Dark times ahead if we continue trend of tending to self

By Geoff Olson

Calgary-"A baby elephant that received a blood transfusion after being spurned by its mother seems to be on the mend, Calgary zoo officials say."- CBC website

No mystery there. For any reasonably intelligent social animal, a zoo is just a prison with bipedal voyeurs-and it's not uncommon for animals born in captivity to reject their young. Elephants live in matriarchal societies, and young females, observing the maternal behaviour of older females, learn what to do with newborns of their own.

As social animals with large brains, we probably have more in common with elephants than we think. Like them, we grow neurotic in isolation, and we take our social cues from our own kind. In a healthy, functioning community, we require more than just parental guidance. We need role models, mentors, peers, and the social connectivity that helps nurture that hard-to-define thing called "character."

While pundits and policy wonks praise the nuclear family as the atom of social functioning for our species, they tend to downplay the chemical bonds of the extended family and the community beyond. Today, social and geographic mobility is the norm in the west, and extended families are rare. The elderly end up in game preserves offering backgammon and stretch classes, out of sight from a Botox-mad culture that regards age as a cruel trick, and death as existential Ebola.

In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam examined social statistics from the past century in the U.S., and found a surprising decline in the number of civic organizations, guilds, sports leagues, neighourhood clubs and volunteer groups. Americans, among the most gregarious people on earth, have retreated in huge numbers from service to the community to tending the self.

Not coincidentally, this trend has been accompanied by several decades worth of ego-endorsing messages from conservative foundations, think tanks, public relations firms and advertising companies-with the self-esteem industry and personal growth movement joining the chorus. The messages to "just do it," "be all you can be" and "look out for number one" all dovetail into something that may seem relatively benign on first glance. But the idea that you owe it to yourself to be happy easily shades into a message much more toxic-that you owe nothing to anyone but yourself. That kind of attitude would be absurd enough for elephants, let alone human beings. Yet it's become almost normative, and the social programmers are once again turning up the volume. As the disparities grow between rich and poor, we are led to believe that a street person with an outstretched hand is not a Thou, but an It-a civic stain on a par with sidewalk litter or potholes in the street.

Not coincidentally, while civic connection has retreated over the past half century, a desert of strip malls has expanded across the U.S.-an expanse of what author James Kunstler calls "subarchitectural crap"-where the defining unit of design is not the pedestrian but the car. (These SUV safaris aren't limited to the U.S., of course. Go almost anywhere in the Lower Mainland and you can see how the strip mall remains the suburban template for the fossil fuel economy.)

That we're heading down a dark and dangerous road seems pretty obvious, yet design gurus like Bruce Mau and conservative info-prophets like Alvin Toffler foresee a future that resembles a perfectly-machined objet d'art, a glittering technobauble worthy of George and June Jetson. Luckily, we have more pragmatic thinkers among us, like Canadian urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who pays attention to budgetary realities and thinks seriously about where the market-accelerated dismantling of community is taking us.

With communal connection displaced by the cuckoo's egg of privatization, Jacobs wonders what will become of the nuclear family as it tries to pick up a greater social burden. The demands of dual incomes from accelerated jobs, coupled with shaky mortgages and huge personal debt are bad enough, but they are also accompanied by an increasing scarcity of leisure time, with greater stress on both parents and children, and half of all marriages ending in divorce.

What she has to say in her recent book Dark Age Ahead makes me wonder more about social animals in captivity. "If the predicaments of North American families continue mounting and climb further up the income ladder, I have no idea what kind of households will emerge to deal with the needs that family are at a loss to fill. My intuition tells me they will probably be coercive. This is already true of the most swiftly multiplying and rapidly expanding type of American households at the turn of the millennium-prison."

gefo@telus.net

posted on 12/06/2004