been subject to such scrutiny and critique as has the bourgeois family. Towering discursive figures such as Engels, Freud, Erikson, Foucault and others have aimed their ample artillery at it. None, however, have simply used arguments from authority, such as it may be, in their vivisections. Seen variously as a cauldron of sexual tension aping the apes, a compact of production-consumption aping the aristocracy, or simply an umbrella sanction to intimately control women as servants and children as chattel, our version of the family is certainly the site of a great many wrongs, almost all of them committed by parents. It is also the case that parenting does not come into one’s life replete with detailed manuals; it is very much an improvised operation, and there are a great diversity of ‘types’ of children to be had. If one overlays this basic incompetency, which is at first no one’s fault, with the objective stressors of parent as worker, parent as consumer, and even parent as police officer, it is no surprise that the interior of the family home quickly becomes a landscape littered with acts of petty terrorism, with parents just as rapidly becoming equally petty fascists. Indeed, apparently if one seeks to parent at all, one automatically tends in these darker directions.

            The seeming price of civility in children is incivility in adults, the ransom of child obedience, disobedient parents. The eschewing of violence as a citizen requires the use of it against our own offspring. These are hard sayings, reminiscent of the ‘tough love’ advocates who hail from evangelical margins of all sorts. In fact, ‘tough love’ is a contradiction in terms, a euphemism for sadism and a vehicle for Schadenfreude. ‘Troubled teens’, another kindred euphemism, are so troubled, if at all, because of how they have been parented. One would like to say, in these cases, ‘poor’ parenting but once again, the character of the modern family is such that one cannot truly make such an assessment, utter such a judgment, promote this kind of ethical evaluation. Parenting is, in a word, what it is, given the other variables in play. If this is tantamount to saying that children can be raised in no other way than that shot through with violence and abuse of various kinds, consider both the facts and the stakes.

            The facts tell us of the sheer numbers of abuse cases, yet under-reported given the absolute stress on family loyalty and the equally naked threat of yet further violence, as well as the understaffed and underfunded resources available for children, especially youth, to which they can appeal. Many young people with whom I have spoken have reiterated the very much stock line that, ‘yes, I was abused in some manner, but the option was the child welfare system, so I stayed at home until I could move out’. The false choice between stakes in one hell and the next is not one any grown adult would likely kindly settle for, though in capital, many grudgingly do. Parents extort their teens with the ironic threat of child services protection, and they blackmail their young adults – a great many of whom, due to economic and demographic patterns, find themselves at home far past the optimum period – through the use of the steep housing and unreliable employment markets. Most parents are, by these acts, criminals, abetting yet further criminal behavior, including well-documented, if seemingly much less common, instances of physical violence against legal adults in their homes. Indeed, it is relatively easy to practice such hoodlum hoaxes against older children simply due to the primary socialization these young people have experienced as actual children. The unmitigated gall of the most zealous child abusers, in suggesting that children are not ‘real’ adults until age 21 or the like, and thus should be subject to ritual violence in the home, in direct contravention of any legal code, is a clarion clue to how bold the ‘parental rights’ propaganda has in our time become.

            In fact, from the very beginning, one does not have the right to even become a parent. Parenting is nothing other than a privilege, and one which not all can either afford, are suited for, have the opportunity to accomplish, or are legally sanctioned to attain. There are no parental ‘rights’, as such, only responsibilities. And the vast majority of these have been gifted to parents by the penurious State, which is increasingly unwilling to perform its previous responsibilities, once accomplished when it itself understood that the new conception of the nuclear family would not be able to educate its children in the manner any State required. The wrongs of the State are vast and evil, yes, but inside each middle-class suburban dwelling, the state in miniature is acted out. It is made into a simulacrum of evil, with every public source reminding children of how ‘safe’ it is to be at home, how ‘good’ it is, and how right it is. Honor thy mother and thy father. It is the State that spouts this antique nonsense, and mostly because of budget line. Focus on the family. I have seen numerous bumper stickers telling us instead to ‘focus on your own damn family’, but to no avail. The charlatan NPOs which have arisen since the birth of the bourgeois family – from the 1830s child-saving movement through to our own five-ring circus of ‘family-values’ organizations – have performed a veritable Olympiad of Oleander, hammering home the idea that a single leaf of disobedience to one’s rightful parents is not only a betrayal of their ‘love’, but as well a ‘sin’, whatever that may mean.

