It makes no sense to decry the hypocrisy of double (or multiple)
standards and the loss of a morality associated with the misery
of people obliged to remain together by forces they consider
legitimate (religion foremost). In the dynamics of the
civilization of illiteracy, forces kept under the control of
rules and norms established in the practical experience of
literacy are unleashed. It would be difficult to speak about
progress where one sees the demise of family, the erosion of
private life, the increased number of one- parent households, of
early and very early maternity, of incest, rape and increased
child abuse, of obsession with contraceptives or ignorance of
their use, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases and
drugs. Still, before hurrying value judgments, one would be
better advised to consider the entire picture and to assess what
makes all these occurrences possible, indeed, what makes them
necessary.
It might well be true that what we perceive as the sources of
morality and happiness-the family, children, love, religion,
work, and the satisfaction associated with all of these-are
exhausted. It might well be that fresh sources must be sought, or
invented, or at least not eliminated because they do not fit the
mold of previous choices. Even the thought that morality and
happiness are altogether unnecessary deserves to be considered.
They are loaded with the expectation of permanency and
universality rendered impossible in the new pragmatic framework
of permissiveness, local values, instant gratification, change,
and interconnectedness.
The nuclear family of the civilization of literacy has been
absorbed in the illiterate dynamics of societal functioning. It
is coming out of the experience restructured. On the other hand,
socially acceptable patterns of development are encouraged
through the public education system, where the chief objective
is the socialization of children, not the dissemination of
knowledge. Ethnic characteristics are progressively, although
timidly, acknowledged. The seemingly losing battle against drugs
leads many parents and social researchers to wonder whether
legalization would be more efficient than spending immense
amounts of money and energy to fight the underground market. In
this world of mediation, science and technology make genetic
engineering possible in the form of influencing the profile of
the offspring, ways to avoid what does not fit the fashionable,
ways to induce early in development (almost at the embryonic
stage) preferences and cognitive characteristics.
Together with everything pertaining to the human being
self-constituted in the framework of the civilization of
illiteracy, the family goes public in the stock market of the
many enterprises involved in the self-perpetuation and the well
being of the species. Its value is no longer a matter of those
constituting it, of its goals and means, but of the return on
the investment society makes in it. As a competitive unit within
the pragmatic framework associated with literacy, the family
freed itself from the constraints implicit in literacy that
affect its efficiency. It became a contract, one among the
growing number, in whose expression literacy gives way to the
alternative litigation language of the law, in respect to which,
with the exception of lawyers, everyone else is illiterate.
Favorable taxation supports children-euphemistically called
deductions when they are really additions-but not beyond what is
socially expected of them, at least in the USA: to become agents
of consumption and increased efficiency as soon as possible. In
this sense, the tensions between generations are simply
refocused-society is willing to make available social help in
the form of transitory family substitutes. The problem is not
addressed, only its symptoms. The languages of counseling and
psychiatry at work here are another instance of specialized
literacy. They substitute for family communication while
projecting limited and limiting psychological explanations upon
all those involved.
In an age that expects efficiency to lead to satisfaction, if not
happiness, the family relies on specialists when problems arise:
psychiatrists, counselors, specialized schools. Sometimes the
specialists are imposed when society perceives a need to
intervene, especially in cases of suspected child abuse. It is
reflective of the pragmatics of our time that the elderly
receive attention in the market of mediations and
specializations on a less obvious level. They are considered only
to the extent that they are viable consumers. Once upon a time,
and still in isolated cases, such as the Amish and Mennonites in
the USA, age was to be honored for its own sake, a value kept
alive through literacy. While many elderly enjoy the benefits of
better healthcare and economic sufficiency, they effectively
divorce themselves from the family in enjoying what the market
offers them. Their participation in the family is a matter of
choice more than necessity. The success of the Internet among
the elderly, in need of communication and support groups, is a
very telling phenomenon. Networks of reciprocal support, as
nuclei of self-organization, emerge independent of any form of
social intervention. Their viability is based on this dynamics.
The struggle between the value of life in the civilization of
literacy and that of illiteracy can be seen in hospitals and
nursing homes where the aged are treated on machine-based
analogies, abandoned or entrusted to specialists in the care of
the dying. While aging and death cannot be eliminated, the
market provides ways to avoid them as long as we can afford to.
It used to be that the new generation continued the family
work-farming, carpentry, pottery, law, business, banking,
publishing. This happened in a context of continuity and
relative permanence: the work or business remained relatively
unchanged. Literacy was appropriate for the transfer of know-how,
as it was for the maintenance of family-based values and
successive assumption of responsibilities regarding the family,
moreover the community. These pragmatic elements no longer
exist the way they did.
Today, even within the same generation, the nature of business
evolves, and so does the nature of the values around which
family is established. In addition, ownership changes as well;
businesses are more and more integrated in the market; they
become public entities; their shares are traded with no regard
to the object those shares represent. The consequence is what we
perceive as lack of family continuity and bonding. The new
nature of the family contract is such that its basis of affection
is eroded. Sequentiality of work is replaced by cycles of
parallel activity during which generations compete as
adversaries. This is why the family contract is shifted more and
more to the market, depersonalized, indexed like one among many
commodities. This contract is no longer literacy-bound, but
rooted in circumstances of distributed activities of intense
competition and networking. Once demythified, family relations
are reassessed; continuity is severed. The market acknowledges
the segmentation of family-no longer an economic entity in its
own right-and in turn accentuates it. The baby business, the
infant market, teenagers, and so on to the senior market are well
focused on their respective segments as these embody not just
age groups, but foremostly expectations and desires that can be
met at the level of each individual.