At the time literacy became possible and necessary, it embodied
an idiom of effective relations, both synchronically-at a given
instance of those relations-and diachronically-over time, such
as from one generation to another, each attached to the same use
of language in writing, reading, and speaking. It is precisely
the need to achieve efficiency, in every human endeavor, that
assigns to the family the function of co-guarantor of tradition.
Even before the possibility of literacy, language carried the
do's and don'ts transmitting rules, based on the practical
experience, that ensured survival through cooperation and new
ways to satisfy direct needs and respond to expectations-rules
that affected the efficiency of each practical experience.
The family appropriated these requirements, shaping them into a
coherent framework for efficient togetherness. Directness,
sequentiality, linearity, centralism, cooperation, and
determinism marked the family experience as it marked other
experiences of human self-constitution. Family members relied
directly on each other. As one male assumed the role of
provider, and the female, or females, of caretaker, a certain
structure of dependence was put in place, resulting in hierarchy
and sub- hierarchies. Family activity involved repetitive and
sequential phases related to survival: reproductive cycles of
animals; the progression of seasons and its relation to
agriculture (rainy and dry, cold and hot, long days and short
days). The pragmatics of survival seemed determined; there was
little choice in method and timing. The family took shape in a
world of cause-and-effect, which also determined religious
practices.
The source of each rule for successful family life was direct
practical experience; the test of validity was the
effectiveness appropriate to the specific scale of humanity.
The do's changed over time, as experience confirmed their
efficiency. They became a body of accepted knowledge from which
moral ideals are extracted, laws derived, and political action
inspired within the context of literacy. In the industrial
equation, output (products, end results, increase or profit)
should equal or exceed input (raw materials, energy, human
effort). The don'ts, adopted by religion, law, and rudimentary
medical praxis, were engraved in language even more deeply. They
were encoded together with punishments that reflected the
urgency behind preserving the integrity of the family- based
pragmatic framework, in the experience of the agricultural and,
later on, the industrial model. The association between act and
result was continuously scrutinized in a world of action and
reaction. In a world of experience mediated through literacy,
rules were followed for their own sake; or rather, for the sake
of the permanence that literacy embodied.
That at some time sexual relations outside marriage could be the
cause of so many prohibitions and dire punishment, mainly for
women, does not bear as much significance on the state of morals
as upon the pragmatic implications of the act of infidelity and
wantonness. These implications refer to lineage, continuity, and
inheritance, psychological effects on other family members,
health, and status of offspring born out of wedlock. Rules
regarding family integrity were encoded in the language of
custom, ritual, and myth. Later on they were encoded in the
language of religion, philosophy, ethics, law, science,
ideology, and political discourse. Eventually, they were
recorded in the rules of the market. Filtered over time through a
variety of experiences resulting in success or failure, they are
acknowledged in culture, and adopted in the language of
education, and probably most directly in the language of market
transactions. To give birth meant to continue the sequence and
enhance the chances of survival; to rear children to adulthood
meant to afford new levels of efficiency. More people could be
more effective in ensuring survival in a pragmatic framework of
direct action and immediacy. Beyond a certain scale, it became
effectively impossible to coordinate the complex of families
that went into the entire family. City life, even in early
cities, was not propitious to extended families. During this
period, the strategy of labor division took over
undifferentiated, direct execution of tasks.
Over time, as the scale of human experience changed, community
expectations were reflected in what used to be the domain of the
individual or that of families. The term over time needs some
clarification. The first phases to which we refer are of very
slow change. From the initial indications of family-like
relations up to the establishment of language families, the time
span is greater than 15,000 years. From nuclei practicing
agriculture to the first notation and writing, the time is in the
range of 4,000 to 5,000 years. From then on, the cycles became
more compressed: less than 2,000 years to the time religions
were established, another 1,000 years to settlement in cities.
Each moment marks either progressive changes in the pragmatic
framework or radical change, when the scale of human life and
work required different means to meet efficiency expectations.
Language acquisition, settlement of populations, development of
writing, the emergence of philosophy, science and technology, the
Industrial Revolution, and the civilization of illiteracy are
the six changes in the scale of humankind, each with its
corresponding pragmatic framework. Many agents of influence
contribute to the change from one pragmatic framework to another:
climactic conditions, natural selection, the environment,
religions, communal rules, distribution of resources, and the
experience of the market. Regardless of the difference in
languages, language use is probably the common experience
through which natural changes are acknowledged and social
differentiation effected.
Exactly what made literacy necessary-the need to achieve levels
of efficiency corresponding to the human scale that led to
industrial society-made the corresponding type of family
necessary. Families reproduced the needed working force and
transmitted the literacy required to attain the efficiency of
qualified work. Such work was accomplished in a setting
fundamentally different from that of immediate, direct,
practical experiences with nature (farming, animal husbandry), or
small-scale craftsmanship. Literacy was fostered by the family
as a means of coordination and as a universal language of human
transactions. This is how family fulfills the function of co-
guarantor of education. Conversely, among the forms through which
the future contract of literacy was acknowledged, family is one.
