12. Who We Live With

12.1 Nuclear Families and Communes

One could also call the last subchapter a utopia of thinking.
However, it was not an idea for a new social order, nor a futurity in the sense of this book. It would have made no sense at all to talk about its costs or its robustness against adversity. That is why there was no review of requirements at the end of the chapter either.
It was, however, something a single person can put into practice. Unlike the futurities in this book, which require an entire society in order to be viable. Before we look in the next and final chapter at how such change might actually begin, this chapter is about a futurity that can be implemented on a smaller scale than that of a society.

Let us take a look at the structural levels of our society (taking into account the futurities presented so far):

1. Society or state: The largest unit or system that functions according to certain laws and cultural rules.

2. Community: An intermediate layer introduced in kinotarchy (the state concept from Chapter 10), at which most social systems can be implemented in different ways.

3. City/village: A spatial infrastructure unit. The area whose infrastructure (stores, kindergartens, sports facilities, ...) is used in daily life.

4. Neighborhood/village community: A group of all the people who live in a spatially defined small area. Small enough that people know each other’s faces and names and greet one another. Enforces norms through social pressure rather than through formal rules and punishments. Offers a network of safety and support for its members.

5. Nuclear family: A household unit whose members live together, pool their resources, and raise children. Two adults and their children.

6. Human being: A single person.

I have omitted intermediate levels such as “municipality”, “county”, and “federal state”. To me these all fundamentally belong to the same level “state”. Each of the listed levels has a different role and organizational method, and each provides individuals with support and division of labor in a different way (in return for rules that its members must follow).

For each of these levels, I have proposed changes in the futurities in this book. I devoted a long chapter to the state as a whole, and in it first introduced the idea of communities (in this sense). In the chapter “Living”, I showed how flexible neighborhoods can emerge in high-rises. In the same chapter, I also presented the futurity of a greener city. Chapter 7, “Education System”, was about how people can be better equipped with knowledge and skills for our ever more complex world. And the last chapter, “What We Strive For”, was about a way of thinking better suited to our complex world, which could then also be taught in school.

There is only one of these organizational levels that I have not yet said a word about in this book: the nuclear family.

Although, that is not quite true: In the last chapter, I noted the loss of extended families due to industrialization and urbanization (and their replacement by nuclear families) as one of the causes behind the emergence of communism. Historically, it is therefore something quite new that most people live in nuclear families (or are single). And this transition brought economic problems with it, because a nuclear family cannot provide as close-knit a safety net as the extended family it replaced.

Now, in our wealthy Western societies, these economic problems have largely been resolved. In these countries, anyone who either works or is caught by the close-knit state safety net has enough money to live on. And it was precisely this upheaval from extended families to nuclear families (and the danger of communism) that led to the emergence of social safety nets. The state has thus taken over some of the tasks that were previously carried out by the extended family and the village community.

So the nuclear family is not the only possible way of organizing life together. It definitely has disadvantages as well. In addition to the safety net already discussed, these include the increasing loneliness in our society. Besides the disappearance of village communities, this is also due to the retreat from the extended to the nuclear family. What happens if a partner dies and the children have moved out? Suddenly, one is alone. What happens if a couple separates, as is increasingly common? What happens if they stay together, but talk to each other less and less?
Throughout their evolution, humans have always lived in small social groups. Today, the nuclear family is all that remains of that. And with only two adults, it is a very fragile structure. If one of the two can no longer fulfill their role, the other is left on their own. If one of the two needs help, there is only one adult in the group who can provide it. That the anonymous state can't fully compensate for this loss is quite obvious (for example in old age or illness: a nursing home versus living with relatives).

Due to its small size, the nuclear family can make only limited use of an important advantage that we humans have increasingly developed over the course of cultural evolution: specialization. Cities and states are successful precisely because people no longer have to do everything themselves.
I buy food and clothes instead of growing and sewing them myself. I pay rent every month instead of building my own house with my own hands. I call a repairman when something in my apartment stops working. I get help to fix computer problems. And I go to the doctor when I am sick.
Of course, I can still do each of these things myself: I can grow my own food or sew my own clothes. Many people can fix their own computer problems, and some build their own house or keep their own four walls in good shape through their own repairs. But most people do only some of these and similar tasks on their own, not all of them. The age of the universal genius is long over. Our world has simply become far too complex and complicated for that.

