The essential role of aunts and uncles

I have come to appreciate aunts and uncles more lately, because now I see the effect that they have on our sons. 

I am just in awe of how loved the boys feel by their aunts and uncles, whether they are blood-relatives or just close friends that care about our children as if they were blood family. And the love of an aunt or uncle is different than what we can give them, it’s something more generous perhaps. It’s as if the boys know, “you are not my parents, but you care about me and love me for who I am anyway, and that makes me feel safe and valued.”

Seeing the special love of aunts and uncles in the lives of our boys, has reminded me of my own aunts and uncles. I never could put words to it before, but I feel that same special, freely given, unconditional love from them. Thinking about it in retrospect, the love and support of my aunts and uncles has been a stabilizing force in my life.

I remember when my car broke down on the way into New York after college - miles away from the George Washington Bridge - and my Masi and Massasahib and extended family rescued me from a shady mechanic shop in the middle of North Jersey. 

Or when my uncles in India deliberately ripped on American domestic policy to get a rise out of me and make sure I had some fire and fight in me. Or all our family friends who subtly reminded me I was a good kid in the middle of high school, by letting me sit and listen and hang out while they talked about scientific discovery, foreign affairs, or literature.

Or when Robyn’s aunts and uncles pulled me in and made me feel like part of the family, even from the very first family dinner I met them at by telling me stories and asking me questions. And they showed up at my father’s funeral as if they had known me my entire life.

I think what’s special about the love of aunts and uncles is that it’s redundant, affirming, and honest. It builds stability and resilience because it’s not the primary, day-in-day out sort of relationship you lean on. But it’s there, waiting to catch you, and to pick you up. And at times, it’s only an aunt or uncle who can really sit you down and get you out of the muck because they are able to have unconditional love but also enough distance and objectivity to call it like they see it.

It’s this combination of redundancy, affirmation, and honesty that makes aunts and uncles so important for a family’s culture. Theirs is a moderating influence that kicks in when things are going wrong.

And the more I think of it, the more I believe that every organization and community needs people who play the role of an aunt or uncle to thrive. In a company, for example, “aunts and uncles” are the people who take an active interest in you and give you advice, but don’t manage you directly. I can think of dozens of people who have been that sort of guide from afar, for me or others. When you mentor and develop others for whom you aren’t directly responsible, it’s such a gift to the culture of the company.

The same dynamic exists in a city. There are plenty of people who don’t have formal responsibilities over something but raise people up anyway. It could be neighbors who aren’t a block captain, but throw parties on their block and keep an eye out for neighborhood kids. It could be successful business owners who give advice behind the scenes to those coming up, outside of the auspices of business incubators and mentor programs.  It could be the elderly couple in the church parish who invite newlywed couples to have dinner once or twice a year and help to nurture them through the ebbs and flows of marriage. These little acts are gifts that build the culture of a City and make the community more resilient. Which, it seems, is exactly like what aunts and uncles do.

I organize my life around three pillars - being a husband, father, and citizen. But what I’m realizing is that “uncle” is a really important role that fits within this framework, that I want to be intentional about - despite how invisible that role may be.

Common bonds and unity that endures

The Hindu priest that married Robyn and I - to be clear, we were married twice: once by a Catholic priest, once by a Hindu pandit - left us with simple advice that we still remember and recite often:

From now on, you must be Together, Together, Together. Remember, Together, Together, Together.

From that day, Robyn and I were united in marriage.

But to be honest, I usually find myself wanting more when I hear the word “unity” uttered. Unity, to me, is a hollow word unless the common bond it invokes is specific and salient. Unity for what? Around what purpose? For whom? Unity bound by what beliefs?

In our marriage,  and in the marriages of the people that we are close enough to see their marriages up close, I would say the beliefs that bind them are specific and salient. Here are some examples from our marriage:

• Our vows: to love, honor, and cherish each other; for better or worse; for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, good times and in bad, until death do us part

• Our common beliefs: belief in God; that we put family first, but that our marriage ultimately exists to serve others

• Our common dreams: to grow old together, to grow a family and stay close to our international extended family, raise our children to be good people, to learn through travel, and be enmeshed in a community throughout our life

• Our common experiences: the trips we’ve taken; the dates we’ve been on; the time we’ve spent doing nothing but enjoying each other’s company; the suffering we’ve navigated together; the little moments every day where we affirm, support, respect, and acknowledge each other and the investment of love all those moments - big and small - represent

If you’re a married person ( or expect you will someday) I do suggest trying to do a similar exercise where you specifically write down what the common bond that undergirds the unity you have with your spouse. I honestly had never done this until just now and I feel washed over with warmth, confidence, stability, and love.

