24. The Family in the Larger Society
Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create. And institutions such as schools, churches, businesses, and government are, by and large, extensions of family forms to nonfamily forms.
Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals.
Some families teach individual conformity, some teach individual rebellion, some teach group responsibility, some teach laissez-faire, by default. Every family teaches something about how to deal with the outside world: how to get along, what to do about injustice and the ugly things in the world, and how to relate to all of it.
Parents can easily teach the laissez-faire attitude by building a cocoon around the children, guiding their steps so they won’t see ugliness and injustice. In short, they protect their children from seeing any part of the seamy side of life. The world then becomes only what the children know, what they have been allowed to see.
Television is making this kind of protection a little more difficult. It’s pretty hard to stay in a cocoon when you can look at what is going on in the world through the window of TV. However, it is still possible to discount much of this because, after all, if you don’t know too much about the world and haven’t experienced what is going on, you can say it’s foreign to you and forget it. Believe it or not, I still find people in the twelve-to-eighteen age bracket who have never seen a person of another race, have never seen a poor person or a rich person, or have not taken a bath in an honest-to-goodness bathtub. In the ghettos and high-rent districts of some cities, children can be isolated in their own neighborhoods and economic levels.
To understand fully what is going on today in terms of families and society, a little historical perspective might help. Once upon a time, in ancient society, the family was the only source for teaching its members what they needed to know to make it to adulthood. This meant learning how to care for and maintain themselves, how to care for and treat others, and how to treat the world of things. Available knowledge was limited, and one person——perhaps two——could know it all.
Initially the content of this learning was probably very simple. Life then was much more a matter of simple survival: how to stay alive, how to get enough to eat, how not to freeze to death or be killed by wild animals, and so on. One had to watch others and then learn for oneself.
Obviously, many of what we consider basic needs today would have been inappropriate and even irrelevant then. Why would early humans need to read and write, study proper nutrition, or prepare for retirement? Many aspects of life and the human race were still locked in the unknown. People didn’t know what they didn’t know.
For example, at one time people did not know that babies were the result of sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse took place, perhaps as a response to an instinct, and led to an awareness of pleasure, but was in no way thought to be associated with the development of the child. The large belly of the pregnant woman was connected with producing babies——that was a little easier to see. The explanation of how the baby got there was not related to intercourse, but instead may have been related to what a woman ate, some thoughts she had had, or a divine or evil intervention of some kind. Once people understood the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, the way was open for new discoveries.
I cite this as an example of the simplicity of information then and how far we have come since. We would have to agree that informing girls and boys today about the intricacies of pregnancy involves much more than proper diet!
In the complexity of our society today, no family can be expected to teach its children everything. We have developed institutional specialists to take on part of the teaching process for us, and the wealth of our technological advancement has propelled us into an age of specialization. Because we have had to parcel out learning experiences to institutions outside the family, we often lose sight of the fact that our real wealth lies in our people. As things have turned out, the family gets what’s left over after business, school, church, and government get through training us. These institutions (which we created ourselves to help us in peoplemaking) are actually moving against the health of the family. Schools separate children from parents, business blithely expects men and women to be away from home much of the time, and our government extracts our young men and women to serve on foreign soil.
Of course, I would like to see all institutions relate themselves to the welfare of the family. It’s entirely possible for institutions to do this without having to forfeit their own goals.
Meanwhile, I’m afraid that we are a power- and thing-oriented society. And our families have become accustomed to going along with this. We teach our children how to be grabbing and powerful in order to cope in the outside world. But what happens? After you win over someone else, where are you really? You are left with the fear that if you don’t watch out, someone will win over you, and you live out your life in insecurity, guardedness, caution, and fear. Suppose you retain your power and get all you want of material things. Can these things talk to you, or have arms to comfort and support you? I’ve never seen possessions or money that were affectionate. Nor do I think it is a matter of either-or (either we have human values and we don’t have power and material things, or we are powerful and have no human values).
Again, we need to examine and recognize the relationship between family training and the development of our institutions. The whole question centers around the use of power; use is the key word. Too often we confuse powerfulness with the person (“I am powerful, I am something; I am powerless, I am nothing”). Compare that kind of thinking with, say, my using my power for my growth and your growth. This kind of use of power doesn’t exclude human values; it enhances them.
Teaching skills to children is a good example of how we can use——or misuse——our power. Most adults in families feel that they are the best authorities to teach their youngsters about discipline, sex, ways of dealing with money, and so on. Then the kids go off to school, where a different set of adults feels that they know best how to teach in certain areas. If the parents and the schoolteachers are presenting very different information, the question arises as to how these two sources of information and learning can be put together for the child. And what happens to the people involved because of these differences?
