THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
THE FAMILY AS A SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEM
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached November 8, 1998, at
The First Unitarian Church of HonoluluIn the recent election, much was heard about the threat to the traditional family from same-sex marriage. The traditional family is, indeed, under threat in our society -- from the inside, as well as from the outside; though not, I think, from same-sex marriage were it to pass.
Mama, Papa and 2.3 children is I take it what they meant by the traditional family. It has been insisted that this kind of family has the best odds on raising healthy children. Not that only this kind of family can, but that clearly Mama, Papa and 2.3 children had the best odds -- maybe.
The next step of the rhetoric, which was to insist that this is the basic unit of society, is ironically not true. It is manifestly not true, neither now nor historically. There has been a brief period in our history in the west when Mama, Papa and 2.3 children had become the basic unit. It did not become that for reasons having to do with its being effective as a model of being a family. It became that in a defensive reaction against the continuing onslaught against the family that began with the Industrial Revolution. Major economic shifts, high levels of mobility, urbanization -- the abandonment of the rural communities as people moved into the cities -- and a brief period of post-war middle-class affluence.
The geographical mobility is an interesting phenomenon and expresses itself in a number of fascinating ways. At the moment, the average American moves every five years. A very few of you can remember being raised in communities where it was rare for people to travel more than 20 or 30 miles beyond the place where they were born. None of our children have any experience of that world, at all.
I run into the dynamic in an interesting way in marrying couples. I remind virtually every couple that comes to me to get married that they are a "mixed" marriage. It gets expressed in the following way. Frequently, a couple will come to me and they'll say, "We would like to get married."
I say, "Great. The wedding ceremony is not an event between three people but between two. I want to help you make that wedding ceremony indeed celebrate the relationship between the two of you. I'll provide all the assistance that I can but I'm going to try to con you into taking as large a hand in determining the shape and content and words, etcetera, of that ceremony as you're willing to let me con you into."
They say, sometimes, "Oh, well, we just want a traditional wedding ceremony."
I say, randomly picking prospective bride or groom, "Would you give me a quick thumbnail sketch of what you have experienced as the traditional wedding ceremony?"
The person I have arbitrarily chosen commences to describe a wedding ceremony, and their partner almost immediately leaps in and says, "No, no, no, no, that's not a traditional wedding ceremony!" providing me the opportunity to remind them that this is, indeed, a mixed marriage. Largely because of that incredible mobility rate in the society, couples coming to get married these days come from subcultures with very different expectations of what being a family is about. It varies by denomination, by part of the country, and--within both of those--by social class. Invariably the couples coming to me to get married have different unconscious models as to what a husband or wife's behavior is going to be. So much so that I warn every couple that comes to me to get married that about six weeks to three months into their marriage, no matter how long they have been living together before, something is going to happen.
This is one of the changes that the piece of paper makes. We'd like to say, "Oh, well, we're getting married. We've been living together now for two and a half, three years, and of course we recognize that the piece of paper is not going to change anything really." The piece of paper changes a number of things. One of the things it changes is that we don't have any social mores, no conceptual model for shacking up, except one: If you don't like it you can split. But we have an incredible baggage of what the roles appropriate to being married are. The trouble is the baggage in Mama's head bears only the most incidental relationship to the baggage in Papa's head.
Six weeks, roughly, into the papered relationship, Mama or Papa is going to make an expectation based on those half-known pieces in the back of the head. It may be as simple as who will, of course, take out the trash; or as complex as how decisions get made. Their partner will not make the same assumption at all. There will be a conflict, and it will be "Your fault." "No, it's your fault." If they remember what Mike Young said to them, they will laugh and go on to discover what their hidden assumptions really are. If they're like most people, who pay no attention to what the minister said when they went to get married, they will crash headlong into it and be entertained for quite a few weeks before they sort something out, IF they sort something out.
Notions of even the traditional marriage are so disparate between people and within marriages as to make that conceptual model a practical nonentity. Historically, the basic unit was not the family in anything remotely like that nuclear family model. The basic unit was the clan: mama, papa, in-laws, children, several generations worth. It is a model which you can see functioning here in Hawaii perhaps more frequently and easily than in most other parts of the country. If you travel up the street I live on, up Kalihi Valley, you will come across house after house with two or more generations living together. The house has been added on to until there's no more property left except the two and a half feet around the edge where they have fudged onto the set-back limits.