            Yet if the bourgeois parent is himself a contradiction in terms due to the family becoming, in modernity and through our mode of production, simply the two-horned locus of reproduction – it is both the origin of production and the destination of consumption; workers must come from somewhere, all those many commodities have to go some place – what of the bourgeois child? Even in the very best of homes, where only the wider symbolic violence is refracted by compassionate parenting – ‘I am here for you always as a resource, I will never harm you, but the world is challenging and you must learn to navigate it, ultimately on your own’ – our shared reality, in which only those with access to resources do survive, impinges in a final manner the way in which one can imagine parenting. For being a child today is mostly to be the passive object of target-marketing of all kinds and from all comers. The child is a bulls-eye; the weapon, advertising. At an increasingly young age, the child becomes a willing target, consuming non-stop, from the virtual unreality to the equally unreal social world constructed around her. This pseudo-world is filled with both fantasy and decoy: the first to conceal from herself the suffering she yet feels, the second to conceal it from others. In inevitable mimesis, the family itself becomes a fantasy of itself; has there ever been an entertainment fiction that centers around the fact of child abuse as a norm; in a word, as a normatively sanctioned reality for the vast majority of children today?

            The family as well conceals its own activities through the use of false taboo. Physical punishment is, for instance, frowned upon, officially, and is sanctioned against by all professional and scientific associations and their journals. And so it is practiced in an unspoken manner. Most parents commit such abuses, but more than this, are then committed to never talking about doing so, even with like-minded others. We read of parents in chat threads and forums who are ‘so relieved to finally find’ an ironically ‘safe’ virtual space where other child abusers viz. parents and their vicarious voyeurs congregate. The detail in which they describe their dark doings is sickening but also most revealing. The ‘open secret’ of child abuse in the family could be such a scandal that impressive resources go into, not putting an end to it, not and never that, but rather in decoying all possible scrutiny away from the family home. Some of this goes into the schools and their annexes, which, to be fair, account for almost five percent of actual abuse, as stated. But by far the most misdirection is aimed at what is essentially a fantasy; the stranger in the panel van and his hyper-modern compatriot, the internet extortionist. But low-tech or high-tech it matters not. The race is very much on to find any kind of Other, however imaginary, who can steal away the villain’s role, for children themselves are stolen at birth.

            The source of this despicable condition lies in the sheer lack of dedicated personnel the modern family allows for itself. Non-Western extended families can also be abusive, of course, but the general stress of parenting is shared by the many, instead of by the merely two or yet one. The much-hallowed Victorian ideal of universal schooling sharing the load, replete with much violence of its own, has been the option for Western cultures. It is terribly ironic that the schools are targeted by the pro-family movements, given that humane parenting simply cannot be accomplished by two persons who are at once expected and indeed compelled to be workers first. In my work with families, I always reassured parents that they had, however cliché, the most difficult job in the world. This is not an essay in parent-hating. Even so, the reality demands that we completely redesign what the family is today, rather than shoring it up with propaganda and abetting its evil behavior. Society is violent precisely because we raise our children with violence. The future is uncertain, even for some, threatening, simply because we do not provide a certain and unthreatening space for our children to become themselves, thus preparing them to shoulder the task which is that human future, as well as being able to receive its beautiful gift.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades and for three years worked as an ethics consultant for families and teens.

