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until the baby boomer generation, families and in many cases neighbourhoods were extensively interconnected networks across generations.
the boomers were largely cut off, for various reasons, which has disrupted/destroyed those normal human relationships. in their place our societies put institutions and other dislocated (and money driven/poor) mechanisms.
western societies have the resources and the means to provide flexible, adaptive and adapted care for everyone - but we choose not to.
and blame the economic and social structures we create as our excuse.
the so-called push to return to family values™ is simply a conservative knee-jerk to their self-constructed loss of power.
every family has values, of some sort. the conservatives want everyone to have their values. like i'd want to live in a family where the male gets to abuse whomever he wants, and the female has to do as she's told. and the kids have to be perfect, all the time.
so our society is changing. that's what they do. what they've always done.
no way in hell i want to live in 'an sca/disney kind of world'. [apologies to my sca friends] the dream of 'returning' to some imagined version of the past holds no excitement for me. even if it were my own imagined version. the past is done. we live now. get over it.
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Family values
But this whole notion of "family values" is a myth which exists in the minds of a bunch of comfortable middle class BBs. Did J Howard, or P Costello, or K Beazley do it tough when they were growing up? Not on your nelly.
Cast your mind back to your contemporaries at university in Arts/Law or Commerce/Law or whatever the heck you did. If they were like mine, then they were pretty much uniformily from a comfortable middle class background, with aspirational professional parents (one or both), good fee paying schools, an environment which led to a high entrance score without too much pain, enough money to make 6 years of uni study comfortable and so a bit of a doddle through the courses and the subsequent PLT or whatever.
Where do some of the strongest proponents of the "family values" paradigm come from? IMHO, a paradox is that J Howard (with his vision of a "relaxed Australia") and P Costello (wanting Oz women to have one for mum, one for dad and one for the nation) have no idea that their policies are pushing Oz in the opposite direction to that white picket fence, mum, dad and the kids vision of Oz. Even worse, because of their comfortable middle class upbringing, they have no real experience or understanding of the troubles and the stresses that many of their fellow Australians now experience as a result of those policies.
Feh!
Re: Family values
So-called 'family values'™ is a Conservative Christian SCAish fantasy of life as we wish it was™, with no clear connection to life as we know it™: except that certain people in positions of power +/- influence think it must be good for us™ because they believe it to be so™
Most of my colleagues were middle class of some variety. Most 'working class' kids know better, and get a trade. [I did Science (Biology), later Comp Sci, later still Law. The latter two to support career 'changes'. My brother is an electrician. He's always out-earned me.]
Seems to me that the qualification for 'politician' is isolation from reality.
I have real experience with and in poverty. I'm much there now.
family values
Of course, as a good Gen Xer, I didn't address your principal point, namely the loss of intergenerational and interclan networks during and after the BBs. That's something I have no direct experience of, but I think I've seen residual echoes of it in some of my dealings with, for example, clients and associates from rural and/or certain ethnic backgrounds. I've also seen intergenerational networking in places like India (although the rapidly evolving middle class there is causing those networks to weaken).
It would be interesting to speculate on why the networks broke apart at the time of the BBs. Cut off? How? Why?
With globalisation and rapidly expanding media technology, are we seeing new, if indirect, forms of network coming into play?
Re: family values
mum was supposed to stay home, while dad worked in the factory/office. the kids were supposed to grow up happy and so on with all the love (things) showered upon them.
they were told that they would and should have everything they wanted.
many became self-absorbed, selfish grown-up children - maturing to adulthood was not required. they blamed us 'gen x'ers (their children) for not living up to their expectations. they applaud the 'gen y's for living up to them so vigourously. (many of whom are equally selfish, and even more self-absorbed)
internet networks may be enabling more people to chat with more people around the world, but there is little apparent evidence that this is either enriching lives or encouraging people to actually deal with other people. in the online world, nobody cares where you are - so long as you are on msn at the right time.
the 'net has been filled with children of all ages. many clamouring for their piece of 'fame' or whatever. so many little self-absorbed egos - thankfully they're not all in the same room, or it'd get ugly.
Re: family values
Start from the first premise. Not just a new social model, but a new economic model (which brought about which?). The 50s and 60s were a time of economic revolution. The divide between middle and working class broke down (I know, I know - I'm using labels). An "ordinary working man" could aspire to own his home, to have a wife who didn't need to work in order to bring in a second income, to have 2 cars in the garage, to take regular holidays away from home, to control fertility and not end up with 8 kids in a 3 bedroom house, to see his kids go to university - that hadn't happened before (at least not in Australia, Canada and the US, where the BB phenomenon was greatest). The parents of the BBs were the 30s depression kids and WW2 young adults. Perhaps the financial and moral support of the extended family and community was no longer needed, as many families became economically independent. So the BBs got showered with all the opportunities and things that their parents hadn't had as kids, and came to expect it as a right - "what do we want, when do we want it" ...
This isn't a defence of the BBs. They will go down as one of the most destructive generations in recent history - selfish, self-absorbed, etc etc - after all, it's the BBs who have given us global warming, water shortages, company CEOs on multi-million annual salaries and Geo Bush/J W Howard - and who have left their kids (us) wondering what the fuck is going on and what on earth can we do about it? Meantime, Gen Y takes a look around itself, says what the fuck, the world is going to hell in a paper mache sampan, so let's have it all now ("what do we want, when do we want it").
My experience is that social interaction continues to decline, driven by the expectation of more and more material gain, and the need to focus on increasing personal financial gain in order to achieve those personal material goals. That's economic rationalism, isn't it? The community vision replaced by the personal vision, community needs replaced by personal needs.
