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 📚
Finished reading: The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari 📚
I expected a more direct treatment of tradition, whereas Ahmari’s book is really a collection of vignettes from significant figures (e.g., C. S. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Howard Thurman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) that are used to answer the title question of each chapter. (And which, I suppose, when taken together offer a cumulative case for “the wisdom of tradition.") Even so, it was a page-turner. Ahmari’s storytelling ability is impressive.
I’m calling for a moratorium on book subtitles of this ilk: “[Discovering/pursuing/seeking/etc.] ________ in an age of ______.”
Writers and publishers have fallen into a rut with this one. It’s so easy, but don’t reach for it. Resist the urge. Say it a different way. You can do it. I believe in you.
View of Dresden by Moonlight (1839) by J. C. Dahl:
Frederiksborg Castle (1814) by J. C. Dahl:
Currently reading: Reading the Gospels Wisely by Jonathan T. Pennington 📚
The Met is running an exhibition entitled Africa & Byzantium, highlighting the often-overlooked artistic and cultural contributions of Africa to the (for most of us, more familiar) Byzantine world.
