Words&Dirt

“As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead (brewed on-site, of course) they had managed to convince him that the medieval world wasn’t worse or more primitive than the modern, just different.

And so the email pipeline now worked like this: down in Douglas, which was the primary city of the Isle of Man, the girlfriend of one of the medievalists, who dwelled in a flat there (‘I happen to rather like tampons’), would read D-squared’s email as it came in, filter out the obvious junk, and print out a hard copy of anything that seemed important, and zip it in a waterproof messenger bag.  When it came time to walk her dog, she would stroll up the waterfront promenade until she reached the wee elven train station at its northern end, where she would hand the bag to the station agent, who would later hand it over to the conductor of the narrow-gauge electrical train that wound its way from there up into the interior of the island.  At a certain point along the line it would be tossed out onto the siding and later picked up by D-squared’s gamekeeper, who would carry it up the hill and place its contents on the desk of the in-house troubadour, who would translate it into medieval Occitan and then sing and/or recite it to D-squared at mealtime.  The lord of the manor would then dictate a response that would follow the reverse route back down the hill to the girlfriend’s laptop and the Internet.

Ludicrous?  Yes.  All done with a straight face?  Of course not.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 248-9

“In traditional American rhetoric, it has often been held that ‘Family and State wax and wane inversely to each other,’ and that powerful states seek to strip ‘the family of as many of its natural functions and authorities as possible.’  As we have seen, however, neither the family nor the state is unitary, and relations between them are far more complicated than this.  In the final analysis, the entire notion of the state undermining some primordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces.  The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.

Despite constant friction and periodic boundary disputes, strong states have historically aligned themselves with private nuclear families against extended-kin networks, community associations, and local rulers.  The classic Greek distinction between oikos (household) and polis (political government) emerged in large part to restrict the claims of genos, or clan.  Western notions of privacy and family autonomy developed as a corollary to the new claims of an expanding state over the public sphere; both family privacy and individual autonomy were increasingly guaranteed by the state.  But, of course, the state expected the private family to be more tractable than were the older public institutions it eclipsed; the more private the family, the more dependent it was on the state.

Trying to adopt a consistent position on whether state intervention is good or bad for privacy may be like demanding that scientists choose whether light consists of waves or particles, when it consists of both.  As we have seen, the state created family privacy in America even as it asserted new authority over family relations.  Conversely, some of the main expansions of state power have come from those most eager to preserve the autonomy of the private family.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 145-6