The ‘Ambitextrous’

The ‘Ambitextrous’ (Overtone and Undertone)

            Multiple meanings in literature, marketing, politics and even within the interactions of the day to day and the face to face are nothing new. They allow for the creative person to explore the human imagination, the wordsmith to get a kick, or the passive aggressive personality to take a shot. Playing deliberately from both hands, however, the ambidextrous text presents to us a more calculated version of the double intent. The more so, such ambitexterity seeks not to be revealed, and this is its chief departure from the coincidence, pun or clever play on words. Here, the merely clever slides into the sly, the amicable wink into that of the leer. It is particularly evident in marketing and politics that the ambitextrous is being employed, but beyond any specific usage thereof, there underlies the very ability for it to be used in the social structure as a whole. While the essential polysemy of language in general presents an overtone – something that desires to be known and thus attempts to take the fore – ambitexterity occurs as a converse to this, as in fact an undertone.

            One of many possible examples of the former in popular culture, amicable, clever but in an inoffensive manner, a wink only rather than a wink followed hard on by a nod, occurs in album titles. One need only recall to mind The Who’s 1971 Who’s Next, wherein we ourselves acknowledge the sense of it being the band’s next release, perhaps the implication that they as a band were in line for something or other – given all of the famous deaths and breakups of the period, for instance – as well as the visual jape of the band members themselves urinating on a concrete pillar and having done their business, asking the simple question of the consumer. A decade later saw the release of Rush’ live album Exit…Stage Left, where no less than three possible senses may be taken; the band leaving the stage, the stage itself has been left by the band, and the stage as a space is what is left over after the band’s exeunt. Hundreds of other examples might be cited, but the point is self-evident: such overtones of polysemy are meant to be understood and quite consciously so.

            It is otherwise with the ambitextrous. Though its use might be regarded as value-neutral, its underhandedness in both its method and its goal sabotages any possible ethic that could have seen to be arising therefrom. Given that I had the idea of the concept through writing what I hoped was no flippant flop – an oversize narrative with which I took great literary pains to avoid being a novel; the end result was more of a failed novel rather than something radically new – I also realized that a calculated effort to move the reader into another space of meaning through the unmarked vehicle of a canonical prose form was nothing more than a deception, however sophisticated or no. This instance can serve as a cautionary device for those future readers of St. Kirsten ­- sub-titled ‘the last novel’; and here there was authentic polysemy; at the time it was to be the final novel I myself would write, or if not, it was that previous, the ‘last’ one, the one beforehand, and thirdly, it was meant to be the final novel ever written by anyone; a concerted conceit but also a well-advised critique of the novelist in general; in a word, after this point there could no longer be a novel written at all – due out sometime in 2025. In principle, the creative effort must remain as the most focused, but also the smallest, version of the ambitextrous.

            For its truer homeland is that of propaganda, and in all of its forms. As Zizek has suggested, ‘only when one comes to believe in the truth-value of propaganda can it itself taken for the truth’. The latter is not as important as the former; one has to value the very idea of being misled. Why would anyone so value such a force? Does it seek to ever provide a suitable and tolerable veil for an oft-intolerable reality? Not quite, as this is rather the function of the social form itself, and we have understood this general principle at least since Durkheim. He suggests that ‘the air is no less heavy for the fact that we do not feel its weight’. Point taken: socialization is the most successful form of ‘propaganda’, if we are uncharitable. But if we are more objective, we understand that in order for any society to function at all, its cultural apparatus must be accepted in the majority by the majority. Its symbolic forms betray their function when investigated by either the native speaker or an outsider – even if the tools to ply such a trade must be learned formally and institutionally and are not, and never, a part of any culture’s primary socialization – and thus there is no enduring mystery about their presence. Much of historical analysis rests on these same pinions, and it is thus but a short step from dissecting a society of the past to one extant in our own time.

