The family as endangered species
Is it late stage capitalism or is it the triumph of civilization?
My Instagram feed loves to blame late stage capitalism for everything. Why are we allowing private equity to run hospitals and nursing homes into the ground? Why is care work so difficult? Why is there so much discrimination against people with disabilities? Late. Stage. Capitalism.
I used to click "like" on those posts until I started digging deeper into history. The struggles of care work have shifted as capitalism developed and took its current form. They didn't start there, though. The lived experience of people who need and provide care seems disappointingly consistent for much of the written record, as far as what I've been able to read.
You’ve been subjected to my musings on how one of the most essential aspects of the human experience has somehow come to be something we are unprepared for — and, most fascinatingly of all, why each person seems to imagine they are experiencing something no one else they know has experienced.
I love reading brilliant writers whom I often disagree with. As much as it's gratifying to spend months coming up with an idea and then discovering that someone has already pieced it all together and polished it to perfection, it's a thrill to have someone else come along and poke holes in it. There are always holes to poke. The world is complex, so no neat little narrative is going to be True, even if everything in it is true.1
Tove K hints at an explanation for why we live in a society that makes care work so incredibly difficult that delves deeper than social justice posturing and vague gestures towards eating the rich. She explains how:
"Cultural evolution is about overcoming human nature. Or rather, it is about encouraging certain aspects of human nature and suppressing other aspects of human nature...In this process, societies needed to suppress human instincts that cause division and infighting and enhance human instincts that cause unity and material production. The role of the family is double-sided. On the one hand, the family is a very valuable production unit for society. It produces children, and, before industrialization, also most goods. On the other hand, families are constant threats to any large-scale society. Whenever they grow too powerful, they start furthering their own interests at the expense of society as a whole."
Strong families impede the development of advanced civilizations. Just think of the blood feuds clan based societies are famous for and how that gets in the way of productivity and innovation. Think of how, in our world, "corruption means furthering the interests of one's own family at the expense of society. In clan-based societies that expression doesn't make sense, because society more or less consists of families." There are a lot of castles in Europe, so I don’t need to belabor the point.
So, in order to advance, we need forces to suppress family ties. Enter: Christianity.
"Christianity is the most obvious [social counterweights to families]. It started more or less as an anti-family movement, describing bachelorhood as the most noble state of living. It later developed into more of an anti-clan force. The prohibition on cousin marriage instituted by the Christian church weakened clans and thereby strengthened social cohesion between family groups."2
When we let go of clan loyalties, we can access a wider pool of talent and labor, allowing a level of cooperation necessary for complex trade networks and scientific advancements leading to technological advancements and skyrocketing productivity.
As soon as the option presented itself, people left their family farms in favor of higher incomes, privacy, and autonomy of city life.
I think of this often, and not just when one of my friends sends me an article about those 1 euro houses in the hollowed out villages of Italy and Spain. There is so much griping about how living alone makes it so much more work to provide care. The head shaking and sighing about kids these days completely ignores that people with disabilities, particularly the elderly, will literally risk their lives in order to continue living alone.3 People will live in dangerous conditions, forgo care, and skimp on food and medication in order to avoid living with family or roommates.
Families with a dozen children did not live in a one room cabin or share a single room in a tenement because they really enjoyed being nearby to help each other with care. By and large, elderly parents do not want to move in with their adult children, nor do they want their adult children to move in with them.4
A huge factor in the struggles of family caregiving is getting people whose families believe they need care to accept care. People refuse to accept limitations, refuse to participate in treatment, and refuse to accept assistance. Many people will tell you that they would rather be dead than dependent.
Sustaining high-tech civilization requires that we suppress the family, yet our continued existence as a species requires the formation of families. We must live within this contradiction. We venerate the family business, so it's good to build a business to hand off to your kids to run...and it's also bad to give your kids jobs, so we punish nepotism.
Care work falls into this gap of contradictions, where we are compelled to do something we are punished for.
There are lots of things we revere about the past that we don't actually want people to emulate. See: yeoman farmers, all the details of Greco-Roman civilization. As much as we like the idea of families farming the same land or running the same business for generations, it's ultimately a weird throwback to serfdom.
Today, according to Tove K, the family faces extinction:
"As things are now, the family is like a dangerous beast that has been pushed into a habitat that is too small, isolated and resource-poor to be liveable."
The solution to the paradox is the domestication of the family.
This takes me back to The Nordic Theory of Everything. Anu Partanen describes a system where families are a collection of people who are free to provide care or not. In this system, it is not parents and children who are ultimately responsible to each other, but the state:
“Nordic families love their aging parents as much as those anywhere in the world. That’s exactly why they want their love for the elderly to remain untainted by the sort of resentments that can arise when aging parents are stuck in relationships of dependency with their own children — relationships that destroy the autonomy, independence, and freedom of everyone involved (Partanan, 2016, 215-216).”
Partanan notes how:
“According to [the] American line of thinking, the number-one best solution to the problem of people not having enough money is marriage. To the Nordic ear, the idea of promoting marriage, one of the most precious human experiences, as a policy solution to poverty sounds like something from the distant past. Marriage today shouldn’t be used to force people into a pact of financial dependency as it was in the old days (2016, 85).”
I think of my friends who not only eschew babysitters, but barely allow their own parents to look after their children. I think of how many caregivers believe they should be the only ones providing care — hiring an aide, accepting a neighbor's help, and residential care are all unacceptable shirking of duties. These baffling behaviors now make perfect sense. This is where the autonomous individual meets vestigial notions of family responsibility.
Suddenly, universal access to the provision of care by the state seems less like the socialism we imagine follows late capitalism and more like...something else.
In the introduction of How Life Works, Philip Ball uses the example of the way we are taught about DNA to explain this. What we're taught isn't incorrect, it's just also not accurate in any way once you zoom in beyond the highest level. What we're taught is a nice overview for people who aren't in science or medicine. Once you attempt to use what you have learned about DNA, it turns out to essentially be wrong.
Am I the only one thinking about how the Dymphna story condemns marriage within a family and then encourages us to abandon unproductive family members so they can be reassigned and overseen by the Catholic Church?
The realities of housing costs and paid employment also make it unrealistic for many people to remain in their hometowns, assuming their families remain in them.
One factor in increased housing costs that people rarely acknowledge is the belief, widespread among the affluent, that not only does each child require their own room, each adult needs a home office. Ideally, there is also a home gym, at least one guest room, and a full bathroom for each occupant, plus a half bath for visitors.