Many values which we might now
assume to be "God given" are in fact fairly recent inventions. For
example, take child labor laws. Page 839 of Volume II of the 15th
Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975, contains an article on
child labor which reads in part: "In Europe, North America, and
Australia and New Zealand, children under 15 rarely work except in
commercial agriculture, because of the effective enforcement of laws
passed in the first half of the 20th century. . . . In less
industrialized countries, on the other hand, millions of children -
some as young as seven - still toil in the quarries, mines, factories,
fields, and service enterprises. . . . Restrictive
legislation is barred largely by family poverty and lack of schools. ¶
The movement to regulate child labor began in Great Britain at the
close of the 18th century, . . . ." So, in historical
terms, this is a very recent trend in our system of values. For most of
the rest of human history, the concept that young people needed to be
protected from working for a living would have been laughed at, as it
still is today in much of the world. Only the wealthiest nations can
afford the luxury of banning most labor by children.
Similarly, women were
considered to be virtually property, or, to some degree at least,
slaves of their husbands, until relatively recently. Quoting from page
171 of Volume 7 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, above: "The
emancipation of women, which occurred in many countries during the
latter part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th, had a
profound effect upon the family law and marital property." Previously,
virtually all of a woman's property was given over to her husband,
usually automatically, upon marriage.
The age for marriage has also
undergone change. Quoting from page 170, as above: "Historically, the
attitude of the English common law was that a person under seven years
lacked the mental ability to consent to marriage, between seven years
and puberty there could be consent but not a consummated marriage. At
common law, therefore, the marriage of a person between the age of
seven and 12 or 14 was `inchoate' and would become `choate' on reaching
puberty, if no objection was raised." In point of fact, it is a return
to something very similar to this value system which would seem to be
appropriate at the present point in time. So, when I present my
proposal in this regard, do not claim it to be unprecedented, for
clearly, it is not.
1 . Families
Family
structure has undergone a great deal of change throughout historical
times. The present trend in the law is to force all but the richest of
us into households consisting of a single nuclear family, which is
defined as parents and their immediate children.84
But much larger extended families were common in other civilizations.
For example, in Rome, the family law gave extreme power to the
patriarch (oldest living father), who had the right to control every
aspect of the lives of his family, including the right to kill his
sons. The patriarch was the guardian of his sons for as long as the
patriarch lived, and thus the custom was that each son would marry and
bring the new wife and any resulting children to live at the home of
the patriarch. In later times, this custom persisted primarily among
royalty and other very wealthy individuals.
Regardless of structure,
however, the family unit has certain basic functions which do not vary
from culture to culture: 1) it provides a physical security for
each individual family member because it maintains a "home" where each
member is theoretically welcome; 2) it provides a similar
psychological security and provides the most fundamental sense of
"belonging" which it is possible for an individual to possess;
3) it provides sexual satisfaction, which is usually seen as an
important reward for establishing the marital relationship (but it
should also be noted that only 54 out of 250 cultures which were
studied by one research team were found to forbid premarital liaisons
between unrelated persons of the opposite sex); 4) a family
provides for procreation and child socialization; 5) it provides a
simplified way of regulating sexual behavior; 6) the family is the
basic unit of social and economic life; and 7) the family
contributes to social order by providing for an initial level of
supervision for all of its members, primarily through discipline of the
children by the parents, but occasionally in other ways.85
In essence, the family is the
building block for all larger social units. It is truly symptomatic of
the deep difficulties in which we now find ourselves when we are forced
to admit that our most fundamental social unit is in tremendous trouble
as an institution. If the family is in trouble, those difficulties
permeate all of our other social institutions as a natural consequence
of the family being the fundamental social unit. So it is that the
pundits now decry the failure of parents to take sufficient interest in
the schooling of their children. This failure is then blamed, in turn,
for the failure of the schools to properly educate those same children.
The "dirty little secret" of
this, however, is the fact that economic pressures have forced women to
take "regular jobs" in order to earn enough money for the family to
afford everything which we have declared that the family needs. If the
parents fail to provide for the proper feeding, clothing, lodging, and
so forth of their children, our society will throw them into jail. If
both parents are gone 9 to 12 hours a day, who is watching the kids?
