I picked my kids up on the weekend for the summer vacation, and thankfully we’ve been rewarded with excellent weather so far. We’ve been spending time together as a family without the usual pressure of having to say goodbye in a couple days, and that’s a big weight off of all of us. It’s been a real pleasure for me to spend time out in the sun with the little ones, watching them thrive in the full glory of summer.
Not having the kids for most of the school year gives me a certain appreciation for these school vacations, but it has also given me the opportunity to reflect on modern life and what has happened to the concept of family over the years. For example, the idea that children should get up in the morning and then immediately leave the house to go to school on most days of the year just doesn’t seem right. In fact, it seems downright unnatural.
Since the industrial revolution began to change the world, we’ve developed a lifestyle that seems designed to fracture the family. Parents and children leave the house and trudge off to work or school to perform unpleasant tasks among strangers during most waking hours. While there, they are managed by people who have no particular emotional attachment to them and graded and evaluated by fundamentally inhuman standards. Once home, tired and numb, they wolf down a dinner and sit, stupefied, in front of the TV or computer for some hours before hitting the sack and starting all over again.
This is all necessary, I suppose, but I wonder sometimes why there’s been so little pushback from people in recent years against the steady march toward being a society of cogs in machines rather than mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters and sons and daughters. Many of the social movements and reforms in the early 20th century were a very human effort to reclaim the family and home and make a stand against the all-consuming march of “progress.” Perhaps it was politically easier to do so back then, when most people – even in the US – still had first-hand experience with a family farm or enterprise and the old way of life.
Today, so few of us have experienced anything besides the daily grind that we don’t even know what we’d do without the “structure” of school and the office.
Think about it: From the age of five, we are expected to spend most of our days living at the convenience of an institution, and then only when old, broken down, and no longer “useful,” we are to finally retire. For younger people, retirement age is expected to be about 70, so that gives us 65 years of institutional life to look forward to.
Is that “progress?”
Unfortunately, I have only seen this trend accelerate. There’s been no evidence of popular resistance, and the destruction of the family has made it all but impossible to even think of rolling back the atomization of society. How could we survive, after all, without a corporation or state agency to provide for us? If most of us have no family to speak of, then anything that might weaken the institutions we rely on would be a threat. There’s positive feedback at work: as we rely more on institutions, the family is weakened, and the weaker the family the more we rely on institutions.
But where does it end?
