" It was a hot day, and I needed to protect this stranger’s child and my own."
One big reason for so much reported child neglect and abuse is that the capitalist system effectively privatizes family life too. And most poor mothers are overwhelmed .
For many long centuries the rise of homo sapiens was made possible not by atomized families but by a primitive " communal " social order where THE MOTHERS -not Mother-protected the young
.
It is annoying for democratic socialists to see still comfortable middle class women pass snobby moral judgment on poor women. Just what does 6 kids and a broken door suggest but an " underprivileged " family ?
We have to stop thinking of capitalism and private property as the eternal order of things.
[In 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote the following in his Treatise on the Gods:
Primitive society, like many savage societies of our own time, was probably strictly matriarchal. The mother was the head of the family. ...What masculine authority there was resided in the mother's brother. He was the man of the family, and to him the children yielded respect and obedience. Their father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent loafer who sponged on the mother. They belonged, not to his family, but to their mother's. As they grew up they joined their uncle's group of hunters, not their father's. This matriarchal organization of the primitive tribe, though it finds obvious evidential support in the habits of higher animals, has been questioned by many anthropologists, but of late one of them, Briffault, demonstrated its high probability in three immense volumes [The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions]. It is hard to escape the cogency of his arguments, for they are based upon an almost overwhelming accumulation of facts. They not only show that, in what we may plausibly assume about the institutions of early man and in what we know positively about the institutions of savages today, the concepts inseparable from a matriarchate color every custom and every idea: they show also that those primeval concepts still condition our own ways of thinking and doing things...]
One big reason for so much reported child neglect and abuse is that the capitalist system effectively privatizes family life too. And most poor mothers are overwhelmed .
For many long centuries the rise of homo sapiens was made possible not by atomized families but by a primitive " communal " social order where THE MOTHERS -not Mother-protected the young
.
It is annoying for democratic socialists to see still comfortable middle class women pass snobby moral judgment on poor women. Just what does 6 kids and a broken door suggest but an " underprivileged " family ?
We have to stop thinking of capitalism and private property as the eternal order of things.
[In 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote the following in his Treatise on the Gods:
Primitive society, like many savage societies of our own time, was probably strictly matriarchal. The mother was the head of the family. ...What masculine authority there was resided in the mother's brother. He was the man of the family, and to him the children yielded respect and obedience. Their father, at best, was simply a pleasant friend who fed them and played with them; at worst, he was an indecent loafer who sponged on the mother. They belonged, not to his family, but to their mother's. As they grew up they joined their uncle's group of hunters, not their father's. This matriarchal organization of the primitive tribe, though it finds obvious evidential support in the habits of higher animals, has been questioned by many anthropologists, but of late one of them, Briffault, demonstrated its high probability in three immense volumes [The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions]. It is hard to escape the cogency of his arguments, for they are based upon an almost overwhelming accumulation of facts. They not only show that, in what we may plausibly assume about the institutions of early man and in what we know positively about the institutions of savages today, the concepts inseparable from a matriarchate color every custom and every idea: they show also that those primeval concepts still condition our own ways of thinking and doing things...]
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments that are courteous, concise and relevant are always welcome, whether or not they agree with the views expressed here or not. Profanity is not necessary. Thank you for reading “Time Enough At Last!”
Ron