Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash
(A ten-minute read.)
During our annual summer vacation to Nova Scotia, Canada, where my family owns property, one of my uncles, who is a huge movie buff, insisted that I absolutely had to watch the movie CODA, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. He couldn’t stop talking about it (which is fairly common for him when he becomes enamored with something).
So, after a bit of prodding, I agreed to watch it with him one night, becoming the tenth person he’d shown it to.
It was a beautiful, powerful, and moving film, a “coming-of-age” story about a young lady in Gloucester, Massachusetts who is a CODA—that is, a child of deaf adults—portraying the challenges that come with being the only hearing person in a family (her older brother is also deaf).
The wrinkle in the story is that the young lady discovers that she not only has a passion but a talent for singing, possessing a beautiful voice, and her choir teacher encourages her to apply to Berklee College of Music in Boston, one of the world’s greatest schools of music, offering to put in extra work to train her as she prepares to apply.
I won’t spoil the film for you, as I would definitely recommend giving it a watch (with the caveat that there is a bit of colorful language). But most relevant for my present concerns is the underlying tension the film seeks to address—which is actually pretty typical for this sort of “coming-of-age” storyline: the struggle between the young lady pursuing her dreams and seeking personal fulfillment (of “following her heart,”), and being a dutiful daughter who shelves her own ambitions for the sake of her family’s well-being.
The funny thing is, for most of the world’s history, and for many cultures around the world still today, the tension wouldn’t even register. It would be a non-starter. Never mind that the story placed a young lady in this position (which is unthinkable enough for many cultures). Even if it was about a young man, the story would still be unthinkable. For most people and most cultures in the world’s history, the corporate, the collective, the family, always wins out over the individual. Indeed, the individual hardly exists at all—and only exists to the degree that the individual helps and supports the collective.
But the Enlightenment changed all that.
I say this because I watched CODA on the heels of listening to a very thought-provoking and challenging podcast, called Mere Fidelity, that an acquaintance of mine hosts. This acquaintance, Matthew Lee Anderson (who my mutual friend Mike connected me with because Matt did his graduate work at Oxford), interviewed a Jewish scholar named Yoram Hazony, who just authored a book about the need for Americans to rediscover a truly conservative political outlook.
On the episode, Hazony declared that classical, Enlightenment liberalism was an abject failure. He had virtually nothing good to say about it or the theorists who introduced and promoted it. John Locke, the English philosopher who provided the framework that would turn into American democracy, was the chief villain, giving us our modern notions of freedom, equality, and individualism, which, according to Hazony, are nowhere found in the Bible. “Liberalism says that every individual is free and equal by nature,” Hazony noted, and promoted the “idea that the individual has to be treated as free and equal,” which is an idea that has led to all manner of societal ills.
I must admit that, as a dyed-in-the-wool American, I was extremely alarmed when I heard Hazony express this sentiment. The idea that all people are “created equal” is, of course, axiomatic and self-evident to an American mind.
So I was extremely vexed by his perspective, and wondered what he could cite as justification for his claims that classical liberalism was a failure. Why did he keep going on about this? Isn’t it self-evident that democratic ideas are obviously right and good and essentially God-given and ordained?
But then I began to understand what he was getting at.
He painted a scenario of a typical American family that illustrates some of the shortcomings of the modern, liberal project: this family, consisting of a Mom and Dad and two kids, lives in a detached home by themselves. The father wakes up every morning, gets in his car, and drives a great distance to work. The kids get in a bus and go off to school, leaving the mother home by herself in an empty house—which is unprecedented in human history. She is left there to figure out how “to make a home without the father or children, without her parents, without brothers and sisters, and other close relations.” This “1950s idea of what a family is,” according to Hazony, was devastating, and he didn’t blame women, as a response to it, for deciding that they wanted to pursue a career of their own.
But now the house is left empty, only being occupied a few hours a day when everyone returns to sleep under the same roof, perhaps after sharing a meal together (though often not). This “image of the nuclear family,” Hazony submitted, “is the destruction of everything that the family used to be.” And it was the product of the Enlightenment, when thinkers like John Locke prioritized the individual—introducing, for the first time, that children were “the equals of the parents at the age of 18 or 20 and at that point they don’t owe them anything anymore.”
So whereas before, it was assumed that a child’s singular mission was to carry on the family’s work, and was praised and esteemed to the degree he (or she?) supported and pursued that, this is distinctly not the case anymore in modern, western society. In fact, it is the child who refuses to leave his or her parents’ home today who is stigmatized and maligned. They must pursue their own dreams and visions in order to live a happy and fulfilled life—even, and sometimes especially, if those dreams permanently take them halfway around the world.
The picture that Hazony paints of the liberal project completely obliterates the propagation and well-being of the family in order to prioritize the individual. The individual is the center of the universe and must pursue and experience meaning and fulfillment at all costs. Self-actualization, self-fulfillment, self-expression is the self-evident pursuit of life. (Once a person recognizes this framework, they see it everywhere—especially in pop culture—with perhaps nothing epitomizing it more than the ubiquitous song, “Let It Go,” from the animated Disney movie, Frozen, with the heroine’s lines, “It’s time to see what I can do/To test the limits and break through/No right, no wrong, no rules for me/I’m free”).
