can this family be saved?
In their new books, Michael Lerner and Mary Pipher offer strategies to protect the American family from the assaults of commerce and modern life. But their imaginations aren't up to the challenge.
By SCOTT ROSENBERG | Illustration by Elizabeth Kairys
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way." Think about Tolstoy's celebrated opening line for "Anna Karenina" and you can't help sensing its subtle pessimism. How could any real families -- these unfathomably complex aggregations of human life and experience -- be alike? We know our families are all unique; therefore they must all be unhappy.
Now think about what might happen to Tolstoy's formula if you flung it into the melee of today's political debates. Conservatives would denounce it as a slur on the traditional family. Liberals would protest that it denies happy families their unique cultural differences. And everyone would want to know exactly what Tolstoy meant by "family," anyway.
The latest wave of left-oriented intellectuals writing about the family offers a new twist on Tolstoy's line. They're arguing that it's the unhappy American families these days that look alike: stressed by working too long hours, isolated from their relatives, strained by the disappearance of communal institutions and bombarded by bad media. In books like Michael Lerner's "The Politics of Meaning" and Mary Pipher's "The Shelter of Each Other," these writers are trying to reclaim the rhetoric of family values from Republicans and the religious right. They hold that to fix families today, we must fix the wider culture that assails them -- or at least help them resist the assault of drugs, delinquency, divorce and (most implacable of all) Disney.
They're not just opportunists applying an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy in the era of the Gingrichian Contract with America; they offer a useful and sometimes powerful critique of the hypocrisy of conservatives who denounce "selfishness and materialism" in private life while promoting it with their public policies. But when it comes to offering a specific idea for change, these thinkers lose their fire. You could call their program Tofu Family Values -- not simply to make fun of it, but to recognize that it is both undeniably healthy and undisguisably bland.
Next page: Transgressing the reality police