Standing Athwart History

I've been married for nigh-on six years.  Each morning, Sarah and I get out of bed fairly early.  We weave around each other, more-or-less seamlessly sharing our one bathroom as we clean and groom ourselves for the coming day. I walk the dog, then fix our lunches and kiss her goodbye. We come home from work in the late afternoon or early evening.  When we get home, we fix dinner; usually we do this together, but sometimes one of us does it alone and simply serves it to the other.  We eat together at the table.  After dinner we clean the table and the kitchen.  Then we retire, together, to the living room, where we sit by the fire and work/read/watch TV/surf/whatever.  I drink a glass of port or a dram of Scotch. (Strictly for medicinal purposes, of course.) We pet and play with our dog. Then we go to bed fairly early, because we've got to get up early the next day and start it all over again.

The point of this story is that we are, at this point in our lives, exceedingly ordinary people.  (I don't mean that in a bad way; I believe that even the most "ordinary" people are actually extraordinary in all kinds of ways. But, that, as they say, is another story.) We've turned out to be exactly the sort of people we always knew we would be.  More importantly, we've become the people we always knew we ought to be: responsible, productive adults, wildly in love with each other and working very hard to create the kind of home we know our daughter is going to need.

And yet I was struck, the other day, by a very unsettling thought.  I was, at the time, sitting by the fire and sipping a really excellent port.  I was also reading a novel, Snow Crash , in which a set of characters was described as being "in search of the America they always thought they'd grow up in."  That phrase hit me like a falling safe.  Suddenly, I was struck by how very close to anachronistic my position was.  Who drinks port after dinner anymore? Who heats their home with a wood fire?  Who reads novels from hardcopy?  And, most importantly, who has a wife and a child and dog and vows to hold onto them all until Death himself rips them away?

Well, there may be lots of people who still do those things. But the numbers are falling quickly.  I read the other day that the majority of households in the United States are not centered on married couples. The number of people living without a partner or with a partner (or partners) to whom they are not married now exceeds the number of people living with an actual husband or wife. This is a truly shocking development.  It reflects, to my mind, a large-scale rejection of the idea that there is such a thing as "the people we ought to be".  In place of this idea is a revolting narcissism that holds every choice to be as good as any other and insists that whoever we happen to be at any given moment is good enough.  Cohabitation is the equal of marriage, artificial insemination is the equal of fatherhood, drug addiction is the equal of self-discipline.

These cultural trends have been evident for a long time.  But they seem to be accelerating rapidly. For instance, there has been a quantum shift in college culture since I arrived in Oxford in 1998.  My fellow students and I partied and drank and dated profligately. But we did not, as a general rule, confuse having a good time with the meaning of life.  While we enjoyed chapter life, we understood that the real purpose of the fraternity was to develop lifelong bonds of brotherhood between us; while we enjoyed dating, we understood that the real purpose of all that dating was to find a partner that we could marry and build a life with. By contrast, YSIL and her friends have lost sight of all of these underlying purposes.  They party together but never build real friendships.  They date but do not love.  They go to class but do not participate actively in their own education. In short, the sense that they are supposed to be becoming something better than they are is almost completely lost.

I'm not sure what has precipitated such rapid and fundamental change in American culture.  I'm also not sure to what extent these changes have propagated or will propagate across social groups.  There are already pockets of the United States in which the idea of "who we ought to be" has all but ceased to exist, and other pockets in which its definition is being expanded beyond meaning.  In the short term, it is possible to insulate one's self from these destructive cultural forces by carefully choosing one's community.   In the long term, perhaps the effects of these changes will be obvious enough and deleterious enough to drive people back into traditional notions of family, responsibility, and morality.  In the medium term, however, it appears that the alteration (I would say decline) in American culture will be profound.  This causes me to worry greatly for young Miss Ainsleigh, who promises to come of age in precisely this unhappy medium timescale.

I don't want you to read this as a gloomy post.  I am, at core, an optimist. I believe that --- Hell, I know that --- my daughter will live to see wonders that I could never dream of.  It is probable that what is gained will be greater than what is lost.  But the slow fade-out of my world nevertheless pains me.  I suppose I always thought that my children would grow up in the America that I grew up in, and that they would consequently grow up with the same sense of who they ought to be that I did.  For better or worse, the former now appears impossible.  It thus falls to me to instill the latter in my children.  That I may be unequal to this task is the single great fear with which I approach my new role as "father".