In traditional societies, children are expected to adopt and internalize social roles. They are expected to do what their fathers and mothers did. This idea is horrifying to many moderns, but I want to explore it.
Asking someone to adopt a role is not the same as asking them to be EXACTLY like you. Two different people can wear the same coat in entirely different ways. If you read the Bible, the characters of the Old Testament were all Jews, but had very different personalities. And this was and is OK.
What they had were duties. But they also existed within a framework where everyone else had adopted the same duties. To the extent everyone behaved as expected, they knew what to expect from others and from life more generally. This might seem confining, and no doubt was for some, but particularly if you know no different, it seems to me to have been a recipe for peace in most cases.
This whole system, though, depends on a larger context, on a belief in something larger. There are no cultures of which I am aware which were both stable over a long term, and atheistic. One sees, obviously, traces of atheism throughout history.
The Indians [on an unrelated note, it is hard from me to use this term for such a diverse group, although this just occurred to me; if I expand it, and increase my historical knowledge, perhaps such antipathy to national abstractions will become more common] had the Carvakas. Their creed? Live for the moment. Go chase that big breasted babe and drink your fill of wine (Smodee odee). Such creeds can’t last. The Rock and Roll lifestyle is a Carvaka creed.
Functionally, our national hedonism can only be characterized as lacking roots in something larger. We are beyond the point where fixed traditions can be watered in the earth of something larger for most people. That is why so many have chosen to stop thinking and seeing. They see destruction and punishment, but think that some “time warp” will save them, so they can do it again. Stopping the fun is just too daunting a thought.
But what I wanted to do–channeling “Alice’s Restaurant” as I tend to do–is compare a narcisssistic family with a traditional family. In both cases, you are expected to play roles, but in the former case, the role is MUTABLE. Who you need to be, how you need to be, depends on the whims and moods of the narcissist. When you “graduate” from such a family, you have no internal compass, no moorings. Without that other person, you are lost. You were lost, of course, before, too, because there was no “you” at all.
In a traditional family, within the constraints of that tradition, it is understood that many different personalities are possible. If you look at the supposedly conformist culture of Japan, there are still ways to arrange flowers, do caligraphy, perform the tea ceremony. Their culture is one of nuances that are missed by most outsiders. That is my outside opinion, at any rate.
I was thinking today, though, about the strange intersection of past and fluidity we are at now. In a culture which is changing–dis-integrating in a formal sense–what is the role of parents in raising their children? What cultural habits remain needed? Do you need to teach your kids to be just like you? Is it desirable in any way that they feel entitled, unempathetic, and individualistic?
I don’t think so, but the question is worth asking. As I ponder it, it seems to me that in chaos, the task is to provide order not by imposing it directly through stasis, but through orienting principles. That way, both motion and relative order are possible. If this is a useful idea, then I would submit that my Goodness system is as good as anything out there at teaching the negotiation of the mutable seas we face, without losing things worth keeping.