Greetings JMC!

The family "model" I have in mind is basically the traditional "nuclear"
man-and-woman-and-child(ren) plus a penumbra of extended family members. My
claim was that this is a universal human pattern, and that films such as
_Shane_ have a near-universal appeal because the Starretts exemplify that
pattern. Furthermore, erotic love -- i.e. sexual attachment between
adults -- has to be understood in terms of that pattern, even if it doesn't
exemplify it.

At the end of my last mailing, I rudely dismissed Foucault's views on
sexuality by calling it a "bambification". In defence of Foucault, you
wrote:

> If we look at...
> the practice of medicine...
> we can see some distinct differences...
[from one era or society to the next]
> There's nothing universal about these
> practices...
> what counts as a sickness...
> depends on the institution that defines
> medicine...
> Foucault says the same for money, for
> sexuality, . . . . There's no
> bambification here.

-- The ways we practice medicine (and our views about illnesses) differ from
one era or society to the next. Much the same goes for economics. But I don'
t think our sexual practices differ much from one era to the next, or
between different societies. I think that to treat sexuality as though it
were *as* plastic as our medical and economic practices is to deny its
primal nature. Sexual desire is ineluctable, and sexual attachment (or
 "love", as I would call it) is irreversible. We might have some choice over
whom we "fall" in love with, but we are notoriously powerless to get out of
love once we have "fallen" into it -- a recurrent theme of all forms of art.

Sexual desire and sexual attachment are forces that most of us have very
little control over -- unlike our medical or economic practices. To lump
them all together as mere "social institutions" is to "castrate" sexuality
(forgive the metaphor) by ignoring its attendant emotional dangers. As far
as I'm concerned, that is to bambify it. From what you say, Foucault thinks
human sexual practices are plastic like table manners or shaking hands. But
they aren't. I'm inclined to think that the only real sexual differences
between one society and the next are *public attitudes* to sexual practices
that *go on anyway*, covertly or overtly. For example, the Ancient Greeks
were very prudish about oral sex, yet very much less prudish about
homosexuality. I would guess that the incidence of both was about the same
as it is with us. (And with everyone else too, whoever they may be, as long
as they are human.) We are all human beings, and I would guess that our
sexual inclinations are as rigid as those of other animals. Why would we be
so different?

> What's erotic has very little to do with
> what's biological. Consider the plight of
> shepherds who have fallen for their
> sheep or sculptors who have fallen for
> their statues .

-- Outside of Ovid (and Woody Allen's _Everything You Always Wanted to Know
About Sex_), I don't think real human beings actually fall in love with
statues or sheep. But supposing someone actually did, a la Gene Wilder's
psychiatrist, I would say he had a serious mental disorder. (It needn't be
immoral or demand a "cure"!) Perhaps we might explain that disorder in terms
of how the biological mechanisms usually responsible for
attachment-to-a-woman and raising-of-children had somehow become
misdirected.

Whatever about imaginary attachments to statues and sheep, in real life
"monogamous" birds do seem to form lifelong attachments to each other, and
we can explain why in terms of "parental investment": the offspring cannot
survive without the commitment of both parents to offspring and crucially,
to each other as well. For example, wandering albatrosses take turns flying
long distances across great expanses of the Southern Ocean gathering fish.
When one of the male-female pair returns to the nest, it regurgitates some
of the fish for the chick (if it has hatched) and some for the other parent.
This is necessary for the survival of the chick, and for the survival of the
other parent, and it requires reliability and trust on the part of both
parents. I'm inclined to think that human attachment can be explained in
much the same way -- in a way that I would call "biological". What
albatrosses say with regurgitated fish, we say with flowers.

By the way, arch-critic of evolutionary psychology Steven Rose would accuse
me here of playing the "Flintstone gambit". Here's what he said about it in
a recent book review:

"In this [the Flintstone gambit], you make
a generalization about how humans universally
live, based on Middle American suburban life
circa 1955, project it back to the Stone Age,
and conclude that this bourgeois universal
dream was naturally selected in what
evolutionary psychologists call the
Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation. The
device is used to justify the naturalness of the
nuclear family, male preference for younger
sexual partners, children's dislike of spinach,
and our love of gardening, to name but a few..."

-- I plead guilty, sort of. Except I do not "base" my claim about the
naturalness of the "nuclear plus" family on "Middle American Suburban life
circa 1955". Rather, I base it on a strictly Darwinian, biological
understanding of love and sexuality. The ideals of "Middle American suburban
life circa 1955" seem to me to approximate the natural nuclear family more
nearly than most of the alternatives, but even if they didn't, I would still
think the same way about my model family. As things are, I point to the
Starretts rather than the Flintstones.

