The Advice Column of Expressive Individualism
by Devorah Goldman, Public Discourse:
The expressive individualists promised a world in which moral conventions could be cast off in favor of something more beautiful, purposeful, passionate, and true. Instead, we have been left with an aimless, bloodless, timid culture.
Carolyn Hax of the Washington Post recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of her syndicated advice column, which is read by millions every day. In many ways the perfect pragmatic liberal, Hax consistently communicates a worldview in which no one owes much of anything to anyone, except in the most transactional way. (The sole exception seems to be the duty of parents toward minor children).
In one archetypal example, a divorced woman—let’s call her Anne—wrote in to ask whether she should consider herself obligated to take her children to see their paternal grandmother, an elderly and infirm woman who lived near Anne’s parents. Anne’s ex-husband had become estranged from his own mother after divorcing Anne and remarrying, but Anne had felt compelled to maintain a connection between her children and their grandmother. She concluded with two questions: “How do I balance ‘I might regret neglecting a lonely ill person’ with ‘But she makes it so hard and I’m tired and she’s not even my relative’?”
The responses are revealing. (Hax regularly solicits guest responses from readers, which she prints alongside or instead of her own advice.) One reader put it bluntly:
I’d advise that it depends on what your children get out of the visits. It’s really about them and their relationship with their grandmother. . . . You don’t mention how they feel about these visits at all, which I find strange. If they love her and want a relationship with her to continue, then you should keep making the effort to visit. If the relationship doesn’t benefit them, then I’d say you can stop. But I’d talk to them about it first if you’re not sure.
Other responses are in the same key, advising Anne either to consult her own feelings to guide her actions, or else consult her children. There is no suggestion that visiting an ailing grandparent is a self-evident good: a chance to exercise compassion or to gain insight into family history, or simply to show respect and gratitude. If visiting grandma does not provide an obvious and immediate “benefit,” well then, there is no need to see her any more. The one exception was a response invoking concern for the grandmother’s mental well-being should the visits from her grandchildren abruptly stop. But even that was primarily an appeal to pity rather than obligation.
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