But it was the clan, the extended family that has been the basic building block of our society from as early as we have any information. This has been what family has meant. It has been all but wiped out in most industrialized countries. Around the world, in second and third world countries, it is being wiped out also by the same dynamics: mobility, urbanization and the impact of industrialization; but also by what look like easy exits from the rigid constraints -- often viciously rigid constraints -- of the clan.
Currently, in this country, fewer than half of our children are being raised in nuclear families.
Even if Mama, Papa and 2.3 children was, in fact, and provably so, the absolutely superior environment in which to raise children, how do we support and expand that ? Is that in fact a realistic goal ? It clearly is not going to be achieved by altering public policy to make it as difficult as possible for all the other possible models of family that exist in our society. The majority of our children are NOT going to be raised in intact nuclear families. They are going to be raised in something else. Where are they going to learn what living in that "traditional" nuclear family is about? They're going to learn it from television? RIGHT! They're going to learn it by the government passing laws that make it even more difficult for every kind of family but the nuclear one ?
The inherent dynamic of two people living together brings with it the inevitability that family will be a self-organizing system. The couple's differing attitudes, their differing value judgments, their differing wants and skills and interests will mean that it is, in fact, impossible for them to recapitulate their parents' marriage in their own relationship because they aren't their parents. There will be significant differences. They will have to be. As I tell the couples that come to me to get married, "You have no choice. You will have to create this organism for yourself. It must be and become your marriage, unique to the needs, wants, expectations, interests and to the life experiences that are thrown in your path. They will be different from the life experiences thrown in the paths of those who originally authored the conceptual model in your mind.
My use of the concept here of the self-organizing system may be alien to some of you. It comes partly as a consequence of reading Nobel Laureate, Ilya Prigogine, and a number of others who are working in dynamical physical systems and the application of this metaphor to social analysis. Bear in mind when I use it, it is a metaphor. It contains all of the limitations of a metaphor. When you think you have seen something by using a metaphor it is always useful to check it back against reality to see that you have not made an inference from the metaphor that fits for the original setting of that metaphor but which doesn't quite match the reality it is being used to describe.
A self-organizing system is a system of stuff and interrelationships. Because of some built-in dynamics of the universe, such systems produce greater order and a particular kind of order. They seem to be running against the tendency of everything to run down and come apart. This happens in a great many systems within your familiar world, though you usually don't look at it that way.
The existence of life on this planet is an illustration of the process of the complexification of self-organizing systems. There need to be several critical conditions present. Without those critical conditions, the next level won't happen.
Among those conditions:
1. Critical elements need to be present. If one is missing, the phase change doesn't happen and the system doesn't move to the next level of complexity.
2. There needs to be high energy pass through. There's got to be a lot of energy passing through this system for it to be a self-organizing system.
3. And here's one that's counter-intuitive: The system has to be far from equilibrium. Inter-change must be happening frequently and being responded to and dealt with by the system.
4. And there must be relative isolation of the system. It must be relatively insulated from disruption. There must be relatively few interferences that will produce the random cascades of happenings that we call "chaos."
If the family is a self-organizing system, as I suggest that it is, what would best support and most healthily shape it?
One of the critical elements that required is that the people involved in face-to-face relationships say to themselves, "I will see this conflict through." They don't have to make promises as to what's going to happen five years, ten years from now. In fact, one of the things I tell couples who are in the process of trying to write their vows is, "Do not try to write promises about how things are going to be forever. If you have not changed enough in five years to have made those promises irrelevant, YOU AREN'T PAYING ATTENTION, ANYWAY!"
The commitment has to be, "I will see this conflict through," so that people can indeed do the necessary negotiating, pushing and hauling on each other to modify the relationships so that they are indeed functional this time. In the case of most shacking up, the partners know that one can go out the front door and not come back at the first sign of not getting their way. There are problems which are not going to addressed, not going to be dealt with. There will be issues that are not even going to come into common awareness. There will be no chance of their being resolved because of the absence of that critical element: the commitment to be there at least through this conflict.
Another of the necessary pieces of a self-organizing system is that "high energy pass-through. For the social organization that we want to evolve and let evolve that we have historically called "family," the energy pass-through has to be at least enough that survival is not the constant first priority. Enough security, enough food to eat, reliable enough shelter, so that the human relationships can become a part of what is going on in that unit must be the case.
