Extended families have their modern variations, informal networks unaware of history, created by accident not by design. The tribes of antiquity were not created by design nor by accident. They arose from need and security. As they do in part today.
In antiquity, tribes were formed along blood lines – usually groups of sisters in a Matriarchy. They also exist today from the Sudan to Sumatra. But a group may coalesce these days along lines of interest or politics or identity. But the bond does not possess the order of strength possessed within a family arrangement. If only those bonds were more powerful.
The advance in women’s freedom has made divorce an option where in previous decades and centuries it was unthinkable. So now a couple are in a position where they (or more specifically the woman) may make a freer choice, where they can decide to divorce. They have children, and the responsibilities are divided. They both find new partners, also with children of their own. Both couples have more children. All the children grow up now with more family links than ever existed before in the nuclear family. Their father’s new family contains their half-siblings and half-siblings of those siblings with whom they have no blood relation but where there now exists a familial relationship of sorts. We witness an accidental expansion in relations.
Another accident opens a path up to group living. A couple may never be able to afford a house, but a group of friends can. House prices go up disproportionately. A home for 2 may be £220,000 (£110,00 per person) but a 7-bedroom home for 12 may be around £800,000. £75,000 per person. As the numbers increase, the economy of scale tilts in favour of the buyer. Singer Charlotte Church wrote a lovely article where she and many friends went and hired a villa together for a few weeks, and she described the co-operation that sprung forth as duties were shared out and the living was easy. She considered as far as the possibility that this group could create a retirement together.
We discover by accident that greater numbers yield benefits but we are intensively programmed to think in twos only. Even couples that take one extra person into their relationship raises eyebrows. An excellent BBC drama, Trigonometry, has three people sat in front of their mortgage lender and they explain their relationship to him… “We are married and this is our girlfriend”.
In every other unit we recognise the intrinsic advantage of greater numbers yielding greater potential and greater security. We do this at work when we join Unions, and in economic terms the benefits of larger groups are well understood and accepted. But in the one fundamental unit that we care about more than any other we confine ourselves to the smallest and therefore the most vulnerable unit imaginable. The brave and intrepid twosome who take on all domestic and economic tasks between them. It exhausts them, especially in the early years when children with massive amounts of energy and desire for knowledge find in front of them two adults exhausted from the efforts of work and family. The child’s Grandparents may have been looking for an easier retirement, but with both their grandchildren’s parents working, they too are drawn into the very difficult equation of how to divide so much care between so few people.
Ancient communities had no preconceptions about ideal numbers in a group. Their minds were not closed to the possibility. They were by definition polyamorous, a subject that they did not struggle with. Why should the concept of being able to love more than one person be a struggle? It is a measure of how closed off from ourselves we have become that we struggle with the idea that we could possibly love more than one person?
There is a tendency across cultures that I became familiar with, specifically in my case within Afro-Caribbean culture. A frequently observed tendency to not form relationships and then have children but simply to have sex and then have children. Again, there is much tutting from the tutting classes about this “lack of responsibility” which is not necessarily the case.
A man fathers children by several women but lives with none of them. He is, if he is decent, inclined to visit his children and support them. He is not irresponsible if he lives in this way if he and his sexual partners held no prior notion of forming a lifelong bond before they had sex. We can say that we are not racist when we can accept cultural norms that are not our own and without imposing a judgement based on our own moral framework. Live and let live.
The women within an arrangement such as this may also engage in sex with other males and have children by them and immediately we see the re-creation of the matriarchal family unit.
Beyond this, the women who raise a man’s children, become connected to other women through the fact that their children are half-siblings to the man’s other children. Again, an accidental growth in numbers and cross-community ties. The very fact that such a culture exists means that all the children within a community such as this will look differently at each other, even as they meet for the first time. The question stands before them. Are we actually related? Just the fact that they might be changes the immediate dynamic. The sense of belonging to a wider group, the outer limits of which we do not know.
It is a small step for the children to recognise this and, in the absence of other decent economic opportunities, to sit down together and organise themselves into an economic Unit, to try to provide a living for themselves. As it stands, not much is available without venture capital, which as I again myself discovered is not something that is made readily accessible to people who start with nothing, without collateral.
Beyond banks, I discovered that even Community Organisations specifically set up after the riots of the early 80s to help create local business, did not include as part of their remit the provision of Venture Capital. Nothing comes from nothing as they say. Without Venture Capital on offer, youth must find a way to start by other means. Starter jobs do not allow the luxury of paying rent, bills, food AND saving. In these days of in-work poverty, our youth are fortunate if their wage even pays for the first three items on this list.
In the desperate search to create something for themselves, young groups are obliged through lack of opportunity to take what is available, which in today’s context means selling something that is not offered elsewhere, namely recreational drugs. And so we see the formation of the dreaded Gangs, often containing many members of the same bloodline before they grow and start to recruit beyond their blood. And they do what humans have always done, whatever is necessary to prosper, if not available within the Law, then beyond it. We are not in a position to condemn something that we have by our passive acceptance of unjust systems, created.
Indeed it is the history of many businesses, especially in the case of the Mafia, that the initial Capital is acquired through illegal means, usually prostitution and drug running, and these days people trafficking, and then finally the organisation once it has capital then re-invests in more legal forms.
At a stroke we could rid ourselves of Gangs by making Venture Capital accessible to disenfranchised youth to set up legitimate business. But, as it is, funding is only available if you have collateral or an excellent credit rating, i.e. if you already have money. Giving something to someone who has nothing is a leap of faith, but not an act of generosity – everyone has a birthright to their share.
So we see how, as the ladder of privilege is pulled up, those left at the bottom accidentally find ways to coalesce through many different forms. We are rediscovering our past and doing what comes entirely naturally. Coming together in larger groups to secure our positions.
All the above are examples of the accidental recreation of extended forms of organisation, brought about by the sometimes desperate and impossible circumstances in which many of us find ourselves to exist under the current system.
The proposal that I present here is to make that process of coming together not accidental but deliberate. Not a reaction to circumstances but a considered and pro-active plan. A re-creation in modern form of what we had and knew and understood for millennia about the formation of large, coherent groups.
But there is one group of people who in full knowledge of the benefits, have always utilised the advantages of extended families. They understand the value of maintaining the ties right the way across their extended family to make sure that there are always people around them to provide security and assistance in a crisis. These people are the Royal Monarchies of Europe.
They are not fooled that small is best. They intermarry to consolidate power between their families and they have been doing so for centuries. They send their armies to foreign countries to crush popular revolutions and re-instate their ailing relatives back in to power. Our Queen is part German because she is originally Saxe-Coburg-Gotha before it was changed to Windsor in 1917 during the First World War. Her husband is Greek and he is the Prince of Greece and Denmark. The Queen’s Grandad, George the 5th counted amongst his cousins Emperor (Kaiser) Wilhelm of Germany and Emperor (Tsar) Nicholas of Russia. The list goes on. The value of the extended family and its power is well known to them.
What I present is not the same form as that practised by the European Monarchies – it is much older, it is more systematic, it has greater benefits and it was universal. We have tried many forms of organization over the decades. Let us now examine the one that sustained us for millennia.