The nuclear family? We blew it up years ago
by Mary Wakefield, Spectator:
Now that John Lewis has produced a Christmas ad that celebrates family, starring white people as humans, all sorts of thinkers and commentators on the right have decided that the progressive madness is nearly over. One after the other they’re popping up in print, like bunnies who’ve decided the fox has gone. ‘Whisper it, but woke is over,’ these pieces begin. Even those Tories who thought it wisest to put their pronouns in their Twitter bios have quietly deleted them.
The soundtrack to the John Lewis ad, the Verve’s dirgey ‘Sonnet’, was recorded in the spring of 1997, just as John Major was vowing to put ‘the family’ at the heart of his campaign, and some Conservatives, I think, just assume that life will somehow naturally revert to the norms of the 1990s – all those children who think they’re cats or are begging to have their genitals removed will fade out like a bad dream.
But it’s the idea of ‘normal’ that’s a hallucination I’m afraid, Tory friends. We have not reached the end of the rainbow yet. How can things return to ‘normal’ when for a generation of young people the whole idea of family has been undermined? Every cult tries to weaken the ties between parents and their children, so as to establish itself as the ultimate authority, and the ‘identity’ cult is no different. Rather than ‘honour your mother and father’ or ‘love your neighbour’, the first commandment is now to ‘love yourself’.
I have an eight-year-old and I can’t tell you how many times a day he is told, sometimes quite aggressively, to love himself – on Netflix, in school, in any after-school class. In church a few weeks ago, the priest addressed the congregation: ‘Do you love yourself?’ he asked us all. ‘Well, you should.’ My son swivelled round in his pew to eyeball me and his face was uneasy. I’ve told him to ignore the ‘love yourself’ stuff in the past, but – a priest? ‘Do I have to love myself, Mum?’ he whispered. It took me until the evening to summon an answer. ‘What the priest meant, darling, is that you have to believe that God loves you, which is different.’ Is that theologically sound? I have no idea.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
