Family Values: Divorce

[MagnetMan]

It is interesting that you agree that the basis of the culture is the religion and government, yet you say that it's not true. If it is only family values that create our culture, then the religion and government shouldn't matter as long as the family stays the same. By saying that if you change the religion and government then the culture changes, you agree with Buffy.

That is not what I am saying. Buffy could not be more wrong. Family is the base of culture - what we do there with each indiovidual psyche, determines the character of the collective culture. If I am reared in a noble family, then I am expected to behave as a nobeleman. Our family values are handed down to us from our ancestors - who gradually developed the culture we enjoy today - by the values they instilled in their kids.

 

If family begins to hand down divorce and abortion as acceptible values at the huge scale we are doing right now - then that is evolutionary unprecedented and I am concerned with what that will eventually do to our basic psyche and how that will affect our future national values. If we cannot honor our relationship as parents and the personal challenges that represents, then what else will become dishonored when our personal integrity is challenged in other ways? I do not pretend to know the final answer. I am simply concerned. My wife and I have eight children of our own and we worry about the charactor of the society they will be forced to deal with. Most moderns seem to think that divorce is no big deal with no long-term side-effects.

 

I respectfully disagree. I have been there and done that and it did me and 200 hundred other boys from broken homes who lived in the same government imnstitution, no good. I have a step brother who, in a moment of extreme distress, thinking she was going to divorce him, murdered his wife and child and ended up in an insane asylum. I also ended up divorcing a perfectly good wife myself and abandoned a beautiful child, who hates me to this day - mainly because it was a common thing to do if one fell for another woman. I never stopped loving my first wife even though I loved the second, and regret my action to this day. These personal episodes are not my only motivation. I am a humanist a professional docyumentary film maker, who has been observing human behavior around the globe for most of my adult life. I was brought up in apartheid South Afrioca and have observed the strengths and aberations of our specie, both as individuals and as a collective, for longer and closer and more dramatically than most.

[Tormod]

Your argumentation skills are a bit lacking. You are extremely arrogant but miss obvious flaws in your own logic.

 

That is not what I am saying. Buffy could not be more wrong. Family is the base of culture - what we do there with each indiovidual psyche, determines the character of the collective culture. If I am reared in a noble family, then I am expected to behave as a nobeleman. Our family values are handed down to us from our ancestors - who gradually developed the culture we enjoy today - by the values they instilled in their kids.

 

So you are saying, basically, that what is going on today is brought upon us by history and that's to be expected (however I disagree that a "noble upbringing" creates many noble men).

 

But now the fun begins:

 

If family begins to hand down divorce and abortion as acceptible values at the huge scale we are doing right now

 

How can it "begin" if we are doing it at a huge scale right now?

 

- then that is evolutionary unprecedented

 

And your proof for this extraordinary claim is?

 

and I am concerned with what that will eventually do to our basic psyche and how that will affect our future national values.

 

Fair enough.

 

If we cannot honor our relationship as parents and the personal challenges that represents, then what else will become dishonored when our personal integrity is challenged in other ways?

 

I disagree. In many cases, divorce is a good solution for children as well as for parents (I have first hand experience with this). Nobody is saying divorce is a Good Thing in general, but it's not the evil you portray it as.

 

What is being dishonored today? Am I dishonored because I have divorced parents? Or because my wife has? Or because my wife's grandparent's are divorced, and my own grandparents' are as well? (Most of the latter are dead, but they divorced long before their lives ended).

 

My personal integrity is not challenged by this at all, except for well-meaning welldoers who think they know what "honor" and "responsibility" is (usually their own standards).

 

Most moderns seem to think that divorce is no big deal with no long-term side-effects.

 

Do you have any statistics to back this up or are yuo just going by your gut feeling?

 

(Personal history stuff, see his post above)

 

So you have a sad history to tell. Why does this have to mean that we need a crusade to save people from divorce? I am in complete disagreement with you. To be married is to honor your spouse and children, to love them and take care of them. When you divorce, that role does not diminish, although many breaks are no amicable (which is a sad thing but frankly people are different and who can say that the marriage was better?).

[Jay-qu]

ok as a first hand witness of divorce (my parents not me) I can say that is a truely terrible thing to go through. I was 13, so for the most part I didnt understand the full reasons for it and so it just ripped me apart. But it does get better and now I am older I have come to understand why it happened(which I will not go into) - although I may not agree and there could have been a way around it what it comes down to is I respect and love both of them whatever happens.

 

I can also see that in some cases divorce would actually benefit the situation, eg if there is violence, but this doesnt mean I disagree with it for all other reasons. People change, you may marry someone and realise that you dont want to spend the rest of your life with them, this could happen years down the track and take even longer for you to muster up the courage to tell them! anyway I better get off to uni :cup: later

[MagnetMan]

Still up to you to show that this "base fact" is or is not correct. I'm showing evidence, you're simply saying its obvious... Why is it obvious?