I think this exercise is worth doing for more than just marriages. Any team or community that wants to endure also requires a durable common bond that is specific and salient. Asking the question “what unites us?” is just as relevant to companies, communities, and even states or nations.

The real hum-dinging implication, though, is how. How do we discover and articulate our common bonds? How do we create and nurture our common bonds? It’s not useful to merely describe that we need common bonds to have unity - that’s obvious. The very difficult question is how.

I’m planning a few posts over the next 4-6 weeks that push this idea of unity and the “how” of it further. But here’s a start: I think a good place to begin is interrogating our own beliefs, and asking what do I believe?

There was a terrific series some years ago that National Public Radio launched called This I Believe. The premise was simple: ask people to articulate their most core beliefs and then share them publicly. And when you hear some of those essays, you don’t just understand others’ beliefs cognitively, you feel and internalize them. We could all stand to write one of those essays and share it with the people we are close to.

Because after we understand our own beliefs, our next job - and I think it’s the harder and more important one - is to listen and deeply understand, feel, and internalize the beliefs of others.

And from there, we are well on our way to articulating our common bonds specifically and saliently - and developing a unity that is durable and enduring.

Preventing violence and madness, through abundance, strong institutions, and goodness

If we live in a community, rather than isolated in the woods fending for ourselves, conflict is inevitable. We are all imperfect humans, after all.

And in my mind that leads me to suggest one, bedrock aspiration that we all must have to live in a community: the conflicts we can’t avoid are settled without violence and a dissolution into madness.

But how?

To do that, I think we must create three supra-public goods: abundance, strong institutions, and goodness.

Abundance is important because it creates surplus. Surplus is important because it prevents us from squabbling over the fundamental resources we need to survive and have a life beyond mere subsistence. It also creates the space for generosity, culture, scholarship, art, and human flourishing.

Strong institutions are important because they create norms. Norms are important because they provide guardrails to ensure nobody behaves so peculiarly that they cause widespread and unbridled harm. Norms are also important because they provide accepted processes for mediating conflict when it inevitably happens.

Goodness is important because it creates trust. Trust is important because it prevents conflict in the first place. When people are good to each other, they give each other the benefit of the doubt and are more likely to let things slide or work out an issue, rather than skipping straight to punching their lights out. Trust is also nice because it reduces the need for concentrated bodies of power to enforce the norms laid out by institutions.

The big eureka moment for me is that we really need to grow in all three areas simultaneously. One or even two of this three-legged stool is enough.

A society without abundance is starving and fragile. A society without strong institutions can’t ever grow in size or manage the challenges of diversity. A society without goodness is lonely and without meaning.

To live in a society that resolves conflict without violence or dissolving into madness, these are the three things we - whether that “we” is us individually, our friends and families, or the formal organization we are part of - must all be trying to bring into the world: abundance, strong institutions, and goodness.

And again, we need all three. Not even two are enough to create a world where our children’s dreams are borne from joy and the convictions of their own souls, rather than from pain and our lesser-than-honorable impulses.

"Even if I don't like you, I will carry you."

There isn’t much about our lives that isn’t affected by how wealthy we are. Wealth is insidious, it creeps into every corner of our lives. Our health, our mental state, our life spans, our relationships, our vocations. It’s everywhere; every damn place.

I am very grateful when friends comment on questions I ask on facebook. And there were many thoughtful responses folks shared to, “what’s something that has little to do with how wealthy we are?”

One friend commented with, “the earth’s rotation.” Which is true, the natural world and the laws of physics have little to do with how wealthy we are. But, knowing her that answer was sincere but probably also a little tongue-in-cheek. Because if an answer is the earth’s rotation - that implies that basically nothing else on earth has little to do with wealth.

Even inner peace and integrity, which some people shared, seems to be affected at least somewhat. Yes, money can’t buy peace or integrity, but chronic poverty probably makes it so that peace and acting with integrity are orders of magnitude harder to achieve for some.

But especially after several friends talked about how they thought hard about the question and literally couldn’t think of anything, I was unsatisfied. I agreed with them, but I was unsatisfied because it’s really sad if no aspect of human life is untouched by wealth.

So I thought about it some more, and I don’t even know if this is correct, but it’s the best I’ve got.

