Haven in a Heartless World [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION As business, politics, and diplomacy grow more savage and warlike, men seek a haven in private life, in personal relations, above all in the family—the last refuge of love and decency. Domestic life, however, seems increasingly incapable of providing these comforts. Hence the undercurrent of anxiety that runs through the vast and growing body of commentary on the state of the family. Much of that commentai-y attempts to show that although the family is changing its form and structure, it serves important needs and therefore has a long life ahead of it. Yet the divorce rate continues to climb, generational conflict intensifies, and enlightened opinion condemns the family as a repressive anachronism. Do these developments signify merely the "strain" of the family's "adaptation" to changing social conditions, or do they portend a weakening of the social fabric, a drastic disorganization of all our institutions? Does the family still provide a haven in a heartless world? Or do the very storms out of which the need for such a haven arises threaten to engulf the family as well? Convinced that much depends on the answer to these questions, I have grown impatient with the quality of the public discussion they provoke. Opinions about the plight of the family clamor on all sides for attention, but they rely too much on vague speculations, vapid pronouncements about "future-shock," and trendy cultural criticism, much of which, ostensibly radical in its condemnation of existing arrangements, is churned out merely to satisfy the demand for cultural novelties. Not only the worst but the best social criticism suffers from a disregard of established traditions of inquir>'. It takes the form of isolated perceptions that shine for a time and then fade in the glare of the latest revisionism. Revisionism in American scholarship rarely bothers to master the work it attempts to revise. Even