Seriously, why are we trying to reinvent the wheel?

There's a "phenomenal structure" that alleviates isolation. It's called family.

Credit: Stephen Hui and Unsplash

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Sometimes I cannot figure out why some people are determined to throw away ideas that have evolved over thousands of years and have a proven track record of working.

That’s what I was thinking recently while listening to this interview, in which the New York Times’ Ezra Klein talked to author Kristen Ghodsee. The two discuss Ghodsee’s new book Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. I haven’t read the book but it sounds like an interesting survey of utopian experiments.

Before long, the conversation zeros in on family. Both Klein and Ghodsee point out that the modern western idea of a nuclear family is unusual compared to most of human history, which is true. And Klein quotes Ghodsee’s book to point out that many people today face “the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity and the many stresses associated with modern life.” That’s also true.

These comments capture the reason I’m writing this blog, and more generally why there’s growing interest in researching and fortifying families. A lot of people, especially parents, are isolated and overburdened in ways that would have seemed foreign to our ancestors¹. And if our forebears managed to avoid these particular scourges, we should be able to as well.

I suspect Ghodsee and I — and almost anyone who spends any time thinking about the state of families today — would generally agree on these basic points.

But what I found baffling about this interview was Ghodsee’s argument that the solution lies in looking to new ideas, most of which seem to be experimental and niche forms of communal living that in some cases are explicitly trying to dismantle families further.

There’s a key exchange a little over halfway through the interview that gets at this idea. In it, Klein points out that historically people have leaned heavily on extended family. He then goes on to wonder if perhaps resurrecting that idea might be the solution to problems of modernity:

And so in some ways, at least one of the questions being raised here — you could imagine society saying, we’ve made a mistake. And the mistake we’ve made is we’ve gone away from the extended family. And we should hitch a steam to something more like relationships with your parents and the fact that your cousins are near you and so on versus experiments in different kinds of living.

Klein then goes on to mention the idea of “relying more on our bigger family networks and looking askance at people who maybe move away” from their family. In other words, today it’s socially acceptable to sacrifice family networks for professional or individual achievement, but Klein is asking if perhaps we’ve gotten that backward.

This is a good line of questioning, and I was surprised to hear a major media figure float the idea that traditional family might be the answer to our many social ills — even if it was just in the form of a question.

Ghodsee mostly dodges the question (though she does discuss WEIRD psychology, which is relevant and interesting). So Klein asks again, this time describing family as a “phenomenal structure that is already built into humanity.” Why not lean into that?

This time Ghodsee did answer, but her answer basically amounted to saying she’s not interested in traditional family. She wants to look at 2050 not 1950 — never mind that both nuclear and extended family concepts far predate 1950 — and her objective is to focus on “the possibilities of nonconsanguineous kin.”

Among the ideas that Ghodsee does discuss are “platonic parenting,” or the idea of people raising kids together but not being in a romantic relationship, and the kibbutzim, which are utopian Jewish communities formed in the early twentieth century².

Both of these ideas are fascinating, and useful for their participants. But I’m not convinced they represent, in Ghodsee’s words, “more sustainable ways of living.” For one thing, they’re not scaling up at any noticeable rate. They’re alternative lifestyles, when what we need are solutions that are — or have the potential to go — mainstream. I’m not knocking alternative lifestyles at all, but there is no way that socialist agrarian communes³ are the most practical solution to widespread problems of loneliness or a lack of affordable childcare.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ghodsee mentions that her goal is to “destabilize this notion” of normalizing the nuclear family. And together with the comment about nonconsanguineous kin (the actual word for such people is “kith” as in “kith and kin”), it’s clear that Ghodsee does not see traditional family structures as the ideal solution to the “the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity.”

To which I ask, why? Klein rightly pointed out that the idea of extended family is widespread and generally effective in human history. It transcends cultures and time periods. It may not be perfect, but it’s the result of thousands of years of social evolution — which can’t be said for many experimental utopian concepts. In that sense, family is a utopian experiment that succeeded so well it become the norm.

Obviously the nuclear family itself has some shortcomings. It was never meant to serve as the be-all end-all of intimate human relationships. We need more. But as I’ve argued before, the nuclear family is a useful starting point, the bare minimum if you will. We should be building on top of it, not throwing it out. To do so is like dismissing the idea of wheels because you got a flat tire; the better solution is to fix the tire and then build an improved car on top, not to try to reinvent the wheel altogether. The wheel works as a concept, even if there are some individual wheels that fail.

I’m not trying to come down hard on Ghodsee. She sounds like a thoughtful person who has observed a bunch of failings in modern relationships and who is trying in good faith to find solutions. And I agree with much of what she’s saying, such as her critique of romantic relationships. In the same vein, one of the most popular posts I’ve written for this blog argued that “love is overrated” as a foundation for marriage.

But it feels like what’s really going on here is a desire to maximize individual autonomy while also getting the communal benefits of a traditional village⁴. It’s a sort of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario.