—

Suppose you go to an ice cream shop and order a scoop of chocolate ice cream. Instead of providing the ice cream, however, the clerk becomes very angry and indiscriminately hits you with a wooden rod. No warning, no apparent cause - just blow after blow from the business end of a broomstick.

This, by all reasonable accounts would be a completely unacceptable behavior. There is no circumstance I can think of where some story like this would be acceptable. It is illegal, yes. But more than that, it violates a norm we have when living in a free and peaceful society. It doesn’t matter who you are - it’s not okay to beat someone with a broomstick indiscriminately and without provocation. It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are or how poor you are, that is NOT acceptable.

To be sure, things like this still happen, but to reasonable people it is not acceptable that they happen. Reasonable people do not think it’s acceptable to be on the giving or receiving end of a broomstick in this way. That’s just now how we live.

And, because this sort of thing happens in ways that are somewhat predictable based on race and class, I concede that lots of people perhaps aren’t reasonable by the parameters laid out in this thought experiment. But let’s just continue because that’s not the problem I’m focusing on here.

What this thought experiment illustrates, however, is that norms about what’s right and wrong exist. Norms we owe it to each other to follow, and that moral obligation has little to do with how wealthy we are. There is moral obligation that exists, that has little to do with wealth.

Now, we may disagree on exactly what those moral obligations are, but this preposterous example, hopefully articulates that there is some moral compact among reasonable people - in this case, not bashing someone’s head in with a stick without provocation or warning - that has little to do with wealth.

The most common discussion that advances from this fertile soil is the question of - what are our moral obligations to each other? And, that’s literally and endless, and important, but also a stupid, impractical debate. Not in the sense that we shouldn’t have this discussion, but stupid in the sense that we facilitate this discussion stupidly.

Because we often exclude people with inconvenient opinions from this sort of discussion and often go into discussions to discern moral obligation where at least one party is unwilling to admit they are wrong. So it’s stupid - because we start discussions without the possibility of reaching a thoughtful conclusion.

But I think there’s another path this conversation can take. Instead of asking what our moral obligations are to others, we can ask something more hopeful. What if we asked: if we imagine the community we wished we lived in, what would that community believe they owed to each other?

And this thought experiment took me back to thinking about wealth.

Because I believe at the time we are conceived we all have equal potential. But then as the clock starts ticking, that starts changing. Because from what I’ve read, the wealth of our mother (or even if our grandmother underwent a period of famine) starts to affect us in the womb, before we are born. So from the moment we are conceived - the context in which we live, which is so strongly affected by our wealth - starts to influence our lives.

But I also believe potential is different than worth. And even though our potential as humans may be different (and unfairly influenced by wealth) our worth is equivalent. We all have equal worth. But more importantly, we all have immeasurably large worth. A life is not just worth something, and worth something equal - it is worth more than we can count or comprehend.

And that’s all fine and aspirational and mushy gushy, blah blah. Here’s what that means for me on the question of the moral standards of the community I wish I lived in.

Let’s ignore what moral obligations we have to the people we love and even the people we like. I’ve found, at least, that it’s much easier to treat people well if you love or like them. What really reveals the character of a person or group is how they treat people they don’t love or like.

I am not this man today, I know I’m not, but the man I want to be would live a creed like this:

I will treat you - whoever you are, whether I love you or not, whether I like you or not, whether I fear you or not - in the way that you would like to be treated. Even if it is difficult, I will treat you with respect. I will try to learn to love you or to like you. But even if I don’t like you, I will carry you. I will carry you without expecting your gratitude or the recognition of others. And if I falter, and need you to carry me, I will let you and be gracious for your kindness.

And ideas like this inevitably attract pessimism. “That’ll never happen. It’s not scalable. It’s not in people’s nature. That’s a waste of time. Let’s focus on something achievable.” I’ve heard phrases like these, over and over.

I think we should try, and try courageously to create a community that believes it has this stringent of a moral obligation to others.

The hope of a community like this is worth failing for. Because even if we only advance one inch in this effort which is equivalent to a journey of many miles, we will have moved an inch. And that inch creates the permission for others to try for two inches. And then for the generation after them to try for four. And maybe someday, even if it’s many decades after our own deaths, the long walk will be over and we will have arrived.

And this whole argument rests on the assumption that we have some defensible moral obligation to others we live in community with. And maybe that’s presumptuous. But I think that assumption is worth having faith in, even if it’s not decidedly proven. It is worth taking a leap for.