Dear Editor, (to Washington Post 2-16-20 never printed)
The nuclear family is not the primary systemic cause that’s “Hurting America” that Robert Samuelson seems to endorse (Is the nuclear family hurting America? Washington Post, 2-17-20) after reading NY Times columnist David Brooks “powerful essay for the Atlantic ‘The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake’”.
The primary culprit is the human mind’s creativity in creating flawed concepts. Constructs or concepts that ignore “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” as prefaced in the first paragraph of our Declaration of Independence. Oddly, about a decade after signing that profound document the same authors created and approved of a Constitution codifying blacks as 3/5th of a human being and based on a profoundly flawed concept of ‘independence’ that we accept without question. Note that ‘independence’ exists nowhere in nature. It is only a word that exists on paper, in language, and in our heads. How did this happen?
As human history progressed the human mind gradually abandoned of its original evolutionary function of solving problems (finding food, a mate, allies, and building adequate shelter and weapons). And, as our mind’s existential problem-solving capacity got so good it created more and more leisure (free) time for making beads and lacking science, thinking up dumb ideas. Increasingly the mind got bored and found another job. Defending those dumb ideas. Some ideas appeared to work for a while. But eventually reality caught up with them. Bleeding the evil out of people once seemed reasonable until science unearthed the flaw. Bleeding continued but eventually people wised up.
One really dumb idea that persists today is national sovereignty. Mind you, this concept is now over 400 years old. It is increasingly a profoundly dumb idea at time in history when exponential advances in our technological killing capacity cannot be stopped, nor our capacity for fouling our own nest.
Our mind’s resistance to reexamining long held assumptions is increasingly an existential problem. And the concept of the nuclear family is not one of them. Our current system of government is. Governments cannot depend on independent agencies and policies in a real world of irreversible global interdependence.
While COVID 19 occupies our minds and kills a few of us, it’s wise to remember that Smallpox killed more people in just 70 years of the last century, than all the wars, revolutions, murders, and genocides combined. It would still be killing us today if there were not a global eradication campaign launched in 1970. A campaign that every nation, county, city, village, and family participated in. Today it only exists in top security level research facilities. As well as bioweapons research labs. But the natural and human induced evolution of pathogens remains our greatest threat. And unless our minds return to their original evolutionary purpose of defending human life, the ills that we will all inevitably succumb to (pandemics, global warming, terrorism, species extinctions, war, or debt caused global economic collapse) will end civilization as we know it.
Making adequate financial investments in the global prevention of each of these ills is now the greatest problem that our minds must focus on. As wise as it would be in the long run to put the global protection of human rights above the protection of national sovereignty (the freedom of states to do as they please) it is unlikely to happen any time soon. And we are running out of time. Human freedom and security for all will only be maximized when we recognize that we are all interdependent on the basics of life. And the longer that independent nations resist or fail in ensuring these fundamental rights, the faster the evils listed above will spread. Walls, political borders, assassinations, unenforceable treaties, diplomacy, or military might will be increasingly useless in containing or deterring them.
‘Independence’ is our mind’s most flawed concept. It ignores the fact that while there are significant differences in our thinking, languages, and appearance-- all humans have the same basic needs. Clean air, clean water, enough food, relatively safe weather conditions, strong immune systems, and safety from mass murder and mass ignorance.
I don’t expect the governments of the world to codify the protection of human rights over their own political power to continue business as usual. But I do expect ‘we the people’ to demand that our governments invest sufficient funds to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals before the year 2030. Without doing this we might escape most of the evils listed above but we won’t avoid a global economic collapse and continued loss of freedoms (mostly privacy). The financial burden of our continued reactionary independent policies will break every nation economically. And with that, global chaos will accelerate. And our privacy and freedom diminish and accelerate at a faster pace than we see today.
The so-called nuclear family is not the problem. The problem is that we didn’t learn from the nuclear age, that we are all in this together. And together we stand, divided (independent) we will fall.
"Everything we shut our eyes to,
everything we run away from,
everything we deny, denigrate or despise,
serves to defeat us in the end.
What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become
a source of beauty, joy, and strength,
if faced with an open mind."
-- Henry Miller
(1891-1980) American writer
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