We seem to live in a society whose stories are filled with antagonism and rivalry. Its heroes are those who had the essential rage and cruelty to kill as many of their fellow human beings as possible, under the guise of a struggle for power. Our history books are deprived of leaders with the wisdom of governing through the power of persuasion.
This very trait seems to have diffused to each of us. At least, that is what I have observed with my latest exposure to the lives of married partners.
It was Saturday morning; I was rushing to work. But, as the normal routine requires, I needed to have my shoes shined. Hence, I found my preferred shoeshine boy to take care of my inner desire for complete cleanliness.
Whilst sitting on the stone covered with worn-out cloth, a married couple and their two children passed by. The couple seemed to be involved in a row.
The lady complained that the husband is not helping her in generating income. She accuses him of sitting idle, roaming between bars and caring more about the English Premier League than the education of his children. She seemed to have lost hope in him and advised him rather to focus on the future of the children.
After a while, I finished my stay at the shoeshine spot and started to walk to the taxi station. There again, I met the lady and her children. But this time around, the husband was not there. Rather, it was just the children and their mother alone.
The mother seemed to have lost control of herself. She was busy telling her children every bad thing about their father. The poor children had no choice but to listen to what their lazy and uncaring father is doing to them. The evidence was clear that everything behind the poverty of that specific family was connected to the slothfulness of the husband.
I felt sad about the children. While I was standing there listening to this rather lopsided story, I started to visualise the structure of the families that we are establishing. My mental tour through the social structure of our society showed me that bias is not typical only to the family that I met. It is instead an inherent characteristic of many of the families we establish.
My graduate classes about social structure and gender roles have shown me that the theoretical frameworks about family vary widely. They range from fundamental feminists, who consider family as the instrument of female subjugation, to fundamental liberals, who leave everything to the choice of individuals. Of course, the global reality falls somewhere in between.
In our fair nation, however, families are biased in both structure and relationships. Structurally, the shape and form of our families are hugely defined by the personalities of men. The rules, values, decision making processes and routines of families in our fair nation are usually determined by the priorities of the men.
Evidently, the change in traits of men between the past and the present generation remains considerable. Most men of the past generation used to focus on winning the bread for the family, making them as self-sufficient as possible and teaching discipline to their children.
With the economic monetisation of our time, the focus of today’s men has fallen upon whatever money can buy. Modernity – defined by the wearing of stylish clothes, driving compact cars and reading less – is their sole area of focus. They are seen living like a herd – aspiring, acting, doing and believing correspondingly. Differentiation is a trait they give little attention to.
In contrast, the relationships between members of a given family have seen a shift in the right direction between the two generations. But still, there seems to be no end to the expanding liberalism of family values. Thus, discipline has become a distant dream in our families.
These flaws seem to result in a bias within our families. Hence, our children are left to be the audience to faulty stories. I wonder how they could be able to have objective views about the very society they live in, and the world in general, while the stories they hear entail deep-rooted prejudices.
Surely, a nation with such families could not dream about betterment. After all, families are the bases of all nations. Structurally balanced families could eventually contribute to creating a fundamentally healthy social structure. Similarly, families with healthy relationships could create a nation blessed with a harmonious society.
However, whether consciously or unconsciously, my generation is losing sight of this universal truth. Rather, it is seen engaged in transferring biases to the next generation. It is sowing seeds of antagonism and rivalry in the minds of its children.
We need to control ourselves and rightly analyse what we are telling our children. We ought to be careful where we are positioning our children within the spectrum of life and consider the connection between our family’s dynamics and the wider society. After all, bias is a significant roadblock to both personal and societal development.
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