WSJ review: Why matters of the heart cannot be legislated
Two new memoirs, "Troubled" and "Motorhome Prophecies," reveal how the most important things in life lay beyond the reach or help of government + Soul of Civility Updates
Gracious reader,
I’m thrilled to share with you a review I penned for the Wall Street Journal this past weekend.
Two new memoirs, Rob Henderson’s Troubled and Carrie Sheffield’s Motorhome Prophecies, both tell personal stories of familial dysfunction and brokenness that led them to appreciate the importance of family, faith, love and the tenets of a free society.
I chose to review these books in dialogue together because they help us think more clearly about the tenets of human flourishing and a free society—and how there are so many important aspects of human life that lay beyond the realm of government reach.
As many of you know, this is a central theme of my book, The Soul of Civility.
A core argument of my book is that you can’t legislate common courtesy, kindness, and basic respect for our fellow persons—you can only legislate against the worst excesses of people failing to do so.
But human flourishing is about more than preventing us from actively harming one another. It requires us to go above and beyond to help one another when we’re in need, and to make one another feel seen, known and loved. Acts of graciousness and hospitality, both practical, intellectual and more— cannot be mandated or forced. They must be spontaneous, organic, and voluntary, something that is endlessly vexing for public leaders who want to legislate their way to the good.
Read the review here, and below are some extended thoughts from my review.
Comment and tell me what you think!
A three-year-old is strapped to a chair with a bathrobe, his piercing cries enduring for hours on end, while a mother does drugs in the next room. Neighbors hear the child’s tormented pleas, and rightfully call child protective services, who take him from his mother and place him in foster care. A young girl grimaces while her father, poor and skeptical of modern medicine, stitches her open head wound without anesthetics. Determined not to be the reason her siblings lacked Christmas presents —as they would, her father said, if she had gone to the hospital—she grits her teeth in pain until the home surgery is complete.
Many important facets of human life—including familial relationships—happen behind closed doors, and are thus often beyond government reach. But what happens in the home has serious public consequences: good parenting fosters good human beings and citizens, while bad parenting often does the opposite. The vignettes above, drawn from two new memoirs—Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class, and Carrie Sheffield’s Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness—add nuance to the causal link between parenting and childhood outcome. They show that while unhealthy families—weakened by divorce, addiction, mental illness, and many other maladies—create mal-adjusted people who in turn create more woundedness in the world, that’s not always the case. Past need not be prologue.
In the vein of Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir Educated, and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, these new books tell personal stories of courage, resilience, and determination. Each of the protagonists manages to rise above their formative wounds, improve their lot, and discover vocations that allow them to contribute to the world around them. This “hillbilly chic” sub-genre to Horatio Alger’s “rags to riches” narrative is familiar. Overcoming their disadvantaged, white-working-class upbringings—defined by abuse and broken relationships—each author secures for themselves a position among the cultural elite by earning a spot in the rarified realm of Ivy League schools.
Robert Kim Henderson’s three names each represents an adult who abandoned him. In Troubled, Henderson recounts a fractious upbringing within California’s foster care system. Henderson describes a dual logic to this environment. Resources, such as adult attention and food, were scarce, which put foster children in competition. Yet the bonds among foster siblings were quickly formed, and they grieved one another when one was moved to a new placement. The system is designed to move children often to prevent attachment between foster parents, children, and siblings—just in case a birth-parent reunion became possible. But attachments still form, and children grieve the loss of their surrogate family members each time. Henderson learned from this the perils of becoming attached to any one person, ever: one never knows when they might leave. His foster care social worker was the one constant in his life—at least until he was adopted. Adoption gave Henderson a stability and joy he never dreamt possible—until his adoptive mother divorced his father, and his father cut Henderson off to retaliate against his mother, a wound from which he never recovered .
Henderson’s mother and her new partner, Shelly, gave him stability for several more years. Then, Shelly was shot in a freak accident and partially paralyzed, a tragedy that irrevocably destabilized his home once again.
In adolescence, Henderson finds comfort in the discipline of martial arts—all the while partaking in the self-destructive recklessness often seen in teen boys from broken homes. He and his peers, virtually all children of divorce, lash out toward others to deflect and numb their wounds of childhood rejection. Hurt people hurt people, as the cliché goes, an idea that is exemplified throughout the book, especially in Henderson’s teenage years— defined by senseless risk-taking, self-destructive behavior, and ennui. Henderson describes one memorable vignette after one of his high school friends loses his grandmother, his lone stable family relationship. Unable to cope with his grief, his friend kicks a defenseless dog for no reason—multiple times—eventually off a cliff to its death.
Henderson looked at the adults and peers in his life, and saw his likely future: crime and jail. He chose a different path. Like J.D. Vance escaped his abusive roots in white working-class Ohio by joining the Marine Corps, at age seventeen, Henderson fled white working-class northern California and joined the Air Force. He eventually found himself moving to New Haven, CT, as a freshman at Yale College, the same stomping grounds that also launched J.D. Vance’s career.
