The Delicate Parent-Child Relationship

I said I would discuss headscarved girls in a forthcoming post; once I can remember what on Earth I might have been out to say, I will get round to it.

Greetings, dear readers. I apologise for my habitual flakiness and my prolonged absences, but the Real World does call me forth for most of the week, so unfortunately my blog doesn't always get the love it needs. The upshot of all this is that y'all don't have to hear me bitching about work and career quite so much any more. I have decided to yield to nature and am hoping to become either an academic or a teacher. If I become an academic, I'll consider becoming a lecturer too.

I must just briefly highlight a blog post which has inspired this very post. It occurred to me that after 'the death of God,' many have been looking to replace (or perhaps, supplement) the notion of a Supreme Being by falling back onto other models. I will venture to say that this has happened more so in the Western world than in Africa or Asia or the Middle East. However, I am not making any judgements there. I am not trying to cheerlead for any part of the world.

The reason I stipulate this is because I am wary of falling into the trap of sounding like my father. 'Oh, the West had its advantages and it progressed, but now look at it, it's all coming to nothing, people want things to be how they were in the good old days.' Trans: They done gone and lost their values! Followed by: 'India is becoming a superpower, China is becoming a superpower, America is going to stop being so powerful. Just like when the British Empire came to an end - nothing lasts forever!' Add 'It's India's turn now!' to finish. The common sense and logic in this, which I agree with - that nothing lasts forever - gets unfortunately drowned in patriotism, a hint of racism and some good ol' conservatism. The West thought it knew best, but WE have values because we're still religious and we have shame, and so soon we'll make up for all those years of Whitey's rule!

That kind of thing makes me uncomfortable for so many reasons, which should be fairly apparent to anyone who's read me more than twice. Life is NOT simple, and the sooner the people of the world get that, the better. I'm aware I sound patronising, but I really could give less of a fuck. The older we get, the lazier we get, wishing to regress back to the times when our lives broke down into simply-moralistic narratives of 'good' and 'bad'. We often conveniently forget that even in childhood, we were being fed those narratives. Children are not 'little angels,' they can be perfectly cruel and thoughtless. That's because we human beings are flawed and complex (I would dare to say, thankfully so).

So on to challenge one of society's last-remaining bastions of respectability. I am a believer in D.H Lawrence, as I believe I might already have said, in the notion of challenging ideals. Ideals and institutions can be instructive in the sense of offering an 'Average' - a yardstick to measure conditions of material need by - Lawrence argues, but we must remember that the Average is just that - a fiction created to assess need. When this Average is taken to be representative of real people, we have a problem, because everybody is different and their individuality needs to be accepted. Lawrence doesn't think we need to celebrate or explain it in any way - just accept the fact of our 'otherness' to everybody outside of ourselves.

Now, I find that eminently sensible. The problem is that Lawrence was startlingly visionary, because the Average DID come to be seen as representative of more than just material need. We (humanity), began to take the beast known as Aspiration further and further. Aspiration is not essentially bad when it comes from within. However, with the 'Average' - it came from without and that was just the problem. It has been happening since before Lawrence realised it. When people talk about our 'broken society,' and cite any number of bullshit reasons, I just want to laugh in their face and tell them to read 'Democracy.'

A lot of all our problems - and this is the whole world over - come from this very tendency to hold ourselves up to others and judge unfavourably; to see what they have and think to ourselves: 'the grass is greener' or 'Must do better.' Nobody's immune, and it covers all areas of life! It's been used to keep people in check for years, from any number of religious texts to 19th-century America to the modern day.

So, I am going to make a daring proposition. If we're always judging people anyway (and come off it, we all bloody well are all the time), then why do we stop at the family? Why do we have such a reluctance to enter into that arena? 'It's a question of people's private lives,' you cry. 'We can't tell them what to do with their children.'

Errr... yes, we can. Groups of people have been (tacitly or otherwise) trying to control or influence the actions of others for absolutely forever. So let's stop with the hypocrisy, shall we? I am going to suggest here that the sort of people involved in Puritan Neighbourhood Watch (another delightful feature of 19th-C America where you could report your (married) neighbours for having had sex) are generally the sort of people who gravitate towards religion. The sort of people who need a Supreme Being, aka a giant authority figure, to complete them in some way.

(Not that all religious people are crazy or bad, mind).

