I recently read the book Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt (2019), and it has given me a lot to think about. The book’s subtitle is “How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics”. This one was a real winner.
Let me see if I can give a brief summary of the argument…Eberstadt wants to know where identity politics came from, that contemporary way of building our political system on some sort of grievance, whether on the Right or the Left. Plenty of people have written about this, and identity politics are familiar to most everybody. Whether it represents the aggrieved white working class or the downtrodden woman of color, these politics of identity create an identifiable “us” who is threatened by an equally identifiable “them”. Etc.
Eberstadt identifies the positive longing behind the rise of identity politics, a trend that goes back many decades by now. She sees the longing to belong to be a great good. It is good to have a place where you feel belonging, where you are at home. The problem comes, in Eberstadt’s analysis, in the fact that the two places where most human beings have gone for this kind of security and belonging, namely God and family, have been under threat in our modern world. Devoid of these sources of identity, human beings look elsewhere for their identity. A secure identity is a primal need, and the lack of this identity in our life brings about a “primal scream”. The difference between filling that need with God and family and filling that need with a politically aggrieved subcategory is simply that human beings are made for God and family and not for grievance groups. The need that is satisfied, therefore, is only temporarily and partially satisfied. And so we scream!
The author wrote about the ways we lost and substituted for God in her book How the West Really Lost God. Her focus in Primal Screams is on the Sexual Revolution and how the breakdown of the family sent us on the futile search for substitutes that can never do what the family can do for us. Eberstadt mentions quite often that she is not the first to look for the origin story of our modern identity politics from the Right as well as from the Left. She mentions many thinkers on the Left that have noticed the same problem. One of the wonderful things about this book is the space she gives at the end of the book to three “responses”: from Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel. It is that second response that I want to use to help me critique Eberstadt’s book.
Among many other things, Mark Lilla wrote The Once and Future Liberal (2017) as a critique of liberal identity politics in the wake of the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Many books came out around that time, trying to answer the question “How did Donald Trump get elected?” Lilla blamed the Left’s wholesale embrace of identity politics as something that turned people off from their message. I have not read Lilla’s book but I have read his response to Eberstadt’s book, and I found it very helpful. The two writers, Lilla and Eberstadt, remind me of a little phrase from Italian: “Non si tocca la famiglia”; “Hands off the family.” I first heard this phrase from a Scripture professor of mine who, when we were reading a passage of the Bible in which the editors had decided to switch verses around to make the passage more understandable, would say, “Non si tocca la famiglia!” Hands off! Don’t mess with what is dearest to me!
Eberstadt faults the many on the Left who notice the detrimental effects of identity politics but do not go to the heart of the reason for the rise of identity politics: the Sexual Revolution. The Sexual Revolution is understood as such an unalloyed positive good that it is beyond reproach, beyond critique, not to be touched. The reaction of people on the Left to the Right’s critique of the Sexual Revolution is “Non si tocca la famiglia”. Hands off! How dare you critique what is most precious to us!
Lilla strikes back in his response (in a very kind way, though) by touching on the Right’s very own fetishization of the principles of Capitalism. He notes that Capitalism’s role in the spread of identity politics is met on the Right with an equally fierce “Non si tocca la famiglia”. At one point, Lilla notes, Eberstadt references Christopher Lasch, a cultural critic and one who early noticed the bad effects of identity politics. (Check out this wonderful essay on Front Porch Republic) In a parenthesis, Eberstadt notes that Lasch blames Capitalism for the rise of identity politics. Moving on… She does not take up the claim of that parenthesis, but Lilla pounces on it and claims that just as Eberstadt blames the Left for being blind to the carnage of the Sexual Revolution so the Right is to be blamed for bypassing the detrimental effects of Capitalism on identity and community.
But what is Capitalism anyway? This is super slippery territory, folks. But, from what I have read of Lasch (and Wendell Berry) and his critiques of the American system, I find it helpful to summarize the culture created by Capitalism in three words: bigger, faster, cheaper. Lasch’s insistence on the need for localism seems only to aide Eberstadt’s case for the damage of identity politics as a substitute for the family. Lasch offers localism, with its critique of Capitalism and the Sexual Revolution, as a way out of the conundrum of identity politics.
