Social analyst say that there are currently three major trends unfolding in American society today.
First, the number of voluntary pregnancies has risen, secondly, growing numbers of people are getting married, and third, people are switching religions?or belief systems?at unprecedented rates.
Some say it?s the war, others a form of subdued mass hysteria, and some even suggest that a collective fear response to the contemplated possibilities of massive deaths due to war might account for this behaviour. As if people possesed an internal mechanism that incites them to replenish their numbers when treathened.
People are also skipping the traditional wedding ceremony, and are either eloping, or just obtaining a marriage license.
andy quinones
Aha! Blu Iguana has touched on the very issue which is near and dear to me. Whether or not symbolism has lost it's effect ,for me, is moot. I do not know what the American experience is ( I live in Trinidad), but certainly people use symbolism as justification for the fact they they are ignorant of the origin and reason behind a concept.
Funerals, weddings, and worship are made into near commercial events with the trappings, clothes and props taking centre stage. This is all well and good for the parasitic industries which prey on people's reliance on ceremony , the decorators, the caterers, the dress designers, the wedding cake baker.... but if we just step back for a moment and examine the import of what is transpiring , we may well concluse as the great playwright did, that all the world is a stage and that our most important life decisions are merely fantasy based for the pleasure of the audience.
In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that people come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.
Marriage:
Early in our history, marriage simply didn't exist, in fact it is a relatively recent development (by "recent" I mean after the dinosaurs died and before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show). Marriage was originally conceived (no pun intended) as a way to signal the presence of a special bond between two people. At that time, marriage had no special significance itself, it was merely a social signaling device, and to some extent it also represented a contract with mutual obligations . In those times marriage stood as a mere symbol for something of actual substance -- a relationship between people that would have existed whether or not the symbol of marriage was also present .
Today marriage (the symbol) has become a thing in its own right, in some cases (and in some minds) replacing the thing it once only represented. It has become a multi-billion dollar industry, and only the most perceptive individuals remember that it was supposed to have symbolized something more important, more fundamental than itself -- a particular kind of human relationship. This reversal of symbol and thing has become so profound that one commonly hears a remark like "Marriage is what I really want!" as though marriage were anything more than a weather forecast or a road sign.
Naturally enough, this confusion of empty symbols and actual things has led to a rather well-documented disenchantment with that institution, even though the disenchantment is based on an error in perception. The reality of a human relationship between people (usually) of opposite sexes is quite different from the packaged perception called up by the word "marriage," to the degree that people often forget that they will have to build the thing (a human relationship) after achieving the symbol for the thing (marriage).
Then, after people waste precious time seeking "marriage" and discovering that marriage is nothing by itself, they complain they have been failed by "marriage." This is advanced puppetry, and no one seems willing to follow the strings.
But marriage itself (as it is practiced in modern times), by virtue of having taken on a life of its own, is in its turn a symbol for something more basic: We live in a time where symbols for things have largely replaced the things themselves , and this tendency exists in direct proportion to people's inability to distinguish between symbols and things.
From Blu
borrowed from weblog http://andyquinones.blogspot.com/
Friday, July 12, 2002