I was thinking about babies 200 years ago. Who calmed them? We assume the mother, but in most homes was there not also an aunt or two or three, and a grandmother, whose energy was in most cases likely much more serene and patient than that of the young mother?
The cultural model in most of the world is not to create remote places to cast our unwanted old and abandon them to the care of the State, much as Rousseau envisioned for unwanted children (of which he personally fathered a couple).
No, the old live with the young and help out. They cook, and care for the home. They exist in that cultural space and impart what they know of life, which I am hopefully not being too romantic in thinking once consisted in something more than how to invest in stocks and tips for playing golf.
Does it not seem that in casting off our old, we cast off both our past, and our connection to the future? Can we not learn to live for more than the weekend, the sportsing and beer, the Cosmos and girl chat?
Here is what I wonder: does some of this hypersensitivity among the young come from the fact that their mothers went back to work a month or two after having them, and were never fully emotionally present to them because they worked all day and were tired? Their care-givers varied at the daycare, and the grandmothers were in other States.
We are supposed to exist as productive economic atoms, able to move and merge with other atoms at will. But we are born to live in webs: of connection, of meaning, of history.
It is just one of the ironies, the intellectual hypocrisies, of Socialism that it presents itself as a giving, loving, compassionate creed, but that in actual fact it separates people from one another, from their past, from their people and creeds.
Yes, we can say tribalism leads to violence. But Liberalism was intended to solve that problem. And it still can, if we return to a genuinely Liberal ethos, as opposed to the overt Fascism which has overtaken our universities, and largely our news media, and political order.
Edit: You know, a big part of what enables nursing homes and full time skilled nursing, is economic progress. Wealth. People buy enormous homes and make no place for mom and dad. And part of this is mutually desired. What I am not noting is how much tension, how many fights, how much unwished unpleasantness must have attended, and must still attend, the care of the elderly.
What I had in mind was Social Security and Medicare, which pay for State run homes, but the progress (and regress) made possible by free markets and property rights (what is mistakenly called “Capitalism”, which was Marx’s term for a system he critiqued in so doing) is a big part of it too.