Anybody Home?

The reason: the intimacy on which our sense of well-being and security rests—a product of our most sacred relationships, above all in the family—is in decline. Witness two recent trends. First, the rise of individualism, unleashed in the ’60s, and apparent in many different guises since, has made self the universal reference point, and one’s own needs the ultimate justification of everything.

Second, the marketisation of everything, swamping every nook and cranny of society. Women, drawn into the labour market on a scale equal to men, find themselves subject to growing time-scarcity, with profound consequences for the family, especially children. Brands define not only the way we buy but also our lifestyle, our sense of identity.

The logic of the market has saturated society, above all the Anglo-Saxon west. It’s the ideology not just of neo-liberals, but of us all, the criterion we use not just for our job or when shopping, but about our innermost selves, our most intimate relationships. The prophets of the market saw it in contestation with the state: in fact, it proved far more insidious, eroding the very notion of what it means to be human. The credo of self, comfortably entwined with the new gospel, has hijacked the fabric of our lives. The result: an ego-market society. Contrarily, new communication technologies—notably the mobile phone and the internet—are contracting our private space, erasing our personal time.

Of course, we remain deeply social animals. We enjoy more relationships now: modern conviviality breeds in the cafe-restaurant culture. Never was being in contact so easy: mobile calls, e-mails, text-messaging put us in a busy, ‘cosmopolitan’ orbit: we are in touch much more, with many more kinds of people.

But quantity does not mean quality. Our multifarious relationships are increasingly transient in nature, of the restaurant rather than of the home. They are overwhelmingly composed of one’s peer group: a loose, mobile social ‘unit’ built on contingent, superficial factors. Our social world has come to mimic the rhythms of the market, privileging contractual rather than permanent bonds.

And the family has become a weaker institution, as indexed by any criterion you care to use: extended families are more tenuous, birth rates are falling, nuclear families are getting smaller, almost half of marriages end in divorce, parents spend less time with children. Yet it’s the site of perhaps our only permanent, life-long relationships. How does it generate the kind of intimacy expressed in the relationship between husband and wife (or partners), or parents and children? Intimacy is a function of time and permanence. It rests on mutuality and unconditionality. It is rooted in trust. As such, it is the antithesis of the values fostered by the market.

Yet even our most intimate relationships are being subtly changed, and corroded, by the new values. There is a new powerful tendency, as Zygmunt Bauman says, to judge love and sex by the criteria of consumer society transactions: in terms of novelty, variety and disposability. ‘Serial monogamy’ is our way of life. Sex—of the flesh—has acquired a stature, to judge by the sales of sex manuals and the incidence of magazine and newspaper articles (for men and women alike), not to mention the avalanche of porn on the net, that elevates it above all else: love has become an appendage of technique. Not surprisingly, love—which belongs in the realm of the soul and the spirit rather than ‘the body’—becomes ever more elusive.

But it’s the deep wounds on the parent-child bond that should detain us most. This is the cradle of all else: it gives us our sense of security, our identity, here we learn our ability to love and care, to give and share, to speak and listen, to be human. The parent-child, especially the mother-child, relationship stands in the sharpest contrast of all to the laws of the market—utterly unequal, yet with no expectation of reciprocation. The only way a child can reciprocate is with the love they give, the sacrifice they make, for their children.

This most precious law is being subtly amended and undermined. Even the act of having children is under siege, as the birth rate falls to new historical lows. Couples are now reluctant to make the ‘sacrifices’—cut in income, loss of time, pressure—that parenting involves. We are now a far richer society than ever in history, but it is now that we have ceded the decision about whether or not to have children to ‘economic’ calculations.

Once we have children, we spend less time with them. The effects are already evident in schools. In a 2003 UK government study, teachers claim half of all children now start school at four or five unable to speak coherently, to respond to simple instructions, recognise their own names, even count to five. To attend to our needs, our children are neglected; our time is substituted by money that buys videos, computer games or other means of distraction. The problem applies across class but the ‘money-rich, time-scarce’ professionals are the most culpable. Time is the most important gift we can give a child, and it’s what we are less and less prepared to forego.

The effects are profound. Decline in early-years school performance is only the measurable price. The more vital costs will be impossible to predict. A decline in emotional intelligence, not to mention a cornucopia of behavioural problems, are inevitable. And, remember, such changes are permanent, irrecoverable. A generation grows up knowing no different, bequeathing the same emotional assumptions to its offspring.

The loss of intimacy has wider implications. Our world, built on the debris of settled communities, is a purely mediated one: knowledge is acquired via the media, not experience. A modern truism is that the media has made us a more knowledgeable society: less parochial, more cosmopolitan. But modern media is bereft of a vital mediator: the crucible of community, the accumulated wisdom of people we know and trust. We are wilfully turning away from the value of age toward a permanent celebration of youth and adolescence.

Indeed, total dependence on the media can lead to ignorance. The chronic fear among parents of, say, paedophilia and child murder is irrational, media-induced panic. Their incidence is no greater now than 50 years ago; what has changed is our ‘awareness’ of the phenomenon. (A less ‘sinister’ but vastly greater threat to child safety, that posed by the fast car, has utterly failed to produce a proportionate outrage.) Media-fed, we are also desensitised—prey to a voyeuristic relationship with the most basic experiences. Death is an item we consume casually: shorn of pain, any real understanding, wedged between stories on celebrity or the weather, the mind detained but for a minute. The grief of loss, the idea of lives destroyed is inconceivable: pain is for the professionals. Less intimate with death, sense of life eludes us: there are no peaks without troughs, life becomes shopping.

The west’s disease is now travelling to ‘developing’ zones: Malaysia, the eastern seaboard of China, Taiwan, Korea, India. True, the family is far stronger in Asian societies. But the market is no respecter of the past. If the west needs to rethink deeply, Asia needs to try and avoid making the same mistakes.

(Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the LSE Asia Research Centre. )