Pulling up the drawbridges, or extending a hand
Following my previous, football-inspired post on team and tribe, I plucked up the courage to read a distantly related Guardian article entitled Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican which sent me back to my own very conservative, Catholic (pretty tribal!) upbringing, with all the pre-marital sexual guardrails and constraints that came along with that. There, too, the default expectation was that mothers would be housewives, to manage the large family* and support the breadwinner. That sense was bolstered by a feeling of us being an embattled, absolutely correct minority, cast unwillingly but cohesively into the wild and sinful wider world. That feeling accompanied me through university and my earliest working days, to thankfully be sloughed off over decades of ‘normal’ life, helped I think by a slow-to-awaken core of suspicion that “all of” right wasn’t necessarily on our side, that helped loosen that armour from the inside.
Yet another related Guardian article cropped up on the American (where elsican?) natalist movement What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about? m highlighting a (for now) relatively small, embattled, inherently correct minority turning inwards to battle and protect itself against a wrong-headed wider world.
Then, finally, there was another article, entitled Please, yell at my kids! Five lessons I’ve learned about good parenting from around the world (I have to say, though: ‘five or ten things’ are the worst articles, but still…) about ways of raising families around the world, with the common, positive thread being that of community. The author also points out that
parenting is hard everywhere, but nowhere is it as lonely as it is in the US
The message for me from all of these links has to be that of plurality as a good. Communities can be too closed and insular, becoming cells focussed on their own people and messages: with the availability of self-reinforcing but unreflective, non-selfcritical media (print media does the job well enough, too), these cells can grow to become a danger to society - from thread to theat, as it were. Communities can also potentially become too loose and incoherent to retain that identity.
If we can gain a plural sense of community, that is, openness to the idea of interwoven groups and communities, then we have a stronger society. For societies are interwoven, interlocking communities. If too many communities cut the threads and build walls rather than bridges, convince themselves that everybody else is the enemy, then societies suffer. Communities need to be challenged with the fundamental questions: who is this good for, and where do our goods come from?
And society needs to monitor and promote the health of its communities. We don’t need to convert everybody from Catholicism; housewives make a valuable (if undervalued) contribution to society; football fans bring cohesion and dynamism to a town; positive birth rates can be a sign of healthy communities. “Just” keep everybody respectful, and things will be better for all.
No doubt that’s a rich Western point of view - but even here, in strong Europe, we need that reinforcement. But before things become too earnest…
*: an early draft had me writing
… housewives being there to cook and manage the family
which, thanks to English grammar, came across as rather gruesomely funny when I mentally parsed it in that way…)
