2.3 Family first, but not the children
There are so many different kinds of families, but what I’m going to look at here is the continuum from…
Allegiance–first families to love–first families.
I’ll start with allegiance.
How many times have you heard on TV…
Family comes first.
Or in a crime drama when a cop is killed, the other cops say…
He was one of our own.
Which means he was like family, part of this professional family, and so everyone pulls out the stops and goes for revenge.
Our tribal nature demands of that we put our tribe first. And the allegiance version of family sees…
The family as a mini-tribe.
Throughout most of human history, we lived in extended families instead of nuclear families. And we lived among other families that we would live among for our entire lives and so there might be a family feeling about them. And in this way family identity would merge somewhat with tribal identity, and so there would be a merging of family and tribal loyalty.
What does this mean for family in our current era?
Suppose a son falls in love with someone from a different race or religion or political party and decides to marry her. How does the family react?
Do they talk him out the marriage before the wedding happens?
If he does marry her, do they kick him out of the family and never talk to him again?
Do they keep in touch but grudgingly, nursing a quiet hostility year after year?
Those are the choices for an allegiance–first family.
Or what if your daughter disgraces you? What if she has sex before marriage? What if she has sex with lots of partners? What if she’s open and flamboyant about it so everyone in your social circles knows what’s going on? And you as her parents feel ashamed. What do you do?
Do you try to force her to change her behavior?
Do you disown her to save your reputation?
The allegiance mindset can drive families to do such things.
But it can get much worse. Say you’re a father in a culture where there is honor killing and your daughter is raped. And it’s clear that it was through no fault of her own. In fact she fought for herself and was beaten badly in the process. Still she was raped. And in your community, in your culture, this is considered a disgrace, so you are duty bound to kill her.
What is this like for you? Are you a father who is so removed from emotion that you can carry out this execution in a cold business–like way? Or does it tear you up to have to do this?
From an evolutionary point of view this is an extreme conflict. On the one hand, your daughter is an opportunity to send your genes on into the next generation. Which is a compelling biological mandate.
At the same time, our tribal nature demands that we be in good standing with our community. If the father murders his daughter, it’s called an honor killing, but really it’s an…
Allegiance killing.
And before we who live in liberal democracies get smug because we don’t allow such killing, let’s remember that in our societies, allegiance families still control their children and suppress their individuality. They punish children who hurt the family’s reputation. And break the spirits of those children.
And we could call this honor suppression. Or allegiance suppression. And though it’s not as dramatic as child murder, it can do remarkable, long–lasting damage.
Now what about a love–first family?
Say you’re the father of a grown–up daughter who falls in love with another woman and decides to marry her and raise children with her. Oh, and her partner is of a different race. Now what do you do?
In a love–first family, you stand with your daughter. You’re there for her and you continue to care about her in the way she needs to be cared about.
In fact, you’re there for her more than ever because you know she’s going to face hostility and opposition from the community. Maybe from many of the people she’s grown up with.
And say your church is anti–gay and comes down hard on you and your family. In that case, even though you were baptized there and have been a member all your life, you might quit and go find a church that welcomes gays and lesbians.
In this kind of family, what you decide to do is…
To put personal love ahead of allegiance.
I consider this to be an example of…
Upgraded love.
Because allegiance has been the rule for most of human history, but now you’re willfully breaking with that tenacious tradition.
There are indeed many things wrong with the anonymous mega–societies that we live in these days. We grew up as a species learning how to make small bands work. We lived in tight groups of about 30 people, maybe as high as 40 or so, where we all knew each other well and held each other accountable to the welfare of the group. And our bands were inside larger, but still relatively small tribes.
Our expertise is in small group living. We don’t know how to make mass society work. Not really. We don’t know what to do with a population of 30 million or 300 million or a global population of seven, almost eight billion.
We can do okay at coordinating large numbers of people but deep cooperation at a mass level is a very different thing and we’re failing at that.
One advantage, though, of a mega–society is that we can find space enough and freedom enough in which we can make our own families based on personal love instead of tribal allegiance. And be pioneers in that way.
There are so many people these days who are falling in love across divisions or making friendships or making political commitments across traditional boundaries, that we might start to get a bit habituated to this relatively new reality. But if we look back at the long millennia of human history, we can see how radical this is.
And if we look back even just 100 years, we can see how new this still is.
And as we watch political movements rise around the world which are regressing into ever fiercer tribal fundamentalism, we can appreciate even more how profoundly different personal love is, and how fragile and how precious.
And…
I think heroic is not too strong a word for people who put personal love ahead of tribal allegiance.
