Archive for the ‘PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY’ Category
Happy families
When moralists and social conservatives claim that the family is the foundation of society, they are obviously correct, in the sense that the alliance of a man and a woman – or some similar combination – to engender and bring up a child is clearly what human beings are programmed to do. Whatever different family [...]
The spirit-of-Christmas racket
A special case of the ‘peace and harmony of the family’ racket is Christmas. The rule of the game is that, when the victims least expect it, the dominant player launches a personal attack. When they respond, they are accused of violation of the ‘Spirit of Christmas’.
I have not actually watched any of the National [...]
The mammal that pair-bonds like a bird
Since our ancestors lived in the trees, we have undergone two adaptations, both of which were an understandable response to evolutionary pressures but whose combination is really quite a bad idea. These two adaptations are the upright posture and the big brain. The pelvic changes of the first adaptation have made it very difficult to [...]
Nostalgia for the longhouse
The evolutionary biologists and anthropologists reckon that we spent a million years or so as small groups of hunter-gatherers. Not isolated, for there was exchange of ideas, goods and sexual partners with other groups, but always in a community several score strong. Our brain seems to be wired to keep track of 120 known individuals [...]
Keep parents away from children
It is a basic assumption of our sentimentalised nuclear-family society that children should be brought up by their parents; which is not to say that this is inevitable, natural or sensible. Throughout the history of the world, vast numbers of children have been brought up by someone other than their parents. In some communities, children [...]
The invisibility of work
It is said that all teenagers pass through a stage in which they think their parents are idiots. Some of them are correct in this belief while others are not. Is this development, however, such a cosmic constant as we assume? Did the young hunter-gatherer always and necessarily think his pop was a doofus? I [...]
Household, kin and family
Is a ‘family’ something we have, or something we are part of? The Latin familia was a noun formed from famulus, a servant – whence also the witch’s ‘familiar’. It meant, not a relationship of kinship but one of ownership. A Roman’s familia was thus his household staff of slaves – it was something that [...]
A house divided
‘When therefore the wife was enraged against her husband, the sons against their father, the servants without cause against their master,’ asks a twelfth-century English writer, ‘might you not say with ample justification that a man is at war with himself?’ Well, yes, if the wife, sons and servants are considered to be a part [...]
My house, my car, my family
It is educational to listen carefully to the way people talk about ‘having’ a family. Because in the ordinary sense of the verb ‘to have’, the object that you have is not part of you. If you have a house, a car, a boat, a dog and a family, these are separate from you, and [...]
Only one good reason to have children
Enjoying sex is the only possible good reason for having children. If this is a dubious reason, well then, all the others are worse. Although people claim to be horrified by the irresponsibility of careless sex that results in children, the accidental child is the only child that is not brought into the world [...]
