What a Shame!

Could gentle parenting have prevented Donald Trump?

Imagine this: It’s 2064, and you’ve been tasked by the Civilization Disorder Prevention Bureau with preventing the events that set in motion the collapse of the 20th century international order. You’re going to be sent back in time. Your target: Donald Trump.

No. Your mission isn’t to sneak into little Donnie’s nursery with a giant rock in hand, like so many sci-fi fantasies about preventing the rise of Adolf Hitler. You’re going to intervene to persuade his parents to parent him more gently.

Ridiculous? Probably. Where am I going with this? Not sure. Michael and Shunryu have pieces in the works that require a lot of in-depth research. But I wanted to remind you all that Taming Complexity is still live.

In any case, what got me thinking about baby Trump was a post that Kat Rosenfeld recently published, a piece that I think gets to the heart of the contradictions of liberal societies, the incoherence of peoples’ demands to “normalize” whatever it is that they happen to like or do.

Rosenfeld juxtaposes two different examples of this. The first is relatively innocuous: social media whining about getting judged by others for having a messy house with mismatched furniture. The other case is about the worry over “normalizing” Donald Trump. Both examples direct us to think more deeply about the machinery that is necessary to sustain a society.

The first case brought to mind philosopher Charles Taylor’s much earlier diagnosis of the malaise that infected modernity. Modern liberal societies tend to heroize the artist (or more recently the innovator), the people who transgress the limits set by their culture. The trouble is, as Rosenfeld also notes, is that transgression can only be meaningful in the context of those limitations. No cultural horizon, no actual transgression. Without pearl-clutching normies, freaky behavior loses a lot of its excitement.

The expectation that everyone can pursue a wholly individually determined authentic lifestyle is a trap, because without societal norms as guardrails, all that is left is empty self-referentiality. The outcome is nihilism, in which individual values become paramount but also simultaneously trivial. You can do whatever you want, but none of it matters.

This example stood out to me not because I care that much about standards of good taste in interior decoration, but rather because my wife and I are like other millennial parents: hopelessly lost in the morass of competing parenting advice. Gentle parenting doesn’t promise transgression, of course, but transcendence, a final surpassing of the claimed cycle of trauma caused by traditional authoritarian childrearing.

But the philosophy has no cultural center. Instead, therapy-speak about boundaries, safety, and emotional self-regulation is meant to undergird a process of conflict resolution, without having a clear model of what kind of adulthood that children are being prepared for. And as much as I’m in favor of my sons learning to speak more kindly, read their own emotions, and all the other things wrapped up in gentle parenting, it’s hard not noticing the massive void of guidance regarding what exactly the transition from, say, boyhood to manhood ought to look like.

What Rosenfeld captures about what “normalization” demands is also true for gentle parenting: an intense aversion to “shaming.” A child should never feel ashamed for crossing a boundary (which are notably individual but never cultural), but redirected to reflect on why they did it. A great deal of this, of course, falls by the wayside in actual parenting, but the fear that a child somewhere might be made to feel worse about make a mistake is so intense within gentle parenting spaces, it is hard not to wonder if there’s a baby being thrown out with the bathwater (and if the whole movement is itself one giant collective trauma response)

That’s not to say that these spaces are free of shame, but only that it is reserved for particular cases: the father who is hesitant to get on the gentle parenting train (“sounds like a potential abuser” is literally written in Reddit threads on the subject) or those Karens who deign to have strong opinions about people’s tastes and life choices. The paradox of achieving a gentle society that normalizes everyone is that it requires heaping scorn on anyone who is insufficiently nonjudgemental.

What I think Rosenfeld is getting at is that this makes for a poor foundation for social norms, that we ought to be more willing to participate to assure a culture that aspires to something more than vast networks of individual noninterference treaties. Shame is a powerful tool, and arguably the most important one in sustaining a society. We should lament it being employed excessively or toward the wrong ends, but to pathologize shame itself is mistaken. For instance, as much as I sometimes resented German neighbors who looked askance of my sloppy American habits, the shame was intended to prevent me from freeriding on the orderly and immaculate country that they had built.

And that’s what this all has to do with Donald Trump. The left-wing refrain has been to refuse to “normalize” the Trump administration. But as Rosenfeld points out, being elected president twice invariably normalizes the man as a politician. The cries of leftists can’t change that. However, the only way that the “undignified, vindictive, astronomically petty, and wildly destructive” behavior of Trump becomes itself normalized, according to Rosenfeld, is “if everyone else — young and old, Democrats and Republicans, public servants and civilians — starts doing it.” Even if the country’s top executive seems immune to shame, we shouldn’t start acting shamelessly in response.

I can’t prove that a culture that increasingly flees from the idea of setting social guardrails in one sector of society is less able to enforce standards of decorum in politics and media, but it seems pretty plausible. It’s hard not to find a better example of someone who seems to only care about what the voice in his head says is right than the current sitting president (something that sociologist Robert Bellah found to be an increasingly common view of morality, what he dubbed “Sheilaism”).

At minimum, I think most people would agree that there ought to be higher standards for today’s public officials and for most of what passes for public discourse. The question is, however, how exactly to do we get there? Once the guardrails are fully gone, either blown up by Trump himself or by those trying to oppose him, how can get them back? In a society whose recent history has mainly been about eliminating social norms, or imposing new ones in a self-serving and polarizing fashion (i.e., “woke” politics), it hard to think of positive exemplars. So, if you have any ideas. I’m all ears.