Photo by Jun Miki (Public Domain)
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So instead of writing a policy paper on how to shore up family life against a solvent tide, I want to address the ideological basis of this problem: namely, the contemporary consensus that makes an enemy of the unchosen, the normal, and the given.
In the spirit of the age, let’s name this consensus uncharitably, and with our own rhetorical interests in mind. Let us dismiss the self-justifications about inclusion, marginalization, and so on that lubricate its spread. Let’s call it bigotry, a fear of the normal. Normophobia. Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative—whether its origin be physiological or cultural—as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Radical normophobes describe their aim explicitly as the total eradication of this (they claim) artificially naturalized domain of the “natural,” in favor of untrammeled, free-floating, individual desire.
Family is at best weakly defended against normophobia. Normophobic consensus operates by smearing every argument from normativity or nature by association with the specter of fascism. And as Wilhelm Reich implied in the words I have used as an epigraph, the very givenness of family patterns aligns the family with constraint, with limitations on desire, and hence—in the moral landscape of progress-as-freedom—with the authoritarian bogeyman. (Read more.)
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