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Musings on marriage, family and utopias
Jun. 11th, 2016 01:32 pmI was just daydreaming and reflecting on how I'm libertarian when it comes to most social issues. Marriage (IMHO) should be between two or more consenting adults, of any number and gender(s), for an indefinite period or a period they mutually agree upon. Then I thought...family. Maybe we should leave "marriage' to the religions and set up families by what the adult members decide (probably with input from adolescent children): a couple or more of adults and their children (bio or adopted); multigenerations (this would be good for single parents living with their parents, or immigrants who consider this standard), or friends living together for financial and emotional support. Friends in such a family could adopt children and co-parent. This way the "no more than 3 unrelated adults in one home" wouldn't apply to people committed as families, and a family could include people who only occasionally or rarely live together (such as when one is a traveling musician, or in the military, or gets a special job assignment). This would ring up expenses for companies offering health insurance to "families" with 1 employee but four or five uninsured family members, but what the heck, we need universal healthcare anyway.
I know this concept isn't new; it's a bit like Friday's family in Friday by Robert A. Heinlein, and the way families are formed in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (one of my personal favorite utopias along with Lois McMaster Bujold's Beta Colony.) And it's been done de facto in societies in the past, I'm sure (some of you probably know examples; I never took anthropology or college-level sociology).
This brings me to utopias. At Balticon two weeks ago I attended a fantastic panel discussion on "Optimistic, Positive and Utopian Science Fiction." The first question caused some hard thinking: panelists were asked to name recent SF titles about positive futures. One panelist named the first novel by another (Ada Palmer's "Too Like the Lightning," which I just asked my adult-fiction-buying coworker to buy for our library system). The discussions were excellent, partly because Dave Robison, the moderator, had fantastic thought-provoking questions and the panelists were, well: Charles Stross, who is bright perceptive and humorous as well as a fine writer; the aforementioned Ada Palmer, a Bryn Mawr & Harvard graduate who studies the history of anime and manga among other things and touted the "pear cake with caramel filling" to be served at her book launch; Michelle Sonnier (who loved the charming French manner in which Mr. Robison pronounced her name), author of sociological SF of about my age (8-D) who is working on a story about a menopausal woman who is the subject of a world-saving prophecy; and Thomas last-name-like-Wollheim but not quite, a senior gentleman who wants to see (or write) a book about "the person who sweeps the floor in a utopia."
One matter brought up is some people (including Ms. Sonnier) find utopias creepy because something is always not quite right. Brave New World came up as one where it might be fine if you were born into it, but the lack of something not defined in the discussion but I think of as independent thought is disturbingly missing. Something is always going to be wrong--humans can't create a society perfect for everyone. There's always a point at which one person's freedom or comfort has to be at the expense of another's or a compromise has to be made. The issue for a society is how the decision is made to handle that.
I know this concept isn't new; it's a bit like Friday's family in Friday by Robert A. Heinlein, and the way families are formed in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (one of my personal favorite utopias along with Lois McMaster Bujold's Beta Colony.) And it's been done de facto in societies in the past, I'm sure (some of you probably know examples; I never took anthropology or college-level sociology).
This brings me to utopias. At Balticon two weeks ago I attended a fantastic panel discussion on "Optimistic, Positive and Utopian Science Fiction." The first question caused some hard thinking: panelists were asked to name recent SF titles about positive futures. One panelist named the first novel by another (Ada Palmer's "Too Like the Lightning," which I just asked my adult-fiction-buying coworker to buy for our library system). The discussions were excellent, partly because Dave Robison, the moderator, had fantastic thought-provoking questions and the panelists were, well: Charles Stross, who is bright perceptive and humorous as well as a fine writer; the aforementioned Ada Palmer, a Bryn Mawr & Harvard graduate who studies the history of anime and manga among other things and touted the "pear cake with caramel filling" to be served at her book launch; Michelle Sonnier (who loved the charming French manner in which Mr. Robison pronounced her name), author of sociological SF of about my age (8-D) who is working on a story about a menopausal woman who is the subject of a world-saving prophecy; and Thomas last-name-like-Wollheim but not quite, a senior gentleman who wants to see (or write) a book about "the person who sweeps the floor in a utopia."
One matter brought up is some people (including Ms. Sonnier) find utopias creepy because something is always not quite right. Brave New World came up as one where it might be fine if you were born into it, but the lack of something not defined in the discussion but I think of as independent thought is disturbingly missing. Something is always going to be wrong--humans can't create a society perfect for everyone. There's always a point at which one person's freedom or comfort has to be at the expense of another's or a compromise has to be made. The issue for a society is how the decision is made to handle that.
