The ultimate purpose of virtue is to make us capable of friendship, of sacrificing our own good for the good of another, thus nurturing that mutual happiness and trust with another self.
We know good families, totally devoted to their children, who’ve been blind-sided by woke “identity politics,” confusing and hijacking their kids. In three cases, kids were adopted and “mixed race;” and despite being home-schooled, normal adolescent resentments were fueled by the reverse-racist “air we breathe.” But more commonly, kids who’ve been shielded from woke culture encounter gender ideology at the local library, public “science” exhibit, or supposedly “safe” summer camp. They come home with questions parents find hard to answer.
If we aren’t prepared for it, answering the “identity” ideology is like facing the old question, have you stopped beating your wife? Our first impulse is to lean on our parental authority (“trust me”), but the whole woke program means to undercut any authority. Identity politics says that all authority is the suppression, oppression, and repression of “who I really am,” or “what I really want.” And what kids don’t know what they really want?
What we need to know and teach our kids, is that the whole woke identity ideology is a massive lie about human happiness and its need for real friendship. Identity politics—demanding to be affirmed in whatever I imagine my real identity—is the deadly enemy of real friendship. This is easily seen in its miserable victims. After all, if they really could invent their own identities, why would they need anyone else’s affirmation? That very need proves that woke identity victims really need love, and they’re looking for it in all the wrong places.
There’s further reason why we need to arm our kids against woke, before they encounter it. Faced with a hostile, inhumane culture, we may try to wall them into a family stockade, hoping they’ll be sufficiently formed before they leave. Or we may just launch them into the world, in the vague hope that we can address any insanity as it arises (assuming they tell us about it). But our kids will inevitably befriend other, troubled kids, and they’ll inevitably (and should) love them and want to affirm them. So the real virtue here, “the mean between two extremes,” is raising our kids as culture warriors, who understand the popular insanity, and have compassion for their victimized friends. Only young culture warriors are really safe from the culture.
So, how can we teach our kids the nature of real friendship, before they face its enemy? The imaginary notion of identity is a corruption of the real human person. Identity is supposedly something totally unique, discovered or invented deep inside ourselves. Yet, when kids begin looking inside, what they find (naturally) is a fur ball of adolescent longings and anxieties, dreams and discontents—all the random vomit of their natural hunger for love.
In reality, each of us is indeed a unique human person. We’re seeded within a unique family, with unique temperaments and talents, and uniquely watered with the love and encouragement we need from parents, siblings, grandparents: all the friends closest to us. Our person (as we’ll see) is actually the sum of our friendships (in a broad sense). So, sixty years ago, if you’d asked anyone about their identity, they’d have said: I’m the child or grandchild of so-and-so, living in that neighborhood, a member of such-and-such church, and a resident of that city. Our real identity is the concentric circles of all our friendships, and the meaning in our life is all our shared, life-giving purposes. In contrast, today’s radical identity politics is an epidemic of attachment disorder, fueled by widespread infant daycare and latch-key homes, and ignited by radical ideologues, profiting from their activism and snake-oil therapies.
Now, there’s obviously a lot packed into this diagnosis, so we need to step back and sketch the nature of personhood, or the “consciousness” of the human soul.
The Nurture of Persons
The study of infant development is a recent effort. Prior to antibiotics, so many babies died post-partum, it was easier to ignore them until they grew into “little adults.” Over the last sixty years, though, neurology and developmental psychology have proven that babies are essentially social beings, demanding love to develop into mature adulthood. Tragically, this discovery was instantly obscured by consumer marketing and political propaganda. Their contrary message has been “self-ism”—“I must be good for me first, then I’ll be good for others.” Self-ism insists that babies are “resilient,” so they can be grown like chickens in a factory farm. This not only gets babies horribly wrong, but gets human happiness 180-degrees backwards. True happiness lies in loving service, willing the good of others.
Our current “identity” epidemic validates the warnings of babyhood’s early prophets. One such was La Leche League founder and pediatrician Dr. Herbert W. Ratner, editor of Child and Family Quarterly. “Because love holds together the delicate membranes of human society and is the basis of our relationship with God, the chief need of the child is to experience love,” Ratner says. “For this task, nature selected the mother. As a female, her capacity to care for the newborn is unique.” Yet the culture began condemning motherhood, even as science began discovering it.
