That which we inherit

Have you ever said something and immediately thought, "Oh my God. I have become  my parent!" The inheritance of familial patterns is confronting to say the least! Let alone the family look. I often look in the mirror to see my father staring back! Bugger.

Inheritance can be a bugger. Inheritance is not just about the transference of material goods when someone dies and leaves them to us. It is not just about the family traits or looks, either. It is also about the culture that we were raised to accept as gospel. The thoughts, beliefs, social behaviours, preferences, maxims, slaguage, art, music, authors, morals, etc.

Inheritance can be blind acceptance that this is the way life is: no curiosity, no challenge, no difference, no resistance, no critical analysis. Just a moral honouring of this is the way we do it. 

This is what the man wants. The man (hegemony to use Gramsci's term for the ruling culture) needs us to think in a particular way because that protects him as the man - the setter of high culture and morals. The setter of keeping you in a particular socio-economic bracket due to your socially constructed beliefs and he in another, better than your one because when he convinces you that your normal is normal you won't resist.

Yet, many people resist being stereotyped into morally, culturally and socially constructed groups and they form sub cultures. Sub cultures born of resisting the man, the status quo. Their initial and early adoption of doing things differently is frequently met with an outcry from both the man and the keepers of the resisted culture or moral.

An obvious example to many parents, is teenagers. Teenagers fight for their anonymity often by resisting their parents and doing the opposite of what parents expect. Yet, developmental moral stage theorist Lawrence Kohlberg tells us that the task of adolescence is separation so they are doing something that is age appropriate and required for development into their next developmental stage. In their pursuit of difference, they often end up the same as everyone else in their cultural class.

Contemporary examples of cultural class sub cultures becoming socially acceptable include the slow movements around craft, art and mending; craftivism as a form of activism; gay marriage; the non binary movement.

The current cost of living crisis suggests that many/most young people will never own their own home. Rather than parents accepting this as a given, perhaps we could be actively encouraging a revolution of moral, cultural and social change. Perhaps we could be reeducating our children into a cultural class that resists the hegemony that says who can own houses and who cannot. Perhaps we could gift our children Gramsci's The Prison Note Books and read them together to help understand how the inheritance of cultural class keeps us where the ruling culture needs us to be?

👵🏼 Megan Bayliss, Social Work supervisor

👩🏼‍🎓 PhD candidate: social and cultural resistance to the status quo.

References

Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q., & Nowell Smith, G. (1972). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1st ed.). International Publishers.