History is not what we think it is. It operates via laws about which we have
not a clue. Those laws are neither economic nor psychological (at least not in
the way we understand psychology), and they are beyond the scope of any theory
of history or culture I’ve ever heard. Such statements may not seem so outlandish after you survey three different
moments of the 20th century: the Sixties, 1989, and the Nineties.
Children born at the end of the Second World War behaved with shocking force
in the Sixties. Sometime around 1965, family disciplines that had been in force
for centuries suddenly dissolved. This didn’t happen just in America. It also
happened in countries without TV, affluence, rock & roll, or racial
tensions. In China, a tidal wave of youth calling themselves “Red Guard”
created a “Cultural Revolution,” a dogmatic stripping-down of their society on
a scale surpassing any social upheaval in the West. Chairman Mao was brilliant
enough to deflect this energy from himself and harness it for his own ends – or
for what he chose to call his own ends. (We’ll never know whether he was just
making the best of an unstoppable force.) But the idea that he “created” this
movement is ludicrous. It is not within human capacity for one person to
create energy of such depth and force in so many others.
In Cambodia, at almost the same time, almost the same thing happened in form
and scale, but far more murderously. When you strip the political lingo away,
you can say simply that the kids murdered the grown-ups. While in Mexico and
Chile, young peo-ple rose up and the grown-ups murdered the kids. In America
and Europe it was a stand-off: For a while, youth suddenly had the force to set
the agenda and shake their societies to the core, but they were nonviolent and
the adult reaction was also (largely) nonviolent. Yet the fundamental
structure of behavior was the same world-wide, despite different
apparent “causes.”
People born during and just after the Second World War hit adolescence with a
vengeance, in virtually the same way, with negative and positive poles of the
same phenomenon, across much of the world. You can’t explain this with the
psychology of individuals or families, or with the economics, politics, and
traditions of drastically different cultures. The most important piece of data
we have is that, despite different histories, technologies, and economies, the
same basic behavior swept the planet at virtually the same time.
Fast-forward to 1989. In May and June, an anti-totalitarian movement in China
culminated with the massacre of students at Square. There is no logical reason
to assume that this defeat would inspire others to the same behavior in
totalitarian countries that had the same capacity for massacre. Yet “something
was in the air,” as the saying goes, and later that year in Poland, East
Germany, all over Eastern Europe, and finally, the Soviet Union, monolithic
governments commanding overpowering military force were overthrown
non-violently – and (except in Poland) the people were not guided by a
centralized or organized movement. Defying theories of political change, people
apparently didn’t need leaders that year; they simply went out and acted in
concert, as though they had access to the same intelligence or energy source.
Not one single political, historical, or economic expert had predicted it, and
only in hindsight were “reasons” found. Yet those reasons (economic stagnation,
etc.) had been around for decades. There was no “reason” for the so-called
reasons suddenly to become operative, in countries with very different
standards of living, at the same time. It’s worth remembering that early in
1989 in Poland, Solidarity mustered only fifty people to a “major”
anti-government demonstration; by the end of the year, catching the energy that
was sweeping the world like a fever, Solidarity had become the
government. Clearly, a human possibility materialized that is beyond the reach
of present analysis. Powerful governments lost conviction and the ability to
wield power; average citizens were possessed with conviction and the courage to
stand up, unarmed, to power. This had not been possible the year before, and
nothing that we know how to measure had changed to make it possible.
Fast-forward again to May 30, 1995. The New York Times reported a
survey done by the nonprofit Population Council: “Trends like unwed motherhood,
rising divorce rates, smaller households and the feminization of poverty are
not unique to America, but are occurring world-wide.”
Again, we see different cultures, with different family traditions, different
economies, different politics, and different (or no) media, experiencing the
same fundamental changes. The Population Council reports that in developed
countries divorce rates have doubled between 1970 and 1990; but even in
undeveloped countries, 25 percent of first marriages “end by the time women are
in their 40s.” Unwed motherhood is common almost everywhere. In Northern
Europe, one-third of all births are now what used to be called
“illegitimate.”
All over the world, women are working harder and longer than men. “In studies
of 17 less developed countries, women’s work hours exceeded men’s by 30
percent.” In industrialized countries, the figure averages 20 percent. “In
Ghana,” the report says, “a third of households with children are maintained
primarily by women.” While in the United States, “nearly half of employed
married women contribute half or more of their family’s income.”
Again, the “reason” from place to place is apparently different. The report
goes on: “In traditional Bangladesh, it may be because the husband was much
older, and died while the children were still young. In sub-Saharan Africa, a
woman might have a baby premaritally and have no strong connection with the
father, or she might have a husband who goes on to another polygamous marriage
and supports the children of that union. In Asia the husband may have migrated
for better economic opportunity and stopped sending money after a year or
two.”
There seems to be no society in which fathers “provide as much child-care as
mothers,” and very few in which fathers have “regular,” much less close,
contact with children. “Among divorced fathers,” the report says,
“three-quarters in Japan, almost two-thirds in Argentina, half in Malaysia, and
two-fifths in the United States do not pay child support.”
In the United States, the general consensus today is that the dissolution of
the family has occurred because our values have been undermined by a debased
popular culture, drugs, crime, and a debilitating welfare system. But no other
country has our massive drug and crime situation, and many cultures
experiencing the same dismantling of families have none of our conditions at
all.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the “reasons” aren’t the reasons.
Therefore the solutions proposed to address those “reasons,” by the left as
well as the right, won’t solve anything. A paradigm of family life that has
existed everywhere for millennia is breaking down everywhere at the same time.
A mass change is occurring on a fundamental, unconscious, compulsive level of
the human psyche, for reasons that are neither personal nor national. Both
affluence and poverty are producing basically the same dissolution of
families.
Something that everyone agrees (on the surface, at least) is essential,
something as basic as family life, is being destroyed everywhere, by everyone,
as though by some unconscious general consensus – and no one knows why. Are men
abandoning family life? Are women taking over families? On some deep nonverbal
level, is there a kind of collusion between the two? Is a patriarchal structure
shifting, very painfully and with much disruption, into a matriarchal
structure? Are the changes in how we conduct commerce (whether the outcome is
affluence or poverty) too much for the old family ways? Or is something
being destroyed so that something new may appear, and is this a mass instinct?
Or is this dissolution a kind of animal, species-wide panic in the face
of an imminent planetary catastrophe? Or – what?
No one has “decided” to do any of this. Everybody feels compelled by
circumstances which, on the surface, are often completely different. So the
particular circumstances can’t be the reasons. Only one thing seems
clear: that why and how we move as a species from one condition to another are
not only unknown to us, they are not even suspected. n
This article appears in June 9 • 1995 and June 9 • 1995 (Cover).