Stop the Presses, I Agree with David Brooks!

I know, I know ...

When I used to watch the PBS News Hour, I often found myself talking back angrily to commentator David Brooks. I mean, he wasn’t like the pundits on The McLaughlin Group, a show that had me shouting at the shouting heads as they shouted at one another; when that one was on, I’d often leave the room. David Brooks was certainly easier to take. I appreciated his measured stances and thoughtfulness compared to the extreme views emanating from the mouths of other conservatives in easily digestible sound bites. But I rarely agreed with him.

That’s all changed.

The new David Brooks, the old family

I realize I’m a bit late to this party. David Brooks has been undergoing some kind of evolution while I wasn’t looking, and lately, I’ve found myself agreeing with him more and more. Not always (Exhibit A: his praise of this year’s RNC, tempered though it was by his stance on The Former Guy) — but enough for me to take notice.

It turns out Brooks is a fellow Flower Child, born the same year as both me and Barack Obama. I know that’s no guarantee of being cool, but — as Marilyn Monroe says in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — my goodness, doesn’t it help?

Brooks begins his 2023 book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by introducing his quest to become a better, more empathetic person. If one sentence can encapsulate the book, it may be this: “Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people.” That goes against the grain of our current “information age” (wait, are we still in that one or have we moved on?), and much of the book goes against the grain of conservatism — though Brooks does long to return to a time when morals were a primary goal of education.

Yet his railing against what education has become instead — preparation for being good capitalist cogs in the machine — definitely sounds like a Flower Child.

As does an earlier article of his I recently found that really called into question who David Brooks is. If I hadn’t known it was by Brooks, you would have been hard pressed to convince me it wasn’t written by a progressive of my own ilk.

Start with the title: “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” Hell, yeah! I couldn’t agree more.

For Exhibit B, I present you a few choice excerpts:

“The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.”

“Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families…. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide — and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.”

“The market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs.”

Testify!

Is the extended family the answer?

The nuclear family broke off from the extended family like a species breaking off from a genus. But was it a natural evolution?

In our modern world, societies tend to evolve in this direction as they become more prosperous. But while we gain something with that evolution, we also lose a lot, as Brooks reminds us. The obvious benefits of extended families: the stability and resilience of a larger support network, the benefit of children learning social norms from more than just two adults, the community that nurtures us in so many ways. The obvious drawbacks: the lack of privacy, mobility, and individual choice — especially for women.

When faced with these benefits and drawbacks, which family form do we choose? Is the nuclear family the answer, when it clearly brings its own ills?

Apparently not. Brooks makes a startling observation. The nuclear family, he says, was dominant in the U.S. for only a short time: specifically, 1950–1965, “a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.”

That suggests it didn’t work very well. But what are we left with now?

The new family is the old family

What’s supplanted the nuclear family since 1965 isn’t simply the extended family. We may be going back to something much older — or a modern version of it.

Till recently, I had only a vague notion that there was something older. Most of us think we have two choices when it comes to family structures. But humans have lived in many ways; we’ve just forgotten or suppressed much of that history. The hefty tome The Dawn of Everything argues persuasively that throughout our long history, humans have experimented with many forms of social organization — including family and kinship structures.

Brooks concurs. For tens of thousands of years, he says, kinship didn’t always mean kin. In the bands we formed throughout most of our history, we created kinship; we chose our extended family. Our community.

If you’ve been reading Flower Child, you know that I — like so many others in our culture — long for community. But how do we get it? As Brooks rightly points out, we can’t go back to living as we did in prehistoric bands. Not only is our society much larger and more complex, but we place too high a value on our individual freedom.

We can only approximate those earlier kinship groups in small ways. While some people have been returning to a version of extended families, like the multigenerational households Brooks discusses in his article, many others have been creating families and communities not based on kinship: Gay men and lesbians banding together in the 1980s after being estranged from their families. The close friendship pairs Rhaina Cohen describes in her book The Other Significant Others. Co-housing communities of various forms, like the one I visited last year near Ithaca.

Where do we go from here?

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not ready for full-on co-housing. I don’t really want collective decision-making, endless meetings, and a lack of private space. One co-housing community that Brook mentions is Temescal Commons, mere blocks from where Rafael and I live; it’s intriguing but seems designed for young people who don’t need much space.

Instead, I love the idea of friends buying houses close together — but that’s no longer feasible in the insanely expensive Bay Area.

Like much of our society, I feel stuck. And despite seeking to strengthen our friendship community by doing things like moving from San Francisco to Oakland, our own family seems to be contracting.

Brooks wrote his article about the nuclear family in March 2020; I wonder if a follow-up would find that covid has further transformed our families. Rafael and I certainly get out less, and as comfortable as our home life is, I sometimes think we rely too much on each other’s company. I can go for days without talking to anyone but him (and the cats) — unless you count a few Zoom work meetings.

As much as we’d like more “family” now — even if that’s just more friends in close proximity — I expect it will become a necessity as we age. I hope we can figure out a good plan by the time we need it.

Even more important, I hope our society as a whole can figure it out. What Brooks laments as the decline of the family is really the decline of community. And guess what — I agree with him that that’s the cause of many of our society’s ills. I’m not sure what it will take to change course and find a way that works better. I hope we can manage it.