And it is the enemy of the family. We are increasingly forced to travel great distances to our place of employment, to live alone or wiith tiny family groups in huge dense communities or widely dispersed suburbs filled with strangers, and to work at tasks that are increasingly abstract and separated from our daily lives. More and more family functions are made impossible by our organization and we are forced to turn them over to impersonal specialists and indifferent institutions. Our entertainment, transport and communications first facilitates, then forces us to go farther and farther for our human contact, be it social or economic.

Consider the collapse of the Roman Empire. After the fall, the vast majority of the people still knew how to grow food, make their clothes, smelt metals for tools, build houses with available materials and simple tools, do all the things necessary to rebuild the civilization, or to maintain their lives until organization returned. Today we are mostly incapable of doing anything except some miniscule task that will be obsolete in the absence of civilization. Most of us, myself included, don't even know how to start a fire without mechanical aid.

Maintaining traditional family structures in a modern society is a luxury only a small propotrion of the population can now afford. As it is, the extended family or clan is almost gone, and even the nuclear family is becoming unnecessary. It is under stress because it increasingly interferes with the mobilirty and independence that society offers, or perhaps I should say, forces on us.

We were faced with similar challenges when we went from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture, but we had millenia to adapt. We faced similar challenges when we went from agriculture to urban industrialization, and it took us centuries of stress to manage that change. Now we are doing it in a post-industrial age, and the speed of change is now so fast that it is almost overwhelming in a single lifetime.