US Civilization's Weakness
Evident in Family Trends
by Jan Lundberg
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Looking at the institution of the family in the U.S., one
can see best the weakness of the nation’s future on a
personal level. This paper attempts to account for why and
how our form of civilization-materialist, individualistic
society and the U.S. itself-is headed for extinction.
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It was once universal that pride in one's family reflected
real wealth that could not be replaced. Even if people had
very little money and very few modern conveniences, they
were generally happy and had more time for themselves and
their family. This is still true in "developing" countries,
although less and less so because of urbanization and
western, industrialized media-pollution.
The modern human being has been sold a bill of goods that
leads only to the grave, with little legacy or honor for
the wonderful family institution that used to define a
person's character and support group. If we haven’t bought
that bill of goods, we still must struggle mightily to live
a dignified life free of pain, deprivation and dishonor.
For rebels who see another way than modern society’s
domination, their fate is likely one of becoming subsumed
or crushed.
However, the apparent bleakness of this analysis is offset
by the future possibilities, if-and only if-the truth of
our economic and ecological health is understood much more
widely. First we must identify and connect our common
problems as appropriate:
The modern U.S. family is going nowhere, I fear. Picture a
multi-generational nuclear family that may become scattered
geographically, as the individuals concentrate on their
survival strategies and-if they're lucky-pursue their
chosen recreation and leisure. This doesn't sound bad if
it's what you're used to. But I'm a critic who has been
around the world, and I believe in extended families and in
strengthening family solidarity.
Picturing again the "normal, successful" modern family, we
see a child growing up without the daily interaction with
both parents in fifty per cent of U.S. households.
(Moreover, a single-person household has also become the
norm.) Additionally, parent-child time is quite limited due
to public schooling and wage slavery. The young'n finds
adulthood and usually goes off to live a rather separate
existence, with visits on holidays as is the norm.
What is being passed from generation to generation? Great
pride and closeness? Teachings, upbringing, stories and
skills? A little of those maybe. But the overriding concern
is money and having a whole separate set of material things
to buy and consume. People are beset by proliferating,
intensifying problems, and understandably have forgotten
how to live. So, how can the family line really be going
anywhere? The grandchild may barely know the grandparents.
The U.S. family is typically leading nowhere. People are
lost and alienated, compared to almost all other nations.
Within the borders of the U.S., Navajos are known to keep
in touch within families daily by telephone, when long
distances separate parents and children. To contrast this
traditional kind of culture with the opposite
extreme-Anglo-American-we see the only culture that disowns
a child (although a South American might disown some child
for growing up to be a Pinochet).
The commonplace U.S. family line passes into a pattern of
hazy, thinly attached bonds as each consumer - I mean, family
member! - is aging virtually alone in more and more
instances. Security is less and less defined as living with
family and being there for each other. Instead, security is
attempted through accumulating money and property if
possible. This may or may not work out; some people fall by
the wayside and become involuntarily homeless.
Jobs often force or allow people to move away from family,
and long-distance relationships then depend on plenty of
money for vacations and travel. The military opportunity,
taken up by the poor, is another source of family division,
even if soldiers are not killed by bullets. Prisons-that
burgeoned industry increasingly called slave
labor-obviously separatefamilies. (In the eyes of the
family patriarch or matriarch, prison would not be so
objectionable if victimless crimes were not so frequently
prosecuted.)
Johnnie went off to the military and then college, got
married, and started a little family away from his parents.
It was a neighboring suburb, but the car was essential.
Johnnie was told that he must work! Then he could buy
stuff. Then save money for his children's college
education. That is better than his spending his money on
cocaine. But in the best of circumstances, following the
formula for family relations in the U.S. and to an extent
in other industrialized countries, people have become
cattle-dehumanized. As we are further separated from
nature, and everything including clean water is
commodified, we are cattle (or any term you prefer for
economic units to be manipulated for the profit of the
few).
If you wish to object and say
"No, we love each other in
our separate family households and various home towns,
and...", blah blah blah, the fact is that pervasive car
dependence, and lack of time to keep in good touch with
family and friends, means that we are on a fast treadmill
going nowhere. For some, making money is satisfying, and
they take pride in offering a good home (materially). But
why is hate, dysfunction, abuse, cancer, back-stabbing,
etc., so rife in the U.S. family? Add toxicity and
radiation as destroying not just our bodies but our minds.
Our materialistic culture obviously has very little
connection with healthy nature, forcing people to squeeze
out a little time for meditation at best. (See Family
Cohesion Threatened by Sprawl and Greed, Culture Change
magazine late fall 2001,
and Sustainability Starts with Family Solidarity, Culture Change e-Letter 13).
