Lewis Lapham: Hostages to Fortune

[marmar]

Hostages to Fortune


Councilor to Queen Elizabeth, lord chancellor to King James I, believed to be the wisest man in Shakespeare’s England, Sir Francis overlooked the risk on the other side of the exchange. His advice is sound, but the chances of acting on it unavailable to the impediments—to wife and children held hostage to the fortune of having been born or married to a villain, a bankrupt, or a fool. The uneven distribution of the sentiment favored the interest of the state, a policy that Lord Bacon fondly embraced. He was an attentive courtier skilled at the seeking of grace and privilege from the perfumed hand of majesty, deft at the removals of unpleasing truth, and with a handsome turn of phrase he circumvented the awkward fact that family is a game of chance.

A throw of the dice, sometimes lucky, as often not, the question of nurture as opposed to nature as well and truly answered by an astrological sign or a poisoned fig as by a storm at sea, a DNA sequence, or a marriage to the king of France. Families grow as do the flowers and the weeds, of their own accord and as they will. Sometimes they lay waste to empires; sometimes they achieve the dignity of a dress label, but always they furnish a society with its living tissue and its intimations of immortality, impart to the individual a sense of self if not a criminal record or a noble name.

.....(snip).....

The mourners at the bier of America’s lost family values like to construe them as immutable laws of nature, comparable to the force of gravity or the speed of light. The notion is reduced to an absurdity on the opening of the nearest history book, even the ones admitted to the fourth-grade classrooms in Texas. The story of Western civilization is for the most part a collection of tales told by, for, and about the ruling families whose smile was fortune and whose frown was death. Family matters were the affairs of state, in ancient Israel and imperial Rome as in the tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare. Blood relation was power, wives and children its instruments. The tragedy of King Lear follows from the royal wish to value the worth of a rich kingdom in the currency of fine sentiment. As a consequence the king lost both his kingdom and his mind. So also with the reading of the records of the families Plantagenet, Borgia, Tudor, Medici, Stuart, Bourbon, Habsburg, and Bonaparte—marriage was an exchange of property; so was murder. Men died from time to time, and worms did eat them, but not for love. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/preamble/hostages-to-fortune.php

[JDPriestly]

1. Great article.

I like this paragraph:

It matters not if dad is a serial killer, mom is gay, the pet an aardvark or a snake. What matters is the substitution of sentiment for power. Let the natural bonds draw closer as the social bond is loosened, and our monied classes remove the obstacle of having to provide for interests other than their own. The bait and switch is the virtual reality serving as stunt double for the reality, or, to put it bluntly, in a rough translation from the late-eighteenth-century French, let them eat videotape. By the dawn’s early light in Oakland and Detroit, the American dream is bursting in air, but inside Hollywood’s star-spangled studios, our flag is still there—not flying where it might add to the sum of the public good, but right there in your own home, online and on TV, “natural warmth of heart” available all day, every day, in time and on demand, at the user-friendly subscription price of ninety-nine dollars a month. Rejoice in the things of the spirit. Welcome to the nursery where everybody is still a child.

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/preamble/hostages-to-fortune.php?page=5

Insightful and well written.