Well, for the affluent, it is some form of day care. For the poor, it
is all to common that the answer is: the kids are assigned to watch out
for each other. That may be all well and good for basic supervision
(i. e., baby-sitting), but how does this result in the
transmission of our cultural values to our young? It cannot, because
only adults can be the source of the kind of supervision and
instruction which is necessary for all of our children.
In essence, the source of our
social troubles today is the natural consequences of forcing our people
to live as nuclear families with both (or all) adults working outside
of the home. The exceptions to this are for the very affluent, who can
afford to live on one income, and the very poor, where the women are
forced into a role as the sole "head of household" in order to qualify
for welfare. Under the welfare reform proposals which are now in
various stages of implementation, we are in the process of forcing even
welfare mothers into the work force. Single parent welfare families
have enough troubles without having to address the problems of finding
adequate day care for the kids so that mom can work.86
While welfare reform is being touted as pro-family, in fact it is just
the opposite. It will tend to destroy what little family life these
poorest of our citizens enjoy. As if the innocent children in these
welfare families did not have enough problems, this will only add to
their troubles, as we remove the only parent they know from their
family.
There is no way to avoid the
fact that the family was, is, and will most likely always be the basic
building block of our society. The only rational alternative to having
families would seem to be turning our children over to state run
institutions, sort of like orphanages, which would take all of the
responsibility for turning out functional citizens. However, this
option is not likely to be acceptable to our citizenry for any number
of obvious reasons.
If there is going to be a
solution to the social ills which confront us, that solution must begin
with a restructuring of our most basic social unit, the family. In
essence, that is the principal purpose of this book: to foster such a
restructuring. However, before we begin the discussions of that
subject, we must first put it all into context, for it is only in
context that the obvious answers emerge.
2 . Tribes And Other Social Institutions
We
often forget to mention the importance of tribal communities,
particularly in the context of civilized people. While tribes are the
only state form recognized by primitive people, as soon as a larger
social order develops, tribes become an artificial designation, as in
ancient Rome, or a forgotten attribute, as in our modern society.
But if families are the basic
building block of society, that infers that there are some larger
social groups into which families are organized. As is discussed below,
the obvious aspects of government occur based upon residence in cities,
counties, states, and nations. There are a number of other
pseudo-tribal organizations, which would include churches and clubs of
various kinds. Our modern churches have the most in common with
primitive tribes because in each case the members are bound together by
a common belief system. Also, you tend to be "born into" a particular
church, and most people do not change their church affiliation during
their lifetime.
A primitive tribe also has a genetic identity because its members are all related by blood to one degree or another.87
Since churches formed the principal social institution within which
young men could meet available young women, churches have always been a
natural meeting ground for people who would marry one another. Thus, it
has always been considered "proper" to marry someone from your own
church and "improper" (but still mostly tolerated) to marry someone
from another church. In ancient times, when people of different faiths
married one another, one of the soon to be married young people would
be expected to convert to the church of the other before the ceremony
could be performed. All of this is basic tribal behaviors.
Other social organizations in
our society display these and other tribal behaviors in their
operation, at least to some degree. A tribe almost invariably has a
formal leader and a series of assistants to the leader. Each
organization in our civilized society has these same things. Viewed
abstractly, there are lots of tribes in modern times.
But we must remember that the
basic reason for the existence of tribes is that it enhanced the
chances of survival. In other words, a group of several families living
together as a tribe was more likely to survive in any given set of
circumstances than was a single family living alone in the wilderness.
In fact, single families living alone need to go to extraordinary
lengths to survive for more than a few years or a single generation.
This imposes such hardships, with such a large chance of failure, that
survival is not too likely for historical periods of time.
So it is that people who found
pleasure living orderly lives as members of tribes found it much easier
to survive, while those who rejected tribal rules and regulations were
quite likely not to live for very long at all. Tribes are thus
pro-survival entities, and if there is presently a lack in our nuclear
families, it is a lack of organizing those families into tribes for the
purposes of survival.
3 . The State
Each
civilization has some state form which it adopts. For the ancient
Greeks, it was the city-state. Modern life in the United States
recognizes formal governmental units of cities, counties, states, and
the nation as a whole. There are also numerous special districts, such
as school districts, water districts, and so forth, that are basically
merely instrumentalities of the formal government units, even if they
have different governing boards.
