“Honor Thy Father and Mother” Means YOU

Dan Patrick on Tucker Carlson's show, Monday night

When I was short, I remember sitting through a church sermon on the Ten Commandments. The pastor, who looked unimaginably old to my grade-school eyes, but was probably only in his middle forties, told the congregation that “Honor thy father and mother,” either the fourth or fifth commandment (depending on your tradition), wasn’t intended for children. “It was written,” he intoned with great Wesleyan solemnity, “to remind us adults.”

Like much about faith, I didn’t understand what this meant until adulthood. I couldn’t imagine how easy it was for grown-ups to become so wrapped in career, household responsibilities, and tedium, that we forget to show proper respect to our parents. We never achieve standing so self-sufficient that our parents have nothing to teach us; even after they’re gone, they teach us the important responsibility of carrying on boldly.

This probably seems self-obvious to my peers, all of us adults, many with children, whose own parents provide a calming and stabilizing influence. I never would have questioned it until this week. But when Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick became notorious on Monday for saying that Americans over seventy will risk death to preserve the economy, I couldn’t handle this. This smacks of Commandment-level dishonor for our elders.

What I didn’t understand from my booming, elderly pastor, was that we adults don’t honor our parents because they birthed us. That’s a mechanical process, and one which anybody with biology can perform, as many children of abusive parents can attest. We honor our parents, and the elders among our community, because their existence ties us to a continuum. They remind us that past, and by extension future, exist.

Working adults get tangled in requirements of the present. In agrarian societies, like early Israel, this means the continual present of planting and harvesting, of birthing livestock and dressing meat. But even that requires at least medium-term thinking, as spring planters must recollect autumn harvest and its needs. The industrial economy shortens workers’ time horizons onto the current pay cycle. We think in weeks, even days, not months or years.

Parents, with their storehouse of wisdom, keep us connected to a larger time horizon. Who among us, after moving into our first apartment, didn’t phone home, asking for help sautéing mushrooms, or negotiating with used-car dealers, or making a dentist’s appointment? That’s just a scattering of what parents offer. We, as children, didn’t understand the scope of time, or how our actions have echo effects. Our parents did.

Religious tradition requires responsible adults to honor our elders, in the aggregate at least, because they provide living, material connection to our traditions. Any society without elders is a society without a past, without long-term philosophy, without depth of understanding. We exist entirely in the present tense. Then we feel hungry for meaning and guidance, which hucksters and tyrants will gladly sell us, in exchange for our souls.

This isn’t hypothetical. As John Taylor Gatto writes, our industrial society pushes elders into long-term care homes, and children into schools which resemble warehouses. This leaves adults spending most of their waking hours outside the home, away from their parents, working for other people. We exist with neither past (parents) nor future (children), eternally adrift, looking for definition. Which, in capitalist societies, we find by spending money.

I acknowledge, as some will insist, that abusive or neglectful parents exist. My relationship with my own parents flourishes with time spent apart, and by not talking about certain topics. In saying this, I don’t purport that we should return to some beatified agrarian past where everything was good. Life is too complex and nuanced for that. But how do we handle complexity and nuance without some philosophical tradition?

What Dan Patrick said on Monday, by Tuesday had become standard talking points among defenders of the status quo. Fox News potentate Brit Hume called it “an entirely reasonable viewpoint.” And though President Trump hasn’t encouraged aged Americans to risk death out loud, he’s clearly prioritized dollar transactions over public health. A healthy fraction of American leadership is willing to jettison part of our heritage if money keeps flowing.

Don’t be deceived. They advocate a society with no past, and thus by implication no future, because they stand to profit. Either they’ll get rich, or they’ll get powerful, or (like Trump or Bloomberg) both. They know a society without tradition is rudderless and starving; they’re banking on it. This isn’t about money versus human lives. It’s about whether we even have a past.