Exploring the Urban Craft Fad: Family

A friend and mentor of mine who is in his mid-fifties often talks with me of the differences between his generation and mine, and we come inevitably to the peril of the modern (and post-modern) family. In his grade-school years it was a strange thing to have a classmate with divorced parents. There was stigma and shame attached to it. In my grade school days it was common; today, in many urban areas especially, single-parent homes of one kind or another are the default. Though a significant number of my close friends throughout high school and college had divorced parents, I have not thought much until recently about the weight that such a situation places on children and how they carry it into adulthood.

Divorce is a difficult subject to talk about because there is still shame attached to it even though it is commonplace. People who grew up in “broken homes” do not want to be stigmatized. They do not want to hear statistics about how likely they are to repeat their parents’ failures. They do not want to be psycho-analyzed. Understandably, they want to be seen as their own people with their own potential. As for the parents, they often face co-workers, fellow church-goers, neighbors, and extended family members who distance themselves out of disappointment, bewilderment or judgment. This is unfortunate because they need the opposite. If a father lacks the strength to stay committed to his family, he needs someone to come walk with him, take the time to find out why he lacks that strength, and encourage him toward good fatherhood from whatever point he is at with steadfast patience. Simply put, there are deep reasons behind each decision to divorce, and a long-stretching (but not defining) tenderness is imprinted on each child of divorce. Both of these call for intentional grace and love rather than detached analysis.

At the same time, the destruction of the family is a crisis, and people need to speak frankly about a crisis if they hope to address or define it in any meaningful manner. To this end, I enroll the insights of Alan Bloom. In his book The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom sets the stage for the current state of the family by explaining the anti-familial concepts at the heart of modern rights-based democracy. If legitimate relationships between human beings are formed on the basis of individuals choosing to enter into a social contract, he says, then even the bond between husband, wife, parent, and child will eventually disintegrate. Following this assertion, he has a few brief pages on divorce, largely drawn from observations of his students while he taught at top American and European universities for thirty years. His assertions are direct and harsh, but they reach into the heart of the problem to strum a somber chord that resonates with much greater force and truth than it did when he wrote the book in 1987. Bloom writes:

“Children may be told over and over again that their parents have a right to their own lives, that they will enjoy quality time instead of quantity time, that they are really loved by their parents even after divorce, but children do not believe any of this. They think they have a right to total attention and believe their parents must live for them. There is no explaining otherwise to them, and anything less inevitably produces indignation and an inextirpable sense of injustice. To children the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not—these are the real source of the war against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy, but that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings. The decomposition of this bond is surely America’s most urgent social problem.”

The “context of family,” Bloom speaks of is both a set of relationships and a place. Together these things form the home, and the concept of home provides the connection to the craft movement that I now suggest. Traditionally, the home is a place where one feels a sense of belonging because of the relational bonds that exist, have existed, and will exist in that place. Most importantly for our purposes, the home is also the place where the people who are unconditionally bound to each other do things together. Work, play, conversation, marital sex, preparation and consuming of meals, study, and discipline are some of the traditional activities of the home. As Bloom points out, even if a family is unhappy, its togetherness instills a child with a sense of permanence. The fact that a family remains together and does these kinds of things together throughout a child’s lifetime provides outward form to the fact that the familial bond is by nature unbreakable and undeniable. This implanted truth, in turn, gives that child hope that other human relationships have the capacity for loyalty and self-sacrifice.

What are the effects when people no longer have confidence in this truth because it has not been modeled for them? Logically, one result would be the attempt to create on their own what they have longed for but never experienced. I suspect that part of the draw to homesteading and homemaking activities is the hope that we really will be able to form a home around ourselves out of the lifelong landscape of disappointing and conditional relationships. The homebrew kit, the urban garden, the respect for place demonstrated when we purchase local produce—these are some of the tools we take up to construct an environment that embodies the sense of rightness we seek (which is the flipside of the “inextirpable sense of injustice” that Bloom describes). We have an appetite for these activities because they foster togetherness, they are marked by wholesome and nurturing productivity, and they require hard work and sacrifice performed for the benefit of others. These are the very elements missing in most separated or unhealthy families.

Of course I am not suggesting that every person who engages in a crafty hobby does so to fill a void in his or her soul. Some of us have experienced such activities in our homes or someplace else along the way. We learned also the spirit of love and simplicity which makes them truly meaningful. Seeing it and knowing that it was good, we picked up some habits with the genuine hope to share that goodness. And some of us just want to learn to brew our own beer because it looks fun and our friends are doing it!

Nonetheless, in an attempt to connect some of the dots on the panorama of the American experience in the 21st century, I have started to build a case that the deterioration of the family and the urban craft movement are linked at some deep level. The next post will explore the craft movement as it relates to other anti-relational forces in the postmodern United States.