If anything religion and government direct "family values" almost entirely in today's society.

Let us start with the original parental pair. They are both the originators and end product of the government of their children. The values they teach their children are also their government and their religion. That is the base, It always remains so. Population pressures on the environment, naturally force us to adopt new and more complex ethical relationships. If they work inside the family and the exdtended family and the national family, they then become codified as social law. We see government and religion ostensibly "directing" the family today - but that government is the result of values originally set by the family, then adjusted by the extented family, and then further adjusted by the national family as evolutionary circumstances changed their occupational and spiritual contracts.

 

Governments and religions can change radically. One tyrant can alter things over-night. Human nature is guided by natural ethics. If an artiifcial law does not prove to work in practice, it is recinded. One cannot recind the natural ethic of sharing, or of courage, or of conscienteousness, or of lovingness, or of inspired vision, or of inttellectual honesty. These are the basic forces of human conduct that determine good government. The are imprinted in our gene pool. Parents are the guides who are responsible for evoking them - not government. Government enforces them at our command. The family home is the source of our culture. If the children are not sent to church - religion dies. If not sent to out to work, government dies.

 

But from an evolutionary and anthropological standpoint, the nuclear family is an extremely recent phenomenon.

The first two hominids who saw themselves as separate from nature and in that moment became human, are our nucleur family.

 

Both animals and early humans and early human societies show a multitude of evidence that the fundamental social grouping is the "tribe" or "hive" or "pod", and that social grouping is manifested in modern society by religion and government Many different "family units" are represented from bee hives where the hive *is* the family, to traditional hunter-gatherer societies where child rearing and relationships are communal (often with chiefs having the privilege of non-monogomy).

 

I visited for a while with a family group of Bushman hunter/gatherers. All the females were the daughters of the old matriarch. Their husbands came from neighbor family groups. You see the same matriarchal family stability in lion prides.

[Buffy]

Let us start with the original parental pair. They are both the originators and end product of the government of their children.

:Tupac: Most fundamental assumption you are making: there was an "original parental pair...The first two hominids who saw themselves as separate from nature and in that moment became human". Why is this assumption at all justified? Do you have any evidence at all that this is how humans developed organizational social structures? That this happened only after they "saw themselves as separate?" How do you explain the complex social structures--really no different than "governments" as there is ample evidence that these groups *do* pass down "rules" (see studies of both primates and elephants)--in lower animal species?

 

Although I would imagine that you would like us to studiously avoid calling that "original pair" Adam and Eve because this is not a religious discussion, there is no place outside the Bible and a few other related religious tracts that makes the claim that you make here, and it is not in the least bit justified by scientific methods.

 

Are you really on a theological quest? That's fine, but you're really not going to get anywhere by trying to dress up your faith-based beliefs as science.

 

Sorry,

Buffy

[MagnetMan]

:cup: Most fundamental assumption you are making: there was an "original parental pair...The first two hominids who saw themselves as separate from nature and in that moment became human". Why is this assumption at all justified? Do you have any evidence at all that this is how humans developed organizational social structures? That this happened only after they "saw themselves as separate?" How do you explain the complex social structures--really no different than "governments" as there is ample evidence that these groups *do* pass down "rules" (see studies of both primates and elephants)--in lower animal species?

 

My Dear Buffy, I admire your persisence at getting to the root of this argument. Obviously I did not go back far enough into the origination of social behavior to make the obvious, obvious enough. Shall we go back to the first cell division in the Archean Era and call that the original pair - and begin there to extrapulate the logical sequence of biological socializatiion that developed thereafter?

[pgrmdave]

What does archeology/sociology say about the early human family groups? How has the idea of a family changed over the millenia?

[MagnetMan]

What does archeology/sociology say about the early human family groups? How has the idea of a family changed over the millenia?

Science has almost nothing to say about pre-literate eras of mankind's social behavior other than what can be speculated from rock paintings. burial sites, stone monuments, mytholgy, tools, weapons and other archeological relics. From a empirical standpoint human civilization began with the emergeance of the first scriptures. So our Stone Age and Bronze Age are to all extents and purposes a complete blank - yet those two foundational eras comprize more than 99.9% of the time Nature invested in developing the human psyche, ever since we became vaguely self-aware some 2.5 million years ago.

 

If we apply common sense as a deductive method, we can argue; as human population expanded out of Africa and our original occupation as hunter/gatherers began to stress out regional environments, survival imperatives, working in conjunction with our increased brain power, forced us into a logical sequence of increasingly complex occupational contracts and social cooperatives.

