228. When Error Philosophers Become Parents.

 

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I see no reason for the Avoidance Parent not to follow the same general rule the Avoidance Ruler follows: come down big on the Big Mistakes and wave away the little ones.  The Big Mistakes a child can make are the life-ruining ones, like doing heroin.  In my day it was getting a girl pregnant, or getting pregnant.  The promising child goes, bang, from a wide world full of options (this college? that career? the best country to pursue it in?) to a narrow world of practically zilch options (work at this plant?  apprentice yourself to that trade? clerk in whose store?). That was in my town but the range of jobs available to a partially educated husband was small in nearly every town and inability to move far (how could you, with no savings and a baby?) made it smaller.

OK, that is the Big Mistake, that is the nuclear catastrophe, the quagmire, the released genocide, and unless he (or she) is confident the child will avoid it on his own the Avoidance Parent will go big on it as he went big on the toddler to keep him out of the street.  And with the same acceptance of collateral damage, physical or psychological.  No injury by a parent is as great as what an automobile or a heroin addiction can do.

Parents, like nineteenth-century rulers, are prone to gauge a mistake by the injury done not to the child but to themselves, their pride, their sense of their (or their family's) position.  And they often fail to distinguish real injury from symbolic injury.  Dress, facial hair, music, posture, indecorous language, most of the gestures of teenage rebellion, do only symbolic injury.  The Avoidance Parent, having identified the Big Threat that does Real Injury, will wave them aside — as Napoleon III, France's great Attainment Ruler, should have done with the Ems telegram, the indecorous language of which led him to declare the war that lost Alsace.  Loss of a province, loss of a child, the same confusion is behind it.

In the family, as in the world arena, the Error Philosopher will be an anti-romantic.  No "Follow your dream," no "Excelsior!" no "Be President."  Just avoid the Big Crash that, with romantics, follows not just failure but simply falling short.  He'll redefine failure.  So that a child who grows up to be a quarrelsome, dogmatic bore will be recognized as a failure.  Despite his Nobel prize.  The payoff to the child? He'll se that there's no need to make it in the big leagues.  Playing decent ball in the neighborhood is, as long as it satisfies you, good enough.  The payoff to the parent: no reproaches like Biff's to Willy Loman: "I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!"

Does this mean that the nation will win fewer Nobel prizes?  It could well be.  Maybe that's the way Error Philosophy will play out beyond the family.  Buy into it and we may buy out of a cure for cancer.