Benedict Option, 2B: The Domestic Monastery & The Monastery Effect

My last post on what Dreher calls the Domestic Monastery of the home got me thinking about the Neil Postman book The Disappearance of Childhood that I read last fall. I actually emailed Dreher a passage from that book that he posted to his blog. It's buried deep in that post if you're interested. But I thought I would dust off Postman a bit to interact with Dreher here.

Dreher's central metaphor for the family is that we ought to function within our homes like little monasteries, with fathers as abbots and mothers as abbesses. The goal is to create a rule of life for our families similar to what exists within the walls of a monastery. I really like that metaphor as a way of thinking about passing down meaning and truth to my children. 

Postman's concerns are not as religiously motivated as Dreher's own, but the result of each man's diagnosis of culture is remarkably similar. Postman's concern is that the ideal of childhood, created by the inception of mass literacy, is being steadily and perhaps irreversibly denuded by our technopoly. In his concluding chapter, Postman floats a hypothetical question: Is the individual able to resist the techification of all things. His response is beautifully articulated and very Benedict-y.

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

I concluded my post last fall by saying the following in response (sorry to quote myself; that seems weird): 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow. 

This, I take it, is the goal of the Benedict Option. Not to fully extricate ourselves from modernity, but to resist its dehumanizing impulses for the good of modernity. To help people see beyond the immediate and the pleasurable and find joy. To drink from the well that quenches our thirst eternally. It is a large and monumental task. But the evangelization of the world has always been the mission of the church. And I don't think it was ever meant to be easy.