Looking over Honoré de Balzac’s Old Goriot, I noted that where society is concerned, a person transitions from the dependent state to the symbiotic state by finding employment, being productive, and paying taxes. That transition is not as clear cut where familial relationships are concerned. Societal expectations assume that the parents sacrifice for the child so the child, in turn, will sacrifice for the parents when they are no longer able to work, or possibly care, for themselves.
Despite acknowledging that most families do not work on this transactional model, it is worth noting nowadays, that few are even capable of fulfilling this nuts-and-bolts approach to as suggested by societal assumptions concerning the functionality of families. While this may have been the standard before, in the modern world the established template assumes too much space, too much time, and too much money. The reality is that aside from those at the top of the societal pyramid scheme, few people can meet the demands, through no fault of their own. As with any functional pyramid scheme, the wealth, far from trickling down, is sucked from the bottom to the top. This has resulted in artificial resource scarcity and intensifying economic division have created a scenario in which every individual must look out for their own needs and attempt to amass as many resources as they can for themselves, in the hopes that in the future they can survive on their accumulated wealth. All the while they contend with the possibility that all their hard work and saving can be made obsolete by relative interest rates, stagnating wages, and any number of economic shocks.
In the meantime, as living space shrinks and wages shrink in real terms relative to inflation, and the costs of living rise, so too does the cost of care, spiralling, ironically, far beyond the capabilities of anybody but those who least need it, to afford it.
What of the emotional contract of families? Are we then indebted to our parents? ‘No, of course not!’, they would instinctively tell us. To give them their due, I doubt they ever conceived of this whole mess as a system of unspoken contracts or deals or favours. How many children do? I don’t know. If they don’t, does this breed complacency? If they do, is it healthy? Is it even accurate to conceptualise a parent-child relationship in terms of a contract or agreement, if one half of that contract had no ability to walk away from the negotiating table?
Complacency with regards to parents is an unfortunate but natural characteristic of children. Observe it all around you and note that it is difficult to resent them for it. How could they not be? They have known nothing else. Known no absence. You may as well hate the fish for having no concept of water. One day, they will inevitably be forced to confront the fact that there is a world outside of the ocean. They will have been dimly aware of it long before its arrival, some vague academic conception. When that inevitable eventuality finally steps across their path and introduces itself, it will leave a mark. They will, however, eventually process the knowledge and persevere.
And parents read all this and respond: “What the hell are you babbling about, you pretentious bloviating cabbage!?” Fair, fair, I hear you. So, to address the elephant in the room, how do we factor ‘love’ into this equation? Or, perhaps, I have arranged this all wrong, and I should be factoring in all other considerations after the fact of love? Love, after all, is the foundational element, correct?
Well, how do you account for it? I love my family. I know this. Beyond that I am not clear on how to define, quantify, qualify, or clarify the emotion. There is, of course, a default back to chemical reactions, oxytocin, etc. However, in context I’m not sure this adequately addresses the subject.
Some might content that that’s the point. Love, they might say, should retain its mystery. I don’t agree. There are people who object to science, it seems to scare them. They claim that it robs the universe of its mystery. Cowards. It has done nothing of the sort. If anything, every endeavour to answer any singular question about the world or the universe has only revealed a chaos of new questions that we are profoundly ill-equipped to address. The mystery has done nothing by deepen by many orders of magnitude.
If we fear robbing the universe of its mystery by probing it, does that reveal a trepidation with regards to our emotions? As if probing them would reveal them to be so shallow? That we would go one layer down and hit the psychological equivalent of bedrock? And why would this scare us? Possible because of the sheer amount of energy devoted to it – now, apparently, with the addition of my own ridiculous musings. If it were so shallow, then we would suddenly need to take a tonne of investment and transfer somewhere else. It would, in theory, lose its potency or sense of importance.
We construct so much around the idea of love. If the concept was ever a straightforward affair, it has been blown out of all proportion by the societal romanticisation of it. Could you imagine if we solved it? Entire personalities would need to reinvent themselves and whole industries would crumble overnight. Our collective approach to it seems no less confused and ambiguous. I’m reminded, of all things, of Malcom Reynolds’ speech the end of Serenity:
“You can learn all the math in the ‘verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don’t love, she’ll shake you off sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down, tells you she’s hurtin’ fore she keels. Makes her a home.”
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Ok, I get it, it’s a pithy throwaway bit of Hallmark cliché. It’s there to close the movie off on an upbeat vibe, it’s not there to actually say anything of consequence, while simultaneously giving the impression of wisdom. A feelgood cop-out masquerading as profundity. What is important is that I’m certain I’m not alone in having heard more or less the same thing innumerable times across the years. Culture across time and space is strewn with similar insipid vagaries. I think that is revealing. It seems to imply that, aside from the cocktail of neurochemicals, and sociological impulses and behaviours, very few of us are any better informed than the average Hallmark cliché.
