Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

We tend to think, now, of the ideal family as a little hatchery for future contributors to the Social Security system, non-criminals who will enhance national productivity while lowering the cost per capita of preventable illness. We have forgotten that old American nonsense about alabaster cities, about building the stately mansions of the soul. We have lowered our hopes abysmally, for no reason obvious to me, without a murmur I have ever heard. To fulfill or to fall short of such minor aspirations as we encourage now is the selfsame misery.

For some time we seem to have been launched on a great campaign to deromanticize everything, even while we are eager to insist that more or less everything that matters is a romance, a tale we tell one another. Family is a narrative of love and comfort which corresponds to nothing in the world but which has formed behavior and expectation — fraudulently, many now argue. It is as if we no longer sat in chairs after we learned that furniture was only space and atoms. I suppose it is a new upsurge of that famous Western rationalism, old enemy of reasonableness, always so right at the time, always so shocking in retrospect.

Well, we have exorcised the ghost and kept the machine, and the machine is economics. The family as we have known it in the West in the last few generations was snatched out of the fires of economics, and we, for no reason I can see, have decided to throw it back in again. It all has to do with the relationship of time and money. When we take the most conscientious welfare mothers out of their homes and neighborhoods with our work programs, we put them in jobs that do not pay well enough to let them provide good care for their children. This seems to me neither wise nor economical. We do it out of no special malice but because we have lately reorganized society so that even the children of prosperous families often receive doubtful care and meager attention. The middle class are enforcing values they themselves now live by, as if these values would reduce the social pathologies of the poor, as if they were not in fact a great cause of the social pathologies of the middle class.

An employed American today works substantially longer hours than he or she did twenty-five years ago, when only one adult in an average household was employed and many more households had two adults. The recent absence of parents from the home has first of all to do with how much time people spend at work. Some of them are ambitious businesspeople or professionals, but many more patch together a living out of two or three part-time jobs, or work overtime as an employer’s hedge against new hiring. Statistically the long hours simply indicate an unfavorable change in the circumstances of those who work. If an average household today produces more than twice as much labor in hours as an average household did twenty-five years ago, and receives only a fraction more in real income, then obviously the value of labor has fallen — even while the productivity of labor in the same period has risen sharply. So, male and female, we sell ourselves cheap, with the result that work can demand always more of our time, and our families can claim always less of it.

This is clearly a radical transformation of the culture, which has come about without anyone’s advocating it, without consensus, without any identifiable constituency. It would be usual to imagine a conspiracy of some sort. That is a good enough reason to do otherwise. Our usual approaches have by now an impressive history of fruitlessness, as we would notice if we were at all a reflective people.

Conspiracy theories are childish and comforting, assuming as they do that there are smart people somewhere who are highly efficient at putting their intentions into effect, when history and experience combine to assure us that nothing could be more unlikely. We long imagined that the great corporations contrived against our good, but if any institution has been as staggered as the family in the last twenty-five years, it is surely the great corporation. Workers who are well paid and secure are good consumers, and in the new economy there are always fewer people who suit that description. The faltering of the economy has always been interpreted as a problem of “competitiveness” with other countries, and this notion has accelerated the cheapening of labor and the reduction of the labor force in traditional industries. That is, it has accelerated the increase of insecurity among those who work. Surely it is a tribute to the vast power of the economy that it has weathered this nonsense as well as it has.

This whole notion of competitiveness was pitched by many of its exponents as a “war” we must “win,” which could surely mean nothing else than the crippling of those same foreign markets upon which our future prosperity supposedly depends. If we force wages down in competitor countries, or if we weaken their industries and lower the value of their currencies, they will simply be less able to buy from us no matter how lean we are, or how mean we are. One could say public opinion has been cynically manipulated with this talk of “challenge” and “war,” but I think we should face the harder fact that a public silly enough to be persuaded by such arguments would very likely produce a class of experts silly enough to propose them in good faith.

The family as we know it in the modern West has been largely willed and reformed into existence. European culture was long distinguished by the thoroughness with which it coerced labor out of its population — slavery and industrialization, contemporary phenomena equally indifferent to such inconveniences as considerations of family, were natural extensions of feudalism, only more ambitious and ingenious in their exactions. The case has been made that childhood was invented, which it was, at least in the sense that certain societies began to feel that young children should be excluded from the workforce, and women with them, to some extent at least.

Working conditions in trades and factories were brutal into the present century. We tend to forget that women of working age were often pregnant or nursing and often obliged to leave infants and small children untended. Sometimes they gave birth on the factory floor.

Children of working age, that is, as young as five, were spared no hardship. The British documented these horrors quite meticulously for generations, and one may read all anyone could care to read about the coffles of children driven weeping through morning darkness to the factories; children lying down to sleep in the roads because they were too exhausted to walk home at night; children dismembered by machines they were obliged to repair while the machines ran; children in factory dormitories sleeping by hundreds, turn and turn about, in beds that were never empty until some epidemic swept through and emptied them, and brought hundreds of new children, orphans or so-called child paupers, to work away their brief lives. There is nothing to wonder at, that the ideal of mother and children at home, and father adequately paid to keep them from need, was a thing warmly desired, and that for generations social reform was intended to secure this object.

By comparison with Britain, America was late in industrializing, and its agricultural economy was based on widely distributed ownership of land. Nevertheless the societies were similar enough to be attentive to each other’s reform movements. The decisive innovation was the idea that one wage earner should be able to support a wife and a few children, rather than that every employable person in a household should support himself or herself and some fraction of a baby or two. The idea of the “living wage” became much more important in America, where labor was usually in demand and therefore able to command a higher price and to set other limits and conditions governing employers’ access to it. Where labor is cheap, the market is flooded with it, assuring that it will remain cheap. Other goods will, over time, be withheld if they do not command a reasonable price, but the cheaper labor is, the less it will be withheld, because people have to live, and to hedge against the falling wages and unemployment which are always characteristic of a glutted labor market. These phenomena have been observed and analyzed since the seventeenth century. Now they are recrudescent like other old maladies we thought we had eliminated.