According to Hazony, however, the primary question one should ask is not what one has to do in order to experience self-fulfillment or to figure out their destiny, but “what needs to be done in order for my family, my tribe, my nation to be strengthened in such a way that it is capable of propagating through time?” Preserving and conserving one’s group is the great goal.
Essentially, the two competing visions revolve around the question of whether the individual or the group is the fulcrum around which society revolves.
Hazony is certainly not the only one who’s troubled by this modernist turn. I’ve noticed that there are many people, from all stops on the political and ideological spectrum, who’ve begun expressing serious concerns about the efficacy of this view of society, essentially questioning the whole modern/Enlightenment/democratic project.
So what are we to make of it?
To be honest, I’m legitimately not sure. I myself have questioned, in various places, the extreme individualism that characterizes modern society. We have largely lost our sense of the corporate and collective and are extremely disconnected.
This, to me, shows up most destructively and regrettably in the religious world, where faith is simply a private experience, and there is mostly an “I” rather than a “we” (in the Christian context, we talk a lot about having a “personal relationship with Jesus,” and our primary concern is whether we as individuals will go to heaven someday, with our corporate responsibility being an add-on at best).
But I certainly don’t think Hazony’s vision is tenable either—if, for no other reason than the fact that we’re not going to put the “genie back in the bottle” in western society (which I think he mostly recognizes).
Similarly, it seems like, for all its pitfalls, the individualism that came from the Enlightenment has been a net gain and, to me at least, is better than the alternative. It seems to me that cultures which emphasize the collective to the neglect of the individual tend to use shame as a primary instrument in the pursuit of compliance—anything to preserve and propagate the future of the group (there’s a reason that cults act in this way, completely obliterating individuality).
From a biblical perspective, certainly both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament largely detail the story of people who lived within primarily collectivist contexts. There is a heavy corporate identity that undergirds the biblical narrative, which I think many western Christians, for one, have lost sight of.
Of course, I don’t know if this collectivist vision is prescriptive or if it’s simply descriptive in the Bible. That is, I don’t read any of the prophets or New Testament writers commanding, “Thou shalt live in a household that is multigenerational and every individual in the household must refrain from pursuing personal ambitions.”
Certainly, the biblical authors gave instructions as to how God’s people were to live together, but I don’t recall them ever forbidding religious people from expressing themselves as individuals (in fact, it seems that someone like Paul, in a letter like Ephesians, tries to strike the balance when he points out how each person has been gifted by the Spirit of God individually, but such gifting was to be for the purpose of building up the body as a whole).
So, as I’m finding with many things in life, it seems like a both/and to me. I don’t think we should prioritize the collective to the complete obliteration of the individual; but neither do I think we should prioritize the individual to the complete obliteration of the collective.
Instead, we should recognize the benefits of a heightened sense of individuality, while remembering the importance of the collective. In doing so, we can pursue the welfare of the collective without resorting to tactics that seek to bypass individual freedom, which often utilize shame to compel conformity.
So did the Enlightenment destroy the family? Probably. But perhaps we can recapture, to some degree, all the important parts of the family—not just the nuclear family, but the whole family of God—using the tools of individuality that the Enlightenment gave us (with its understanding of personal freedom and individual dignity and identity), which can help us avoid the pitfalls of the exclusively-collectivist vision.
Bringing it full circle: ironically, I raised these questions with some of my extended family while we were on vacation together in Nova Scotia. For at least one week each summer, about 40 or 50 of us gather together, mostly under one big roof, to spend time with each other at our favorite place on earth. The family has been doing it for almost five decades, with the tribe expanding over that time of course (it started with my grandparents and their four daughters).
Many people, when they hear we do this every year, marvel that we can all do this without going insane or killing each other. Such individuals, of course, implicitly subscribe to the Enlightenment-vision of the nuclear family, which has a hard time processing the idea that for many cultures throughout world history (including today), 50 people living in one household has been the norm.
So as I tried to explain what I was talking about to my various family members, soliciting their opinion of the matter, I said to them, “You know how we all come here and stay together for a week or two each summer? Could you imagine doing—or would you want to do—this year round?”
Without hesitation, everyone responded, “Nah.”
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.
i tend to agree with james. until the mid 1800's, most families lived and worked together on farms.
the Industrial Revolution suddenly and thoroughly changed that as fathers and daughters moved to cities for work. today, fathers (and recently mothers) are absent from the home until they return at night from work. i believe this economic change is the cause of the changes to the family you describe. i believe the Enlightenment ideas you describe were a reaction these economic changes, not a cause, and were an attempt to provide a political accomodation to the economic changes.
the current workplace and social changes brought about by the digital revolution will also result in new intellectual, political and social realities that current generations may find abhorrent but which generations to come will find normal. perhaps Trumpism is our first taste of such changes. perhaps we are also seeing the first effects of these changes on religion as people are moving away from building-centered religious institutions much as they moved away from home-centered family life in the 1800's and 1900's.
don lewis
An interesting article! I wonder, though, whether it wasn't also the Industrial Revolution that made the family more nuclear? It caused families to move to cities for work, often leaving the communities their families had lived in for generations, the father was removed from the home, sometimes the mother too, in order to provide for their families, the houses in the industrial towns they lived in were often more designed for a smaller nuclear family, the kids would go to school to learn a trade. The Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment began around the same time (1700s).