Declaration of Dependence
Liberty alone is a lie.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
July 5, 2001 8:30 a.m.

an there be too much liberty?  Our reverence for the crack in that bell seems to say, no.  For liberty's sake, Americans shun comfort, brave solitude, put fortune and life at risk.  Liberty appears to trump all.  Yet liberty unbounded is an illusion; liberty alone is a lie.

Without having put it into words, the Founders understood this.  They took for granted the respect for authority and the ethic of mutual obligation that governed America's families.  They assumed that children would be responsibly ruled by their parents until they were capable of wielding liberty wisely themselves.  It was understood that independence was for nations, and that freedom belonged to the world of commerce and politics.  Life within that crucible of liberty — the family — was not about freedom.  Responsibility, discipline — and an intimate fellowship that softened and justified all the sacrifice — was the order of the day.

Liberty is for adults.  But human beings are born helpless.  Only the child who is gently but wisely governed attains to mature self-government.  The child who can depend unconditionally upon his parents will give unconditionally — will want to give unconditionally — to those who will someday depend upon him.  Liberty in commerce and politics is sustained by the family, but the family is sustained by something very different than pure liberty.

All of this may seem elementary, but none of it is obvious — especially not now.  The cultural changes that have overtaken America in the past thirty years or so have put into question everything that the founders took for granted about the limits of liberty.  The post-sixties ethos of personal liberation is precisely an attempt to put a final end to authority and sacrifice by carrying the Declaration's principles of freedom and equality into the sphere of the family.  But the great obstacle to the liberationist project is the ineradicable helplessness of human beings at the beginning and end of their lives--a helplessness that demands familial authority and sacrifice, whether we wish it or not.

American's are justifiably proud of their legacy.  At great cost, and after great peril, democracy and the market appear to have triumphed.  Much of the world now speaks our language, listens to our music, wears our clothes, watches our television, or yearns to do these things.  We can barely bar our doors.  During the campaign's foreign policy debate, President Bush spoke of humility, but it's difficult to be humble under such circumstances.  There is something important that we still need to learn from the rest of the world, however--something we've forgotten.

When Americans look out at the world beyond Europe, they tend to see an ocean of humanity ripe for liberation — peoples entangled in various degrees of ignorance, prejudice, and authoritarianism — yet also peoples who seem to be yearning, sometimes without half knowing it, for liberty and equality.

There is truth in this way of seeing the world.  Yet if it is possible for whole societies to turn against the realities of human liberty and equality, is it not possible for a society to turn against the reality of human dependence?  For all their sacrifice of  liberty and equality, traditional societies pay homage to the truth of human dependence.  Adults in these societies are seldom alone — and seldom wish to be alone.  Children are nurtured by many.  The ill and aged remain in their family's care and company until death.  For all the sacrifice of freedom and equality that such webs of mutual obligation entail, something important is gained.

America has untangled that web of mutual dependence.  It is difficult to think of a social reform or a technological innovation in the modern world that does not somehow contribute to the individual's ability to maintain himself independently of others.  In a sense, modernity is precisely the ripping away of that fabric of mutual entanglement that defines traditional societies.  People who live alone need answering machines…and answering machines make it easier to live alone.  Our telephones, televisions, recorded music, and computers are important to us because we are so often alone.  With these aides, we seem not to be alone.  And simply having them encourages us to be more alone still.

We can pretend that these technological companions are enough.  And in a sense they are.  Technology, after all, cuts two ways.  Answering machines make it easier to live alone, but also allow people living independent lives to meet with lovers and friends.  Yet for children and the elderly infirm, none of this will do.  Machines make those who are already independent more so.  But the dependent require more.  For children and the elderly infirm, someone simply has to be there — to feed, to dress, to provision, to teach, to govern, and to love.

Thirty-some years may seem like enough time to assess our new cultural mode, but it's not.  The easy part is over now, but the crunch is coming — the revenge of the repressed, so to speak, as the truth of a dependence long denied emerges.   A changing America has followed the baby boomers from their college years through maturity.  And the boomers are now at the apex of their cultural power.  But we have yet to reckon with the maturity of the boomers' children, and the old age of the boomers themselves.  Above all, we have yet to reckon with the combination of the two.

