This piece will be appearing this weekend as a newspaper op/ed in my very red congressional district (VA-06). This piece, like most of my weekly op/eds, is intended to challenge the conservative majority of the area with the purpose of bringing them back toward political sanity, so that their political role in the nation will be guided more by “the better angels of their nature.” Whether these efforts of mine have any of those intended effects or not, I cannot say, but I feel it imperative to do what I can.
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How can valuable ways of living be passed from generation to generation?
That question – which faces every family -- is one of the themes in the first book of the Bible – Genesis– as interpreted in an extraordinary book, The Beginning of Wisdom, by Leon Kass.
The basic truth that we humans are mortal – and that, therefore, what is of value, if it is to endure, has to be transmitted through generations -- provides the foundation for the compelling case that Kass makes: namely that an important part of the remarkable narrative of the Bible’s first book is the story of the construction of an intergenerational channel to perpetuate a new a more righteous way of life.
That new, more righteous way begins with what is imparted to Noah, and gets carried forward through the line of one of Noah’s sons. Later, an addition to that new way is established with Abraham, who comes (at long last) to have a son (Isaac) to carry that “covenant” forward.
It is not only those Biblical patriarchs, of course, but all parents who confront the challenge of how to convey to the next generation whatever is deemed valuable for them to learn about how to live -- how to act, how to think, how to feel, to what to give allegiance.
Family culture -- in its many dimensions -- has long fascinated me. At one level, things like:
- what one neighbor told me-- that for generations, every man in his family has built his own house; and
- how the great achievement of the composer J.S. Bach was made possible by his growing up in a family steeped for generations in the making of music.
And at a deeper level, a family’s fundamental values.
Though we tend to absorb from our parents how to be a human being, the transmission of family culture can break down.
I first became intrigued by strong divergences within families in 2005, when I was teaching an adult education class. The political polarization in the nation was by then already becoming intense, and it arose in discussion that some members of the class were dealing with how, in their politics, different members of their families were taking starkly different paths.
Riven by intense disagreements, some families were fighting, some were avoiding areas of dispute, some were cutting off contact altogether.
I wondered: How does that divergence happen? I asked those who were their families’ “black sheep,” “How do you account for your seeing things so differently from your siblings and parents?” And I asked those who had siblings whose political worldview was completely at odds with the family culture, “How did their breakaway happen?”
Even after years of inquiring about siblings taking radically different paths in our polarized political times, this hit-and-miss quality to the transmission of family culture remains for me an intriguing mystery.
(Nonetheless, the reader of Genesis ought not be surprised by that unreliable transmission: Adam had his Cain as well as his Seth, Noah had his Ham as well as his Shem, and it was to Isaac and not to Ishmael that Abraham passed the covenant that would constitute the heritage of his descendants.)
The whole idea of “transmitting what is of value from generation to generation” is a profoundly conservative idea. Indeed, that is the heart of conservatism: the idea that the achievement of previous generations – creating the cultural structures to make their world and lives work well -- is to be respected and preserved.
Which is why what we’ve lately witnessed is so shocking.
Family cultures are, of course, embedded in – and expressions of – larger communities (from subcultures to whole societies to still-wider civilizational systems).
And American conservatism– over the generations going back to our founding – has been wedded to certain long-established values, such as:
- patriotism,
- the Constitutional order and the rule of law, and
- the ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Over centuries, among American conservatives, those values have been handed down from generation to generation.
And that’s why it is so shocking, how the present generation of American conservatism presents a most extraordinary “case of the failed transmission.” The mystery of that case:
- How have the majority of the recipients of that conservative heritage been moved to align with a political force that assaults the values at the heart of what previous generations had sought to hand down to them?
- What has happened in this generation to overpower the long-established covenant handed down to them by their forebears?
In the historical perspective, this generation of American conservatives is a most dramatic “black sheep.” Or, to change the metaphor – due to some strange force of gravity operating in the political dimension of this generation’s consciousness – it is an apple that rolled far downhill away from the tree of their conservative heritage.