> The critical positioning of your
> argument is the tie you make between a
> biological drive and the raising of
> children. These two items have no
> necessary association either historically,
> culturally, politically, . . . .

-- I don't understand what you're getting at here. Surely the biological
drive and the (successful) raising of children are inextricably linked? Any
of the other biological drives we have are there because without them our
ancestors would have died before reproducing. We have a biological drive to
eat and drink because otherwise we'd die. We have a biological drive to have
sex and fall in love (in no particular order) because otherwise we wouldn't
reproduce successfully. With humans, unlike many other species, "reproducing
successfully" means raising children as well as merely producing them. The
biological drive is often consciously aimed at other things (than
reproducing), but its usual result is reproduction.

> what happens when, as in Plato's works,
> biological parents do not raise their own
> children; rather the state removes
> children from their biological parents so
> that they can be raised by surrogate
> parents in surrogate families? For Plato,
> the state recognizes erotic love and the
> biological mechanism required to create
> children, but the creation of families is
> not dependent on either erotic love or
> any biological mechanism. What about
> the family--or lack of it--that
> Jean-Jacques Rousseau discusses in his
> _Confessions_, that Huxley depicts in
> _Brave New World_, that Stanley
> Kubrick depicts in his make of Anthony
> Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_, . . . ?

-- Well, what about them? Real humans would find most of the made-up
arrangements you cite practically impossible. You've listed a series of
academics' fantasies -- utopias or dystopias, but I can't see how any of
these things could be source of evidence for anything.

> As to families, by going to a universal
> family you have completely
> de-historicized the argument. How do
> Native American Indians think of their
> families? How do street gangs think of
> their families? How do Japanese
> Buddhists think of their families? How
> do . . . ?

-- My guess is: very much the same way as we feel about our own families.
(Whoever "we" may be!)

> What makes you think that a
> father-mother-son family constitutes a
> universal family? You have created
> "universal" at the expense of race,
> religion, nationality, . . . and history.

-- Yes. I don't apologise for it, because I'm inclined to think that race,
religion, nationality and history are all secondary to what I'm talking
about. All of the things you mention are mere superficialities compared with
the force of family attachments (including, most importantly, sexual
attachment between would-be parents). Unlike religious toleration (or, for
that matter, race-hatred), erotic love (or, for that matter, nepotism) is
found wherever there are human beings.

> I wonder whether the "average"
> American family in the 1950s meets the
> _Shane_ model.

-- I think the average American family of the 1950s aspired to it, but
usually fell short of it. In fact, I think the average human family in any
part of the world at any moment of history aspires to it -- but falls short
of it.

> Surely, this model of the
> American family is not common either to
> Mark Twain or to William Faulkner.

-- Does the model not act as a foil? I mean, Twain and Faulkner may not have
created (virtual) families that conform to the model, but surely they
exploited widespread assumptions about the "traditional" nuclear family to
throw their own creations into sharper contrast?

> How does your conception of the
> universal family apply to the current-day
> concept of the family in the United
> States?

-- I would say that the phenomenal success of _The Simpsons_ is partly the
result of the fact that Homer and Marge et al conform to the model. By the
way, the Simpsons come a lot closer than the Waltons ever did. I'm inclined
to think George Bush senior lost in 1992 partly because of his ill-informed
moral elevation of the Waltons over the Simpsons. (Amazingly, Dubya seems
not to have put his foot into the same bucket, at least according to the
electorate.)

> How does it apply to the conception
> of the family in the 1950s, in the 1870s?
> How does the concept of family apply
> to a king and his harem?

-- I would say that the lucky few who had harems were still subject to the
forces of erotic love (i.e. sexual attachment). The story of Scheherazade
rings true here. My guess is that to the sultan (or any man with a harem)
most of the girls were like the skin mags in his sock drawer compared to the
*one* woman of his dreams. But even if they weren't, the "owning" of a harem
is an extremely unusual arrangement -- far more unusual than homosexuality,
say, which doesn't fit the model either. I would guess that less than one
per cent of one per cent of men throughout history ever owned a harem,
whereas at least three per cent of men throughout history were homosexual.

> How can a family be considered
> universal, even nuclear, if it does not
> contain its own replica?

-- What do you mean? Please say more, but please remember that I'm strictly
an amateur.

> A mother, a father, and a son is not a
> universal family any more than a
> mother, a father, and a daughter is a
> universal family.

-- I didn't mean to give the child a determinate sex. But a man, a woman and
some children is a "universal" family if you consider the norms we all set
ourselves when we claim to be in love: we say things like "this is it",
"forever", and so on. We give each other "eternity" rings (apparently -- I
don't know what they are!). Like a zebra trying to get away from a pursuing
lion, our initial intention may differ from our eventual success, but let's
be clear about what our intentions were in the first place!

Jeremy




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