The family [antikvár]

The Eternal FamilyHuman history, according to Judeo-Christian theology, began with a family in crisis: the marital discord of Adam and Eve, the sibling rivalry of Cain and Abel. In the mythology of the classical Greeks, the principal crisis was the revolt of Zeus and his brothers against the tyrannical rule of their father Cronus, while in legends of North Australia's Stone-age Wul-amba, the crucial episode was the theft of tribal secrets by brothers from their sisters. In modern times, Freud has described the primal human event as the banding together of brothers in a savage horde whose members killed and ate their father in order to possess their mother.At the base of all these disparate systems of thought, there is a sense of the family as something primordial, essential to the existence of man, and at the same time a sense of instability, conflict and change and crisis.The crisis can indeed be called eternal. There has probably never been a generation from Adam's to the present that did not, in some way, feel certain that the family as an institution was breaking down and that the good old customs were being drowned in laxity and in permissiveness. It is very easy to understand why. People form their idea of what a family should be when they are very young and impressionalile. By the time they have grown up, the world has changed, and the family, that most adaptable of human institutions, has changed with it; things are no longer the way they were in grandpa's day.The world changes at different rates at different times. Most people think of the present century as the one that has most radically changed the human condition. It is debatable whether other centuries have not seen changes just as drastic, but it is beyond dispute that change these days is more nearly universal than ever before: all corners of the globe are caught up in the process. Industrialization, urbanization, the deification of the nation-state, the breakdown of traditional religious and moral codes, the spread of secularism, the consumer-oriented economyeverything combines to put old family structures under strain on a global scale. Relationships basic to family lifebetween young and old, between men and womenare undergoing transformation. The African chief sees his sons go off to work in a new city and set up housekeeping with girls from other tribes who do not speak the ancestral language and who will bring up their children unaware of ancestral gods and customs. The elderly Jap-