At Taki Mag, Dalrymple reflects on the modern collapse of filial loyalty and the curious cultural hostility toward parents that has become increasingly common in contemporary life. Drawing on Confucian ideas of filial piety, he contrasts earlier moral expectations, where respect for parents was considered a central virtue, with today’s tendency to regard parental relationships primarily through the lens of grievance, resentment, and psychological diagnosis.
I don’t know if there was ever a time when relations between parents and children were perfectly straightforward, without complication or conflict; as, for example, when children were obliged to work from the age of 4 because it was economically necessary for them to do so, as in true peasant societies. But parent-child relations have never seemed so fraught as they do nowadays.