... it illustrates the little recognized dynamics of poverty. To me, among the striking things about these families are their general malaise, the rarity among them of happiness or contentment, the rarity of affection. Demonstrative affection or, except during a relatively brief courting and initial mating period, what we usually mean by "love" are rare among the poorer, simpler peoples of the world. Above all, where hunger and discomfort rule, there is little spare energy for the gentler, warmer, less utilitarian emotions and little chance for active happiness. These generalizations, however, do not fully account for the characters of the people described for us here, and we may note that the most dreary, the most utterly loveless, the most hateful, are the nouveaux riches Castros, handled with a magnificently brutal frankness, a family to dismay Chekhov, to stand Zola's hair on end.
Is this reasonable? Can we believe it? Can we accept as characteristic the repeated elements of decaying or decayed religion, broken families, union out of wedlock, adulteries, and plain polygamy? The answer may lie in yet another factor. All of the families in this book consist of people whose culture is what we usually call "in transition," meaning that it is going to hell in a handbasket before the onslaught of the Age of Technology. Here is the greatest export of the Euro-North American family of nations--a new material culture that shatters the nonmaterial cultures of the peoples it reaches, and that today is reaching them all. All over the world, people are hating the light-skinned, machine-age nations, and busily aping them. One of the first returns they get is a cultural desolation.
Let us look again at the Castros. They have achieved a North American material culture. They have a two-toned car and plumbing, they even eat a North American breakfast. At the end of the day, Senore Castro curls up with a translation of a North American bestseller. They have not entered the northern culture, they are merely uprooted, divorced form the enrichments of their own sources without having received any substitutes other than objects; they are sounding brass and tinkling cymbals, being without love, being true to nothing.
The malaise I am discussing extends over the whole world. A portion of the dynamics of poverty, at least, belongs to it, for in many, many instances an old, physically satisfactory, primitive existence is replaced by an unsatisfactory, impoverished existence as peoples become caught in the economic web that is inseparable from the extension of the Age of Technology. Typically, too, the culture shock results in a breakdown of the basic social unit, the family, although in the case of the second, third, and fourth families of these five, we note with interest how strong is the continuance of the pattern of cohesion, resulting in truly curious patchings together of fragments and of parts that themselves are products of the breakdown.
Drastic culture changes, especially notable in family life and religion, are occurring as well among the nuclear nations of the new age, even though they have had a comparatively gradual transition into it over the past century and a half, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Most "whole" cultures, cultures in which the people follow a long-established set of adaptations to themselves, each other and their circumstances, reward their participants with what can loosely be termed satisfaction. It is characteristic of breaking or broken cultures that they no longer give satisfaction, no longer "make life worth living," which in turn may lead to bitterness towards the original source of change, an intuitive blame-placing. Whether or not unconsciously stressed, the element of unsatisfaction is strongly apparent in Dr. Lewis's five families.
This work is more than a sampling of Mexico. It illuminates, painfully, something of the human condition of the masses, the myriad millions, who through that same technology have suddenly become our near neighbors, whose good will or emnity may prove crucial to our own survival.
Oliver La Farge
March 1959
N.b. It is not the intention of any Hell's Bibliophile to be an unmitigated bummer.
What needs to be created is a humanized techno-culture, a culture as a "long-established set of adaptations to themselves, each other and their circumstances", such that happiness, "satisfaction", is possible again. The onslaught of technology is relatively recent, even in the west, in a cultural time-scale. Its newness explains why our culture is ripping itself apart in a thousand ways, the thousands of depictions of anomie, meaninglessness, and meanness in our cultural artifacts and politics; few having a clue to the overview of what is going on. Pouring liquid sodium on the fire of insecurity-produced paranoia.
Devising a possible way of life that provides for happiness is only possible by public free conversation, allowing all to be heard, praises and grievances, truth and insanity, loves and hates. (If I cannot hate you, I cannot love you.) For this purpose, the Net is the best we've got; oppose actions of those who would restrict it or its contents.
Please note that "conversation" here also means every interaction with anyone else. Every personal interaction, every purchase, every defensive posture, every act of war, every unresolved misunderstanding, every genocide, every unanswered letter, every lost opportunity, every transfer of genetic material, every constructed artifact, every atom of every molecule, every word spoken or unspoken, every cry of the heart. How could one thing be separate from another? The culture and everything which exists is only the heaping together of everything anyone ever did or thought or was. That's all there is, and all there will ever be.
May each of your actions and thoughts move toward increased general happiness, wisdom, and courage.
Or not. You decide.
I hope that you all will consciously participate in this ongoing, never-ending, public conversation.
Selfreferential url: http://209.24.112.224/DrPseudocryptonym/HellsBibliophiles/fivefamiliesexcerpt.html