By John Zogby
Continuing my journey in Prague, I had a salon with members of the Young Presidents’ Organization chapter and senior leadership of Vaclav Havel’s Forum 2000 – a group of 25. The questions, as always, were varied. They wanted to know about President Obama’s recent visit to Prague, prospects for peace in the Middle East, and how long I thought this Great Recession might last. But we spent a lot of time again on the First Globals™.
One strand of our discussion related to the future of family. If mobility is the force behind First Globals™, what will bring stability to their lives? Will there be rules that tie them down? Will they regard parents as useful once they are exposed to more and more new technologies, new places, and new peoples that their parents have never experienced? Will there even be family meals? These questions were especially asked by younger parents. And I like being put on the spot in these kinds of situations: I need to be spontaneous, need to see the polling data flash before me, and need to provide answers to very complex concerns. I also like emphasizing the role I have spent for most of my adult life: an historian.
New changes in economies have always necessitated super-structural adjustments. Priests didn’t have to pray all day and night for the good hunt if the tribe had turned to agricultural and trade to sustain themselves. The role of women changed with the onset of agricultural economies. Feudal hierarchies no longer were relevant in dynamic economies based on investment, trade, large production, and the exchange of money. Children were needed to work in the fields to help seed and harvest for survival – but who was going to watch the kids when parents had to go into factories owned by someone else?
So adjustments have always had to be made with new economies. Back in the early 1990s I was asked to teach two courses in media and communications and I remember being a near-ranting Luddite about new communications technologies. The proliferation of the “personal computer” would atomize us humans, separating and isolating us from each other. I was greatly aided in my rants by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – a still important jeremiad against new media. But I was so wrong. I underestimated my species’ need and capacity to build new communities, to seek out virtual relationships that were professional, fun, and even amorous. Like Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, a wonderful work of sociology that decries the loss of the public square and the village green, I guess I forgot back then that men and women will always need sociability and conviviality. And we have found it.
Just like the family. It is evolving. Those who want to keep the nuclear family intact play a useful role, but forget that the nuclear-size family is only a recent phenomenon. If change is so bad then should we bring back the tribe and tribal warfare? Do we really want all of our aunts and uncles and their offspring living happily under one extended family roof? The family is evolving and where it stops I just don’t know – but even then the new form will only be for a short while.
#1 by Gezonde Voeding on December 8th, 2009 - 8:50 am
I always impressed if someone talking about family, because for me family is the only one i care about. I don’t care anything except my lovely family.
You have a great experience pal, please keep share.