Before this specialization existed in the form of cities and states, almost everything was produced within the group living together and pooling its resources. Division of labor through specialization is something that has become increasingly necessary as the world has grown more complex. The nuclear family can do little to help with that.

There have certainly been, and still are, other forms of living together besides the nuclear or extended family, even in our modern age: from shared apartments during student years, to the communes* of the 1968 revolution, to multigenerational houses. So far, however, all of these have remained either transitional solutions (shared apartments) or isolated experiments.

Just as the education system or the structuring of housing can be viewed as social systems, so too can the form of living together. And just as I have sketched new futurities for the education system and for housing starting from a blank slate, without regard for how things have functioned up to now, the same could also be done for the form of living together. So, do I have an idea for how people might live together differently from the nuclear family, and differently from historical or currently known alternatives?

Yes, I do.

Just like the ideas of container apartments and container houses with neighborhoods, the futurity of living together presented in this chapter has the big advantage of being an option. Anyone who is happy in a nuclear family or living alone does not have to do anything differently than before, not even if what is described here were to become reality. This is not a futurity that society as a whole must adopt in order for it to function.

My hope is that the description in this chapter puts an idea into the world. One that gives people who like it a shared language to talk about it, gives them a blueprint for putting it into practice, and thus opens up the possibility that something like this might actually come into being.

 

With the known alternative forms of living together, I see either the problem that they are too loose to provide a reliable safety net and sense of security (shared apartments, multigenerational houses), or that they require a romantic relationship between all the adults, which is difficult to bring about and becomes ever more fragile as the group grows larger (polyamory).
That leaves the communes, which are about living together and pooling resources in a larger group. They come closest to what I have in mind.

From everything I can see, communes normally have a strong ideological bent. For example, with the goal of growing their own food, achieving a shared political objective, or living as ecologically as possible. And it is of course true that every group living together needs something that brings and then holds it together—a shared core. In communes, that seems to be a shared ideology or a shared goal. Be that anarchism, communism, ecology, or the Jewish faith (kibbutz).

For the nuclear family, by contrast, it is simply the love between the two adults that brought it together. And it is compatibility* that holds it together. Of course, a nuclear family can also have a concrete shared goal. For example, to become as good at table tennis as possible, or to overthrow the existing political order. It just isn't a prerequisite for forming a nuclear family.
This is the first shift in focus, compared to communes, that I have in mind: I do not want the group to come together because of a concrete goal it wants to achieve—just as little as a nuclear family does. Instead, alongside the shared desired way of life, I want the decisive factor to be the compatibility and synergy of its members.

Of course, a shared core is still needed to bring the group together and hold it together. I think a shared fundamental value is sufficient for this. That can be something like wealth or happiness, or the “self-development” presented in the previous chapter. “Self-development” has the great advantage that, by virtue of this fundamental goal alone, the group members already strive for cooperation rather than competition. A value system shared by all members, whatever it may be, gives the group a common basis for discussion in order to find mutually agreeable solutions in conflicts. It is certainly not necessary for every possible group constellation, but it helps enormously—especially, of course, when the shared fundamental value encourages cooperation.

Many communes are quite large. For example, the German Wikipedia article on communes[67] mentions rural communes with 10 to 30 people and gives “Gemeinschaft Tempelhof” as an example with about 150 members. I am certain that in communes of that size, subgroups form within the commune. People who get along particularly well and do a great deal together.
That runs counter to the role that type of group is meant to fill. It is meant to be the innermost social group to which a member belongs. Within it, everyone should get along well with everyone else, know everyone else well, and have trust in one another. That goal is not achievable for a group of 30 people, let alone 150.

For communes, the place is normally an essential part of their concept. A house people have occupied together, a farmstead they manage jointly, or a business they run to generate income. All of this leads to different kinds of communes, with different concepts and goals. This again is entirely logical, since it gives the group a shared anchor and a shared purpose. But again in contrast to the nuclear family, which does not depend on the specific home in which it happens to live at the moment.
Here too, in my idea, I want to shift the focus away from the specific place and towards the group. Whether it lives in a house, on a farm, or simply in a large city apartment should make no difference to the basic organizational form. Of course, as the group grows larger, it will become increasingly difficult to relocate to another city, since all members would need to find new jobs there. That effect will not be avoidable.

I hope I have shown that I do not want to simply describe the idea of the commune in my own words, but that I am in fact aiming at a different goal. So what is it that I have in mind?