For these religious people, the irony is not apparent. I'm speaking of the irony of the omnscience of God. God really is everywhere for them - because they put God everywhere. They attempt to give a sacred veneer to many parts of human life, causing a great amount of damage in the process. It is terrifying because these people with their conservatism, become God. They exercise the Supreme Will of the mob mentality, and then it almost doesn't matter what God might think of things because they have sat in judgement and delivered their verdict. 'God' might as well be the name they give to their ego, because they are busy assigning sacredness and profanity right, left and centre.

Talk about missing the point. It makes me laugh, but the way I see it: that's religion for you! I'll explain myself a bit more. In an increasingly cynical modern world, conservatives and the religious (I might as well change that to 'religious conservatives,' mightn't I?) have created a series of 'lesser gods' to which they lend the tint of holiness in a bid to stave off the ugly reality of change and progress. DO NOT BLASPHEME, or you will repent.

One of these 'lesser gods' is parenthood. There have thankfully been some writers such as Lionel Shriver who have attempted to humanise parenthood to some degree by revealing that it's not all unconditional love all the way and that parents ARE people too, you know, prone to resentment and frustration. However, much of the religious brigade HATE that kind of thing. My own parents told me that 'Your parents are a form of God'. Errr... no, thanks.

Why can we not admit this reluctance to accept that families are, after all, composed of human beings? I don't buy all that 'there has to be a mother and a father' crap either. Generally if the child has a male or female role model of some sort to help them through adolescence and plenty of love and support, why should there be a problem? It is reluctance to accuse families of being in the wrong that leads to situations such as that of the 'British Josef Fritzl' (the article I link to is highly recommended, particularly the last section of it, which probably partly inspired this). The family, and especially the nuclear family, is not 'untouchable,' the more this is clung to, the less people want to intervene when such things happen, because it makes the ugly truth resurface before us.

In seven out ten instances of rape, for example, it's committed by someone you know. Apparently, it came out in 2005 that it's most likely to be someone you know stealing your identity. Yet again, the narrative doesn't split easily into 'us' (family) and 'them' (rest of the world). Even if crimes aren't committed, your family can still emotionally abuse you, control you and mar your confidence for life. Trying to speak up about that and gain some perspective can be even more difficult, in fact, if your family were bad to you but not in a easily-stereotypable pantomime-villain way. Think about how bad it must be for women who suddenly become 'honour'-killing victims or get forced into marriage as a result of this last taboo, that of speaking against your family.

'Don't go telling your friends about what happens in the family,' my parents used to say to me every now and again. I think now that somewhere subconsciously, they had acknowledged that they weren't behaving in a totally acceptable way, and hence the guilt made them try to keep me in check, even when I wasn't telling anybody.

Despicable situations such as incest, abuse and domestic violence occur because we want to persist in keeping an aura of respectability about the families. Nothing else is left! the likes of the Mail-deluge cry. Nothing is sacred any more!

Quite right, and as I've said before, why should it be? Until we can come up with absolute, conclusive proof of God, the only thing that we can be sure of is that the ludicrous ideal standards being applied are our own - i.e. human. Even if they don't begin as our own, they become so in time!

It is your so-called loved ones who can hurt and manipulate you worse than anyone else, and that is why the familiar becoming unfamiliar (Das Unheimliche) continues to haunt us even though Freud has been and gone. Look at Fritzl and his 'British equivalent', look at Baby P, you morons, and get some perspective. I especially loved the nebula of hypocrisy surrounding the latter, where the social workers were essentially blamed for the parents' negligence while no-one mentioned that the sort of 'AARGH, NANNY-STATE POKING ITS NOSE INTO ALL OUR LIVES' screech was probably partly responsible for the social workers not intervening sooner. Oh wait, a dude on the Telegraph did (shock shock, horror horror, shock shock horror!) as did Liberal Conspiracy (unsurprisingly).

(See? The Telegraph talking sense. The world ain't simple fo' sho).

Speaking of fear, rearrange the second and third letters of 'sacred' as I often do in error, and there you have a diagnosis of carping Mail/Sun/Express-types worthy of a Freudian slip :-D. 'Scared' is all they ultimately are, like pathetic children in the grown bodies of adults. Children trying to play at paternalism, wresting the freedom of others away in their chubby snatching at authority! Freud would have had a field day, especially with the likes of Comstock (whom I can imagine hitting it off with Paul Dacre). I would say give them a slap and send them home crying, but they'd probably find a way to blame 'ZaNuLab' for this not happening... ;-D

(Il me semble que j'aie trouvé un mari futur! Scary or wot?!).

To quote the man MF Grimm: 'I love you all, till we meet again / My weapon is the pen / Same agenda, no snakes alive in the end'. (I don't take myself that seriously, but his anger is eloquently, elegantly infectious).