On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 2:25 AM, Deepa Mohan <[email protected]> wrote: > I cannot believe that the old system was always good; the concept of family > before self, of duty before self, did, in my opinion, lead to a lot of bad > practices, and deep unhappiness. This was especially so when a person did > not believe implicitly in this concept. > > For better or worse (obviously, you two feel it was for worse), the change > has come to stay. We are now cocooned in individuality; but yet, I feel that > we are quite connected to our families and to our friends.
[Most of this should apply to any set of peoples of the world from a few hundred to a few years back really, but I'll limit this to the TamBram community since that has personal relevance to many here.] There are three spheres of an individual's personality, the personal, the familial and the societal. In traditional Indian societies the personal was always the smallest, most neglected sphere with very little space available for individual expression. The societal as well as the family received the most attention. In what are considered definitely personal choices today, such as the choice of a spouse or career one often had little or no say in a traditional society. The choice was made keeping in mind the preservation of familial and societal ties. The Tambram "agraharam" was a socio-familial-professional housing project, where one lived cheek by jowl with friends, relatives and colleagues. The strongest punishment that could be meted out by society was expulsion from this tribal housing project because it represented the sum total of one's identity. Thus the workplace was a place for the family and the society to intermingle, it wasn't uncommon to have the shop or workplace in the front of the building and the home attached to the rear. None of the gross income inequalities of market-capitalism today could exist under a system where the sources of income were shared; it was socialism of a kind before there was a word for it. Early military traditions recognized the importance of the tribal bond, and the military unit under which one serves is family and society for men away from their real families and society. Let's consider now how modernity and the tribe of one have changed all this. The modern workplace is not guaranteed for life, one cannot construct an identity of society and family around one's employer, not when our jobs change every 3-4 years. Nor can one count one's colleagues as friends or relatives. When we work in merit based occupations, our colleagues are chosen solely by their ability to do their jobs, and not necessarily for any of their other companionable traits. And our careers are often chosen for flexibility and ampleness of opportunity and income. Thus the modern career leaves behind the familial and societal spheres and enters the personal sphere. Once career becomes personal, the power equation between the spheres of life has shifted drastically. People who desire choice in their career will also desire a choice in their partner, in their beliefs, in their religion, in their social circle, in every aspect of life primarily because there's no coercive counter force. Once career leaves the societal and familial circle there is no control left over the individual for society to exert, thus we see more and more expansion of the personal sphere. Once there's a critical mass of personal decisions made it becomes expensive to maintain all three spheres - endless justification of one's personal decisions to society and family can be demanding, increasing the concentration of our lives around the personal sphere. This is also termed in the West as self actualization and individual development, which on the face of it is a jolly good idea. In a way this is freedom, but it is also lack of insurance, a lack of a frame of reference. Human beings seek happiness and direction through comparison. With the reduction of family and society's role in our lives, our comparison scope is left impossibly open or wide. It is no longer possible to compare oneself against the finite 30 or 40 families in an agraharam. It becomes harder and harder in fact to find other individuals who made the exact same set of choices in life, and this makes comparison difficult. It becomes necessary therefore to create artifices that create the illusion of comparison when we can't find equals to compare against. Driven by a desire to make the comparison at any cost we often trap ourselves into a limited dimension, such as material wealth and possessions that reasonably translates across all people. Wealth is a moving target of course, and leaves one very open to the vagaries of economics and there's no generational stability like one used to have with reputation and family heritage. If one refuses to make such crass comparisons then one invites fear, which is the natural human response to the unknown. Chasing the personal sphere is risky - it is the way of the world today - but it is risky - and worst of all this risk isn't obvious at first. To balance the personal with the social and familial is a tough thing to do in the modern world where choices are increasingly personal because the personal has a short-termist appeal to the curious. Short term thinking may be the downfall of our age - in an age where we don't hesitate to question anything, where every event can be analyzed on the social networks and talk show TV, we often draw conclusions from limited data that spur our actions. The present day angst ridden American campaign politics makes for an excellent object lesson in short term thinking.