            The ambitexterity of ‘society’ as an abstraction rests in its ability to maintain a loyal fellowship, not a sycophantic follow-ship. Society and its polis are thus not ‘political’ in the specific sense of them being geared into the desire for power. Society has a power over us because we grant that authority to it through upholding cultural norms and participating in their corresponding forms of life. Culture trumps society just as history trumps morality. We are vehicles, in daily life, of both the passive symbols of our shared culture as well as active expressions thereof. This is why adolescence itself has at least two functions; it hones the adult’s skill in ‘maintaining the right’ in the face of youthful challenge, but at the same time, youth allows adulthood to make necessary adjustments to the social order, and in a most ad hoc manner. In this way, culture cleaves to itself the fluidity it needs to survive historical changes. It needs rebellion as much as it needs revolution, and it is up to the adult to winnow the one from the other other since the very incompleteness of socialization to be found in the adolescent disallows such persons themselves to make that same distinction.

            So far, we have seen the ambitextrous as a false mimesis of polysemy, as a calculated creative effort, and as an effect of how society itself functions through its symbolic forms. None of this is particularly underhanded, but in each of the foregoing examples, the undertonal quality is, nevertheless, present. Now we are better prepared to examine the purely propagandistic effect of the ambitextrous; this is not only its authentic practice but as well its highest self-regard. If successful in hoodwinking us into imagining that our way of life, our manner of unthought, our sense of right and our suite of prejudices are not simply the best way but in fact the only way for human beings to live, then it has served its highest master. Propaganda is least effective to any of these regards when it is served directly from the State. We are generally aware that this or that politician seeks to gain power and thence maintain it. Secondarily, the status of being someone who actually makes decisions is also in play. The vast majority of us have no such power, no such authority, and this is the majority explanation of why we tend to treat our children, and especially, our adolescents, so badly. Contrary to a fashionable script, this includes almost all white heterodox males as well; no power, no authority. The stage is thus set for the ambitextrous to take firm hold.

            Its leading edge is advertising. No matter the product being shilled, it is the landscape into which this item is set that holds the truer sale. We see non-whites, recently in a super-abundance which reflects nothing of their demographic ratio at large, but what are they doing? They are adding a pigment to an otherwise utterly Bourgeois setting. We see non-whites driving cars that in reality they cannot afford, living in gracious executive homes that are purchased by an insignificant number of their peers, spouting off in a tongue foreign to their ears, and driving their faux children to distraction by their ambitious social-climbing, made to look second nature in ads whilst in reality being a desperation of anxiousness. Just so, in order to remind us that this social order being portrayed is after all white at heart, we are yet called to witness white people doing all of the same things but mustered up with a sense of panache that non-whites are yet to master. With a salacious Schadenfreude, parents curb teenage desires in killjoy compartments, while very much in the background a reliable automobile is so noted. Reliability is itself being sold, in this sense, since teens are notoriously unreliable and in every way, and it is thus an adult’s responsibility to introduce them to a general responsibility, which apparently includes never even kissing one another before one marries. Being married is thus likened to driving a reliable car; the commodity fetish in this case is not about the product at all, but rather about a sensibility.

            The ambitextrous sells what is taken for common sense, all the while actually being a sensitivity over against both change and to the human imagination. It is a fear of desire, an anxiousness over personhood. It compels obedience not to the State nor even to society, both of which have their own, self-authenticating mechanisms of symbolic persuasion, as we have seen, but rather to our own worst selves; the self that masks selfishness with both a self-absorbed consumption and an aping role-play of the martinette, the one who mimics an authority he does not actually possess. That children are the chief victims of this masquerade troubles us not at all, for our own memories of childhood which have survived at all and which are not diluted by the sentimental – the major function of the ambitextrous in advertising is to present family life as the very home and hearth of human happiness, another unutterable lie given the abuse statistics, for one – remind we ourselves of being chattel. The fascism we endured was only overcome by us converting to the fascist figurehead. We now not only live the lie of ambitexterity, we are that lie.

