Two aspects of the triumph of the “bourgeois family” have had a profound effect on society: first is the capricious yearning for the so-called “better life,” which has resulted in a highly trained cadre of consumers, and second, an increasing lack of significance attached to the concepts of “place,” and family.

Hannah Coulter & The Bourgeois Family

by Robert Cheeks

The rise of techno-capitalism has signaled the triumph of the “bourgeois family” and the demise of the “traditional” family. Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas said that economist Adam Smith was well aware that the “weakening of familial ties would increase the necessity of sympathy between strangers and result in cooperative forms of behavior that had not previously been realized.” Commenting on Hauerwas’s statement, Professor David Crawford of the John Paul II Institute for the Studies on Marriage and family said, “It is not that families would cease to exist, but they would be transformed into the image of the exchange relations that underlie liberal societies.”1

Two aspects of the triumph of the “bourgeois family” have had a profound effect on society: first is the capricious yearning for the so-called “better life,” which has resulted in a highly trained cadre of consumers, and second, an increasing lack of significance attached to the concepts of “place,” and family. These two factors have played an important role in a society that has become acclimated to a rather pernicious spiritual condition that theologian, David Schindler, refers to as “homelessness.”

Kentucky essayist, poet, and novelist Wendell Berry has given his readers a glimpse of people who lived the “old ways.” In six novels and twenty-three short stories Berry has created the Port Williammembership, a group of neighbors who live along the ridges and “bottoms” south of “the river” in and around Port William, Kentucky, a town that never was yet always existed in our hearts.
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