How so? If bigger, faster, and cheaper destroys communities, then a localism that is smaller, slower, and (yes) more expensive, could create communities in which strong identities can be forged. If I look to my neighborhood and not the internet for belonging, might I also avoid the primal screams of the identity crisis? If I know the name of my local bookstore owner, not only because he or she is wearing a name tag, might I be able to have a civil conversation with this bookstore owner about the content of some of the books that I might disagree with? I can’t have a conversation with Amazon. They make it about as hard as humanly possible to have a conversation! And, in the end, who would want to have a conversation with Amazon? The reason I go to Amazon is because the big, massive company allows me to get my books faster and cheaper. You might laugh at me that the main reason I would be using Amazon is for books. I know most people buy everything but books on Amazon. But I use it as an example, because Amazon put all the bookstores out of business, those bookstores that were owned by real people with whom you could have a real conversation about the books on their shelves. Lasch, along with many others, critiques Capitalism as impersonal. And it is this impersonality that leads us to pseudo-personal relationships based on aggrieved identities.
What does localism have to do with the Sexual Revolution? Wouldn’t our conversation about hot-button issues changed if they were had within tight-knit communities and not on the impersonal “platforms” of the internet and of national and international politics? For example, and here it gets real, how does the conversation about abortion change when we are not talking about “national (or state) bans” and instead are talking about people we know who happen to be in tough situations? I am not saying that knowing the person makes us more accepting of abortion, but rather that creating communities where people are known and loved and seen would probably bring down the number of abortions dramatically more than any national or state policy. Another example, conversations about “trans rights” and “gay marriage” are very impersonal. How might the conversation change when I am talking about a family member I love who has always struggled to fit in? As a priest, I have had a number of powerful conversations with people struggling with “identity” questions in the Sacrament of Confession, conversations that I have never had on any online platform. In fact, it is precisely because of how toxic the impersonal, online discussion of these hot-button issues that I am convinced the best way to deal with the Sexual Revolution is on the local level.
Maybe we could critique the Sexual Revolution from the perspective of smaller, slower, and more expensive, if only we were willing to budge a little on bigger, faster, and cheaper. A word about cheap and expensive might be in order.
One of the big political questions that come up every now and then is how much we “pay at the pump”. Cheaper gas wins elections! My friends from other countries find it amazing how cheap gas is in this country. But what is the cost of that gas? Someone, surely, is paying for it somewhere else so as to make our American lifestyles possible. It could be the vast military efforts, the lives of our own soldiers and the lives of the “bad guys”, that protect our supply chain of oil coming from other countries, for example. Do we want cheap gas at that price? Maybe we should just all drive electric vehicles. But where will we get the energy to charge all these vehicles and keep up with all the “smart” features in them? The amount of solar and wind farms we would have to build to keep our current energy use may not be worth it.
But if energy were not cheap…we might have to walk places instead of drive everywhere, which means we might have to build cities that were more walkable and not just a string of freeways and strip malls, which means we might have to build beautiful things here at home and not have to travel over oceans every summer to see other people’s beautiful buildings (in walkable cities), which means we might use less of that expensive fuel.
And while I’m on the soap box…when Kamala Harris talked in her acceptance speech about beating China in developing AI, I thought to myself, at what cost? Spare me! The amount of energy needed to power AI for all the things we want to use AI for will only further destroy the environment that later on Kamala Harris said she wanted to protect. For example, “Google says its total greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50% over five years, mostly due to electricity that powers AI data centers” (NPR). Well, I guess we can just cover our hills and valleys and farm land with “renewable” solar panels and wind turbines. And keep bigger, faster, and cheaper.
…or we could live more simply, and use less, and love those who live close to us, and build strong communities and beautiful cities, and live closer to where we work and worship, and stop shopping on Amazon, at Starbucks, at Walmart, at Target, not just because they are “woke” but because they destroy communities…
I know this is super idealistic, and it might seem like I’ve strayed a lot from Mary Eberstadt’s book. In short, I would like Eberstadt to recognize the impact that bigger, faster, and cheaper has had on people, making worse or even causing many of the problems of the Sexual Revolution. I thoroughly recommend Primal Screams, but I would like to add some other suggestions to the mix.
Look Homeward, America by Bill Kauffman (Just don’t buy it on Amazon!)
The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry (Same!)
Local Culture, Issue 2.2 about Christopher Lasch (You can download the PDF for free: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/local-culture-archives/).
Thanks for reading!