            In this, the ambitextrous has successfully merged propaganda with socialization. In all of the efforts of the Tyro of the State, nothing political has ever come close to the rate of success to be found in contemporary advertising. And though we can find other spaces in which the ambitextrous is present – the schools are the most obvious example – in none do we find the sheer shameless showcase of purveying sentiment in the name of mere commodity. The latter is only a bauble, a representation of a hobby or the stuff of the dilettante. It is an ongoing astonishment, for the thinking person, to weekly witness the witless wonder of a way of life based upon so contented a self-delusion.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Wider War on Personhood

The Wider War on Personhood (is a form of auto-genocide)

            “You will not forget that the stress laid on the writer’s memories of his childhood, which perhaps seems so strange, is ultimately derived from the hypothesis that imaginative creation, like day-dreaming, is a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood.” (Freud, 1957:182 [1908]).

            The last poet and the last human are one and the same. This, Freud notes at the beginning of his essay ‘The relation of the poet to daydreaming’, is what the writers try to assure the rest of us. In the writer, however, the heart of the child remains active. A child’s beloved is his playing selfhood, what an adult would call a persona. But a child is not yet a person in any holistic sense. Under a just law, she must be treated as if she were a fully cognizant person with all of the attendant rights such a legal entity possesses. But in day-to-day life, the fuller responsibilities of being and adult must be treated rather as a becoming; as something that is gradually developed and introduced, just as we adults become inured to the sense that death will at some point complete our own being. This ‘ownmost death’ is the culmination of the self as a thrown project, as a being-in-the-world, but it also represents the end of personhood and indeed, the return of a kind of persona. Each of us traverses the space between childhood, wherein the self is not easily distinguished from other selves and personae rule the child’s fantasy worlds, and dying, wherein the self experiences a diminution; in short, a regression.

            Kindred with the oft logistical dependence and loss of autonomy aging and dying promote, various aspects of our being retreat into what by then are the murkiest memories of authentic existence as dependent. This is one of the crucial differences between actuality and authenticity that a human being can know, and this kind of knowing is quite intimate, and ironically perhaps quite personal, even if it is that very person who is failing. The aged are not children, but they generally must be cared for as if they are, and are so once again. So, there is in fact a double regression at work: that occurring to the person in question as she ages, and that happening to those around her, the caregivers, family members, friends and lovers alike. This community is regressed into the much more-narrow role of parenthood, whether as a paid professional health-care worker or as an intimate. The latter ‘sign up’ for such a role more or less tacitly, taking the vow of ‘sickness and health’ either formally or informally. The former expect that their vocation, at once noble and degrading, will include such caregiving and perhaps see themselves as heroic, even though their quest is routine, even otiose. What these others share, those both intimate and professional, is the experience of the objectification of being – the self brought low by failing mechanism – and thus also the foreknowledge that they too will one day be similarly regressed. All the care for others matters not, counts for nought, in this knowing.

            If we have in the human arc a kind of faux circle, moving from the authentic pre-personhood of the child to the very much non-personhood of the dead, it is more understandable that vestiges, charades, trysts, and echoes of this existential frame resonate throughout the rest of our life, that in which we are more or less fully functioning adults with the usual suite of obligations and perhaps even some status here and there. The juvenile role-play of sexual burlesques, the desperate bullying of the authoritarian parent, the desire to repeat experiences first had in youth, which can easily become a compulsion, and the fantasy of projection even adults may indulge in – though with different avatars and icons than has the child; the thirteen-year old whose heroine is Swift may well become the thirty-year-old whose hero is Trump, for instance – all attest to the powerful force the imagination has over the worldly selfhood. Yes, the self is in, and thus is in possession of, the world as it is. But the imagination transcends this ‘isness’, and places before the willing senses another world, the world as it might be, even the world as it could be. This is the world of fantasy and projection, and that it often occurs to us as partaking of the visionary, rather than merely in the imaginary, constitutes its tantalizing hook.

