James Dobson's Evil Empire, A Philosopher with Chronic Pain, and the Family Debt Trap - Dinner Table Digest № 29
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This edition of the Dinner Table Digest is entirely devoid of content about Christian Nationalism. I’ve included a little poll mid-way through this Digest about whether you want more content on Christian Nationalism. 😁
Sections: Ministry of Violence / Why does Chronic Pain Hurt so Much? / All in the Family Debt
Ministry of Violence - Tal Lavin
For those raised on the parenting advice of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, this piece will likely stir a range of emotions. I know that it did for me. It took me a long time to realize that spanking of any kind, that physically striking a child in any way, is abuse. Indeed, as many survivors of physical abuse as children now know, each strike re-wires an already delicate and developing brain. The emotional whiplash of being told by a parent that they love you, even as they strike your bare bottom with a leather strap, creates confused expectations about who your parents are. Are they your protectors and providers, or are they your punishers?
Why Does Chronic Pain Hurt So Much? - Kieran Setiya - The Atlantic
When philosophy and chronic pain meet up, as Kieran Setiya shows us, there are interesting conversations to be had.
But as someone who has lived with pain for 19 years … [I believe] physical pain has “referential content”: It represents a part of the body as being damaged or imperiled even when, as in my case, it isn’t really. Pain can be deceptive. And we have many words for it: Pulsing, burning, and contracting are all good words for mine.
That pain represents the body in distress, bringing it into focus, helps us better understand why it is bad. Pain disrupts what the philosopher and physician Drew Leder calls the “transparency” of the healthy body. We don’t normally attend to the body itself; instead, we interact with the world “through” it, as if it were a transparent medium. Being in pain blurs the corporeal glass. That’s why pain is not just bad in itself: It impedes one’s access to anything good.
This accounts for one of pain’s illusions. Sometimes, I think I want nothing more than to be pain free—but as soon as pain is gone, the body recedes into the background, unappreciated. The joy of being free of pain is like a picture that vanishes when you try to look at it, like turning on the lights to see the dark.
Philosophy illuminates another side of pain—in a way that has practical upshots. This has to do with understanding persistent pain as more than just a sequence of atomized sensations. The temporality of pain transforms its character.
Although I am not always in notable pain, I’m never aware of pain’s onset or relief. By the time I realize it has vanished from the radar of attention, it has been quiet for a while. When the pain is unignorable, it seems like it’s been there forever and will never go away. I can’t project into a future free of pain: I will never be physically at ease. Leder, who also suffers from chronic pain, traces its effects on memory and anticipation: “With chronic suffering a painless past is all but forgotten. While knowing intellectually that we were once not in pain we have lost the bodily memory of how this felt. Similarly, a painless future may be unimaginable.”
All in the Family Debt - Melinda Cooper - Boston Review
A fascinating piece about how economic neo-liberals worked together with social conservatives to re-institute Elizabethan poor laws on American (and, to a limited extent, Canadian) families.
… many of the policy reforms after the Reagan revolution can be understood as an attempt to reinvent the imperative of familial responsibility in the new idiom of household debt. As policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century social state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socioeconomic order. The family, not the state, would bear primary responsibility for investing in the education, health and welfare of children.
This return to Elizabethan poor law principles was made possible, in part, because of an unlikely alliance between neoliberals and social conservatives. Despite their differences on virtually all other issues, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged—and at the limit enforced—as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. Though it is often overlooked in the literature, economic liberalism is as much concerned with familial responsibility as it is with personal responsibility, and the neoliberal emphasis on familial relations as a substitute for public relief is an unappreciated, but critical aspect of free-market liberalism. More than anything else, this appeal to familial responsibility sealed the working relationship between free market liberalism and social conservatism, very much defining the shape of social welfare in the contemporary era.
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