If you’re looking for something interesting, smart and short (and free!) to read, consider George Scialabba’s Divided Mind, a 60-page collection of some of his best essays that he’s conveniently posted on his website for readers to download (for free!). In particular, read “‘A Whole World of Heroes’: Christopher Lasch on Democracy,” which is the longest and best essay in the collection.
Scialabba’s an interesting creature. “The son of working-class Italian-American parents, he was once a member of the ascetic and conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei,” as Scott McLemee explains in his profile of him at InsideHigherEd.com. He went to Harvard, worked as a substitute teacher and a Welfare Department social worker, and then got a modest-paying but affably undemanding gig as a building manager at Harvard, which gave him the time to embark on a self-directed, decades-long study of the greatest writers and thinkers of the western world. The result is that he’s now one of the most profound and lucid moral-political-cultural-literary critics we have, not to mention someone who truly seems more interested in writing well and being read than in fame and fortune (did I mention that his book is free to download).
His essay on Lasch, who’s obviously one of his prime influences, and whose statement of critical orientation—“Marxism and psychoanalysis still offer the best guides to an understanding of modern society and to political action designed to make it more democratic”—could almost serve as Scialabba’s own, is great for a number of reasons. But for our masculinist purposes, I want to draw attention to this passage, in which he describes Lasch’s modified Freudian account of how a healthy self is developed in children.
And finally, there is everyday contact with the father, whom infants of both sexes formerly envied, hated, and feared because of his superior access to the nurturing mother. When the child is part of the father’s work environment, it observes two things: first, that he is fallible; and second, that he possesses important and satisyfing skills, which he is able and willing to pass on to the child, thus earning its gratitude. Both insights help reduce him to human size in the child’s psyche.
This is what I was trying to get at, a few weeks ago, when I wrote about "the task of being a father and the challenge of living in the world responsibly," and when I criticized another blogger for his list of exceedingly noble values he wanted to pass on to his son. The job of the father, I was trying to say, isn’t just to offer his kids a model of how to be right and good, but also to offer an example of how to be wrong and bad, and to allow his children to compare the concrete experience of their fallible father to the abstract ideals which he espouses. Acknowledging and confronting that disparity, then, transforms hypocrisy into dialectic.
The job of the father–and of the mother too, but I’m not going to be a mother–is to model and offer a kind of love and self-love that doesn’t depend on perfection and that incorporates both expectation and forgiveness, both the ways that we’re strong and the ways that we’re weak. As I wrote:
The task of the Twenty-First-Century Dad … isn’t just to teach his kids that war is ugly. It’s also to teach his kids that the instinct to compete, and to conquer, and to do violence to those who seem threatening, is part of what it means to be human, and that there’s probably no way, at least without the benefit of some serious psychopharmacology or yet-to-be devised genetic engineering, that they’re going to be without such instincts. … I’ll protect my daughter from a lot of the darker things that go on inside my mind and the minds of the people in her world, but I won’t protect her from all of it. I won’t even protect her from herself all the time.
In a comment to that post, Sheila suggested that I was letting myself off easy, that I was rationalizing my desire to avoid the hard work of raising politically conscious children–hard work that includes, I’m guessing, a certain amount of self-denial when it comes to consuming or replicating thought patterns, cultural products, and traditional ideas that are sexist, misogynistic, racist, classist, etc. I don’t want, in other words, to deny myself or my children the pleasure of movies like Revenge of the Nerds just because they happen to be ideologically gross.
And no doubt Sheila’s right. In most ways it’s easier to live a conventional life than it is to live a radically good life, and I don’t think I have it in me to be the radical. I stand by, however, my contention that there can be something dangerous and self-defeating in raising your children in a way that propagates, even with the best of leftist intentions, what Scialabba (channeling Lasch channeling Freud) calls "the fantasy of a return to oneness and omnipotence," which leads, in Lasch’s formulation, to narcissism, which he believes is the defining neurosis of our era. So I’m going to try not to do that.
