Words&Dirt

“America needs more than a revival of obligation within the family.  As business writer Bob Kuttner has commented, it ‘desperately needs an economy based upon notions of mutual obligation and reciprocity.’  People should be able to expect ‘that our home, our church, our kid’s school, our bank, and the place where we work will stay put.’  Without such commitments in the economy and polity, family life will remain precarious no matter how many family values we try to inculcate.  When there is so little trust and commitment outside the family, it is hard to maintain them inside the family.  Old family strategies and values no longer seem to fit the new rules of the game.

It’s not that the old rules of the game were fair.  But the past two decades have stripped away the illusion of fairness, as well as much hope of winning by the old rules, without leading to construction of any new rules.  The result is that some people break the old rules even as they espouse the values behind them, others throw all values into question, and still others try desperately to get their own families and loved ones to play by the rules that have no general support in larger institutions or the popular press.  Consequently, people feel embattled, if not embittered, and, above all, very much alone.

Only the family, it seems, stands between individuals and the total irresponsibility of the workplace, the market, and political arena, and the mass media.  But the family is less and less able to ‘just say no’ to the pressures that emanate from all these sources, or even to cushion their impact on its members.  It is no wonder, then, that many people experience recent cultural trends as a crisis of parental authority and family obligations.  It is no wonder they hope for a renewal of family values that would soften these social stresses.  But very few people can sustain values at a personal level when they are continually contradicted at work, at the store, in the government, and on television.  To call their failure to do so a family crisis is much like calling pneumonia a breathing crisis.  Certainly, pneumonia affects people’s ability to breathe easily, but telling them to start breathing properly again, or even instructing them in breathing techniques, is not going to cure the disease.

The crisis in the family in late-twentieth-century America is in many ways a larger crisis of social reproduction: a major upheaval in the way we produce, reproduce, the distribute goods, services, power, economic rewards, and social roles, including those of class and gender.  The collapse of social interdependence and community obligation in America challenges us to rethink our attitudes toward the periods of dependence that characterize the life of every human being, young or old, in or out of a family.

To handle social obligations and interdependency in the twenty-first century, we must abandon any illusion that we can or should revive some largely mythical traditional family.  We need to invent new family traditions and find ways of reviving older community ones, not wallow in nostalgia for the past or heap contempt on people whose family values do not live up to ours.  There are good grounds for hope that we can develop such new traditions, but only if we discard simplistic solutions based on romanticization of the past.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 277-8

“Zula used the lavatory.  When she emerged, all three men were still in the same positions, though Jones had now begun cackling with satisfaction.

Noticing Zula standing above him, he tucked his chin, rolled to his feet, and beckoned her forward.  She squeezed past him into the cockpit, dropped to one knee, and looked up.

No more than a hundred feet above them was the underbelly of a 747.

So that explained why they had felt free to gain altitude.  They had timed their flight plan so as to synchronize it with the jumbo’s takeoff from Taipei airport.  It was headed for (she guessed) Vancouver or San Francisco or some other West Coast destination.  Cutting underneath it as it vectored northward from the tip of Taiwan, they had positioned themselves beneath it and gained altitude in lockstep with it, their bogey merging with its bogey on the radar screens of air traffic controllers and military installations up and down the eastern coast of Asia.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 510