            Thus regression, even if the hallmark of aging and dying, is always available to us as a kind of auto-homicide, for it involves, at least for the moment, the death of the self. But what if entire cultures engage in this kind of regression? And further, what if such a culture, as expressed in a society or in a politics, willingly compels itself to undergo mass regression? This is, we will suggest here, what is occurring, and in a global fashion, in our own day. Freud recognized the incipience of such a crisis when he comments that it is the nation-state that takes the lead in regressing adults into children; nations and their leaders treat citizens as menial, mediocre, and misbehaved. This is so, we can add, because not only does the state represent the religion of modernity, it does so by way of ancient mythological themes. The state possesses the pantheon of godhead, in its various ‘ministries’ – and why else would such departments carry this hold-over nomenclature hailing from the premodern period of pastoral care and missions? – and performs the same function, and as often as not, with the same unction, as did the religious institution. And if it is the case that only in a theocracy are women and children enslaved by violence, in our pseudo-theocratic politics, we nonetheless enslave ourselves.

            But the state is hardly the only regressive force present in modern culture. The vast popularity of fantasy fiction based upon both narrative and media targeted at children is also a case in point. We behold a regression in literacy of all forms; cultural, historical, textual, psychological. The comic-book legends, the cartoon heroes, the cardboard cut-out live action characters, mimic and mirror the manner in which we ourselves play out our oft-conflicted social roles. Can the mother and the professional co-exist in one person? Can the father and the recently marginalized male do the same? What of the dutiful daughter and Electraic lover? And speaking of such, what is our duty? To one another, to society, to the state, to culture? It does appear that any kind of authentic and autonomous selfhood could not bear any such burden. But instead of asserting all the more prodigiously, and with a truer heroic courage, that very selfhood, what we observe is a personalist retreat from personhood in imaginatively constructing new forms of gender and even divisions of the person in what the psychoanalyst would surely have called mild psychosis. It is somewhat reasonable to argue in return that the sovereign self of the Enlightenment is itself a fantasy, and thus all attempts at shoring it up, including those psychoanalytic, are in their own way, creations of the imagination alone. I would suggest in response that the purpose of such a self-conception rests in its service to that very imagination; its freedom, its creativity, its curiosity, even its nobility. Most of all, the authenticity of selfhood, in the face of forces of regression arranged against it, speaks to both myth and reality in a unique manner. It does so by bringing legend into life, fantasy into reality.

            Instead of constructing persona, foisting upon the mature self a premature regression or, for some purposeless souls, never exiting childhood at all; instead of acceding to the state or to the low-culture industry alike what is most precious about human existence by becoming only what these institutions demand of their overlapping but so seldom competing markets; instead of puerile attempts to avoid the existential narrative of happenstance birth and unknowing death, both of which occur to mine ownmost self and for my experience, to no other, rather we must resist the wider war against personhood by reasserting, if not the sovereignty – a term deliberately used in the 18th century as an antidote to the regent who, in the Ancien Regime was the only ‘person’ who existed in such a social form – then both the autonomy and the authenticity of singular selfhood, undivided by either social role performances externally or made schism by self-inflicted role-playing internally. It is a feature of successful propaganda that its audience take on the work of ideology as part of their own life-vocations. This ‘internalization’ is made possible by the simple and basic processes of child socialization. All of us are ripe, as it were, for indoctrinations anew. But the very fact that such efforts are made, and at such cost, in desire of compelling each of us to regress ourselves in the face of our ownmost humanity tells us that the default setting, if you will, of that selfsame human being is not regression but rather progression; we evolve ourselves through phases of life, we are beings who are forward-looking and future-seeking.

            Adults made children once again are easier to control politically, easier to vend to as consumers, easier to manipulate psychologically, easier to ignore. Children made adults present grave challenges to both market and state, for they understand the difference between fantasy and reality, between myth and world, between self and other. If we like to say to ourselves, ‘well, no adult wants to be treated like a mere child’, then it is high time to make that aspiration into a wider ethic, instead of paying it personal lip-service in the effort to assuage our conscience – which cannot be regressed if and once formed at all – that our personhood is not truly at risk, and it is all fun and games after all. That conscience will, over time, find it unacceptable to be masked over by a mélange of role, phantasmagorical and social at once, and the murder of selfhood will attain its own wider form in the auto-genocide of culture itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was a professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.