Parents shouldn’t curse their children. I suppose we all agree. Enough, at least, to shake our heads at that horrible scene playing out at every Wal-Mart in America: the toddler screaming, writhing on the linoleum floor, clutching some forbidden Nerf Gun; the mother, red-faced and cussing out her bundle of joy for “bothering all the other customers.”
But expletives are not always so explicit, and for every Mom hollering at her Hannah on aisle fourteen, there is a Dad tenderly cursing his Christopher on the drive home from the tee-ball game, saying, “You’re gonna go far, kid.” America’s basic mode of praise and admiration for a child is expressed as a desire for a child to leave, go far away, and make it out there.
It’s not the worst kind of curse, in which “a man commands or desires another’s evil, as evil,” (ST.II-II.Q76.A1) banishing his kid from the community in the hope that he suffers. Rather, one “commands or desires another’s evil under the aspect of good.” Leaving is construed as an evil necessary to attain a greater good, and the community is cursed as the thing holding the child back, an implicitude made explicit in phrases like “you’re too good for this place” or in gestures like the uniquely midwestern manner of shaking your head and muttering “this goddamn town” before sipping from a bottle of beer.
Whether a curse can summon demons or cause unwanted hair loss is a question I leave to the exorcists and the hairdressers, respectively. But that this particular curse is efficacious, I have no doubt: Children told that they will go far do in fact go far. Tender minds told to follow their dreams do in fact follow them, to New York City or San Diego, depending on which movies are in vogue. These words are magic words, by which I simply mean they achieve what they say. And unlike the specificity of the Harry Potter spell, the curse for producing a leaving child can be cast in a diversity of formulae.
One way to is to simply establish, in a child’s imagination, a mystical geography in which there is made hierarchically superior to here, an effect achieved with phrases like “it’s a big world out there” and “they’re gonna love you out there.” The term “out-there-in-the-real-world” is the ultimate expression of this formula, and it is, of course, insane. As if “reality” could be thickened and condensed by virtue of being located beyond the off-ramp of a major highway. But what phrases lack by being stupid, they gain by stupefying. Repeated enough times, with enough seriousness, “the-real-world-out-there” forms children for whom what is “real” is vaguely associated with what is “there,” while what is “here” becomes unreal, a dream, or perhaps a nightmare from which they will wake up.
No spell is as effective at reorienting a child in this manner than those that elevate the “far” over the “near,” as in the phrase “you’ll go far” or the many metaphors associating childhood success with traversing a large lump of space. “You've come so far” and “you'll get there eventually,” we say to the child learning to tie his shoes, decking out his immobile, concentrated efforts with the language of interstate traverse.
All of this is foolish and bound for disappointment. For it is a fact of human existence that “there” is no more attainable than “tomorrow.” Once you arrive at tomorrow, it has become today, and once you make it “there,” “there” mutates into a “here.” Trying to enter the-real-world-out-there is a loony effort, for it is precisely Out There which is never realized as Out There, but only on the conditions of becoming a Right Here. The real world, insofar as this has any meaning at all, is always, only, and ever the real-world-right-here. To assert the opposite is to writhe at the contour of our creation: We are bipeds with butts banned from sitting on any bench but the one right here. In all likelihood, we will not reach this realization until we really do reach Mars and, bored on the Red Planet, our There become Here, we reach for our phones, and fondly tell our Martian children, “You're gonna make it big out there, kid.”
What, then, do these words achieve? It would be silly to pretend that this, our near-universal transvaluation of the far over the near, the there over the here, the outer over the inner, and the leaving over the staying, has produced particularly happy adults or a notable swath of flourishing children. Rather, it has produced a society of dissatisfied and restless adults; fundamentally orientated towards a Real World that never arrives and an Out There that is always reduced to mush by the sad fact of our occupying it; those who don’t “make it there” getting depressed; those who do getting more depressed; a few families moving now to Colorado, now to Texas, racking up experiences of travel and acquisition, and faking by repetition what cannot be achieved in a singular act of “going far.”
What follows is my suspicion, born out of no small degree of paranoia, that the creation of the Leaving Child as the ultimate production of our society is not an accident, but is quite purposeful, or at the very least so fitting to our society that it appears as such. There are only so many movies one can watch, in which the central drama is a protagonist constrained by a Here and liberated by an Out There, before one imagines some coordination in the storytelling; only so many motivational posters that one can read, bespeckling the beige walls of our major educational institutions, sternly telling one to “shoot for the moon,” before one begins to imagine that the poster designers spoke with the script-writers, and the script-writers with the novelists, and that the novelists all watched the same advertisements for new cars sold by virtue of their ability to get people Out There, and that the advertisers must be moonlighting as the songwriters who write the annual pop homage to New York City, and so on and so forth. It is an age of conspiracy, I admit, but I can think of no more plausible conspiracy than this: that the powerful of the earth strive to create a population fundamentally dissatisfied with being here rather than there.
