For some of us it’s easy to grow sick of continually hearing the praises of family values. In place of families and the great maintenance time they consume, the race needs to forge a stronger human family. Barbara Ehrenreich tells it well:
The family is all we need, America’s ostensibly Christian evangelists tell us. . . . But if anything represents a kind of evolutionary regression, it is this. Insofar as we compress our sociality into the limits of the family, we do not so much resemble our Paleolithic human ancestors as we do those far earlier prehuman primates who had not yet discovered the danced ritual as a “biotechnology” for the formation of larger groups. Humans had the wit and generosity to reach out to unrelated others; hominids huddled with their kin. (Quoted from Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books. 2007)
For a brief biography of Barbara Ehrenreich, click here.
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