Hierarchy in the extended family
Some distant relatives visited me recently. I had not seen one of my elder cousins in roughly two decades, though I had kept in contact with the others. Cousin remarked that I have not changed at all. I happen to do a clean shave of my facial hair these days, which makes me look younger, so that story checks out. Me being a smartass around loved ones, I noted that I actually do not age: “I just gain experience”.
Cousin told me about their children. One of them is already an adult. I was aware of it but was still mildly surprised to piece together the facts. To my mind, a 20-year-old was born in the mid-90s. I guess this is what the stable mountain life does to you: you remain fresh, but you also lose sense of the years flying by.
I commented how I am eager to meet everybody and we will make that happen soon. My longer-term ambition is to reintegrate the family, buttress it with new neighbours, and rekindle the values that we almost lost to consecutive systemic crises.
With those and other relatives, we all agree on the importance of the extended family, which is a feature of traditional Greek culture. To which I emphasised that in terms of familial ties I do not do degrees: blood is blood.
The extended family has many benefits for individuals. The babies are raised by all their cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents, so the burden is not placed exclusively on the parents like it does in the atomic family. Same principle for the elderly. And everybody has people around to talk and do social activities with. This is a natural unit of solidarity that has stood the test of time. It does not rely on the state apparatus.
What the extended family also does is establish hierarchy and, by extension, enforce conformity with rules. The elders teach and demonstrate the values, while the rest embed those lessons into their behaviour.
These structures can, of course, be unfair, though that is a matter of how they are used. Hierarchy is not inherently tyrannical. The parents have, for example, power and control of their baby child, though this is used to help the child grow in a controlled environment until it is ready to rely on its own means. Too much freedom too early will definitely be catastrophic.
This is the essence of a virtuous hierarchy: to keep checks in place for those who need them because, fundamentally, not all people at all times know how best to exercise their freedom. Why that might be depends on all sorts of factors. They may not yet have the skills. They might be going through a tough period of emotional instability, which clouds their judgement. They are the kind of person who thrives when they get as much feedback as possible, but who otherwise hesitates to take the initiative. Or they simply have not thought things through to understand the consequences of their actions.
A right or obligation is balanced against the totality of rights and obligations. There is no such thing as an absolute prescription in a vacuum. Individual freedom, then, is not the only factor to be accounted for. The longer-term wellness of the individual as well as the group is equally important. For example, I will not sit around twiddling my thumbs while a relative is doing heroin: I do not respect your freedom to ruin yourself and to make your entire family suffer forever.
There is this Western notion of “my body; my rules”, which effectively does not recognise the externalities of one’s actions. When the junkie ends up living a lifetime of psychoses, there no longer is “my body” that is affected, but the bodies of everyone else. Lots of cases follow this pattern, but I will not belabour the point.
This sense of the collective good extends to matters of honour. A member of the extend family becoming a criminal is bad news for everyone, so we all have a strong incentive to enforce the moral code. We are not waiting for the bureaucrats in the capital to take action after the fact: it is our duty to preserve what we value. This arrangement creates the appropriate incentives.
Familial hierarchy is about love. Though love, too, is misconstrued nowadays to mean “you are perfect as you are, sweetheart; do whatever you want”. This is a license for complacency, which breeds the kind of feebleness that results in moral decay. Love needs to be tough sometimes: a “no” builds character and serves you well long-term. At other times, love will come in the form of emotional support and the appropriate gentle touch. What matters is the wellness of the individual through the coherence of the collective: the good of the place and the good of the space, as I often put it in more abstract terms.
Tough love is not tantamount to cruelty. It does not even involve corporal punishment (I think corporal punishment typically reveals a failure to lead by example or to be in control of the situation—put differently, it is part of the problem). One is tough when they are firm. And one is firm as well as equitable when they themselves embody the rules they are enforcing.
Indeed, what undermines hierarchy is the elders not following their own precepts. The uncle who tells you not to smoke while lighting up a cigarette cannot show tough love: it is ineffective because of the dissonance between words and deeds. What you need is the person who does not smoke and who actually follows through with their words. That is the toughest person around.
Your relatives calling out your nonsense in a spirit of love, or helping you cope with a difficult situation in a way that is empowering, is the best thing that can happen to you. They do it because they care. As such, they are preparing you for the much harsher world that is out there; a world in which certain strangers will blithely throw you under the bus.
Cousin was an athlete and remains as fit as ever. This is one of the embodied values I have in mind. If cousin comments on your habits, for example, you have to at least listen because you know there is some knowledge there that has been put to the test for decades. Thus emerges the hierarchy that holds you accountable.
The elders in an extended family are not necessarily the oldest people around. It is those who know what they are talking about and who exhibit it as part of their life. You become a hierarch organically by showing the requisite skill and responsibility. In practice, you are there when others want your advice. This will correlate with age, though age alone does not make you more prudent.
The extended family integrates friends and neighbours more easily. An individual cannot necessarily do that. For example, I am friendly, reliable, and talkative but I am also an introvert who tends to not contact anybody (though I am actively working on changing this). The integration continues naturally because, say, my friend may find others in my family with whom to be friends with and to do interesting things together.
As such friends and neighbours become de facto relatives and are treated as equals. There is a sense of togetherness and belonging, which builds solidity at the social level. I have experienced all of this before and am eager to contribute to it at the earliest opportunity. No matter the state of technology and how sophisticated we think we are, the ancient traditions remain ever-relevant.
I was able to build a house here, with material and financial help from locals and some people online. With my extended family around I would have the potential to build an entire civilisation.