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Today, we can see that “home and family” have become casualties of modern progress. Within living memory, people lived in a very different world from ours today. Old people still tell of a time when “We didn’t have much,” but nonetheless the family was together, and they can still tell stories of things the family did together. Mostly those were simple things, like picking berries or singing or telling stories, that might not sound to us like much fun, even though the old folks still remember them so fondly so long after. But we don’t really know, because we’ve never tried them ourselves. The truth is, they were fun; a lot more fun than videogames or TV or soccer practice. But what was fun about them was not anything in themselves. What made them fun was doing them with family. What the old folks are really remembering was not so much what was done as how it felt to be doing it together. Today, of course, most people can’t say that, because they no longer know what “family” feels like.

“Family” means more than being of one blood or living under one roof. Family is a relationship of love and trust and intimacy, and it takes a certain feeling of identity to bring that about. It is actually a kind of double self-identity, which we might call “personal identity” plus “extended identity.” For people who have never experienced it, “extended identity” is not an easy feeling to explain. In a family, one feels like an organism, but also like a part of a larger organism, made up of oneself and the other family members. In a family, there is very little privacy, but you don’t resent the lack of privacy much, because the presence of others you identify so personally with doesn’t feel like an intrusion upon yourself. It just feels like an extension of yourself; your extended identity. This is because family members are together so much that they take each other for granted, and this togetherness is caused by family members doing so many things together. Today, family members do far fewer things together than they used to do in the past, and thus don’t always identify with each other enough to feel like a single organism, and there is little or no extended identity amongst them. Instead, the other people who may live under one roof come to seem like mere friends or even strangers. When that happens, our identity reverts to being personal, individualized within ourselves, and the presence of others comes to seem like an invasion of our privacy. This feeling can become so strong as to make us prefer to be alone, every chance we get. When the family organism thus disappears, extended identity is no longer possible for those living together under one roof.

Modern society generally does not know how to provide remedies for loss of extended identity, and tends to consider it a matter for the church and religion. This is because modern society doesn’t really understand this kind of alienation, and most religions, including Christianity, do understand it to some degree, whether or not they may have the right cure. In particular, modern Christianity’s answer is based on a thesis most often called “Family Values.” The Christian idea is for family to come together by making Christianity and Jesus, rather than blood, central to the family’s dynamic. Christianity can and does point to examples of families who have, or at least appear to have, made this approach work, and feel quite sincerely that here lies the answer to all of society’s modern social problems. However that may be, one main difficulty in the way of such solutions is implementation. It is not easy to persuade families to undertake what to them seems such an extreme approach to solving their problems, and even when they try, the attempt is just as likely to create further disruption as to be successful, as different family members react in differing ways to the intrusion of unnatural religious enthusiasm into their midst. Such failures, however, rarely daunt the Christian sensibility, because they are invisible to it. The Christian prayer group rarely need deal with the dissident family members, whom they merely consider to be retrograde to their thesis, as being not yet “saved,” and will tend to focus entirely on the family member who has become a member of their fold, not only consoling him for the alienation of his other family members but often compensating for that loss by becoming a kind of alternative surrogate family to him themselves. Although the Christian thesis never acknowledges it, this is a sense in which, from the true nuclear famly’s point of view, family member involvement in enthusiastic forms of Christianity is very apt to do true families more harm than good.

Historically and culturally, Christian religious conviction has tended to lose out over time to the encroachments of scientific and secular thinking, on the one hand, and greed-driven Consumerism on the other, reducing Christianity itself to the status of not so much a religion as a lifestyle-choice. We tend to think of Christianity’s main value as merely that of putting the brakes on society’s plunge down the slippery slope of cynical purely materialistic savagery. We do not so much want ourselves or anyone else to BE Christian as to BEHAVE Christian, in the sense of being humble and harmless to others and being constrained by Christian values. At the same time, we are resistive to what may seem Christian fetters on and impediments to our own behavior, and also of losing our friends and being thought weird or even being taken advantage of by our neighbors if we allow ourselves or our family to be identified with an enthusiastic Christian ethos.

If society at large has no good answer to the problem of personal alienation within the family context, it is because society itself doesn’t understand how we got this way, and certainly never planned on it. But in fact, the disintegration of family has been a side effect of technological progress, a fact society doesn’t dare face up to because it can’t face the idea of losing out on technological progress or risking offending the God of Greed with heresies. The whole original idea of technological progress was to try to make life better, and to the extent that we have succeeded, Mammon has seemed to deliver on his promises. Consequently, we have come to believe more devoutly in Consumerism and Mammon than we do Jesus, and to fear that offending Mammon may mean punishment by being plunged back into a videogameless world of cooking our own food and doing our own laundry. However, there is no question that our covenant with Mammon of techno-progress was a devil’s-bargain, in which the clause of loss of home and family was in too fine a print for us to read at the time.

The larger forces that cost us home and family were, firstly, secularization, due to scientific progress, and, secondly, the breakdown of community, again largely due to technological progress, such as the industrial-urbanization of society and the invention of the automobile. The smaller more immediate forces are of course related, having to do with the subsequent loss of significance of the home. In earlier times, families were much larger, making identity-extension of family members much easier. The family might contain one regular breadwinner, usually the father, in his role as paid wage slave, or perhaps none, when the usual American lifestyle was subsistence farming and a whole large family worked together to win a living out of their land. Without modern conveniences or ready cash-money, keeping a household going, whether rural or urban, was also an ongoing whole-family job involving knowledge, teamwork, regular assignment of chores and mutual cooperation, and no child could expect to “come out and play” in his neighborhood until “after I do the chores,” an expression taken for granted in the old days but which most modern kids would find baffling... not only because modern kids don’t have to do any chores, but also because, for modern kids, going “out to play” generally means being driven round to karate class, Little League or soccer practice.