I am thinking of a boy whose father is an automobile mechanic. The son goes to a trade school and then frequently runs into clashes with his dad about the right way to fix cars. This kind of conflict is more than a disagreement between an old-fashioned way of car repair and newfangled trade-school ideas; it reflects the widespread belief that there is one right way to do whatever is required. Some of us may realize this is faulty reasoning, yet many of us go right on using it.
Let’s take another example. Joannie, a precocious five-year-old in a local kindergarten, could read, do simple arithmetic, and was a highly creative child. Kindergarten bored her and she said so at home. Mother sent a note to the school saying the curriculum was too boring for her child, and that the teacher should make kindergarten more interesting.
Joannie happened to be one of forty kindergarteners——one the teacher noticed was “always disruptive.” So the teacher sent a note telling the parents that if they didn’t do something about Joannie, she would ask her to leave.
These notes happened to cross each other in the mail. Incidentally, the teacher did not know that Joannie knew how to read; the parents didn’t know that Joannie was disrupting the class. Both parties had incomplete information, and a fight and hurt feelings were in the making. Principals in the drama were “those permissive parents” from the teacher’s view and “that incompetent teacher” from the view of the parents. Joannie was sure to lose as long as this kind of thing was going on.
What was needed was a system that made it possible for information to be shared by all involved. This kind of feedback paves the way for appropriate changes because it recognizes that no one can know everything. I certainly cannot know the full effect of what I do to you unless you tell me. And what hope does a teacher have for changing parents already labeled permissive? How can a parent hope to reach, let alone change, a teacher already labeled incompetent? In this regard, the attitude of “I know that I don’t know everything” is very useful. Also, whenever anything happens, there are many parts to the happening, not all of them readily apparent. Without feedback, attack, capitulation, and indifference inevitably follow. Feedback systems are thus vital in families, institutions, and areas where the two combine in some mutual goal.
Insidious and hurtful misunderstandings arise when people cannot find a way to share information. The ensuing hostility lowers self-esteem and creates true deterrents to any kind of problem-solving. The misunderstandings, the walls around people, and the gaps grow even greater. Thus human beings who feel misunderstood and violated suffer loss of self-worth, which in turn cuts down on their productivity and joy of living. And this happens whether the one who misunderstands and violates is a parent, teacher, pastor, business executive, congregation member, or whatever.
All right. At this point I think it would be useful to recap the components that society and individual families hold in common, as discussed earlier in this chapter. Each contends with relationships between leaders and followers, young and established, male and female, together with the processes of making decisions, using authority, and achieving common goals.
Today these components are being challenged in families and institutions all over the world. People are beginning to recognize the common thread basic to all relationships, and they are beginning to demand that our institutions recognize it, too. This basic thread is that every leader is a person, every youngster is a person, males and fe- males are persons. Decisions, authority, and goals are basically personal means of getting along together.
Finally, we must all recognize that life is run with people, and what goes on among people is the chief determinant of what happens to them and the environment around them. What people know, what they believe, and how they handle their differences begin in the family. At this time, our institutions reflect these family learnings. Further, we realize that some of these learnings have deterred growth, and so the time has come to change the basis on which we operate. It will not surprise you that all this has to do with self-worth——how it is manifested, how you communicate about it, and what kind of group relationships emerge among people with high pot, who communicate in a leveling way, who know how to be intimate, and who can trust openly.
I see a need for families to ask to become partners in any institution in which any of their members are involved and to be considered as part of that establishment. The family is the integral unit in society. Actually the family is one of the few units whose geographical area and membership are small enough so that everyone can sit in one room and can be known. Rare is the family numbering over fifteen. Fifteen is a recognized, good-sized, full group. So when a group is no larger than fifteen and gathers on the same premises, everyone can expect (within a reasonable time) to be known, heard, and seen, and to know, see, and hear.
Remember the family meetings we talked about many chapters ago? Sit down with your family for the express purpose of finding out where everyone is in relation to outside institutions: school, business, church, Camp Fire, Boy Scouts, the track team, whatever. Use this family meeting as the one place where you can each look at lacks, oversights, injustices, rewards, and experiences, in the frame of everyone’s needs. Talk over any adjustments that might have to be made. This will provide you with the feedback system we mentioned before.
So what am I actually saying to you? Start with your family. You all know about self-worth, communication, and process; now put these powerful forces to work in your family. And when they start to function in your family, making it a more nurturing one, these same forces will be applied in society. It could even be the beginning for a new kind of society. After all, the family unit is the synthesizing
link to its parent: society as a whole. As such, the family and what it teaches are central to the achievement of peace.