Saturday, 21 August 2010

A Real Family

The Importance of Intergenerational Consciousness

"But by far the most important channel of transmission of culture remains the family: and when family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture to deteriorate.  Now the family is an institution of which nearly everybody speaks well: but it is advisable to remember that this is a term that may vary in extension.  In the present age it means little more than the living members.  Even of living members, it is a rare exception when an advertisement depicts a large family of three generations: the usual family on the hoardings consists of two parents and one or two young children.  What is held up for admiration is not devotion to a family, but personal affection between the members of it: and the smaller the family the more easily can this personal affection be sentimentalised.  But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote.  

"Unless this reverence for past and future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than a verbal convention in the community.  Such an interest in the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different from that of the builder of social programmes."   

T. S Eliot, Christianity and Culture, (London: Harcourt, Inc., 1948), p.116

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