Last night I saw Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 for the second time. Afterwards, as I thought about the traumas inflicted by the Bush family in its pursuit of its private interests, and of the widespread rage these traumas have ignited, I was reminded of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Or The Modern Prometheus.

Consider Frankenstein’s plot. In the unrestrained pursuit of his narcissistic obsessions, Viktor Frankenstein, a product of a wealthy and somewhat incestuous family, gives birth to a creature of incomparable ugliness. Frankenstein disavows all responsibility for his creation, and secludes himself within the comforts of his family’s estate. Reviled and abused, the heartbroken monster eventually decides to seek compensation from its creator. It says to Frankenstein, “Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be . . . Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.”

When Frankenstein refuses to give his progeny its rightful due, the monster embarks upon a campaign of terror. It kills Frankenstein’s family, and then lures Frankenstein to his death in the Arctic Circle. The book leaves the monster grieving over Frankenstein’s body, with full awareness of the tragedy that’s befallen them. Loathing its own existence, and bereft of any hope for a place in society, Frankenstein’s deformed child then awaits its own demise in the depths of the polar winter.

In his essay Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionising the Family in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, professor David A Hedrich Hirsch argues that underlying Shelley’s novel is a social critique of the way mercy is hoarded within families, damning those outside the walls of family privilege to unbearable torment. Today, this practice is rationalised by the family values movement. Margaret Thatcher expressed these values in their purest form when she said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” This is a radical departure from most anthropological thought, which sees societies, and the emotional attachments supporting them, as fundamental features of human existence.

The family values movement teaches people to confine their feelings of loyalty to their own kin, and to pursue their families’ interests without concern for the effects this might have on the larger (non-existent) society. As historian Stephanie Coontz writes in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Perseus Books Group, 1992), “Love of family . . . could justify almost any kind of behaviour towards strangers. For more than a hundred years, ‘I did it all for you’ has been a legitimate male defence against a woman’s tentative objections to any of his actions in business and politics. It also seems to have been a way that men put a moral gloss on behaviours or life choices that otherwise make them uncomfortable. Autobiographies of early capitalist entrepreneurs demonstrate that there was a close connection between intense family sentiment and competitive business ambitions.”

At the same time, the family values movement encourages people to ignore the ethical significance of their dependence upon their societies. For example, Coontz demonstrates that even American pioneer families—those supremely rugged individualists of American myth—relied heavily on “massive federal land grants, government-funded military mobilisations that dispossessed hundreds of Native American societies and confiscated half of Mexico, and state-sponsored economic investment in new lands.” By ignoring the social foundations of family privilege, conservatives reinforce their ethical anaesthesia and comfortably inflate their own egos.

Given this, it shouldn’t surprise us that followers of the movement embrace a process of corporate globalisation that’s multiplying the ranks of the impoverished and oppressed both at home and abroad, and undermining the social and environmental foundations upon which our economies and our nations are built. Neither should we be surprised by their paranoia about those outside their families’ privileged circles. On some level, conservatives, like Frankenstein, must realise they’ve traded love for hatred, and that their victims have a superhuman capacity for vengeance.

Moore’s documentary demonstrates what happens when family values are taken to their logical conclusion. By accumulating wealth and power at the expense of the global society, the Bush family has mangled the lives of many millions, both domestically and internationally. Each of these victims has a claim to compassion and respect, to be treated like members of the human community. Their spiritual mutilation is breeding rage where there was once a chance for wondrous friendship, and will likely unleash a catastrophic cycle of violence.

Fahrenheit 9-11 could have gone further than it did. The problem we face extends well beyond the Bush dynasty to the very heart of our global societal order, an order historically founded upon “family values.” As it’s grown, that order’s become exceedingly precarious. Today, our ecological niche is quickly mutating, our international economic system is increasingly turbulent, and the means of mass destruction are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and harder to control. In the midst of this, people are losing hold of their humanity. According to pollster Michael Adams, author of Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values (Penguin Canada, 2003), in America—the most powerful empire the world has ever known—a vicious form of nihilism is the fastest growing cultural trend, and virtues like empathy, introspection, civic responsibility, and ecological consciousness are in rapid decline.

As the US forces other nations to sacrifice their social safety nets, we can expect to see this cultural rot spread well beyond America’s borders. Meanwhile, many people in developing nations are turning to terrorism to address their grievances, led by the example of Al Qaeda, a network descended from the radical Islamist groups recruited, organized, and trained by the CIA to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In a world as fragile as ours, the monsters we’re creating may soon have the collective strength to ruin the most protected families, and condemn us all to an inescapable wasteland.

Frankenstein’s creation warns that fallen angels become malignant devils. We should remember this as our fascination with family values robs us of our societal heaven, and sends ever-more of us plunging straight into hell.

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