 

1. Hunting. (Family Groups)

2.Farming. (Clan Groups)

3. Industrial craftsmanship. (National Groups)

4. Scientific technology. (Internationalized Colonial Groups)

 

Each Age of development required its own ethical social construct in order to be successful. Hunter/gatherers survived as family groups, mainly because of the basic sharing ethic that lifted us above all other primates. It took some 99,000 generations to instill that ethic in the human gene pool. It is the foundation of all our intelligence. Without it no new age could have taken root and man would never have progressed beyond the ape. So with every new born, the social training must begin there. And because that imprint is so well established in our genes, it is not like we have the impossible task of civilizing a chimpanzee with each new born. It takes seven years for the shring ethic to be fully awakened in a child's consciousness.

 

Sharing keeps the instinctively selfish individual psyche open and makes it aware of the collective needs of the society upon which its own survival depends. A generous sharing ethic makes for a good person, a good citizen, a good businesssman, a good scientist, a good government.

 

When man was forced to domesticate Nature in order to survive, an entirely new agricultural-based social paradigm had to emerge. Extended family cooperation was an essential element in this new social milieu. Whereas the former hunter/psyche lived in a naive state of relativity, existing from moment to moment and dependent on the firtunes of the hunt - the new psyche had to be disciplined to accomodate an artificialzed sense of time and space. Land had to measured and cleared. Seasonal growth had to be accounted for. Crops had to be planted, tended and harvested. Pestulence and predatory animals had to be deal with. A sense of future anticipation had to be instilled.

 

The social discipline that under-pinned the Bronze Age was a chore-based work ethic. The ability to focus for extended periods of time on tedious pieces of work, is what makes business, science and government function today. It was earned back in the Bronze Age, over a period of 600 generations.

 

I can go on and on, explaining each of the next five ethics that underpin the inividual and collective psyche - but you really need to read the full explanation in my book. It is the only one in existence that explains all the above in full detail. If you are really interested in further understanding. click on my website listed below,

[Buffy]

My Dear Buffy, I admire your persisence at getting to the root of this argument. Obviously I did not go back far enough into the origination of social behavior to make the obvious, obvious enough.

So does that mean you don't consider any of my questions to be valid? I think you're missing some interesting issues. Your thesis is not at all obvious, and although you've taken another step to try to explain, many of the same questions and contraditions arise:

Science has almost nothing to say about pre-literate eras of mankind's social behavior other than what can be speculated from rock paintings. burial sites, stone monuments, mytholgy, tools, weapons and other archeological relics.

No, studies of primitive cultures still in existence provide all sorts of information about how our ancestors operated. Sadly, they are disappearing fast, but we have about a hundred years of anthropological fieldwork to work from. And these groups provide some clear contradictions to your other statements:

...forced us into a logical sequence of increasingly complex occupational contracts and social cooperatives.

 

1. Hunting. (Family Groups)

2.Farming. (Clan Groups)

3. Industrial craftsmanship. (National Groups)

4. Scientific technology. (Internationalized Colonial Groups)

Actually its pretty clear that hunter-gatherers *are* clan based, and only when you get to farming--which requires the establishment of ownership of land by *individuals* do you see familial groups starting to form boundaries from that of the group. This indicates that your whole premise of "family-first" is still completely unsupported. It appears that your argument that "there's no data" gives you the freedom to make up anything you want, but we do have data, and you should address it.

...but you really need to read the full explanation in my book. It is the only one in existence that explains all the above in full detail.

What we're really trying to say here is that if you can't explain within the space of a few paragraphs why these problems we've identified in your assumptions are incorrect, we're unlikely to bother with your book. Please realize that its not the *detail* that we're finding issues with, its the basic assumptions that you're making that you are not justifying and that appear to be in conflict with a considerable body of research: what we need is to understand the reason for your assumptions before we even get to discussing the implications.

 

Verdict first, trial later,

Buffy

[MagnetMan]

No, studies of primitive cultures still in existence provide all sorts of information about how our ancestors operated. Sadly, they are disappearing fast, but we have about a hundred years of anthropological fieldwork to work from.

Quite true. 40 years ago I managed to make contact with an uncontaminated family group of Boskopoid hunter/gatherers in the Kalahari Desert and make field observations of my own. Inevitably such groups no longer exist for Time waits for no man. I have also been in close contact with Pondos and Zulus since birth. My mother has Pondo blood and was born and raised in the Transkei. She was one of the few "white" people who could speak Xhosa fluently. I was suckled by a Pondo woman when my brother was born a year later. My theory on Psyche-Genetics is based on a life-time of first hand observations and direct recitations of tribal lore. Perhaps after you have done some field work of your own, we can compare notes more favorably. As it is you seem to be regurgitating information that has been digested by someone else.

