One chapter in a long story
I hope my kids see themselves as part of a group of people working together over many generations
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I.
A few weeks ago, I had a chance to tour a cathedral in a Spanish town called Plasencia. Work on the cathedral began in the 1200s and continued for a couple hundred years. Then in the 1400s, work began on a new cathedral more or less in the same location. The result today is two buildings, filled with medieval stone and explosions of Baroque filigree, effectively sandwiched together.
A few hours after touring the cathedral, my family and I found ourselves back in the cathedral plaza, where the town was putting on a bit of theater. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to follow the plot, but it was a delight to watch a performance in a plaza where people have been doing performances for centuries.
It’s a tremendous privilege to travel, and it’s one I never anticipated having. But as I’ve experienced a bit of the world, one of the unexpected things I’ve walked away with is an altered sense of time. Exploring old cathedrals has reminded me how greatness — great architecture, great traditions, great art, etc. — comes from people working together over successive generations. Many who worked on the Plasencia cathedral never saw the finished product. But they kept stacking stones, century after century, gifting each generation something that was just a little better and bigger.
This, to me, captures the idea of a village. I started writing this blog because I wanted to explore the way family can play a role in abating things like isolation. But visiting old places has reminded me that a village is also a project that takes place across time. It’s not just a friend group or even a nuclear family. It’s a collective of people working on something that will last.1 By definition a village involves permanence and durability, lasting obligation and cooperation. It’s more than just shared interests or affection. I have no idea how the early residents of Plasencia felt about each other, but I can see an astonishing testament to their efforts. It takes a village to raise a cathedral.
This is also why I brought my kids on this trip to Plasencia (also something I never dreamed I’d be able to do). My hope is to give them this sense of time, to help them understand that they are just a middle chapter in a long story that began before they were born and which will continue after they’re gone.
In other words, my kids and I may not build a literal cathedral, but I hope we can adopt the cathedral-building mindset23. Our lives and the lives of those who come after us will be richer if we do.
II.
Just a couple days after returning from Spain, I read this piece in the New York Times Magazine about modernism. The piece explains how the project of modernism is to reject the past and lean into newness. It quotes French poet Charles Baudelaire, who captured the idea in a few lines:
O Death, old captain, it’s time! Lift anchor!
We’re sick of this country, Death! Let us sail ...
To the depths of the Unknown to find something new!
The pursuit of newness and the rejection of tradition eventually came to dominate visual art, music, poetry, architecture and other creative fields. For a modernist, “good art is good because it is innovative” and not “too much like what others have made before.”4
Whether or not this idea is the right way to approach the arts is beyond the scope of this blog5.
But it occurred to me that modernism — which is to say, perpetual grasping for novelty — also explains a lot of today’s parenting and family life. It’s basically what happened in my own family when each generation tended to start over and leave few foundations in place for the next generation. It explains the endless new parenting advice books, which all seem to contradict each other. It’s a way to understand growing levels of estrangement, or the many posts on social media from millennial parents who seemingly had effective upbringings but have nevertheless rejected their own parents’ ideas and leaned into (probably disastrous) helicoptering.
Like a painter rejecting figural representation in favor of scribbles or blocks of color, family life is now dominated by rejecting what worked in the past and embracing the new.
III.
I often include the caveat in this blog that people should do what they want. To each their own.
But also, it’s pretty clear in my mind that modernism as a philosophy for families or village-building has failed. As evidence, I could point to the research on today’s rising levels of depression and loneliness. I could point to the recent “nepo babies” debate, wherein people criticized individuals who received advantages from their parents — but in doing so also inadvertently highlighted the value of one generation building on the success of another.
Or I could point to the fact that so many parents today lack villages that provide material support; my generation (elder millennial) has failed at village building, but villages are multigenerational projects. Something broke in previous generations to produce today’s world. Someone stopped stacking the stones in the metaphorical cathedral.
I could point to all of that, but instead I want to highlight a piece of writing that anecdotally captures the way we’ve simply given up on longterm village building, and how the result is isolation. The piece comes from Slate and laments the itinerancy of academic life. Professors these days tend to frequently hop from one college town to another.6 At one point the author, an academic herself, shares this devastating realization (italics added for emphasis):
Our daughter was born and attended pre-K and kindergarten in Connecticut, grade school in North Carolina, and middle and high school in Illinois, then went on to college in Minnesota. Based on her intended career path, as well as my own, it is doubtful the three of us will ever live in the same state again.
That’s a sad realization, and it captures the downsides of what I’ll call family modernism.7 If you’re always off looking for something new — a new job, a new place, a new friend group, a new tenure track, etc. — you’ll end up spending a lot of time alone. Which makes sense; to hunt for the new necessitates leaving the old world and its people behind. We’re talking about two sides of the same coin.
What really surprised me, though, was the way the author seemed to simply accept this situation as an inalienable fact. There’s a sadness that family and village end up sacrificed for more individualistic pursuits, but never a realization that such a sacrifice may not be necessary or desirable. I wanted to call out to the author of this Slate piece that she and her daughter could choose a different path. Instead, we get family modernism. It’s the chaos of a Jackson Pollack painting turned into a life philosophy. What an utterly ahistorical way to live.
Everyone has to balance the demands of work and family and community, of course. But that was always true, and yet somehow people still managed to build villages — and those villages built cathedrals. Now, I hope that by visiting old things that people worked on together for many lifetimes, my village remembers to keep stacking the stones for the people who come next.
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News to check out this week:
Good News For Anxious Kids (And Parents)
“In 2008, I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone in New York City, where we live, and wrote a column about it. This caused a media firestorm: How dare I send my kid into the bowels of the earth without an adult – or even a phone? The controversy landed me on every possible talk show where I kept trying to explain that I LOVE safety – helmets, mouth guards, seat belts—but still think kids can do way more on their own than our fearful culture lets them.”
It’s for this reason I prefer the word village in the first place over vaguer terms like “community.”
Obviously one trip to see some old buildings will not, by itself, give my kids that sensibility. But I hope they have the chance to go on future trips that also remind them of this idea. And trips like these are a useful reminder to me to parent like a cathedral builder.
It’s worth pointing out that plenty of people have this long term view without making lengthy trips to the other side of the world. Most obviously, the people who started work on ancient cathedrals did not already have those buildings in their communities, and yet they began the work anyway. Today, I don’t think you need to travel across the world to get this perspective. But it has been helpful for me personally, and I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to do it. I will also added that while I’m not going to write a post on the finances of a trip like this, I’m happy to privately share details with anyone who is interested on what we did to cut costs, save up, and generally afford this trip. Years ago, wife and I used to write a blog together about our dirt cheap travels, and budget travel is a topic I love to ramble on about.
This idea is so engrained now that it nearly sounds like the definition of art in general. But there are plenty of times in history when art was “good” for reasons other than being novel. Medieval art — which was unfairly slandered by the Renaissance painters — comes to mind.
Though I will say I’ve gradually become disillusioned with the modernist project, particularly but not exclusively when it comes to architecture.
This is basically true for most professional class jobs now. If you want to increase your salary, or the prestige of your job, you hop around frequently.
In my mind there’s a lot of overlap between this idea and WEIRD psychology.