Carrie Sheffield—like Tara Westover’s story in Educated—was raised in a Mormon, fundamentalist, prepper home that overlayed spiritual and physical abuse with religious zealotry and mental illness. Sheffield’s father, Ralph, dominated her childhood with his narcissism and delusions of grandeur. He claimed he was a prophet from God destined to become President of the United States. So persuaded of this good news, he travelled his wife and eight children across the country proselytizing on streetcorners, attracting bystanders with his family’s classical musical troupe.
Naturally skeptical of everything mainstream—school, modern medicine, orthodontics—Ralph made decisions that frequently hurt the family he claimed to love, such as the opening story that describes him manipulating Sheffield into allowing him to stitch her headwound. In a similar vein, Sheffield reveals that she has a dead incisor tooth in her mouth to this day thanks to Ralph’s D.Y.I. orthodontics composed of popsicle sticks and elastic bands.
Sheffield eventually decides to leave her cult-like, abusive home—an immediate impetus being the sexual assault she endured at the hands of her schizophrenic older brother. Ralph is silent on the assault, but does not take the news of his daughter’s departure well, pronouncing her dead to him. Sheffield’s mother prophesizes that, after leaving, Sheffield will be raped and murdered. Sheffield cuts ties with her family and starts anew, eventually earning a full ride to Harvard Kennedy School. Along with her professional successes after leaving home, she recounts her many failures, especially with men, linked to the way she was raised. Growing up, Ralph, the central male figure in life, instrumentalized her. Instead of making her feel seen, known and loved for who she was, to him, purely a means to his religious and political mission. As a result, she frequently settled for men who used her, too. But Carrie recognizes that used people use people: she is empathetic to Ralph for his abuse of her, and tries to understand his actions in the context of his own sexual abuse that he endured as a child. She aspires to be different, and intentionally breaks the instrumentalizing cycle to which her childhood conditioned her.
Once, a social worker tried to put the Sheffield children in foster care, which they narrowly escaped. Reading Sheffield’s story alongside Henderson’s experience in the foster care system leaves one unclear on whether Sheffield and her siblings would have been better off in government custody. Henderson and Sheffield—as well as Tara Westover and J.D. Vance—are success stories. They were born into adverse circumstances that government programs didn’t and couldn’t solve. We are fascinated by these and others stories because the protagonists transcend generational cycles of hurt and create their own paths. For Henderson, the discipline of military training, and the brief seasons of stability in his life after his adoption, as well as his love of philosophy, helped him succeed. For Sheffield, her evangelical Christian faith was central story, which she embraced after leaving The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and was central to the healing and forgiveness that led her to improve her lot. Their pasts haunt them, but in writing these books, they choose to use their own healing to help others heal, too.
Henderson and Sheffield’s stories of vicious cycles are familiar: the selfish actions of a single person can cause hurt that no government action can fully mitigate against or fix. Yet they also remind us that the opposite is also true: one person’s decision to overcome their past can do great good. One magnanimous soul can with their life produce a ripple effect of social healing, a mellifluous echo that reverberates across time and place. These books comprise the mellifluous echo that the authors have chosen to create with their lives. They show those who feel trapped by their past that they, too, can overcome.
Alexandra Hudson is the author of “The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.”
Recently
I spent yesterday at Portsmouth Abbey, a prep school the Kennedys attended in Rhode Island, where I delivered a talk to the students, and enjoyed a discussion with faculty afterwards.
I loved being a guest lecturer and seminar leader at University of Louisville’s McConnell Center. Listen to my remarks on Tocqueville, civility, and civil society here!
In Boston last week for a book talk hosted by the New England Legal Foundation.
In the news
Thrilled to join Ben Shapiro on his podcast, which you can listen to here.
Enjoy my long conversation with viewers of Washington Journal, on C-Span.
Listen to my conversation with Yascha Mounk in an episode of The Good Fight podcast.
Enjoy the transcript here.
New Review of The Soul of Civility at The Vital Center: “Hospitality, tolerance, and forgiveness are among the practices that flow from civility, all so desperately needed in this age of loneliness, self-righteousness, and grudge-holding. The bottom line: if we can approach every interaction in our busy lives with concern for the dignity of the people we encounter, we will be better neighbors, better coworkers, better friends, and better citizens.”
“The Miracle that Saves the World” my latest in Public Discourse.
Coming Up
Returning to Rhode Island for a day trip to spend quality time with the students and faculty of the Portsmouth Abbey School
The Soul of Civility tour carries on to Europe! Events kick off in London starting April 15th with an afternoon event at English House of Commons and the House of Lords, Westminster, the Academy of Ideas, and Oxford University at the invitation of the Pharos Foundation.
Then it’s on to Paris for events and conversations that I welcome you to join, details of the tour found here.
It you’re in these cities and would like to come to the events, write to me!
Thanks for being part of the Civic Renaissance Community! I’m thankful you are here.