 

And these groups provide some clear contradictions to your other statements:

I am quite prepared to debate any professional anthropologist who directly contradicts any statement I have made. Bring it on.

[Buffy]

Quite true....Perhaps after you have done some field work of your own, we can compare notes more favorably. As it is you seem to be regurgitating information that has been digested by someone else. I am quite prepared to debate any professional anthropologist who directly contradicts any statement I have made. Bring it on.

What's interesting is the very little bit that you have mentioned about this in this thread seems to *not* support your *own* conclusions. But as you will not respond to anyone who has not actually got a degree in anthropology--no matter how relevant their questions might be--I guess I shouldn't expect to get anything out of this discussion.

 

That's unfortunate for all of us here, and I'd suggest you might want to think about how your attitude and unwillingness to discuss issues is viewed by others.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[MagnetMan]

What's interesting is the very little bit that you have mentioned about this in this thread seems to *not* support your *own* conclusions. But as you will not respond to anyone who has not actually got a degree in anthropology--no matter how relevant their questions might be--I guess I shouldn't expect to get anything out of this discussion.

 

That's unfortunate for all of us here, and I'd suggest you might want to think about how your attitude and unwillingness to discuss issues is viewed by others.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

 

I have responded to every question as politely as I can and as promptly as possible. I have never left anyone hanging. . In fact I have invariably taken it a step further and given more information that might help further clarify any issue. My attitude, whether or not it is repected by you or any "others" has always been sincere. My passion has shown at times. But that is because I only discuss issues that really affect human lives.

[Buffy]

I have responded to every question as politely as I can and as promptly as possible.

With all due respect sir, you have indeed refused to answer relevant questions:

having got this base fact wrong, and by not acknowledging the fundamental effect parents have on cultivating the future behavior of society as a whole. the rest of your argument does not, in my opinion, hold any water.

Summarily dismissing questions posed about your basic argument is fundamental, but the implications need to be considered.

In fact I have invariably taken it a step further and given more information that might help further clarify any issue.

But you have not addressed the questions.

My attitude, whether or not it is repected by you or any "others" has always been sincere.

And I get that you sincerely believe that since we don't have the proper degrees and experience, we have no right to make any criticisms of your work. I am afraid your polite--but really obviously condecending--demeanor really does not fool anyone.

 

Again, if you would like to engage us in a two-way discussion here and respond to the questions raised--not by condecendingly repeating facts that do *not* address our questions--we'd be happy to work with you. Otherwise, the impression you leave is that you just want people to listen and not object--something which you can better do on your own site.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[MagnetMan]

With all due respect sir, you have indeed refused to answer relevant questions:

Cheers,

Buffy

 

The relevant question is what is your view about divorce?

[InfiniteNow]

Divorse is all too often used as an excuse to validate other claims about society. It is pretty simple really. Two people came together when it was right to do so, and then circumstances changed and they felt it better to be apart. It's only by holding on to some preconceived, personalized, and idealized notion of right/wrong that people feel there are problems with it.

[Buffy]

The relevant questions from me are predominantly in post 14 in this thread and there are plenty from others especially Tormod's in post 19 in this thread. We would appreciate it if you would go back to those and try to address our questions.

The relevant question is what is your view about divorce?

I will indulge you. I believe it is like what Churchill said about democracy, its the worst system except for all the others. And to quote Bill and Hillary, it should be safe, available and rare.

 

But of course those are just my personal opinions and I don't necessarily expect everyone to agree, as it has a great deal to do with one's experience--which as I mentioned above, I have a great deal of, on both major roles in the process.

 

When it comes to public policy--which is the end result of our discussions--one has to make an accomodation among the variety of opinions. But it would help in defining that accomodating position to actually discuss the assumptions and implications thereof that we are at least trying to discuss here.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[MagnetMan]

When it comes to public policy--which is the end result of our discussions--one has to make an accomodation among the variety of opinions. But it would help in defining that accomodating position to actually discuss the assumptions and implications thereof that we are at least trying to discuss here.

I am concerned with accomodating the impact on the children, especially those under the age of puberty.

 

The basic public argument is that they are better off in a divorce if the parents cannot get it together. I do not think the chikldren themselves would agree with that. I will agree that my personal view is somwhat biased for I have been traumartized by a broken home, but significant studies show that future maladjustment is prevalent. I have been accused by making assumptions that the current accelerated divorce rate is unprecedented in the evolution of human consciousness - and that we have no way of knowing how dysfunctional the average psyche will be down te road if the trend contitinues. Nobody has shown me precedent. Predicting a dire outcome, based on current studies that show how divorce relates to drugs, sex, crime and chronic under-achievement, from a generational perspective is hardly presumptive. What is your view on this?