A Thanksgiving-inspired defence of the family

Don’t let Neo-Maoists and deranged hipsters ruin it for the rest of us -- and what is up with the left's obsession with sexualising children?

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers! I hope you are all enjoying a long weekend in peace and abundance.

Last week my friend, author Nancy McDermott, sent me a few links by or about “philosopher” Sophie Lewis, a darling of the far-left intelligentsia and author of books about how terrible the nuclear family is, and how it should be abolished. She says things like: “the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalises and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”

Happy holidays from the Communists, folks!

It’s tempting to dismiss Lewis as a marginal misanthrope with a scary totalitarian fetish. Unfortunately, though, somehow this attitude is showing up all over. The encroachment of state power upon the boundaries of the family unit is something we see more and more of: America’s largest teachers’ union, for example, informing parents that they know and love the children more than parents do. Covid revealed the ugly bureaucratic lust for total control that was lurking beneath a polite veneer of government policy. 

Far be it from me to paint a sentimental, cloyingly positive view of The Family. I grew up in a big one, and it was far, far from perfect. In fact, it was often batshit crazy — full of arguments, grudges, harsh words, toxic behaviour, recriminations, and years’ long feuds. 

It was also full of laughter, and food, and love, and wisdom, and connection in both mind and body to a vibrant life force outside myself — yet one I was also fundamentally part of. It was my biosphere, the ecosystem that nourished every cell of my being. It was raucous fun at times, and at other times — like when my father was dying and many, many relatives lined up at his bedside — it was a devoted act of service.

It’s fashionable among the left to say friends are the family you chose. And more and more people are choosing non-traditional living arrangements that — it’s trendy to say —  could “re-make” the family into something that exists beyond biological ties. But as I have aged I have found the difference between them is palpable. If for no other reason than being a member of a family is like being woven into a tapestry of people who are both eerily similar to yourself and at the same time very, very different. It is an ongoing lesson in humility and perspective. 

I would no more want the state to take on this complex, evolutionary dynamic — part nurture and part psychological bootcamp — than I would want to eat my own dog. 

Ms. Lewis and her comrades would not approve, not in my use of nature metaphors nor in my insistence that the family is something quite special. That is because, in their view, capitalism has ruined everything, like a mean mum or dad coming in and demanding you clean your room. 

“The family is the reason we want to go to work,” she says. And that’s bad, because work is a total bummer and everyone wants to party in a Hackney warehouse instead.

Lewis might protest that she also does not want the state to take over, not really. Instead, somehow, revolution will “automatically” “change how we love.” How will that work, exactly? Young Ms. Lewis does not spell it out.

When I was 15, I had a huge crush on a boy who did not reciprocate my feelings. In fact, one night at the local disco, I caught the callous bastard kissing my best friend. Humiliated, I developed a mini-treatise on the toxicity of love. It was not, I concluded, the deep and bonding and sweet and joyous feeling that makes the world go round. It was instead a misery-inducing exercise in rejection that brought me about as much happiness as a horrible bout of sickness. Thinking I was ever so clever, I called this, love-itis. (Like appendicitis, geddit?) In my adolescent frustration I scribbled the world all over my school ring binder, in fancy, elaborate handwriting. 

This is what I’m reminded of when I read Lewis. I’m reminded of an earlier version of me, feeling resentful at being excluded from something I really wanted. So I blamed the thing itself.

In an hour-long interview with Verso Books, Lewis’s publishing house, she presents a more polished critique than I did at age 15, doodling on my notebook. But at its heart, her position is that of an immature, bereft young person with a longing for things to be different. In the interview, she talks approvingly of 18th century French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who she explains, was “committed to the destruction of the private nuclear household…Fourier is talking about this communalised way of living, I think he says it should be 1200 people or so, in a very specific architectural home, with a provision for some privacy, but also a lot of things carefully organised to be done together, inter-generationally. It’s all very anal, he has a plan, and a timetable for the utopia.”

“Queer orgies were very much part of his future society,” she continued. Is it just me, or does this sound like a gulag, but with group sex?

While soft in her mannerisms and tone of voice, Lewis in her interview with Verso comes across young enough that she elicited some feelings of compassion in me. But toward the end of the interview, at the 55 minute mark, she really lets the mask drop to reveal what crusading academic James Lindsay warns is the true agenda of the hard left: to get sexual access to kids.

What Lewis is proposing is dangerous and sinister. She talks about “children’s liberation” and a “fascist obsession” with “the innocent, de-sexualised [she makes air quotes around both phrases], fertile child.”

So there it is, spelled out: the in the left-wing utopia the nuclear family is abolished, nobody has a job, and children will be available for sex. Doesn’t it feel like we are on this road already? Are you a fascist for not going along with it?

“The left is afraid, I think, to say, children are people with bodily autonomy and sexualities, even, and the right to be part of the world and determine their health care needs and who they live with and how they live.”

It’s clear from her own telling, Lewis has not outgrown her own fraught familial relationships and remains, essentially, an angry teen. That has made her, no matter her book smarts, not a philosopher but a deeply unwise sophist who luxuriates in her ideology and her niche identity, which has no bearing on the real world. And it certainly would have no resonance with actual working class people, whose plight she claims to champion.

It’s beyond time for the people who once considered themselves of the cultural left — as I did — to repudiate the darkness at the heart of left-wing ideology. When it comes to family, tradition had is it more right than wrong.

For an entirely different take on the family, you can watch this conversation from 2021 between myself, Nancy McDermott and Jodi Shaw. (I forgot I set up a Saving Culture Youtube channel, feel free to subscribe!)