Birth rate plummeting: "If you don't want to have children, everyone thinks you're strange. They tell you 'how pretty you are...'"
Sherry Turkle, the New York professor and conversation guru: "Many prefer to share intimacies through a screen than in person"
"As you get older, the future shrinks and becomes smaller and smaller." No band-aids. With this overwhelming awareness of time,
Siri Hustvedt
(Minnesota, 1955), attends to us by video call from her residence in
New York
, filled with infinitely high shelves packed with books. The phrase does not come from a defeatist person, but from someone who, contrary to clichés, laughs the more she knows about the world.
Hustvedt is an apprentice and a teacher. Author of multiple
novels and prestigious essays
in which she addresses everything from sociology to psychology or neuroscience, including education and data, she is now working on a novel about eugenics, the discipline that aspires to modify genetic inheritance to improve a race. or species. She has just republished her great work,
The Dazzling World
and has become
a grandmother
, which gives her food for thought about motherhood, which she refers to as the "ordinary miracle." When does one become aware of maternal love? "When I was a teenager and my grandmother died, my mother, walking through the garden of the house where we grew up, looked at me and said, 'You know, it's strange to lose someone who only wanted the best for you.'" No band aids, again.
ASK. Birth data are plummeting and almost a third of those who have not taken the step admit that it was
due to lack of interest
. Do the movements that demonize motherhood and fatherhood have weight to a certain extent?
ANSWER.
Parenting is a choice, and part of this phenomenon is in some ways a reaction against the centuries-old idea that motherhood is the ultimate fulfillment of a woman's destiny. My daughter and her husband were constantly harangued about misery and how difficult parenthood would be. And of course this happens, but you cannot underestimate the incredible joy that parents feel when they look at their child. For evolutionary reasons, most human beings take care of their offspring, partly also because there is a kind of happiness in it; and that's how it should be to maintain part of the motherhood equation.
Q. The majority of respondents who were over 65 years of age regretted not having made the decision...
A.
Part of that regret comes from the sense of continuity that having a child gives. There are two ways of thinking about time if we take it as a biographical line: you are born here and you die on this date; It is a straight line drawn with chalk. But you can think of time as a circle in which the chalk continues to turn for generations. On the other hand, you become old and weak. My mother once told me when I turned 90: "You know, getting older is wonderful. The only thing, Siri, is that your body starts to fall apart."
And, jokingly, she makes an example of herself: "Don't you see? Look at my wrist," and shows us through the screen a bandage that covers her hand and forearm. "Or even look at my husband," she says of the writer
Paul Auster
, who fights cancer and stays away from public life, receiving the support of many people: "Day by day, this is how one begins to live very in the present".
Hustvedt went to
therapy
for the first time at age 52 and talks about the experience as a "liberation." When she was preparing to say goodbye to his analyst, she found out that she had died. "It is the hardest part of getting older, seeing your loved ones die. It is the cruelest situation in a period of time - in which you begin to realize after 60."
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Q. Anxiety is the great disorder of this century, according to all health organizations. What has happened to society?
R.
Actually, do we have data from other centuries? No, right? Therefore, it is not clear to us that people are more stressed now than they were, for example, in World War II. There are links between anxiety and other similar disorders, such as stress, loneliness and lack of connection, especially in cultures where the cult of the individual has been taken to such an extreme that it has isolated us from each other. And now they resort to what is called 'self-help'.
Q. That is the great new source of education?
A.
Education is precisely one of those issues that research has barely touched on. In the United States, one of my heroes, the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, had a great effect on American education. He referred to human beings as living creatures and, as organic beings, promoted their dynamism and freedom. For years, children in the United States who attended schools that followed these lines did not do homework because it was considered that they had to play and be free. There is plenty of research showing that giving children hours and hours of stupid homework is a bad idea. And I agree. Let the child go home and choose a book, play with her fantasies, even get bored, because boredom can be important in childhood.
Q. Some parent would throw their hands up if they listened to this teacher. What is the role of authority?
A.
It is a complicated question. Authority is a legitimized power and is exercised through the auspices of some recognized institution such as the school. Now, stupid obedience to authority leads nowhere.
He tells how
he faced
an unfair accusation from a strict teacher when he was eight years old. He wouldn't let them talk during lunch. Suddenly, without him having opened his mouth, he pointed at her and punished her. After gathering courage, he asked her during the break
why me
. "At that moment she looked at me and I glimpsed doubt. I saw shame. She told me she was swallowing her food as she spoke. And there, being just a child, I knew it was ridiculous. The main authority I could imagine beyond my parents was really stupid. It was a life lesson."
Q.
Saying this today would go beyond normative correctness. Where do we stop?
A.
My utopia is not one in which each person has the same point of view, but rather it is a plural utopia, which means respect. We have to recognize that democracy, which is a plural idea, does not ensure its survival against authoritarianism or fascism because we have seen how a majority of people can vote for an authoritarian government. How do we protect ourselves? There is no simple answer because sometimes it is easier to delegate your beliefs to a single person who tells you what to do.
Q. It is difficult to teach a generation that has lost hope in the future. How do you recover?
A.
To live, people need hope in the future. One of the things I learned during the saddest times of my life, even recently, is that the only thing we can be sure of in life is change. Whatever it is now, it won't last forever. It's funny to say this, because deep down you're admitting that something worse can happen, but there's a small sense that it can be reversed and that it won't be bad forever. Part of youth consists of thinking that there is a great future ahead, and this future is what helps in ordinary life to have humor or to recognize ironies. There are reasons to be anxious and pessimistic, but restoration of hope is possible. And for this the only thing that would work is collective action, which is what truly promotes changes in the world.
Q. The fear of aging is spreading among the youngest, who are increasingly pursuing aesthetic operations and entering the universe of self-care. Why was this fear inflated?
A.
Propaganda that turns 'how to improve yourself' into a worthy cause is part of neoliberal culture. And, in reality, when you improve your image you do it for other people. We shouldn't judge him.
Q. You said that you felt advantageous at 60 because you had lost that threat that erotic desire posed. Is it more credible now?
A.
Let's face it. Diverting attention from beauty or attractiveness has certain advantages. Be careful, I am conceited like anyone else, and it is actually important for human existence. It can be seen in those psychiatric patients who do not take care of themselves and end up trapped in their illness or suffering. Vanity is necessary. At the same time, women have been under enormous pressure for centuries to embody someone else's ideal. Now it is seen on social networks, where one presents oneself as a commodity: here I am in my beautiful kitchen, with my perfect children... But no one is the perfect woman. Nobody is perfect anything.
In
The Dazzling World
, the protagonist relates that for years she had to make such an effort to bite her tongue in the face of discriminatory comments that she almost ended up swallowing it. Hustvedt is trying to get women, in particular, to stop clenching their jaws in this world of flesh and blood.
Maternity
Feminism