To:
letters@guardian.co.uk Re: Family matters Date: Sun, 6 July 2003 |
If the modern nuclear family were a dwelling . . . . by Jenny Diski (Guardian, Wednesday 2 July 2003) Dear Jenny What
we tend to forget about
the nuclear family is that
it was not designed (i.e.
did not evolve) to exist
in isolation, but as part
of an extended family and
the wider local community.
For the vast majority of
modern families these
complementing and
supporting structures have
long all but ceased to
exist, made redundant by
an economy that has no need for them, but
rather for people who are
mobile, unattached to
immobile extended families
and local communities. What
nowadays is referred to as
the “local community”
is usually nothing of the
sort, but just an
ill-defined collection of
individual households
living in virtual
isolation from one
another. For all practical
purposes the “local
authority” has
taken the place of the
extended family and local
community, providing
services paid for with
money taken from alienated
and thus resentful ratepayers and taxpayers. The
local and national
authorities may in some
respects be better
at providing for our
material needs than the
extended family and local
community were, but in the
same way that a “robot
mother” might provide,
within the limits of its
programming, for all the
material needs of a child: the essential
human element is missing
(of which "love"
is just one, ill-defined, component). If you chop off a person's hands and feet you wouldn't be surprised that they were no longer able-bodied. It's the same with the family. The economy has left it a torso, to which the government has attached artificial limbs. They are not completely useless, but are no replacement for the body's natural ones. Modern society has been formed (or rather, malformed) by economic forces, which economists would have us believe are natural and thus immutable. If fact, they are natural only in the sense that they are largely based on man's primitive, animal nature. It is time we started asserting our higher, more human nature and basing our economic activity and lifestyles on that instead. The socialist experiments of the last century provide ample lessons on how NOT to go about it. We need to replace non-sustainable, mass consumer society, which has developed to serve an economy based more on our animal than human nature, with something very different, a sustainable society (economy and lifestyles) based on our more enlightened, human nature. We need to create real local communities, in which families and extended families play, perhaps not always, but usually an important, if not essential, role.
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