The pragmatic need for permanency reflected in the expectation
of the stable family has many consequences inside and outside
family life. These can be witnessed in the spirit and letter of
contractual obligations people enter under the coordinating
power of the literate commitment. Education, law, politics,
religion, and art are impregnated with this spirit. As the
ultimate family-the homogeneous family of families-the nation
asserts its permanency as a reflection of the permanency of its
constituent atoms. When deterioration occurs in the conditions
that make literacy possible and necessary, many of the
permanencies associated with literacy, including the
interpersonal relations adapted to it, or the homogeneity of
nations, fail. As we entertain the prospect that nations, as
definable political entities, might disappear, we automatically
wonder whether the family, as a definable social entity, will
survive-and if yes, in what form.
What breaks down when family fails?
The downfall of nations and empires has been attributed to the
breakdown of the family. The weakening of family has been cited
as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Anti-abortionists and other traditionalists in the United States
blame the breakdown in traditional family values for many of the
social ills of our day. Now that the royal children in Great
Britain are divorced, people wonder how long the monarchy will
last.
One of the symptoms of the civilization of illiteracy is the
perceived breakdown of family. Simultaneously, other
institutions, such as schools, the church, the military,
embodying permanency and stability, are undergoing drastic
reassessment. In a broad sense, a transition from one way of
life to another has been taking place. But things are a little
more confusing since what used to be is not always actually
replaced by something else, but rescaled, turned into a
possibility among many, in a dynamics of ever-expanding
diversity and wider choices. Many have argued that the breakdown
of the traditional family was inevitable. They bring up
cultural, ideological, and socio- economic arguments-from the
liberation of women and children to the exhausted model of the
patriarchal structure. All these arguments are probably partially
right. After previous economies of scarcity and limited means of
production, human experience at the global scale has brought
about a wealth of choices and means of affluence that question
the very premise of the family contract.
In a context of rapid change from the practical experience of
authority to the pragmatics of endless choice, subsumed under
the heading of freedom, the permanency of the family structure
comes under the methodical doubt of our new patterns of praxis.
The tension between choice and authority was experienced in
family life in the specific context of human relations based on
hierarchy and centralism. New questions have a bearing on
sexuality, parent-child relations, interactions among families,
and the whole social fabric. Likewise, the transition of what was
projected as self-control-with elements of self-denial, for the
sake of family, a form of internalized authority-to the
discovery of new frontiers, and the alternative pursuit of self-
indulgence, follows the same path. These new frontiers and
alternatives make values appear relative and undermine the
spirit of sharing implicit in the traditional experience of
family. Sharing is replaced by strategies of coordination and
wealth preservation, all involving many mediating elements, such
as political power, the legal system, taxation, charity.
It is argued, probably with good reason, that the high rate of
divorce-the socially sanctioned breakdown of a family, but
probably only relatively indicative of the breakdown-is not
meaningful unless put in a broader context: how many people still
marry, how many remarry, how much longer people live. The high
rate of divorce at the end of World War II is symptomatic of
events above and beyond the structural characteristics of family
constitution, re-constitution, or breakdown. The rate of divorce
in the years following the war, especially in the last 10-15
years, is nevertheless connected to the underlying structure of
a pragmatic framework within which permanency, whether that of
language, family, values, nations, laws, art, or anything else,
becomes a liability because it affects the dynamics of change.
One out of two marriages-and the proportion is changing quite
fast-ends in divorce. This is, nevertheless, only one aspect of
broader modifications making such a rate more of a qualifier
than an accident in human pairing.
The dynamics of reproduction-births per marriage, average number
of children per family, children living with one parent, infant
mortality-is significant from the perspective of one of the most
important functions of family. In the pragmatic context of
today's integrated world, the need to have many children in order
to maintain continuity and viability is different, even in
Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or Africa, than at any previous time.
The species has practically freed itself from the direct pressure
of natural selection. What is at work, even in areas of extreme
poverty, is a perverted mechanism of interdependencies echoing
what herders in East Africa expressed as: "He who has children
does not sleep in the bush." The family has ceased to be the sole
source of welfare. Its functions are taken over by the
community, the state, even international organizations. The fact
that in some parts of the world this structural change is not
acknowledged, and very high birth rates are on record, shows that
the result of ignoring the pragmatic exigencies of this new age
adds to the burden, not to the solution.
Another phenomenon difficult to assess is the single woman who
decides to give birth. If individual or social material
resources are available, moral and educational needs or
expectations still remain to be addressed. Individualism fostered
to the extreme partially explains the trend, but cannot
satisfactorily indicate the many aspects of this new phenomenon
characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. If one reads
the statistics, single parenthood appears like a sure winner in
the lottery of poverty and frustration. The problems of children
who will be growing up with a mother single by choice will be
the source of much sociological and psychoanalytical research in
the future. But existence is more than numbers in ledgers, or
psychological predicaments. Self-fulfillment, the instinct to
nurture and to ensure continuity are all at work in such cases.