OMG, that little rant went all over the place, didn't it?
Re: family values
the boomer's didn't give us global warming, but they did give us "it can't be real" [aka "it can't be our fault".]
the pursuit of me has been popular for some time - indeed, it's the basis of the 'american dream'. the boomer's have this in spades, thinking it an entitlement. their entitlement. and they don't like to share.
gen y grew up knowing nothing different than economic rationalism. as far as they know, it's the way things have always been. it's only gen xers who remember the transition.
gen y's also got to see how badly gen xers faired when they didn't play by the boomer's rules.
[it seems to me that we are pretty much on the same page/wavelength here, btw :)]
Re: family values
Mmmm, maybe not. The fuzzy things which define a social model and the fuzzy things which define an economic model are not necessarily correlated, nor identical. For example, changes in the social model may take place without any corresponding changes in the economic model (because other non-economic factors may be at work - GOK what they might be), although I would expect any changes in an economic model to result in some changes in the social model. So changes to economic factors will probably lead to changes in social factors, but changes to social factors may not lead to changes in economic factors, nor will they necessarily have arisen from changes to economic factors.
I like your distinction between Gen X and Gen Y; ie Gen Y knowing nothing but economic rationalism, and Gen X growing up into it (the first Gen Xers came to adulthood at the beginning of the Hawke/Keating changes and during the Thatcher/Reagan period). I've always had difficulty resolving the divide between Gen X and Gen Y.
The "me" thing and BBs are interesting. My grandparents' generation seem to have been driven by a desire to leave something tangible at the end of their lives for my parents, so they conserved their assets and at their deaths a substantial estate has been passed on to my parents and their siblings. My parents plan to consume their assets during their later years and I and my sister expect to see nothing from their estate, given (a) they intend to spend most of it and (b) they will live much longer than my grandparents. The BBs want to have their cake and eat it (and everyone else's, so it seems).
Re: family values
the exchange of money and capital in our society has a profound effect on everything else. consider the flow-on effects of your parents' choice to consume the assets accumulated by their parents - and not just to you.
it appear to me that generation cycles have shortened in recent times. generations used to be roughly 25 year groupings. many sociologists still operate on that framework. i'm wondering if that is still valid, as five and ten year gaps in age can now be sufficient for people to think differently and have differnt values and world views. human generations are not 'merely' genetic 'batches', but have strong links to social factors as well.
i'm supposing at the moment that you do not have a livejournal weblog of your own. what brings you here?
Re: family values
Procrastination is my primary driver for visiting blogs. The alternative is proof-reading of contracts. These days, I mostly work from home, and I have found that I am not as self-disciplined as I had thought myself to be - so I divert myself by reading blogs.
I do not have a blog. This possibly is not playing fair; ie others blog and I merely roam around posting comments. I do not think that I could sustain a blog without resorting to the mundane, and there's enough banality around us without me adding some more (I hasten to add that I do not find the majority of blogs banal, even the most personal and journalistic - I am grateful that some people have the courage to share publically their experiences, views and thoughts - would that I was so courageous).
I have a growing interest in what makes groups of people tick, whether those groups are a small cabal of like-interested people or a whole social structure. I also have an interest in relationships (that comes from a personal history which I prefer to keep to myself), and I love the English language.
I only found your blog yesterday, via the Adelaide Index.
Re: family values
explore the openid option above.
people blog for different reasons. some to express themselves, to talk about their lives, to discuss a particular topic (plenty of fanblogs, for example).
blogs are also an avenue for developing relationships. they can be intensely personal, or very generic. they can also be anonymous. at least one of my blogs is anonymous: so much so that no one else knows it is mine.
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Pity that many in the SCA don't...
<grin>
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indeed.
honour, courtesy, chivalry, and politeness
I'd be happy to lay good odds that J W Howard, P Costello et al would all agree that honour, courtesy, chivalry and politeness are good things that should permeate Australian society. Too bad that such attributes cannot coexist easily with the present Hawke/Keating/Howard/Costello model of economic rationalism and the consequent dictatorship of the marketplace.
I wonder how chivalrous some employers will be after the new IR laws have been put in place.
Re: honour, courtesy, chivalry, and politeness
i expect that there will be little virtue displayed by many employers come the devolution. particularly since they already have an 'oversupplied' market to choose from.
as a lawyer, i am all too aware of the lack of virtues out there in commercial/corporate land. especially in middle-sized businesses. which the 100-employee rule is designed to cover.
chivalry isn't dead. we just can't afford it anymore. [meaning, it isn't taxable so it doesn't matter.]
Re: honour, courtesy, chivalry, and politeness
Perhaps the true objective of the new IR laws is to lock in that labour "over-supply", particularly with the looming labour shortage as the BBs shuffle off into retirement. It won't work. Ha! The reaction of most businesses to the increasing shortage of both skilled and unskilled labour in Australia is to blame government, conveniently forgeting that it was business itself that in the name of economic rationalism stopped apprenticeships, industry scholarships, cadetships, training courses, graduate programs etc in the 1980s. Now businesses are busily poaching labour and staff from each another, and bidding up the cost of labour in the process.
Large-sized businesses are no better than SMEs when it comes to possession of "virtues" - those "grey" corporations actually are a bunch of tunnel-visioned people with extreme "fuck-you" attitudes, to anyone outside the corporation, to the law, to elected government, to society around them and to each other as they battle to get better hand-holds on the greasy career pole.
Re: honour, courtesy, chivalry, and politeness
economic rationalists have a control fetish. they hate surprises.