The New York Times now sends me all of its advice columns in a nice, neat, email package. I have ignored “Social Qs” for some time because its columnist, Philip Galanes, is a left-biased goof and his perspective is not to be trusted. (Here was the last time EA pondered a “Social Qs” column.) However, by presumably pure coincidence, Galanes’s latest column supplements the issue raised in this recent Ethics Alarms post about the adult child who wants to have old Mom talk to a bot about her problems because the adult child is sick of listening to her.
The “Social Qs” inquirer named “Mom” says that after a single heated argument with her adult daughter, the daughter declared that she would have no further contact with her mother “and has stuck to it.” She asked Galanes what she should do.
My answer would be along the lines of, “Good luck: you raised an ungrateful, cruel, socially handicapped asshole.” Galanes, naturally, suggests that the mother see a therapist (the daughter rejected joint counseling) because “it would probably mean a lot to your daughter.” Sure it would: that would be a tacit admission that the mother was in the wrong. However, in the course of offering his advice, Galanes made an interesting observation that had never occurred to me but has the ring of truth. He wrote,
“Another observation — which, again, I won’t assume applies to you — is generational: My parents, for instance, believed that family was everything. So they took a lot of guff from their parents and siblings — who, in turn, tolerated unpleasantness from them. But my siblings and I are more focused on our mental health and well-being: You can push us only so far before we make our exit.”
Notice that Galanes said “we,” meaning that he endorses the daughter’s cutting off her mother and might do the same. This comes on the heels of another column from “The Ethicist,” in which an inquirer asked “Is It Wrong to Leave My 85-Year-Old Mother Alone on Thanksgiving?” the Ethicist thought it was a reasonable question and I ruled that even asking it was evidence of ethics rot. My own offspring barely speaks to me despite living rent free in my home and my wife and I rescuing him from an orphanage in a horrible country.
Is this a vile new cultural norm? Did the Boomers raise a generation that don’t respect their elders and look upon their families as casual connections to be cut off on a whim? How did that happen? Is this another side effect of Marxist indoctrination? And most of all, now what?
[Note: that scene above is what I believe is an excellent portrayal of a father-daughter estrangement being healed. The scene was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. I recommend the film, “Molly’s Game,” highly, from an ethical, legal, and artistic perspective.]
