Family: Discovering the Primitive Future
A paradox has developed: Homosexuals want to establish families and to have them acknowledged by society. Adults who have children choose to avoid the family contract. Well over 30% of the children born in the USA are born out of wedlock. In the pragmatic equation of human self-constitution, these facts bear deeper signification.
Commenting before a television camera after a celebrity divorce trial, an onlooker remarked that there is more communication in preparing a pre-nuptial agreement than during a marriage. As exaggerated and imprecise (communication between whom-the couple or their representatives?) as this remark probably is, it nevertheless captures some traits of family life in our age. Indeed, families are constituted on the basis of economic agreements, mediated by lawyers and financial consultants. The risk of family breakdown is carefully integrated in the calculations establishing the viability of the marriage. Children are part of the calculation-minus the long-lasting emotional effects-as are the odds for illness, disability, and liabilities, such as living parents and siblings who might need assistance, or obligations due to previous marriages. The curves registering amount of time the recently married spend together reveals that once the agreement is signed, dialogue shrinks to less than eight hours a week, which is well below the time spent watching television-almost seven hours a day-or devoted to physical exercise. If surfing the Net is part of the newlyweds' life, there is even less dialogue.
Typically, both partners in the marriage work, and this affects other aspects of family life besides dialogue. When children arrive, the time parents spend with them decreases progressively from the days following birth through the critical years of high school. It is reported that on the average, youngsters in the USA get their parents' attention for less than four hours a week. In some European countries, this time can reach eight to ten hours. On the Asian sub-continent, many children lose contact with their parents before the age of six. Statistics show that over a quarter of the American student population planning to enroll in college never discuss their high school programs, or necessary preparation courses, with their fathers. Close to half this amount never discuss their plans with their mothers (single or not). The same holds true for students in Italy, France, and Belgium.
Divorce percentages, abortion rates, number of partners over one's lifetime, and hours spent with the family in meaningful exchange of ideas or in common tasks express a condition of the family that reflects the dynamics of today's human practical experiences. Over 16 million children under the age of eighteen years live with one parent (mainly the mother). Economics (income level, joblessness, opportunity) plays a critical role in the life of the young and of their progenitors.
All the changes leading to the civilization of illiteracy affect the experience of family life, and result in radical changes of the family model itself. Faster rhythms of experiences leading to casual relationships and to forming a family are on record. Shorter cycles during which the experience is exhausted result in increasingly unstable relations and families. Permanence is no longer the expectation in marriage. Throughout society, clear-cut distinctions between morally right and wrong are being replaced by situation ethics. Increased mediation, through counselors, lawyers, doctors, and financial planners, explains the new efficiency of the family as short-lived interaction and cooperation. The factors mentioned characterize the new pragmatic framework of human existence in which a new kind of interpersonal commitment is made and a new type of family is established, not unlike the short-lived corporations that are exhausted as soon as their product's potential has been reached.
In this pragmatic framework, family-like interactions harking back to the civilization of literacy, with its hierarchy and central authority and the promise of stability and security, are considered the only alternative to the new situation of the family. The people who consciously seek this alternative discover that the family is bound by relatively loose connections and that reciprocally advantageous distributed tasks replace family unity. Mediated and segmented experiences and vague commitments, which evolve into a frame of vague morality, dominate family life today. Marriages of expediency, undertaken to solve some difficulty-such as resident status in some countries, health insurance, care for one's old age, better chances at a career- illustrate the tendency.
Once the conditions for the perpetuation and dissemination of values associated with literacy are no longer granted, at the current globally integrated scale of humankind, family life changes fundamentally. Even the notion of family is questioned. Family unity, reflected in the coherent pragmatic framework afforded by literacy, is replaced by individual autonomy and competition. An array of options greater than the one feasible at the scale characteristic of agricultural or industrial economy, presents itself to adults and children in their practical experiences of self-constitution. Nobody escapes the temptation of trying and testing in the multiple of choices that are characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.
There are many facets to what is called family. The concept displays ample variety in its perceived or construed meaning. Sexual instincts manifested as attraction, associated with the awareness of the consequence of reproduction, might lead the list in defining what it took to establish a family. At the same level of importance is the need to establish a viable unity of economic, cultural, and psychological significance, a framework, sanctioned by religious and political entities, for carrying out obligations significant to the community. These, and a number of additional elements, such as morality based on the pragmatics of health, inter-generational exchange of information and aid, social functions ensuring survival and continuity through cooperation and understanding with other families, are tightly connected. The nature of this interconnectedness is probably a much better identifier of what, under given socio- historical circumstances, is considered and experienced as family.
Togetherness