While affirming the essential historical veracity of the Gospel accounts and the importance of real history to which they testify, we must not in theory or in practice supplant the text with our reconstruction of the events behind it, nor should we make this reconstruction the end goal of our reading. We have no access to the events behind the text other than the testimony of the Gospels themselves, and to avidly seek such data would be to deny what we do have in the canonical, inspired Gospels: testimony to those events. To seek the behind-the-text realities is to fall back into the errors of modern historicism, which eschews testimony, distrusts witnesses, and desires to reach the supposed, original, objective truth of the matter. But this…is epistemologically and historically naive and impossible! One must finally trust testimony, or not; we can evaluate the trustworthiness of a witness, but we can never objectively get beyond the irreducibility of testimony.
Parents gain early knowledge of what gatekeeping institutions want and then refashion their family’s inner workings to present a convincing semblance of this thing. With time, through successive stages of their children’s lives, parents come to think of their family as a machine for producing this institutionally desirable thing over and over again.
Cityscape #1 (1963) by Richard Diebenkorn:
From Petworth Park (1932) by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson:
Hampstead Heath (1921) by John Lavery:
A Moorish Landscape - Evening (1914) by John Lavery:
West of Ireland Landscape (c. 1920) by Paul Henry:
The main functional benefit of modern hands-on parenting is not that it makes kids smarter but that it makes them better at sitting still and sticking with the irksome tasks that schools, colleges, and employers will assign to them throughout their lives. On one hand, we’ll be reassured that, if we’re parenting in this way, we’re giving our kids a marginally better chance at a successful life. On the other hand, we might be a little chagrined at the idea that the selection needs of college bureaucrats and the behavioral preferences of corporate managers have come to inform our parenting methods, that their priorities have somehow taken up residence in our home lives, as our priorities.
This quote seems to capture the Big Idea of Feeney’s book (at least, from what I gather so far): namely, that various mediating institutions outside the home—often billed as “voluntary”—end up having an involuntary quality to them, as families become more conformed to the demands and expectations of these institutions. (Families, particularly parents, are willing to conform themselves to these outside demands because these institutions are perceived as necessary in gaining competitive advantage for future academic and career success.) I detect more than a little Illich in Feeney’s argument. I can see why Matt Crawford so enthusiastically endorsed the book, as it overlaps with many of his concerns.
From the first queasy hints of pregnancy to the wrenching parental rite of college graduation, raising a bourgeois kid has become a total thing. There’s so much information available, so many parenting tools, so much insight and advice from kid science and brain science, from BabyCenter and Moms.com. Of course, when it’s your kid, the ability to do things that might be conducive to their future success translates into the felt obligation to do these things. In other words, the presence of all this advice, the swelling of our parental agency thanks to all this helpful knowledge, makes us parents guiltier and more anxious. To learn of possible pathways to success for your children is also to imagine new routes—should you be lazy or remiss in applying this knowledge—to failure. The crude parental logic of this is: do more. Do as much as you can, because among the many things you’re now empowered by knowing is that there are a lot of parents out there who are doing as much as they can.
Currently reading: Little Platoons by Matt Feeney 📚