Family in these liquid times

When I was younger, I thought people should live in anarcho-communes that should come to be self-organized around people with similar interests and worldviews, that child rearing should be a shared community responsibility, and that the nuclear family as a reproductive unit made some limited sense but little more, i.e. a man and a woman could come together to raise a kid for a few years, but it made little sense to continue to be together beyond that or babysit the grown kid for much longer.

I came to be enamored with such revolutionary ideas when I was in college, where I read books, watched European cinema, met some other freethinkers, were inspired by a few intellectual professors who thought out of the box  - and most importantly, because I was away from my hometown, saw my parents maybe twice or thrice a year, and my relatives and cousins, all the people I had grown up with, even less. I was a self-absorbed person wearing easily of too much human contact, and I was pretty bad at keeping in touch with my extended family. This is perhaps very normal in the individualistic West, but not so usual in an Asian culture where I essentially belonged. Anyway given the circumstances, it struck me how little these people now mattered in my grown-up life - now I had friends with whom I shared similar interests and ideas, people whose future career goals were similar to mine, people I lived and worked with. Isn't that what should matter when it came to human relationships and not some vague biological links? Genetics was passe, memetics was in.

Perhaps growing up is a series of reconciliations to the fundamental truth that things are far from ideal, that our lives are inherently messy and controlled by numerous factors beyond our reach, that happiness is mostly about self-deception, that it's easier to join the tyrants than to fight them. In my younger days I would wage a war against things that I felt were not right, and lose. Now I would accept them, or in the worst case, resist them cautiously, and emerge unscathed.  This is perhaps why I am convinced now that the family is a fundamental human institution, the basic unit of our social organization founded on powerful biological drives, that is here to stay.  These liquid times (to borrow from the name coined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, that he has written about at some length in a wonderful series of books)  entail continual displacements, from the places one learns to call 'home', from the family, from  cultural comfort zones, and so one learns to find comfort in newer people and places, and is reconciled to this world of shifting performative identities. My first taste of this world excited me with its novelty, and I thought that it was possible to make these shifts smoothly, that blood ties mattered less than shared interests.  Having lived through more of it now though, I feel differently.

I felt an almost physical sadness, a sense of being cut off, when I took the flight back from Calcutta to the US this time. Earlier going home on vacation from college was just a ritual, something that I performed mechanically, and the series of feelings would be almost predictable - initial relief to get away from all the work, some happiness to see the parents, and then a period of boredom because there seemed to be nothing much to do, a binge of meeting old friends perhaps, a trip or two to see the relatives, and then being back to the more familiar, more real world. This time was slightly different, and I have a feeling, that with every passing year, the differences are going to get more telling. There is of course a feeling of increased responsibility towards the family which has nurtured you for so long,  what with the parents growing older, and there is the question of raising a family of your own. I would gladly follow the same model that has proved so successful for me rather than do something revolutionary, when nothing means anything anyway. Earlier I would laugh condescendingly at these thoughts. Now I find them perfectly reasonable.  I was very happy to see my cousin after five years. We and his newly married wife, went around the beaches of Florida, and I was reminded of the days we would go pandal-hopping during Durga Pujo when we were in school.  On the flight back, I watched a documentary about a pride of lions.  The alpha male is the patriarch ruling over his pride of lionesses and younger males. Sometimes a rival male will try to attack and chase him away, and kill his cubs - the lionesses would initially resist, but finally not seeing a way, they would come to accept the new lion, and have new cubs with him. How pathetic! How imperfect!  Yet are we very different? Similar strains of politics and manipulation run through our relationships.  Yes we no longer rape and kill as a matter of custom, but we still covet what we don't have, we want control,  we want to fit into the pride, we want to pass on our genes.  The family is a rock solid institution based on biology and years of social evolution, and like all institutions it may have flaws - yes it may not work for everybody and it may be abusive in cases, but there is no immediate substitute in sight.  I think I cried a little while watching the documentary.

nb :  As an afterthought, it occurred to me to suggest a very charming film called "Together" for viewing. It is by the very promising Swedish director Lukas Moodyson who also made  "Fucking Amal" (he has a way of dealing with childhood and adolescent themes).  This movie is about a mother and two children who move into an anarcho-commune after falling out with the husband, and the transforming effect it has on their lives as well as on the members of the commune. The commune is seen to relieve the pressures and responsibilities (and accompanying hypocrisies) of family life, but cannot really escape the fundamental human instinct for family relations.