If any of that is remotely on the right track, then it might indicate that we consider mystery and importance to be interconnected. Which on the face of it seems to be an error of judgement with potentially serious implications. But that is a whole other topic, and it would probably be best tackled by someone more knowledgeable and intelligent than myself, or at the very least I would have to do a reasonable amount of research around the idea before blithering on about it. So, for the moment I will shut up.
If the societal model presumes a ‘care now–cared for later’ exchange of services, then we have an intersection between societal and domestic spheres. Does a parent, making a Goriot-style material sacrifice for their offspring conceive thereof in terms of future compensation? Should they? If you ask any individual on the street, they would emphatically decry the idea because we tend to conceive of love and exchange as almost antithetical to one another. We run up against an unspoken social ideal that repudiates the question. However, according to the societal model of families, we absolutely should. We find ourselves in a contradiction in terms of how we conceive of the family and what the mechanics of the family are in its wider context. If, from a familial perspective, the answer is emphatically ‘no!’, then we must reconcile that with the socio-economic perspective for which the answer is emphatically ‘yes!’
If either answer is true, then what do we make of wills and inheritances? Do we then interpret this as an unspoken pressure in society on parents to not only provide as best a life as possible for their children, but also to somehow continue to provide for them even after death? No wonder the millennials and Gen. Z are forgoing children.
Does ‘love’ become a sort of ‘God of the gaps’ here? There is a tonne of pressure and many expectations, unanswered questions and responsibilities, a number of which might contradict each other. Let us suggest a hypothetical situation in which we run up against all of these things, and we have no answer or understanding, or we simply cannot meet the alpine expectations and ideals arranged ahead of us, no matter how we try. Let’s further say that those who fall short are called to account for themselves and placed on trial with society in a position of prosecution, judge and jury. When cross examined, do we default to ‘love’? How then does the judge and jury rule?
My old man was in hospital years ago. Mum arranged a visit and I was going to turn up a while before and was slightly hesitant. She mistook this as reluctance, but I was perfectly willing to go. I’m just not much for small talk, and I didn’t want to sit there like a spare dick at a wedding. What was the purpose of visiting if I couldn’t do anything useful? I needn’t have worried – the old man’s conversation skills are a lot better than my own.
The point, I subsequently realised, is that people can extract value from the mere presence of their loved ones, to put it in the exhausting transactional framework of modernity. Taking that to be true, just turning up is a sign that you care, and so care must have value.
Care is the currency in the economy of love.
I have a thing about paying debts. I foolishly lost some of my mate’s earplugs at Fortress Festival in June this year. He assured me he’s cool with it, but I’ll be damned if he ain’t getting a new set of earplugs from me, whether he wants them or not.
Eight years ago, a guy I used to work with brought me a double Monkey Shoulder. I never did get to repay him, but, apparently, I won’t forget the favour. Like I said, debts.
As transactional as all of that is, is it also not a demonstration of care, and thus has value?
The problem with transactionality is that it is rigid and cold. It implies a minimum value for some theoretical base emotional unit – whatever the care equivalent of a penny or a cent is.
This is at odds with the fluidity and warmth of emotion. You can’t break it into stacks of exchangeable currency. I’m not sure how many Monkey Shoulders there are to a pair of ear plugs, but I value my friend’s ear plugs more than I do the whisky.
I don’t actually care about the ex-colleague, though he was a decent bloke. I do care about my friend, but both are acts of kindness, and if only the action mattered then they would hold equal value, but they do not. So perhaps the value extracted from an act of kindness is directly dependent on the amount of care you have for the person performing the action?
We might say that kindness implies care, but the ex-colleague had zero reason to care about me – his generosity wasn’t linked to care it was linked to good will. And suddenly we’ve got two new concepts into this farcical emotional economy I’ve started to rough out, ‘kindness’ and ‘good will’. How do those interact with ‘care’ and ‘love’? Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose I could sit here pontificating on the concept for thousands of extra words, but I probably wouldn’t get anywhere, it looks like a bigger question for another day, and we’ve already proposed that transactionality and emotion aren’t exactly soluble.
What now? Do we fold the concept of care into some vaguely repugnant notion of an unspoken contract between family members? If you don’t call your mum for a certain number of days, are you incurring a debt of some description? If so, how does repayment work? What’s the interest rate? Who arbitrates?
At this point I’m pretty sure I’ve put my foot in one more rabbit hole I don’t really have the inclination to get lost in, so I’ll let the more emotionally intelligent get on with parsing that one out. Hell, they probably already have, I’m just late to the party.
Yet, if the relationship dynamics at play in Old Goriot reflect an arguably conflicting overlap between the domestic and societal spheres, then they must imply some interaction of significance. If the novel’s themes are still relevant to the world of today, almost 200 years later, what does that imply?
Words and Chaos 
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