The Nuclear Family and Its Discontents

 

[In the ‘post-kinship’ era] the nuclear family by itself cannot resist the impingements of modern political and economic institutions: the father, mother, and their children must be surrounded by some intermediate, protective body of persons in order to be safe from unacceptable levels of [institutional] control. In fact, those modern political and economic institutions could not have been created in the first place unless the original protective body of persons, the clan, was broken into its constituent and susceptible parts, its nuclear families. The first civilization, in the Middle East, and all subsequent civilizations elsewhere, were constructed on the break-up of their pre-urban clans. (Bram, Recovery of the West)

The break up of the pre-urban clans by more muscular civilized states not only enabled ready manipulation of individual persons, it accomplished this by institutionalizing a newly crafted social unit – the nuclear family – an isolating entity susceptible to control because it was by its very nature incapable of functioning effectively on its own in a new and strange environment. The nuclear family could not adequately care for the needs of its constituent members without creating exceptional hardship, pressure, and tension within the family unit itself. It could not long resist State intervention, because it could not remain self-sufficient. Obtaining food and shelter, rearing and training the young, maintaining health and general welfare were all challenges that would necessarily lead the increasingly isolated family unit into greater dependence upon anonymous institutional powers, designated specialists, bureaucratic functionaries, and legal restraints.  Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, would find it difficult to cope with their own needs as well as those of their offspring, lacking the kinds of support traditionally offered in extended familial and broader tribal configurations.  Given new economic realities, the State presented itself as an adequate, if not the only viable, substitute.

Although I am hesitant to reference her, I am reminded again of Hilary Clinton’s book, It Takes A Village.  In reality it takes a clan, indeed an entire tribe, to adequately care for the young, and to provide for the daily needs of all members.  I would say Ms. Clinton’s literary attempt, while noteworthy for its boldness, was no more than an imperial sales pitch aimed at justifying further incursion by State powers into the lives of its citizens. Quoting another famous political pitchman – her book may have simply been aimed at refocusing nuclear family ‘hopes’on the power of existing political institutions.

So here is where we find ourselves, in small isolated families, bound together internally to one another and externally to the State by codified rules, sanctified by sacred proscription and prescription, and in many cases backed up by the force of law.  Thou shalt! Thou shalt not! A man must cleave to his wife; a wife must submit to her husband; children must honor and obey their father and mother; you must not covet your neighbor’s wife or commit adultery. Where do such moral strictures come from? Why are they necessary in the first place?  They appear to be cornerstones in the founding of the nuclear family.  Perhaps in a world bereft of genuine kinship, where ordinary egalitarian relations of tribal consanguinity and affinity have been broken down or destroyed, they are necessitated in the interests of creating discrete and manageable family units.  And here is where many of our problems emerge.

Sigmund Freud was certainly accurate, if not prescient, in his analysis of the deep malcontent haunting modern civilized life, including the psychopathology of its principal domestic institution, the nuclear family.

Freud provided perhaps the most serious, if indirect, accusation [of the family] when he described the “happy” nuclear household as the breeding ground of neurosis and sexual perversion.*

Yet Rousseau seems to have anticipated the core of Freud’s objections by almost two centuries when he warned about the overpowering nature of civil society, and the origins of the modern State.

[The Legislator must] so to speak change human nature… weaken man’s constitution to strengthen it; substitute a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence which we all have received from nature.  He must, in a word, take man’s own forces away from him in order to give him forces which are foreign to him and which he cannot use without the help of others. The more the natural forces are dead and annihilated, the greater and more lasting the acquired ones…

Freud, however, speaks as if the nuclear family is a given of human nature – primal and eternal. He does not seem to have critically questioned its centrality, its necessity, nor its role in justifying other civil institutions upon which it depends, institutions moreover, that Freud himself understood as impositional and inimical to our natural inclinations (instincts) and perhaps to healthy processes of psychological development or individual ontogeny.  Of course, at the same time, Frederick Engels was delivering his own armchair analyses in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which appeared in 1884.

Each and every one of us can recall or readily recognize the signs of stress and distress in our own families either from childhood, those of our friends and confidants, or as adults attempting to raise our own healthy children and realize some meaningful communion within the context of that rather small and isolated nuclear unit.  This might explain why in older cultures – cultures still rooted in traditions of a more ancient past – an extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, as well as other consanguine and affine relations, are always close at hand to help.  It is interesting that in Russia, when a child is introduced even to a “stranger,” that person is addressed as “uncle,” “aunt,” “grandma,” or “grandpa” depending upon his or her age and sex.  Even the unknown doctor at the children’s clinic is referred to as “dyadya” (uncle) while a new teacher at kindergarden is addressed as “tyotya” (aunt).  This seems to hearken back to another time, perhaps long ago, when more traditional tribal or extended clan relations held sway.  According to Paul Shepard, 

Aunts and uncles are essential members of the primal household because they are halfway between parents and others and therefore sometimes in positions of more authority and less conflict than parents. (Coming Home to the Pleistocene, 161)

Furthermore, it has been well-documented that pre-civilized, kinship-era children spent most of their early years not with their biological fathers or even other men, but rather in the company of diverse women (grandmothers, aunts, mothers, cousins, sisters) and other children of diverse ages within the natural environment (see, for example, Mircea Eliade or Paul Shepard).  Several “familiars,” clan or tribal relations would care for the very young while others were engaged in foraging, hunting, or perhaps horticultural activities in the earliest villages.  

I am not suggesting that there were no problems with child-rearing, companionship, or life maintenance issues in the pre-civilized clan or tribe.  But, there were evidently more flexible and forgiving arrangements to assist in development of the young, the well-being of the group, its individual members and their needs. And apparently, there was no fixed epistemological sense of “us” (man-woman-child-triad) against “them” (the rest of the tribe or clan), as we find so prevalent amongst nuclear families today. Remember what Morton Fried wrote in The Evolution of Political Society, that “egalitarian sharing” – and not competition – was what distinguished the earliest members of our genus from those forest-dwelling primate cousins before us.  Sharing of child-rearing responsibilities was no less common than the sharing of meat from the most recent hunt.  

Finally I would argue that just as there was no alpha-male among the earliest communities of our genus, so there was no primal patriarchal “nuclear family” acting as a structural model for the hierarchical State.  As Fried notes:

[This assumption, arising with Aristotle in The Politics]… is based upon a culture-bound view of the family, especially in those versions which assume some form of ‘patria potestas,’ the theoretically uncurbed power of the father.  It has long been clear that in many societies the kinship status of the father is devoid of any of the role content usually associated with ‘pater’. (Evolution of Political Society, 83-84)

Rather, as I have suggested, it is much more likely that emergent and muscular civil hierarchies — prime culprits in the destruction of egalitarian relations among clanspersons — gave rise to the isolated and controllable domesticate household, under the power-relations of a patriarchal male. Competition, accumulation, and stratified social relations quickly followed suit.  It may be here that we find the roots of the many social and interpersonal ills that haunt us today, direct outcomes of pathologies born of our unmitigated immaturity (neoteny) — an immaturity tied to the intrinsic limitations of life in the isolating and isolated nuclear family.  Perhaps it is time for the nuclear household to go the way of our culture of excess, greed, and arrested development. Perhaps it is time to recover the experience of genuine kinship, friendship, and the sacred dance of wildness.  Perhaps the only way to bring the machine of modern civilization to its knees, is to dismantle each and every instance of the nuclear family, one household at a time. Long live tribal memory. Long live the undomesticated soul of Homo sapiens.