We may argue about the public policy issues surrounding the social security safety net for our people. Things like welfare, whether publicly supported or privately supported, that provide a modicum of social security to families, are not a matter of being moral or compassionate. They are a matter of enlightened self-interest. If you wish to live in communities that have reasonably healthy agglomerations of human beings living in face-to-face relationships, there must be enough of a net that the human relationships can be a significant part of what receives primary attention.
Thirdly, self-organizing systems function only "far from equilibrium." One of the significant threats to family through our recent history has been the controlling rigidity of the clan in its historical forms. As mobility and affluence have provided the opportunities for easy exits from the clan, the good and the bad of the conservatism of the clan has been ripped apart and separated. All that's left is the tendency to conserve, to insist that things must be done the way they have always been done. Your business is always my business because, after all, we're family. The vicious gossip and lack of privacy, the curtailing of one another's potential that too often was part of the clan, becomes one of the few things left in the clan.
For the family to be self-organizing; that is able to respond, in fact, to the changing situations that it finds itself in, there must be a certain level of comfort with change. It is, after all, an inevitable accompaniment to children growing and changing, to the changing life stages of the adults who are in face-to-face relationships in these social systems. That change is, indeed, a part of life itself. Especially in the life we share together in this end of this century, change with a vengeance is one of the few constants. It must astound those who still have experience of the tight extended family experience.
Our families are going to have to exist in a state far from equilibrium. They must be constantly responding to, adapting to, reacting to change. It is not going to go away, no matter which party you vote for in the next election.
But the fourth piece that makes self-organizing systems possible is perhaps the one that is going to give us the greatest difficulty. One of the things that seems to be required is the relative insulation from chaos. Social systems, like physical systems, can handle a high level of being out of equilibrium, a high level of change, so long as that change is not too abrupt, too total, assaulting too many conditions of the system all at the same time. The safety net to shelter from too rapid, too abrupt change, good or bad, needs to be there.
One of the insulators from that abruptness of change that is already evolving and being stressed heavily in our society is the embedding of families in a larger community. One of those larger communities that is characteristic of the way in which family is responding in this country is the church.
The churches that you see growing and expanding like crazy are not the churches that are preaching hellfire, sin and damnation. Our stereotypes of the evangelical churches are mistaken. They are conservative ! And much of that is worth conserving. What characterizes those churches is a lot of activity that is just plain fun for families. A lot of activity that says, "You're a valued and valuable human being. You are loved and cared for. It is O.K. to be who you are." A lot of activity that gives a kind of insulation from and at least a time lag before one has to respond to the onslaught of the demands for change from the outside society. It remains to be seen how effective those family centered mega-churches will be. It remains to be seen whether standard brand churches, like ours, can in fact become extended communities for our families in the positive ways without having to carry on the old negative ones.
But, in fact, historically, this is what family has always been for our species. From our very beginning as social animals we have been in some kind of family life structure. That changing shape of family has been in constant response to the fact of our being social animals, and to the constant onslaught of change over the eons.
We are social animals. We come to consciousness already socially involved; maybe even socially embedded. Our long childhood -- neoteny -- is both curse and blessing. We are born so dependent that we cannot avoid that social embeddedness. But that same neoteny means that we come to adulthood with a far more complex repertoire of behavior than any other species -- a far more complex repertoire of behavior for screwing everything up, as well as responding in novel, creative, communal ways to those challenges.
[from "A Fragile Bulwark Against Chaos,"
by Rev. Mike Young]
It is that social fact that we respond from. We have changed and will change the shape of family. Perhaps something like a Covenant for Families might help us make sense of and navigate this current transformation. It might be drawn from some of the pieces that I have talked about. It may not be sufficient, but anything less certainly will not be.And, finally, I end with the most important issue of all of this. After 30-odd years as a minister, somebody needs to find a socially-enforceable way of determining who gets the church in the divorce. We almost always lose both. At the most critical time in a family's life, when it needs all the support that it can get, we don't work as an extended community. We must learn how to do this better; not just for the fifty percent of our children who have or will experience the sundering of their family. We must also learn to do this better for their parents and for the rest of us who must live with the resultant ragged holes torn in the fabric of community.