The rising crisis of America's dependents — children and the elderly — was the real story of the new census statistics released a couple of months ago, although this was buried underneath the rush to tout the disappearance of the traditional family — supposedly reflected in the fact that less than 25% of American households now consist of a married couple with children.  As E. J. Dionne Jr. recently pointed out, even in 1960, the height of the Ozzie and Harriet era, only 45% of American households were composed of a married couple with children.  Many of the remaining families consisted of aging parents who's children had left.  And while families with children are about twenty percent less likely to be led by a married couple now than in 1960, what the low percentage of families with two parents and children really reflects is the fact that people are now living longer. 

Every senior living alone counts as a "family," and the real problem reflected in the census statistics is that a vast generation of elderly and long-lived boomers is about to experience years of dependence upon a generation of children imbued by the boomers themselves with the ethos of self-fulfillment.  In caring for their parents, these children will be forced to negotiate the complex lines of resentment and responsibility left by divorce, blended families, and single parenthood.

It's a frightening thought, and as a society we haven't begun to face it.  For us, the related truths of dependence in children and the aging are still taboo.  An article like Mary Eberstadt's recent "Home Alone America," which details the extent and consequences of the parental desertion of the home, still has the power to shock — not simply for what it says, but for the fact that someone dares to say it.  In her important new book, Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work Jennifer Roback Morse puts her finger on the problem, but so far the book hasn't garnered the attention it deserves.

Yet someone, at least, is trying to force the notice of society onto the consequences for children of the new cultural mode.  Where, however, is the discussion of aging?  Yes, the coming crisis of Social Security and the roots of that crisis in the demographics of the baby boom is now a subject of public debate, as are proposals for prescription-drug benefits.  But Social Security and prescription drugs only scratch the surface of the social dilemma we are about to face.

Medical science has added years to our lives, but in the process has also subjected us to unprecedented periods of frailty and dependence.  The explosion of Alzheimer's Disease is only the most dramatic example of the problem.  A stabilized Social Security system and prescription drug benefits can't do much by themselves for an Alzheimer's patient.  It takes a spouse and/or a grown child (preferably more than one) to manage the thousand-and-one things that must be done for an elderly person with advanced Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.  Even taking advantage of, say, Medicare's offer of reimbursement for a wheelchair, can be a task well beyond the reach of many elderly.  A high quality assisted-living facility may do the paper work, but who arranges to place an elderly person in such a facility in the first place, or to pull him out if the care is inferior?

The care in even the very best assisted-living facilities and nursing homes can be woefully wanting at times for a truly helpless elderly person.  Private care is beyond the means of most, and private care has in any case to be managed and paid for by someone with the best interests of the person in question at heart.  There is simply no substitute for family in such matters.  But when the time comes, will the children of the boomers come through?  Many boomers have no children.  Many had children late.  Many are divorced more than once.  Will nephews and nieces, relatively immature children, and the children of blended families and complex custody arrangements be there when it counts?  Or will latch-key children make for latch-key parents?

Then there's that other product of the sixties ethos — the nursing shortage, which is already seriously degrading hospital and elder care throughout the country, and promises to be at crisis proportions in the near future.  Not only did feminism precipitate the nursing shortage by opening up a vast array of career choices to women, feminism created a positive distaste for nursing, which, for the independent woman, too much resembled the service and sacrifice of mothering.  And we've put a patch on the nursing shortage in the same way we've patched up the mothering shortage — by importing nurses and nannies from places like the Philippines.  The world thirsts for our music and technology, but what we now need from the world tells its own sad story.  We have turned away from — even feel a subtle contempt for — the reality of human dependence.

In America, true independence has always been grounded in an unspoken acknowledgment of the reality of human dependence — and therefore in the authoritative guidance and loving sacrifice that children receive from adults within stable families.  Through some wondrous but fragile alchemy, a child well loved by a parent will want, and even need, to return that loving care.  We have been tampering for well over thirty years with this time-tested formula, and there's good reason to fear the result.  So maybe what's needed is to say out loud at last what the founders had no need to say.  Perhaps what's wanted today is an acknowledgment — a ringing declaration — of the reality of human dependence.