When lamenting the inadequacies and failings of the nuclear family we tend to forget 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 all but ceased to exist, effectively destroyed by the demands of our modern economy, which requires people who are mobile, unattached to immobile extended families and local communities, and who work not for love but for MONEY. Human activity which does not involve making money is of little or no economic value and is thus not encouraged. On the contrary, it is discouraged in favour of ever extending the monetarisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life, thus contributing to the "sacred cause" of economic growth.
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 and a moral economy based on our more enlightened, human nature. We need to create real local communities which, ideally, should include at least some members of our extended families and friends, which will take back many of the functions currently performed commercially or by social services.
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