Marilynne Robinson on Family

Carrying on a series posts in which I snatch random fragments, magpie style, from Marilynne Robinson’s enchanting Death of Adam Essays I offer a couple of fragments from the Family essay.

For some time we seem to have been launched on a great campaign to deromanticize everything, even while we are eager to insist that more or less everything that matters is a romance, a tale we tell one another. Family is a narrative of love and comfort which corresponds to nothing in the world but which has formed behavior and expectation — fraudulently many now argue.It is as if we no longer sat in chairs after we learned that furniture was only space and atoms. I suppose it is a new upsurge of the famous Western rationalism, old enemy of reasonableness, always so right at the time, always so shocking in retrospect.

There is a great deal in here, too much to unpack here, but I think this strikes pretty close to the heart of our modern cult of irrationalism or, as Robinson would say, unreasonableness. Note the positive treatment of ‘romanticism’ and the negative handling of ‘rationalism’, just the opposite of my own assessment, we moderns being irrationally romantic to our detriment.  This threw me off for a while, thinking I might have found a productive tension between Robinson’s understanding of modern thought and my own but it on reflection it looks like a mere play on terminology.  I hope to return to this with a follow up post.

It is tempting to think the following goes too far, but I don’t think so.

This whole notion of competitiveness was pitched by many of its exponents as a “war” we must “win,” which could surely mean nothing else than the crippling of those same foreign markets upon which our future prosperity supposedly depends. [...] One could say that public opinion has been cynically manipulated with this talk of “challenge” and “war,” but I think we should face the harder fact that a public silly enough to be persuaded by such arguments would very likely produce a class of experts silly enough to propose them in good faith.