Johnnie's daughter Joan follows the common example and
tries to achieve happiness and self-reliance. She works
hard and probably gives up her dreams. But even if she
pursues her dream, say, of becoming a great costume
designer, she finds very little time to visit or get to
know her fast-aging grandparents and her nieces or cousins.
There is no clue offered to Joan that there's anything
generally wrong, or that there’s an alternative, if we
consider the television shows, newspapers, and songs on the
radio. Those media, all corporatized, tell us what to
think. Although Joan may or may not support the latest war
or police action by the U.S. government, she may or may not
smoke medical pot, or make her own clothes, or have her
baby born at home instead of in a hospital, she has to
subscribe to the value system around her to survive
materially. The effect of the culture, and the
civilization's march across the last of the wildernesses,
are the same almost no matter what Joan tries to do: She
can love her old dad Johnnie and her mama, and be sweet to
other members of the family-even extended ones-but there's
only so much time in a day, only so many days in a year,
and so many years in a life. Her life slips by at great
speed, rather than meditatively so as to savor many moments
each day. She may sense her aloneness and the fact that her
family isn't strengthening at all. Her family and the
community are weaker and weaker.
Joan may thus feel depressed and confused, even if she is
fit and sexy. Where is that love and support from family
when she needs them? It is no wonder that eventually she
may make the
"hard decision" to put her mother and father
in a nursing home, after they fell one too many times in
their
"retirement home" for-profit institution. Whether or
not Joan can withstand the common pressures of divorce, job
loss and career change, she is too alone and has failed to
gather and pass on what her grandparents knew. She can't
tell many stories to her children about the great and
great-great grandparents. Our culture once was telling us
that these people were
"great," not just old and dead! But
finding out about one's heritage in the U.S. is perhaps
even more rare than stamp collecting. Elsewhere, one would
not have to try to study one’s ancestry because a child
knew it cold before hitting puberty.
Joan is cattle, even more so than her old Dad whom she may
or may not love and revere. They have in common that public
schooling taught regimentation and conformity to them and
99% of the citizenry. Her feeling or sensing the real
impediments to family solidarity and traditions prevents
lasting relationships from forming in her life, and
contributes to lack of community on the neighborhood and
town level. Safe in her box-of-a-home, using her electronic
(pollution) devices for communicating and relaxing, Joan is
part of a society-wide problem, no matter how
"nice"
she is, no matter how great Johnnie was at the 100 yard dash.
Happiness as we have come to know it, in the best of terms
and circumstances, is an illusion in mainstream materialist
culture. The U.S. may have many happy people, but consider
that their ignorance is recognized world wide. They would
be more happy if they had a sense of their family being so
tight in their lives that money was not something to worry
about. The sham that is the consumer's life - no matter if
one voted for Bush, Gore or Nader - is what sends some people
into experimentations such as cohousing and living in
communes. However, if those experiments are in the U.S.,
failure may be built in. So, another country and its
tighter family structure would seem to be the ticket. But
this is no solution for masses of people in the U.S., so
they will first have to see their petroleum gluttony
terminated before realizing that they must depend on others
for daily mundane accomplishments and long-term survival.
Good luck to Joan and to what should have been her
rock-solid, illustrious family and set of neighbor-friends
that together, or one-on-one, should have seen each member
of the community through the rough years and the tragedies,
as well as rejoicing over the births and comings of age.
The knowledge that there is continuity and nothing lost
over many, many generations, has become an alien concept in
the
"Land of the free and the home of the brave." Or is it
the land of the slave and the home of the shopping spree?
Today we are threatened with discontinuity on all levels,
as war of terror spins out of control, and law enforcement
intrudes further and further into people's lives. It never
used to be this way, and it will not endure. Support your
family, neighborhood and your planet, and only then the
flag if it honors your values and supports spending all the
time you want with your family and friends. Whose life is
it, anyhow? As the Jim Page song goes, Whose world is it?
We must first understand the problem, with unvarnished
truth. In some of our upcoming Culture Change Letters, the
positive alternatives to business-as-usual, along with
hopeful scenarios, will take center stage. This will temper
the
"negative analysis" of impending social and ecological
upheaval that some decry as doom-and-gloom, that may usher
in the transition to establishing universal sustainability.
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– Jan Lundberg
Jan Lundberg founded the Sustainable
Energy Institute (SEI) in 1988. This essay is number 15 of
his Culture Change letters.
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