When old fashioned family members weren’t working together at home, they were generally playing together at home, since, in general, there was no place else to go and no way to get there, the only family excursions from home being the weekly shopping tour or the Sunday walking promenade or drive. Since there was always lots of work and daylight was the best time to do it, many family recreations were end of the day hearthside entertainments, in an age when candle light and lamp light were expensive, right up until gaslight and then electric light began to become commonplace conveniences around the turn of the previous century. Other recreational forms were also best done collectively; holidays, church and community “socials,” trips to the county fair, attendance at circuses, traveling shows, public entertainments and such.

What broke this dynamic down was, again, technological progress, especially the invention of automated household conveniences, of recorded audial and visual media, and of cheap reliable artificial light. Family members quit working around the home together as there came to be less and less work around the home to do. As family sizes shrank, and once being a housewife became no longer meaningful, women tended to seek paid employment outside the home, not just for the added family income but often as not to bring more meaning back into their lives. Over time, the effect of the trend was to empty the household of adults for most of the day and, ultimately, to shift the focus of daily life from the now insignificant home to the workplace, the place where everyone was. For children, significance accordingly shifted from the home to the school, shifting developmental social significance in their lives from their parents and family members to their schoolteachers and classmate peers. The price to be paid in such a developmental setting is loss of personal power and control for the child, who is thus forced to seek personal power and identity and control in a much larger and more complex social setting than his home and amongst other family members and neighborhood kids, and the child’s compensating need to regain extended self-identity can only be negotiated in terms of his status amongst his classmate peer-group—an adult-type scenario which inevitably ends up horizontalizing his behavioral expectations and development to conformity with a large arbitrarily chosen peer group, alienating him from his nuclear family dynamic, and effectively robbing him of his childhood.

Meanwhile, the overall effect of the universal availability of “canned” or recorded, as opposed to live, as well as home-made, personal entertainment, has been to make it more conveniently portable and tailored to individual taste and preference. In earlier times, live forms of entertainment were generally enjoyed by the whole family together, who both created their own entertainments and went out to attend live entertainment performances together. In such a scenario, individuals go to their entertainment physically, and in groups, usually family groups, while reaching out to it mentally and spiritually. Younger family members might need to expand their consciousnesses to understand and appreciate performances by adults, while older or more sophisticated family members might have to step their expectations down a notch to appreciate entertainments or performances which might not happen to be up to the level of their usual personal tastes or standards. While such might seem a general hardship from which we have all gratefully progressed, the fact is, such progress has come at a price. What made live one-size-fits-all forms of entertainment fun was not so much the quality of the performance itself as the fact that the whole family was enjoying it together, enjoying each other’s enjoyment, so to speak, and enriching the family dynamic, not only while there but in the shared memories they would carry away of their experience together.

Today, by contrast, the personalization and portability of entertainment has tended to completely diversify and scatter its impact on our lives as well as to horizontalize and stratify not only itself but the society it serves. With the portability of entertainment has come new and undreamed-of social impacts so novel that we have not as yet come to grips with how best to deal with them, including the emergence of youth culture, generation gaps, gender gaps, cultural gaps and peer-group gaps. Where the old audience for entertainment was typically not just the family but well-socialized crowds of families, the new audience for modern entertainments is typically only partially socialized peer groups and, more and more often, barely socialized solitary individuals.

Today, it is estimated that the average youngster spends a whole work week every week being entertained by canned instant entertainment, mostly solitary or else with a very small group of peers, and mostly passively, such as before a TV set. The effect of such a lifestyle is of course to completely desocialize the youngster, drawing him deep into a completely passive subjectivized lonely world. Of course everyone he lives with lives the same way, all more or less strangers to each other. Earlier generations spent this same amount of time working together, playing together and being entertained together, and always in live or quasi-live interactive pursuits. Even listening to a radio together allows interaction amongst listeners in ways not possible when all eyes and ears must be focussed on the TV set. In general, the most solitary pursuit of earlier times was reading, which previous generations did much more of than we do today. Here we must note, however, that reading, though a solitary pursuit, is interactive, since the real focus of the printed word is not so much on the page as in the mind’s eye. We see the difference immediately in the aftereffects of what has been read, as opposed to what has been seen on TV, when such subjects come up in conversation. Descriptions of what has been read, even amongst ordinary people, tend to step up a bit from ordinary conversation, and borrow in reminiscence some spark of the author’s own eloquence and diction. By contrast, discussions of the contents of a TV show, even amongst able conversationalists, tend to step down and sound rather silly after the fact of the show itself.

One of the world’s most poignant lamentations has always been the question of what is happening to our youth, whose proclivities, tastes and activities always look delinquent to the eye of their elders, who are always left with that proverbial sense that youth is wasted on the young. Today, however, such complaint always takes on a special edge, inasmuch as the youth of past generations, however seemingly retrograde, nonetheless did not spend as much time and energy as the youth of today commiting crimes, being sick, dysfunctional or overweight, going insane and finding so many ways to kill themselves and each other. And of course society wrings its hands and wonders why. Can it be the disintegration of family that is the trouble? The answer is of course yes, partly that. Can it be the violence of movies, TV and videogames? Again, the answer is yes, in part, but only in part. What people tend not to fully appreciate is the degree to which it is not so much the content as the desocializing character of the activity itself that is the main mischief. To borrow a coinage from Marshall McCluhan, it is not the message but the medium itself that is the message, and the culprit behind so much of modern society’s troubles.

The main difference with today’s child is growing up incomplete, a partial person, with only a personal identity, the extended identity that is supposed to also be there being merely vestigial, deformed or missing altogether.

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