"Why I Am Not A Family Abolitionist"
"Why I Am Not A Family Abolitionist"
My review of Sophie Lewis's "Abolish The Family" published at Compact Magazine
I have some really neat news. I wrote a review of Sophie Lewis’s Abolish The Family for Compact Magazine, and it was published today.
Abolish The Family is not a very coherent book (and she! uses a lot! of exclamation points!!), but regardless I engage as seriously with her ideas as possible, since family abolition is part of a larger project of utopian socialism (think “fully automated luxury space communism,” etc.).
I’ve elsewhere discussed the problems with this current, including in my book coming out next year, but the basic conflict is over whether or not you can change material conditions through better technocratic organization. In other words, utopian socialists would “design” and “socially engineer” society to create their version of a better world, regardless of whether or not anyone actually wants the world they want.
It’s machine logic, and in the end a very totalitarian idea, despite being often re-narrated as anarchist or decentralized.
The family quite often becomes a favored target of this framework, something they’d either remake or abolish in favor of idealistic principles of community divorced from the really-existing ways we relate to each other, especially kinship. In the review, then, I write about my own shitty experience with family—being extremely poor and raising my two sisters and taking care of our schizophrenic mother at 13—and how I once, too, thought family should be abolished. Until, well…you’ll see in the review.
You can read my review here, and consider stopping back by here to let me know what you thought.
A thought - the idea of abolishing the family is an attempt, unconsciously to make everyone androgynous secular globalized friends flattening out the diverse ecosystem of relationships - neighbor, friend , man woman, grandfather, grand mother, mother, father, co-worker, business partner, brother, sister, son, cousin, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew, husband, wife, daughter, lover, stranger you meet along the way, advisor, mentor, employee, employer, leader, follower, acquaintance, spiritual guide, rival, competitor and on and on and yes the androgynous, gay, lesbian, trans types and the added variety of cultures and belief systems. Each of these states of being have their own essence, taste, feel and purpose. Often those who squawk the loudest about diversity actually in practice want to reduce it severely. There are types in their minds that are not part of diversity.
And I would add to those relationships - the broken, the crazy, the weak, the sick, the problem people - who will always be with us, and have their own place and purpose.