Abstract

ABSTRACT:

America is a grand evolutionary experiment.  As beautiful, creative, and inspirational as America, the culture and country, has been for the past 200 years, the past 40 years have produced an awareness of an evolutionary tipping point, a point at which this evolutionary flowering and success is threatening to poison the very source of its nourishment, the family.

On December 14 2012 twenty first-graders and seven educators were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Some would like to understand this tragedy simply as the work of a deranged young man, Adam Lanza, isolated and alienated from family and society. And surely this is true. But many suspect a larger truth lurks in the background: Something has gone wrong with American culture.  This essay is an exploration of that suspicion and the possibility that something else is at work in America and American culture—and that something else has spread and is spreading around the world.  On July 22 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, most of them children, at a youth camp in Norway.

 This book is an exploration of the complex relationship between family, the market, and the ideational and value foundations of both.  Can the values and moral principles of family that have informed biological and family life since the beginning of human evolution, be projected onto and replace “the market,” or are those spheres of life somehow intrinsically and necessarily different? And the dopple-ganger, Can market values and forces ever displace family values as the engine of healthy social organization? And what is the appropriate role of self-discipline or “government” in grounding, informing, and nudging this process towards more beautiful forms of human evolution?