One conclusion from the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece, which I loved, that I hope everyone on the left can agree upon is that whatever you think of Hannah-Jones, her politics, or the piece itself (and, please, I beg of you, don’t use this post as an opportunity to rehearse your tired opinions and beefs that have been already stated by a thousand other people), it does an amazing job of showing how much barbaric, and it really is barbaric, pressure our society puts on individuals—whether as families, parents, children, but particularly as parents—to address problems that are collective in origin and can only be political in solution.

It doesn’t matter what the problem is, our society has relegated it to the family to solve it. And there is no way it can be solved at that level. It doesn’t matter whether the issue is race, inequality, schools, healthcare, the mental health crisis, screens, segregation, we constantly leave it to individuals, and particularly parents, to resolve these issues. Which is why ethics rather than politics is the dominant frame of so many discussions. Though I’m sure this is my own provincialism speaking here, living on the front lines of this kind of conversation in Brooklyn, as a parent in Brooklyn, really gives you a front-row seat to what is wrong with our society, and how it approaches political questions.

The truth of the matter is that we are just not designed, as individuals, to bear that existential load, as individuals. It’s too much. We are social beings, political animals, as Aristotle called us. That, in fact, is our nature. We deal with problems collectively, not individually, through speech and argument and reason and deliberation and action. To think that individuals, or individual parents, could negotiate and manage all of that, by themselves, is to relegate them to madness, to bear the burdens of Job. (Not for nothing, he had a big family; should tell you something.) I’m not Job. I’m not superman. I don’t want to be. And I shouldn’t have to be.

If there is one thing the left could do for society, something that would really distinguish it from all the other forms of politics on offer today, it would be to relieve individuals of the moral burden and responsibility we place on them to somehow get right what society has so vastly gotten wrong. That kind of left politics really would be a form of freedom, which cannot be created by granting people moral permission to do whatever they want. Nor can it be created by a therapeutic culture, a la Good Will Hunting, of telling people “it’s not your fault.” It can only be created by transforming the material basis and political context of our individual choices. Only then can we step out of the moral noose our society has put everyone in. This, by the way, is one of the key insights that Marx stumbles into by way of the Jewish Question. Which you should all pre-order now.

Just to be clear: Turning to the collective and the political does not mean there is no room for individuals and their choices and actions when it comes to political change. Or that people should not be held responsible for their choices and actions. There is a lot of room for the individual. It’s just that those individuals and choices and actions have to be part of a collective movement, an institutional transformation, a wider politics, if we are not going to be sent back to the dark ages of religious inquisition and moral terror. Because that really is where we are living now: in an age of inquisition, where even someone who is trying to grapple honestly, and however imperfectly, with her life, and her choices, is subject to nothing but relentless moral inquisition, by herself, her family, her readers, and the public. That she may have helped to create that public is neither here nor there. Our job on the left is to create a different kind of public.