The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [87]
Though such activities seem almost entirely praised, they faded away. The next generation didn’t show up. We insisted that no one should make us do anything, and felt sure that our voluntary associations would always be there to fill the gap. But they are not, and now we do not get together the way we used to, and that makes us a little alienated and a little politically neutered. Most historic periods have time set aside for a certain amount of active, regular gatherings. Because attendance was mandatory—or at least societally expected—other responsibilities could not encroach upon them. Ours are envisioned as worthwhile, but voluntary and self-oriented, and that is why it is so hard for us to fit any of this into our lives.
As twentieth-century associationalism faded, the nuclear family took on much greater importance than ever before. The nation also grew in our mind’s eye, as people had more and more daily information about the country. Everything in between shrank down dramatically. Life now included less extended family, shared religious observance, shared local customs, guilds, traditional clubs, and a great range of associations that met, self-governed, and drank and ate together. In almost all cultures across time and geography, the middle level of culture—the extended family and the town—had always been the most important by at least a few crucial tests. Long before people would die for their country, that bland abstract, they would die for their town, where all their relatives were buried and all their grandchildren lived. As for the nuclear family, if one family member committed an indecency and shamed the family name, even a mother (or daughter or son or father) was expected to cut ties to the offender. Can you imagine shunning your sister in defense of the honor of your aunts, uncles, and second-cousins in the eyes of your neighbors? It is historically strange that humanity is so geographically stirred up and urbanized that people do not even know their extended family or their neighbors. Now we sit in our private homes with our three other family members and we watch news about the nation.
We worked hard to get here. The midlevel was oppressive. Think of how many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels are about the demands of the extended family, or the town or local church. Extended family, town, and local church had moral standards (or perhaps “moralized rules”) that were standing in the way of individual progress, liberty, and love. In England, the United States, France, and Russia, the great theme was how love and creativity suffer under the burdens of respectability. It was the common subject of James, Hardy, Hugo, and Tolstoy, in The Age of Innocence, Jude the Obscure, Les Misérables, and Anna Karenina. Save the occasional paean to tradition, novels became associated with calls for individual freedom. Freedom from the midlevel won out. It was in the interests of democracy and capitalism. One’s own nuclear family became a mini-utopia where one expected to live most of one’s affective life, with a constant eye on the nation at large.
Our liberators left us in the lurch. They did not know that without mandatory associations it would be hard to keep up any associations at all. The buzz of young democracy faded in the early nineteenth century as ad hoc task-oriented community projects ended and increasingly were not replaced. At the end of the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth, there was a remarkable return to civic activity in stable and lasting associations, and also in local, more amateurish social clubs. From the 1960s on there has been a clear trend toward social behavior that requires no commitment to actually show up anywhere on more than one or two occasions. For