However, the principal
defining element of each of these state forms is a boundary drawn on a
map. Thus, geography defines the state, not the people who comprise it.
This is an essential distinction. The state has no natural relationship
to its people, which makes it impossible for the state to fulfill the
survival needs of the people who comprise the governed citizenry. In
other words, the state cannot fulfill the needs of the individual for
belonging to a tribe.
There are practical aspects of
each known state form which contribute to this. The most obvious is
that most of these governments manage so much geography and so many
people that individualized attention is impossible. Only in the
smallest of rural communities can the formal government have enough
knowledge and caring to intervene in the individual families which
comprise that government.
I believe that part of the
longing that many of us feel for simplified rural lifestyles is really
a yearning for being part of a tribe, and then finding no fulfillment
of those tribal longings in our complex modern society. At its base, we
crave individual attention, and we cannot easily achieve that attention
as members of a large group.
The key, then, is to foster
the development of groups of families into pseudo-tribes which can
fulfill the needs we have for belonging to a larger community that has
the time and energy available to give us each some significant amount
of attention. There is a natural attraction for this buried deep within
us, and if a solution to our present social ills awaits discovery, we
would do well to examine a return to tribal organizations as the next
social unit up from the nuclear family.
4 . "Law And Order"
The
most basic social value of our society is "law and order." What does
this really mean? It means that we all agree to live our lives in
accordance with a system of laws that theoretically protects us all
from one another. The resulting "order" is what allows us to call
ourselves "civilized."
The opposite of "law and order" is anarchy.88
While numerous anarchists have made proposals for anarchy as the basis
of civilization, all such proposals are so totally impractical that
most of us give them no serious thought. While the law is a thin veneer
indeed, it keeps me from blowing away my neighbor in a fit of pique,
and will generally also keep my neighbor from doing the same to me. By
definition, anarchy has no rules, and is the absence of "order" in our
society. While it gives each individual the maximum amount of freedom,
and is thus attractive to those who see freedom as the paramount value
of them all, anarchy also requires each individual to live in complete
fear of what somebody else might do without consequence to themselves.89
We should recognize that our
concepts of "family values" and "law and order" are nearly synonymous
with each other. If we promote one, we promote them both. If one is
failing, then probably both are failing. What our society really needs
is a philosophy which can be easily transmitted to our young and which
promotes these key values.
84 I am talking here about zoning laws which restrict the number of individuals who may occupy a given home based upon the number of bedrooms, the ages and genders of the inhabitants, and their status as related or unrelated individuals. It is also interesting to note that only a few communities in the most populated areas will even allow a so-called "granny flat" to be part of the dwelling unit. This type of accommodation is usually described as a one room apartment, about 800 square feet total, and with kitchen facilities included. Such simple types of dwelling units, common in historical times, are now all but banned as primary dwelling units here in the United States (except in the most rural areas).
85 For example, there was a trend for a while for kids to turn their parents in on drug charges. But any kid with half a brain knows that the kids will be placed into foster care if they turn their parents in, so this is a fairly rare occurrence.
86 Of course, this is no different than what the "single parent working poor" families face.
87 All tribes have acquired members either voluntarily or involuntarily in various ways from other tribes existing around them. This is partly related to "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" syndrome, which is a pro-survival instinct. Our genetic diversity as a species is enhanced by breeding outside of our own tribes from time to time.
88 Anarchy is defined as "1. a state of society without government or law. 2. political and social disorder due to the absence of governmental control . . . . 3. a theory that regards the absence of all direct or coercive government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society. 4. confusion; chaos; disorder . . . ." (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, 1993.) It could be rationally stated that the opposite of anarchy is slavery, and that our modern system of "law and order" actually falls somewhere in between the two extremes of anarchy and slavery. Nonetheless, a total absence of "law and order" would, in fact, be anarchy, so I stand by the sentence in that context.
89 If I killed my neighbor, would anyone care enough to retaliate? Kitty Genovese would probably argue in the negative. Of 38 neighbors within earshot of her brutal murder, none of them even called the police. The fact that 38 of them heard her being killed was only discovered as a result of the police investigation which occurred after her dead body was found.