Human souls are designed for reasoned speech, so we naturally enter the world incomplete, neurologically under-developed. Like Kanga’s Roo, we complete our gestation outside the womb in the maternal embrace, what Ratner calls “a womb with a view,” since we must first learn the local language, with all the subliminal communications, common purposes, and distinctive poetry of our native culture. In Mommy’s cradling arms, soothed by her scent and already familiar voice, we newborns are neurologically hard-wired to fix our gaze on Mommy’s Smiling Face. In a nursing duo, our baby eyes have a focal range of a single foot, the distance from her breast to her face, and her high-pitched voice is designed to be heard by our tiny ears.
Mommy constantly flatters us, so over those first formative weeks (processing enough sensory data to shame a computer), we learn neurologically to distinguish speech-sounds from noise-sounds. Sounds from the Smiling Face are speech, and ambient sounds are mere noise. As a result, in later life, we can understand quiet conversations in heavy traffic. And, perhaps to the annoyance of progressive parents: no, television cannot substitute.
“When the Psalmist pleads to God to ‘turn His Shining Face upon me,” Ratner suggests, “he echoes the acceptance the nursling seeks from its mother, its source of security.” Baby and Mommy both wonder at each other, like parallel mirrors, infinitely reflecting each other. And wonder, says Aristotle, is the beginning of wisdom. In babyhood’s earliest beginning, the mutual wonder is not the philosophic question, “Why is there something?” but rather the fact, “That is there someone.” That Smiling Face—our first friendship—draws each of us into the world, entices us into the universe, conscious of ourselves as selves in our relationship to another self, and then other selves.
“The infant’s inability to communicate verbally and conceptually bespeaks the woman’s ability to communicate in a modality of ‘feeling’,” Ratner elaborates, “knowing and loving through the intuitive, poetic, experiential, and affective. These non-conceptual modes of communicating result in a preternatural form of knowledge… a predominantly spiritual, sensorial gestalt.” The nursing duo’s mutual security and delight embeds in each of us a bedrock faith that Life is Good, codified in the original Christian principle, “To be and to be good mean the same.” Mommy’s delight with us prepares us for confident lives of reasoned speech, free agency, and gratitude for life.
Learning from Pathology
At this point, parents may ask, what does this have to do with protecting kids against identity ideology and a false idea of happiness? When babies or infants are denied that necessary love, drawing them confidently into the world, their development as reasonable and free persons goes badly. At one horrifying extreme, after the fall of communism, hundreds of Romanian orphans were abandoned in warehouse care facilities. There were only enough caregivers to shove bottles of formula into their mouths. Deprived of a cooing Smiling Face, they grew into childhood with their brains’ speech centers permanently crippled. Trapped in their animal reflexes—an imaginable state, totally isolated from others—the tragedy was softened only by the fact that they couldn’t know they’d been robbed of “the world out here.”
Today, the West is suffering a similar—though less physiological—crippling of kids’ ability to form friendships, given the spread of daycares and latchkey homes. Before the 20th century, says attachment researcher Adam Lane Smith (Slaying Your Fear), children were nurtured in families chockfull of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—maybe two dozen other adults, helping Mommy focus on Baby, so attachment disorders were almost unknown. Post-war, though, only 65 percent of Boomers could easily form healthy friendships, versus 35 percent with issues. Today, among Gen-Z, only 35 percent can form stable relationships, while 65 percent suffer some degree of attachment disorder. No surprise, a third of college students are being drugged for depression or anxiety. The drugs may mute the symptoms of these youth, but the other two-thirds, undrugged, form the cohort of hysterical “identity” victims, cannon-fodder for activists. Smith concludes, “Daycare’s been devastating, one of the worst things we’ve ever done to children.”
Psychologist Erica Komisar (Being There), thoroughly hated by militant feminists, insists that babies need the full-time attention of their moms for at least their first three years. Babies are incapable physiologically of regulating their own stress levels, so they depend on their moms to act as their “central nervous systems,” conveying security, care and personal worth through their hormonal smell, tone of voice, and embrace. Maternal calm teaches babies to moderate their own emotions. Their emotional attunement teaches intimacy, emotional communication, and social cues. Attachment security teaches trusting cooperation and agency for later in life. And at the bottom line, in order to become friends to other friends. kids must learn to moderate their desires, fears, and competition.
What Are Friendship and Happiness?
So again, what does this have to do with teaching our kids about friendship and the culture war? Friendship, says Aristotle, is the mutual goodwill between persons, sharing some good. That shared good can be mutual usefulness (like business partners), mutual enjoyment (like teammates), or mutual admiration of their virtue (like honest citizens or church members). Clearly, there’s lots of overlap, since businessmen might “take a hit” for each other, without expecting payback, or sports fans might admire another’s command of statistics (if remembering sports stats is a virtue). But the most important reality, Aristotle suggests, is this mutual awareness. Two folks might have good will toward each other at a distance, even doing good for each other, but not know it’s mutual. We’re not really friends, unless we’re mutually aware of our mutual good will.