The interview captures this idea when, near the end, Ghodsee describes the typical American white collar life path:

Like, I can spend my time and resources to move away from my extended family to pursue a career, to get enough money to buy a big house and a nice car and pay for child care for my children or whatever, to create a world that is exhausting in the way that I have to expend all my time and energy in order to achieve that.

It seems like Ghodsee is bringing this up as a critique. She’s saying this is no way to live a life.

But curiously, it’s also the life both she and Klein appear to be living; they both admitted earlier in the interview that they left behind family to pursue their careers. Ghodsee actually chose a profession, academia, that she describes as “incredibly itinerant.” And the objective seems to be finding a way to build a village of one’s liking without giving up that itinerancy. The idea is that you can still abandon your network, either for work or simply because you don’t get along. Then you handpick your new “kin” group — which doesn’t include any of those pesky people with unfashionable political ideas or impertinent personal questions.

This is not communalism and it’s not a utopia. It’s individualism taken to an extreme. I choose my career path. I choose where to live. I choose my kin. I choose the people with whom I’ll be estranged. I get to be the protagonist of the story and never have to subjugate my values or desires for those of the group. I get the village and I get to do whatever I want.

By comparison traditional family sounds harder. It means tolerating people I didn’t hand pick, and whose ideas I might disagree with. It means I might end up working the family farm, literally or metaphorically, instead of galavanting off to do something more glamourous. It means that my primary value has to be the strength and survival of the group. It means “looking askance” — or in other words stigmatizing — the choice not to prioritize family. It’s a hard sell.

The problem though is that fascinating utopian experiments notwithstanding, the individualist’s path isn’t actually working for a lot of people. It may sound great on paper, but most people don’t live on communes. Isolation is growing and loneliness has reached epidemic levels. Estrangement is a growing and widespread problem. The more we’ve told people to live their most authentic lives and follow their passions, the more isolated we’ve all become. Many people don’t even have a sufficiently large friend group to offer any material support for their families. How are you supposed to start a utopia when you have no friends or can’t even find a babysitter?

Reinventing the proverbial wheel when it comes to families, in other words, has yet to produce something as enduring or appealing as the family-village that was so common in the past. And in that context, it makes less sense to keep grasping in the dark for the next new thing than it does to simply resurrect the ideas that worked for all of our ancestors.

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Headlines to check out this week:

Play Deprivation Is A Major Cause of the Teen Mental Health Crisis

“Research, proving what should be obvious, shows that play is a direct source of children’s happiness. When children are asked to depict or describe activities that make them happy, they depict or describe scenes of play. There is also research showing that when children are allowed a little more play—such as when schools offer a little more recess—the kids become happier. Research also reveals that children consider play to be activity that they themselves initiate and control. If an adult is directing it, it’s not play. The joy of play is the joy of freedom from adult control.”

Yes in My Backyard—and in My Frontyard

But pro-family advocates of all stripes should adopt a version of saying yes to housing in their backyard for one very simple reason. The direct link between housing costs and family formation means more housing in their backyard will make it more likely their front yards will be filled with neighborhood kids playing.⁵

1. The Atlantic ran a story on this idea just yesterday.

2. Reading about the kibbutzim reminded me a lot of an earlier utopian experiment my own people tried: The United Order. This was the early Mormons’ attempt at communalism and common ownership of property in the mid 1800s. The experiment is widely understood to have failed, though there is still a town near Zion National Park named Orderville, after the United Order. But in a more general sense, the Mormon pioneer experience was an attempt at utopianism — they moved to a new place and built their own society from scratch — that actually works. Salt Lake City is still a city today, and a thriving one at that. The evolution of Mormonism (and I use that term because I’m talking about a broad movement that includes more than just the mainstream church) from a peculiar frontier religion to a relatively mainstream culture is an interesting case study in long-term utopian experiments.

3. Ghodsee mentions a few interesting things about the kibbutzim, including that they tended to follow traditional gender roles when it came to childcare, and that they tried to break the bond between mothers and newborns, but that those efforts failed and had to be walked back. The kibbutzim also went into decline in the 1980s because young people wanted more opportunity and opted not to stay there. I am in no way an expert on the kibbutzim, but I suspect there are a few lessons about human nature in these facts.

4. It’s pretty clear to me that the conversation is happening through a Marxist lens. I’m putting this in a footnote because sometimes when you mention “Marxism” you’re plunged into a culture war, and that’s not what I want here. I am not a Marxist and I think as a political framework Marxism has failed whenever it’s been scaled up, but I’m also not using the idea here as some sort sort of boogie man. Still, for a lot of reasons, it is often antagonistic to traditional ideas about family — to the point that today’s “family abolitionists” are in fact Marxists. And I think once you start looking at the world through that lens it’s going to be difficult to accept the idea that traditional family may still be useful.

5. h/t Life Considered.