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Comment by nickdothutton | Hacker News Reader

At some point many years ago I read that the family, not the individual, is the building block of society. It might have been Chesterton or Friedman as I read a lot of both when I was young. It certainly is a lot easier to hold the line when you have a squad of half a dozen to a dozen with you (wife/husband/children/brothers/sisters/uncles etc). If the state is there, then you are fortunate, but I wouldn't want to count on it myself.

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It's cultural.

I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.

As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.

In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.

I know several families who are absolutely not a building block of society. Some not by choice.

I'll never understand how people think a personal anecdote contradicts a more general point attained by evaluating collected data that would include those anecdotes.

e.g. The claim: Planes are a very safe way to travel.

Followed by someone jumping up to say: I know a person who was injured in a rough landing.

Note I'm not claiming either the individual or family is the atomic unit here just pointing out that your contribution doesn't contradict or even narrow the argument.

My apologies, for that was not my intention. More that it’s not all binary good or bad. I should not have typed that fallacy.

HN commenters do this all the time. A lot of people here treat comments as mathematical or logic proofs. They see a statement like "Planes are a very safe way to travel", and their minds go to:

∀x(X(x)⟹(Y(x))

and then they make it their mission to find the falsifying x sub 0 example.

All the time? HN attracts some ... interesting ... characters so I accept it as something that has likely happened at some point, but something common? Anecdotes aren't shared in some kind of weird effort to falsify an imagined mathematical proof. They are shared because that is the natural progression of a discussion.

More commonly we see things like,

A: "I went to work today"

B: "One time I was on my way to work but I slipped on the ice in my driveway and ended up in the ER with a broken leg instead"

A: "Your broken leg does not disprove that I went to work today..."

Where A is trying to relive their glory days on Reddit where such a retort would have been considered funny, but thankfully most HN accounts know better than to think that is still funny, or that it was ever considered funny on HN. This thread being illustrative of one such exception, of course.

You’re right it looks that way now i read it back. I’m sorry.

I understood your point. You did nothing wrong, the person replying to you read too much offense into what you wrote. They're looking for a fight. Ignore them.

Why would someone take time out of their day to contradict or narrow someone else's so-called argument? Nobody cares about your argument. Anecdotes are shared because someone found an anecdote, that came to mind based on previous discussion, to be interesting. Sometimes that interest isn't shared and the thread dies there, but other times others do find interest in it and discussion continues. That's the nature of discussion.

This is how it has always been throughout history (and still is in most parts of the world).

Individual is part of nuclear family, nuclear family is part of extended family, extended family is part of tribe, etc. When one part is in need, the others jump in to help.

Wasn't "nuclear family" something marketers invented in post-war USA to sell more houses?

The term I am familiar with prior to that was "immediate family" (as opposed to "extended family").

You come across the term a lot in old genealogy books. For instance in "The History and Genealogy of the Prentice, Or Prentiss Family" (from 1883) contains:

> All his immediate family, himself, wives, and children, are dead.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_History_and_Genealo...

Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family%2C_Pr...

> throughout history

Ancient egypt? Roman times? Medieval times? Byzantine times? Pre-colonial Philippines? Pre-colonial America?

I think it may have started in the late 1800s at the earliest. I would need a bit more evidence to be convinced that your model of individual to nuclear to extended etc has been a thing longer than a few centuries, vs the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states. We just had clans which were all our family. A fellow villager wasn't much different than a cousin. The individual and nuclear family, not so much a thing.

There's extensive written evidence as far back as writing goes of recognizable family units. Here[1] we see a young man in 18th century B.C.E writing to his mother to ask for new clothing for school. It refers to household units with mothers and fathers having discrete roles. In 1250 B.C.E.[2] Egyptian workers took days off to take care of their wives, or sick members of their immediate household. Cross cultural examples abound. In Mexica (Aztec) culture adult life began upon marriage where a couple was given a small house and plot of land.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu

[2] https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/

I think I'd need quite a lot of evidence that families weren't the major unit of society. A hunter-gatherer tribe is an extended family, so that only proves the point. If there's more than about 30 people in one then surely family based factions will form within it to some extent.

Probably you're focusing too much on the parent comment's mention of nuclear family. Even that, despite only being named a few decades ago, is likely to exist to some extent. Even in some ancient tribe or village, most people would favour their spouse (or equivalent) or child over a cousin or niece/nephew if some dispute formed. That hardly seems controversial.

It was _especially_ like this further back. You literally could not survive without the tribe, and the tribe had norms-and-values you had to adhere to, some of which were to do with family units. This went for nomads and settlers alike.

Tribes aren't the nuclear family. The nuclear family lives separate from the tribe.

The Odyssey is in theaters right now; it rather famously deals with the importance of family and that's a close to 3000 year old poem.

Not really relevant at all

How do you figure? It seems trivially relevant to asserting that family has only mattered for 200 years.

I suspect you're actually talking about the current western/american conception of family (fair!) but it doesn't make sense to ignore this obvious miscommunication.

To be fair (and I’m certainly not saying its not a good movie) Odyssey has very little to do with the original story or the worldviews and values described by Homer if anything at all. It’s a modern fantasy movie (i.e. the characters world views are mostly modern) loosely inspired by the Odyssey.

Of course this is true! But family still plays a major role in both versions

> the vast majority of human life experience being in nomadic hunter-gathering, villages, farmland, and walled city-states.

in which they lived in families, extended families and tribes as the primary units. I didn't understand your argument at all.

The nuclear family lived separate from the extended family. In separate cities. This is a new thing. You lived with your clan in history, not apart. The nuclear family is completely separated physically from their extended families, even across village lines.

Oh, I see. I agree with the other commenters, I think you may be focusing too much on the "nuclear" part of GP's comment. I interpreted that more as "immediate" family, and I think throughout history that people were most likely to rely on immediate family, then extended, then general kin.

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