Aristotle focuses on this issue of mutual awareness, when he asks the (strange) question, why would a good man need friends? A truly virtuous person least needs the help of others, most enjoys his own activity, and is most self-sufficient. Yet, for humans (unlike animals), “our life is primarily our awareness of our feeling and thinking.” And it’s easier, he says, to contemplate the goodness of our friends, rather than ourselves, Friends are the greatest good, he concludes, because “life is something good in itself,” and “a friend is another self.” So human happiness is the mutual awareness with our friends of the goodness of our shared lives.
We should be hearing echoes here of Mommy-and-Baby as two parallel mirrors of delighted wonder at each other’s existence—wonder that life is good. And we should now grasp the catastrophe of our society’s “identity” hunger and attachment disorders. Most of these kids believe themselves unloved. Some indeed are unloved, incapable of moderating their emotions, and robbed of any sense of the goodness of their own lives. They’re seeking a label to pin on themselves, as some claim to personal worth. They need real friendship, but their crippled capacity for attachment is seen in the horrifying facts that suicide is becoming the main cause of death of young men, and young women are suffering a plague of “cutting.”
Getting Practical in Teaching Our Kids
Obviously, our kids can’t master the intricacies of developmental psychology, so what must we teach them, first in their own formation, and then about the crippled kids in our neighborhood?
The almost unspoken issue in virtue education is the final purpose of all its isolated habits. We speak of courage, self-control, fairness, and generosity as good in themselves, and they are. And it’s self-evident to kids that it’s better to be brave than cowardly. But what about self-control, versus gluttony? Fairness versus greed? Sacrificial habits don’t seem so obviously good for “me, myself, and I.” Yet the ultimate purpose of virtue is to make us capable of friendship, of sacrificing our own good for the good of another, thus nurturing that mutual happiness and trust with another self. So, not surprisingly, classic children’s literature normally has its protagonists wrestling with their own passions, for the sake of staying true to their “kindred spirits.”
Anne in Anne of Green Gables must wrestle with her own competitiveness, to grow a friendship with her friend, Gilbert. Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, must repent of the fact that he betrayed his siblings and Narnia friends in his greed for Turkish Delight. The entire Lord of the Rings is one long contest between its heroes’ friendships and their own terror, fatigue and ambition—a contest that Boromir loses.
(In contrast, “progressive” books like Judy Blume’s Forever portray kids as wounded, neglected and totally needy, so always seeking other’s to rescue them and satisfy their needs.)
How can we express the difference? The healthy judgement, If I were better, the world would be happier, must be contrasted with the resentful, If the world were better, I would be happier. The first is an appeal to gratitude, agency and responsibility, while the second fuels discontent, victimhood and resentment.
Friendship is so much the pond where we swim, we must make a deliberate effort to flag it for our kids. And we need to stress repeatedly how easy it can be, to wound another’s trust, and how important is learning to apologize. So, whether we’re reading The Secret Garden, Winged Watchman, Johnny Tremaine, or even Artemis Fowl, we should constantly emphasize that real friendship—and its sacrifices—is the greatest human good (natural and supernatural?).
How can we prepare our kids as culture warriors an inhumane culture? We must help them see that these demanding, hysterical, and needy kids are really the victims of parental neglect and diseased imaginations. So, within the limits of their own safety, our kids might reach out in goodwill, but only if armed with the conviction that “affirming” another’s lunacy can only hurt them. We should encourage compassionate supper-table conversation about other kids’ unhappiness. And let’s remember, our kids will have their own inevitable resentments and discontents, and sometimes these can be more easily discussed, using the examples of others.
However threatening the world, however tempting a stockade, we must model compassion.
Soon, our kids will head out into the world and befriend more-or-less crippled companions. We don’t want them to think they have to choose between their damaged friends and us. We must exude confidence that the current mischief is reaching its demonic extreme, where evil destroys itself. Life is good— good in fact—and those who think otherwise, whether malicious or despairing, can’t endure. When our kids are ready for the world, confident in life’s goodness, they’ll be in a position to rescue at least some of the despairing with their gratitude.
This essay first appeared at the Canadian Centre for Home Education.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is a photograph, “Two Men” (between circa 1845 and circa 1855), taken by Moses B. Russell, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.