Secularization, Rugged Individualism And The Loss Of Community... What Does "Bowling Alone" Have To Do With It?
https://newsfrombarbaria.
I belong to the last generation of Americans who grew up in an intact “three generation family,” which is to say, an integrated family comprised of grandparents, parents and children.
Until the cultural revolution of the 1960s, human beings ALWAYS grew up in mutually-supportive extended families - or, at minimum, three generation families.
In my 3-generation family, we ate at my grandparents home at least once a week; my grandparents ate at my nuclear family's home at least once a week; and if Mom and Dad wanted to "go out," Mum and Gramp were always "Johnny on the Spot."
It is also true that church communities (in my case the Catholic parish community) was always a dependable social, economic and educational backdrop/backstop to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."
Then, our modern - and postmodern - worlds exploded into a rocket burst of individual atomization.
The ties that bound society together blew apart and, from then on, we have lived in a self-interested world where, in any ultimate sense, "it's everyone for themselves."
Suddenly, we made it our social goal to replace the value of extended families, with the purchasable services (for a precisely-defined price) that replaced the value of a social system where one parent always stayed at home, and where grandparents could babysit when the parents wanted to “go out,” by way of purchasing daycare and babysitters.
Currently, the United States is home to more single-person households than any society in the history of the world -- as a direct result of Capitalism's creation of universal consumerism.
Where once we enjoyed supportive, interactive societies, now it's a free-for-all, albeit a damned expensive free-for-all in which the ever-expanding underclass makes it necessary to put a higher percentage of our citizens behind bars than any country in the history of the world, including the Soviet Union at the height of the gulag. https://share.google/aimode/w0W55R0bZ1XbZCcKE
The United States Of America: "We're #1" (Ah! The Shame...)
We are no longer a civilized country, and only think we are because there are so many rich and ultra-rich citizens that they can sustain the fiction.
Google, “Bowling Alone in America” for quick insight into what this radical, unprecedented transformation in our social structure, has meant for the modern and postmodern world. https://share.google/aimode/ORDaoRJMPjAZ6RYb9
Currently, there are more single person households in the United States than in any society - EVER - in the history of the world.
I believe that this de facto experiment in “social engineering” is the biggest experiment humankind has run, ever since Lucy “came down from the trees” in the Olduvai Gorge.
If I had to bet, I would say that America's skyrocketing measures of neurosis, psychosis, fatal shootings, generalized mayhem (even in the Oval Office) and the generalized normalization of cruelty (especially in the White House), are fundamentally attributable to the fact that atomized, highly- individualized societies like Uncle Sam’s are not viable "over the long haul," except for those relatively few wealthy people who can “pay the price” that enables them to purchase what used to be the valuable services that were formerly offered - automatically (and without any fee-for- service) by members of “the extended family,” or “the three generation family.”
Capitalist Consumerism has reduced the United States to a "Values Void," where the automatic default is to buy stuff and ever more stuff in the ill-fated project of trying to fill the void (left by The System's nullification of "Value") with purchaseable pleasures that comprise what Christendom used to call "the glamor of Satan." https://share.google/aimode/6WVspRr5QDvy38ymT
Priest-scholar Ivan Illich probes the ongoing "replacement of value by price," and Oscar Wilde has defined an American as "someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
The 20th Century Writers Who Have Been Most Influential in the Development of My "Outlook" and Worldview are Ivan Illich, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, Neil Postman and G.K. Chesterton
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