Three Questions for Parental Rights

My barber is expecting a child.

I learned this in the course of getting my hair cut, while having a conversation about life in Thornhill, which is where his wife is from. It also happens to be where I spent a good deal of my formative years, through much of elementary and high school.

When I told him this, he asked where I went to school. I told him, and then, in response to the blank lack of recognition of the name of the school, I mentioned that it was a private school.

On hearing that he said something that surprised me.

As a relatively young man – I’d guess he’s in his early thirties – in a field that, at least on the surface, seems like it should be fairly progressive, I wasn’t expecting to hear anything like the parental rights inference that he made.

But, that’s what I heard, an expression of concern that his child would be exposed to an ideological agenda so powerful that it carried the potential to profoundly change who they are.

And the barber one seat over, also a young man, sporting hair and clothes verging on the avant garde of Paris’ fashion week, nodded his assent to this.

Nevermind the absurdity of this line of thinking, the fact that whatever children might see or hear in the classroom is by far a lesser influence on them than their parents, given at least some degree of competence in that department, have. This is a sentiment that seems to be relatively wide-spread – the conservative appeal to voters along these lines is not without reason.

Recent news articles with headlines stating that young men, those between 18 and 30, are increasingly suspicious of feminism, gives one instance of a reluctance to accept challenges to the status quo, to whatever the dominant strain of ‘normal’ is. A recent article in The Financial Times notes that this increasing conservatism among men diverges from what is seen among young women, who are 30% more liberal than their male peers. This dynamic repeats across a number of countries.

A take on this, that I largely agree with, outlines the many ways that young men are falling behind today, whether that’s behind young women, who are graduating high school and post-secondary institutions at a higher rate, or whether that’s in achievement in the marketplace, where real wages have declined compared to years past. The sense of not being able to gain a toehold, to find a sense of accomplishment, drives a crisis in identity for many, and for many this causes a turn toward solutions that present some semblance of meaning to them, a semblance of stability or righteousness of how the world should be.

The simplification of these narratives, such as that offered by Trump, by populist conservative Premiers like Daniel Smith in Alberta, and by Prime Minister wannabes like Pierre Poilievre, provides an us-vs-them dynamic, an easy way to find blame for what one perceives as having gone wrong.

A look at just about any of the claims made by these folks shows that they discount the agency of the other, the “them” in the combative narrative. Those struggling with gender identity are not able to decide for themselves, rather, whatever they might be going through is both imposed upon them by outside forces, wokism and the like, and taken from them as a condition that is internal to who they are, and thus something that they should be allowed and enabled to pursue on their terms.

The factors contributing to this slip to the right, often to its intolerant extreme, among young men, whether the divergence in both value orientation and economic outcomes with young women or other factors needs, I think, to be understood in a much broader context, namely that of technology and, especially, social media.

Teasing apart the claim, that the school is somehow a battleground for the identity of our children, splits, as with so much of our societal narratives nowadays, between the online world, and the in-person world. (I don’t think we can say the latter is the real world anymore, which is quite something in itself.)

The notion that kids are being indoctrinated in the classroom is, by and large, something that is pushed online. Claims have been made that kids identifying as cats have been accommodated with litter boxes, to illustrate the radical extremes of gender politics within today’s schools. (These claims have been repeatedly debunked, in case you were wondering.)

In contrast to this, the influence of parents on their children is deeply personal. It is woven through care, through moments of frustration and failure, moments of joy and of embarrassment – in other words, it is profoundly knowledgeable of the other, and even the secrets, intentionally held and not, shape a deep intimacy. Knowledge is something that requires work, it requires us to meet whatever it is that we hope to understand on its own terms.

I think it’s this degree of difficulty, the work that’s required in the engagement, that really sets the online world and the in-person world apart from each other.

Another sudden leap in technology, which took place a few hundred years ago, is helpful in illustrating this.

The modern conception of human rights, which we take for granted now, is due in large part to the printed word.

In the 18th century novels and newspapers proliferated. What was accessible to a few, more privileged people now became, or at least started to become, commonplace. In the new fora authors and readers multiplied, bringing more accounts of different experiences into what became the public consciousness.

It was these new insights into the worlds of others, the experiences, the internal lives, that the protagonists of these accounts brought about that gave rise to a capacity for empathy that had previously been dormant.

