RUTHFULLY YOURS

Family is no mere sociological construct, so we must stop treating it like one. It is how people live and thrive. It is natural. It carries with it certain obligations and duties. It is not malleable, no matter how hard those bent on re-defining the institution try to make it so.
The past couple of months have witnessed two extraordinary events in the history of Western moral culture. First, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a five-four decision that the right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples under the United States Constitution. The states are now required by judicial fiat to license marriages between two people of the same sex. The second is really a series of events, namely the exposure of Planned Parenthood. The practice of abortion, and the most (in)famous company practising it, have been laid bare on YouTube. These two events represent major moral flashpoints for Western society. It may seem coincidental that these crisis points have been reached almost simultaneously. However, it is hardly surprising that these two events are unfolding at the same point in history, as they share a common root.

At the root of the Obergefell v Hodges decision and the very existence of Planned Parenthood is a neglect of, and reversal in, the Western understanding of the concept of family. While there are, undoubtedly, other factors at play in these crises, the neglect of the idea of family is an important one that must be brought into the discussion. The family is here taken to be the organic community developed through and around a marriage. It usually, though not always, involves a man and a woman in marital union and their offspring. Therefore, it includes not only a married couple, but also their children. This does not exclude infertile or childless marriages from using the label of “family”; it merely requires the natural possibility of children as an outworking of a marriage. It also does not exclude single-parent households. These are families, but they are incomplete in the natural and organic sense. Just as in the childless marriage, in a single-parent family there is a component missing in the structure family.

Review In the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,’ some works gain in meaning because of their new context.

Every large museum has a repository of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, acquired over the years, that are seldom on view. They range from minor efforts by major artists (and vice versa) to ambitious works by once well-regarded practitioners that no longer correspond to current taste, and a lot in between. Smart curators often mine these holdings for forgotten treasures—taste changes—or for what these works can tell us about the desiderata of the period in which they were made. Case in point: “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of responses to the emotional climate of the fraught years before, during and after World War II.

Organized by MoMA’s Lucy Gallun, assistant curator, Department of Photography, and Sarah Suzuki, associate curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and drawn entirely from the museum’s collections, the show assembles paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs, many rarely—if ever—exhibited, by more than 30 artists. Some celebrated, some obscure, they come from North and South America, Europe and Asia. Each of them experienced the horrors of the war, its preamble and its aftermath differently: as combatant or victim, refugee or exile, direct witness or distant observer. Despite these variables, the mood of all the works in the exhibition is one of anxiety and pessimism, whether expressed through representation, abstraction, symbol, or metaphor. Cynics can put this down to curatorial choice or to the finiteness of the human imagination. Or we can assume that the pervasive sense of threat and bleakness conveyed by “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” accurately reflects the devastating world-wide events of the decades under review.

America is large and diverse. So it is risky to draw conclusions based on local samples. Nevertheless, a recent conversation with the chair of one of Old Lyme’s two political parties was of interest. Each of the two main political parties have roughly 30% of registered voters. Both, however, have been losing members, while the ranks of independents (Unaffiliated, as they are known in Connecticut) have been growing. The latter comprises 40% of the electorate. Nationwide, a 2013 Gallup Poll showed Republicans with 25%, Democrats with 31% and independents with 44%. Twenty-five years ago, those numbers were, respectively, 31%, 36% and 33%. While this is not a tsunami, it is a trend.

There are myriad reasons for this shift, including a decline in the homogenous nature of our culture to less parental influence and, importantly, a decline in community social groups that once helped bind us. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone, wrote of the decline in civic and community service organizations fifteen years ago. Last year the federal government sponsored a study by the Corporation for National & Community Service that identified falling rates of volunteerism. Another study by USA Today showed similar trends among college graduates. The void created by the loss of volunteers has been filled by government employees. More government workers mean increased government spending. Gerrymandering has meant less competition between parties and more among inter-party factions. The result: more people feel isolated from a expanding sense of extremism in both parties.