The Family: past and present
The Family: past and present
In many myths, cosmogonies and religions the human age begins with the creation of a couple Apsu and Tiamat, Yama and Yami, Adam and Eve. Is this image of the primordial family unit comprising a man, a woman and their offspring on the way to becoming a universal model today?
When we look back into history, however, we find larger and more complex family structures: hordes, clans, tribes, lineages, urban and village communities where several generations lived and worked together, where the example set by the ancestors continued to inspire their distant descendants, where the same customs were perpetuated down the centuries, and where religious cults were deeply rooted.
The family, in the widest sense of the term, is the source and the refuge of its members, an institution with codes and hierarchies which may be oppressive to some but which provide a sense of security for all. For thousands of years it has been society's most durable link and the most effective means whereby the distinctive characteristics of a people's culture have been maintained and transmitted.
But today this link is tending to slacken as the family is increasingly confronted with the disintegrating forces of modern life. The existence of the small nuclear family and the single-parent family raises the questions of whether the basic units of society are everywhere being stripped down to their simplest form of expression and whether the cultural diversity which they have hitherto vehicled is inexorably yielding ground to uniformity and monotony.
A certain tendency for the family to contract is apparent, but the need for community persists. Perhaps humanity, eternally creative and unpredictable, is engaged in the the painful process of exploring new ways of living in society which will at last reconcile family solidarity with individual liberty.