And it’s this capacity to understand what the other’s experience might be that contributes to our conception of universal human rights.

Lynn Hunt, in her essay, The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights¹, notes that, “novels create empathy through the magical power of narrative, not by means of explicit moralizing.” She cites Henry Homes, the Scottish jurist and philosopher, who notes that the reverie that the reader is able to experience while reading a novel leads to a losing of one’s sense of self, as well as the sense of reading, and a placing, instead, into the world that springs forth from the pages.

Hunt writes that, “for human rights to resonate as a notion, people had to learn to think of others as their equals and as like them in some fundamental fashion.

One might object, here, and say that the written word has proliferated with the internet, that there are far more opportunities to get some insight into the experiences of others now.

But I think this misses a crucial difference between the way that we consume what is online, and the way that we consume print.

The reverie that Homes talks about experiencing, with the novel, both displaces the self and provides a new self to inhabit, the self of the protagonist in the narrative.

I suppose there’s a reverie that anyone who’s scrolled through a social media feed will know, as well, and in some senses it also displaces the self. But rather than allow the reader, or viewer as the case may be, to sink into the experience of the other, the scroll effaces the self but doesn’t really allow something else to take its place. The scroll kind of becomes the point, so that it’s the passing of whatever fragment of experience might offer itself up on the viewer’s timeline is subsumed by the hit of the possibly green grass just below in the feed.

There is, in other words, a difference in the way that we encounter these two things, where one takes more time and greater investment, while the other is fleeting and ephemeral.

I don’t think everything that’s going on with young men and their increasing intolerance can be chalked up to social media. There are many elements of our day to day lives that are designed to make it easier for us to not have to deal with what another might be going through. Policies that prohibit panhandling, for example, aren’t so much meant to address associated problems of poverty and addiction as they are meant to simply remove it from our experience.

But, to the extent that the difficult and problematic, the messy and complicated, is removed from our lives, the less we have the opportunity, I think, to flex those muscles of understanding and problem solving. Of course not every problem should be pathologized, and in developing those muscles of tolerance we also create the space in which difference, that which resides outside of the normal, can be appreciated.

We do ourselves a disservice by limiting our exposure to challenges, to difference and variation, we become brittle and our world contracts and becomes smaller. Unfortunately, much of our technology is designed to do just that, to feed our whims and comforts, to serve up content selected according to an ever more narrowly refined set of criteria run through a digital algorithm.

These circumstances paint a picture of young men who, it seems, feel increasingly unable to find purchase, or see themselves as a meaningful part of society, young men who aren’t able to connect with others in a deep and meaningful sense, to experience that reverie of inhabiting the life of another. And so they seek out easy answers on social media, fall prey to blowhards who punch down and scapegoat, who take advantage of the frustrations of not knowing exactly how one fits into things.

A lot has been written about how a big element of this is toxic masculinity, or white privilege. I’m not so sure that is really what is at the root of this, though. The factors that enable a young man to feel good about themselves aren’t so different from those that enable anyone else to feel good about themselves, and it’s only after meaningful, dignified engagement with society fails, I think, that it becomes all too easy to turn to the triggers of race or gender or sexuality. It has been born out again and again that when people feel valued and are treated with dignity they in turn value and treat others with dignity.

The point we are at, though, is one that mirrors in many respects past conditions that have repeatedly led to the ascendancy of authoritarianism. In turn, authoritarianism marks itself with legitimacy by establishing an Other, by prescribing the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in society, and by then directing popular frustration and mobilization against that which falls outside of it.

The next couple of years seem to mark a choice for whether we move towards authoritarianism, or whether we begin the long process of repairing the tatters of our social contract. Understanding that people, even if they express support for issues that are anathema to you, for issues that seem entirely misguided and, sometimes, even cruel, that these people often are searching for answers and meaning, and that they likely feel a sense of alienation that they cannot quite identify, will be important to countering the appeal of populists, charlatans, and demagogues.

One of the most useful pieces of advice I’ve heard is that when you hear something that you disagree with, pause, and then ask three questions about it before forming or offering your own opinion. Not only can this greatly enhance your understanding of others and what they might be thinking, but it provides an example that others might, just might, follow.

1. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N., editor. Human Rights and Revolutions. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.