For one of the obvious effects of remaining, sticking it out, and living here rather than there, is that one becomes much more powerful. By “powerful,” I have no bulky, martial notion in mind, rather, I mean it in a painfully literal sense: one develops greater capacities for action. One can do more.
This is true individually, in that, the degree to which one remains in and grows virtuous within a particular place is the degree to which that place reveals itself in all of its particular possibilities for action. A man may go a year before realizing that the local fruit is edible. He may go five years before realizing that there is an inexhaustible supply of used brick by the river, and that one can build with it without material cost, if one knows where to look. He may go twenty years before developing enough friendship and loyalty within a community of neighbors that he can speak an efficacious word, asking for a gift of labor which exceeds his individual capacity, and receiving it. Places are shy creatures, slow to reveal themselves, but for those who wait for them virtuously, they are selfless benefactors, bestowing power on their residents.
This fact is usually known and discussed from the outside, insofar as it shocks and offends those for whom power, if there is any at all, is supposed to come from the State, or at least from the anonymity of money. A young man, enchanted by a Small Town as a particular There to consume, becomes irate to find that his aspirations are already checked, weighed and dependent in their efficacy on the judgments of several families, an old woman who seems to control the neighborhood's parking situation, and a Good Old Boys Network (he calls it, furiously) that anonymously thwarts his efforts. He finds as an obstacle what could be otherwise described as an exciting possibility: That power is accumulated in those who remain in place, and this capacity for action necessarily helps or opposes those who arrive.
As it increases in individual power, so a life unhaunted by the real-world-out-there is increased in its familial power. If one's children are not cursed to leave for Somewhere Else, then the words of the psalm ring true: children are like arrows in the quiver of a warrior. There is nothing quite so awe-inspiring as the man or the woman who can act as a family; who can activate a whole plenitude of latent loves, loyalties, duties; motivating children and the family that extends from them into communal actions that far outweigh, in their import and scope, whatever actions they would undertake as mere “individuals” or “citizens.” But they cannot do this while telling their children to leave.
There is something rotten about the timing of the curse against the child. For it is precisely when the child, after much agony, embarrassment, and frustration from the whole community, actually becomes useful, that he is begged, by song and script, to “go far.” If children are arrows enquivered, they are unwieldy arrows for about a decade and a half. Modernity ensures that a man cares for them when they are useless, and casts them away the moment they can be aimed at killing anything of real importance, sending them to college and a job to repeat the entire process with a family of their own—by dissipating it the moment it threatens to become powerful.
This is a contraceptive that acts after conception, in that it prevents, not the existence of the child, but the existence of the useful child. It is a prophylactic, not against the biological family, but against the family as a reservoir of great power. The ideological contraceptive inspires the more humdrum pills and injections, and this for rather obvious reasons: It’s a raw deal, to spend a life rearing, raising, educating, molding, helping, caring, and shaping a basket of squawking infants, up and out of their uselessness and into the mighty capacities of humanity, only to, on the occasion of their eighteenth birthday, piously offer up the fruits of your labor to the Real World. The joys of the marital act have been commented on, but with these terms, it hardly seems like a thing worth procreating for. Advocates of contraception understand this much, that it is difficult to get people to use contraception when they imagine their children will be useful to them; when they consider children as wealth. Thus, part of the promotion of contraception pushes towards urbanization, getting families to live in such a manner that children do not appear as useful.
The curse against the child is hardly performed through any malevolence on the parents’ part, who, after all, love their child. Rather, children are told to “go far” as a kind of piety by which fathers, mothers, and families divest themselves of the genuine power, the capacity for action, that comes from a community in which people stay, and in which that spirit of staying is passed on to the next generation, forming a more powerful social unit. Such an act of piety is fitting for the members of a liberal society, which is founded and justified on the notion of sovereignty, namely, that there is a single power which ultimately grounds the social order, and that any node of power which is not conformed to it in submission must therefore be treated as a rival sovereign.
But the Real World looks more fake every day, seeming to find new ways to reveal itself as an insubstantial bit of posturing; a ritual of money, exchange, and discrete acts of violence only ever advertised as being more true than the particularities of a human life, embedded in a place and in a people in pursuit of the common good. And so it is worth considering an alternative to the regular offering of children to a disappointing Out There, a god whose only unambiguous gift seems to be the castration of American families into relative powerlessness. The alternative is simply to become powerful, not in the usual methods of strength, which only work through oppression, but in the weakness of family, in the humbleness of staying a while longer in one's particular soil, and in the craftiness of establishing networks of loyalty and love by which a community may perform great and magnificent works. Such an alternative would begin where the status quo left off, admiring the successes of children, not with a curse, but a blessing: “I am so glad that you are here.”