The new pragmatics ultimately affects the motives behind forming
a family in the civilization of illiteracy. Marriage, if at all
considered, has become a short-term contract. Its brevity
contradicts marriage's reason for being: continuity and security
through offspring and adaptation to life cycles. The attitudes
with which partners enter the family contract result in a
dynamic of personal relations outside of that sanctioned by
society. Vows are exchanged more as a matter of performance than
of bonding. Natural instincts are systematically overridden
through mediating mechanisms for providing nourishment,
acquiring health care, and settling conflicts. Child rearing is
the result of pragmatic considerations: What does a couple, or
single parent, give up in having a child? Can a mother continue
working outside the home?
In order to correctly qualify answers to these questions, we
would need to acknowledge that many characteristics of the
individuals constituting a family, or seeking alternatives to
it, are reflected in the family experience, or in experiences
that are parallel to it. Economic status, race, religion,
culture, and acculturation play an important role. Literacy
assumed homogeneity and projected expectations of uniformity.
The new pragmatic framework evidences the potential of
heterogeneous experiences. Data indicating that the average
numbers of divorces, single-parent households, number of
partners, etc. vary drastically among groups of different
biological, cultural, and economic backgrounds shows how
necessary it is to realistically account for differences among
human beings.
Let us take a look at some statistical data. But before doing
that, let us also commit ourselves to an unbiased
interpretation, free of any racial prejudice. Almost 60% of
Black children in the USA are living in a one-parent household.
Of these children, 94% live with their mothers. It was
documented that 70% of the juveniles in long-term correctional
facilities grew up without a father. To make any inference from
such data without proper consideration of the many factors at
work would only perpetuate literacy-based prejudices, and would
not lead to a better understanding of the new circumstances of
human self-constitution. Our need to understand the dynamics of
family and what can be done to effect a course of events that is
beneficial to all involved cannot be served unless we understand
the many characteristics of the practical experience of
self-constitution of the Black family, or of any non-standard
Western family.
Under the expectations of literacy, a prototypical family life
was to be expected from all. As the expectation of homogeneity
is overridden by all the forces at work in the civilization of
illiteracy, we should not be surprised by, and even less inclined
to fasten blame on people who constitute themselves in ways
closer to their authenticity. Multiplication of choice is-let me
state again-part of the civilization of illiteracy. Modern,
enlightened laws introduced in some African countries prohibit
polygamous families. With this prohibition in place, a new
phenomenon has occurred: Husbands end up having extra-marital
affairs and support neither their lovers nor their children,
which they did under polygamy. Paradoxically, activists in the
Women's Liberation movement are seriously considering the return
to polygamy, as an alternative to the increasing number of
deadbeat dads and the misery of abandoned wives and children.
There is no necessary relation between the two examples, rather
the realization that within the civilization of illiteracy,
tradition comes very powerfully to expression.