Modern life is considerably more privatized or, if you will, isolated, than life was fifty or a hundred years ago. Because people survived together. You think of the farm family on the plains, they relied on each other, even on the children. You think of urban immigrants, packed into the tenement houses, they had to work together and there was a remarkable amount of cohesiveness, particularly around ethnic identity. The Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Poles, the Slavs. Earlier on the Germans, the French. And you had parishes with those ethnic identities because people relied on their community.
Unfortunately, modern life is very private. People get into the upper-middle class and they want a big house with a big lawn and loads of hedges. They wanna move out into the wild blue yonder. And, because of commuting, the man may be out of the house ten or twelve hours a day and he comes home exhausted. And the wife, because of the small number of children, does not have the old domestic responsibilities. And so, you have a society of ease.
That's dangerous. If you read any place in the history of the world when societies got soft and fuzzy, they were about to go under. And I think that people only sharpen their awareness of ability, their sense of self-respect, by struggle.
Just an auto-biographical note, I've worked every day of my life since I was in the 4th grade. The 4th grade, I started out with a paper route of 62 papers. Which is a lot of papers for a little kid to carry, made five dollars a week, and I saved most of that up. I came from a large family, I was the oldest, and my brothers all took the jobs that I had. We worked in a china shop, we caddied, we did things together and life was that way.
Now, the extreme privatization that comes from economic security or apparent security, can cause people to live isolated lives.
