Why Family Matters

Por qué importa la familia: la escuela de la vida 8/16/23, 1)47 PM
Why Family Matters

– Emotional Nepotism
One of the things that makes families so important and so meaningful is

that they are centres of unashamed nepotism. Weʼre used to thinking
very negatively of nepotism. We are taught that a good society is one in
which people rise and fall according to their own merits or flaws – and
do not gain any sort of unfair favour from their families. But, in a crucial
emotional sense at least, most of us donʼt actually believe this. We are
all, to a greater or lesser extent, emotional nepotists.
Historically, the idea of nepotism in Europe was particularly associated

with the Catholic Church during the Renaissance. The word nepotism
was born when a series of Popes took to appointing their nephews
(nipote in Italian), along with other family members, to top jobs
irrespective of their talents.
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Titian, Pope Paul III and His Grandsons, 1545–46
In 1534, the already elderly Alessandro Farnese was elected Pope and
took the name of Paul III. One of the first things he did was to elevate his
young grandson (also called Alessandro) to the influential and lucrative

position of Cardinal. He made another grandson the Duke of one of the
small Italian states that was – at that time – directly under the control of
the Pope. It was all appallingly unfair. In this regard, nepotism presents a
deep affront to modern enlightened ideals of open competition,
especially around work and careers.
But we have to admit that the idea of bias towards relatives possesses –
in the emotional as opposed to the professional sense – a deeply
reassuring and attractive side as well. What is more, we have all
ineluctably been the beneficiaries of the starkest, grossest nepotism
already. We wouldnʼt have got here without it. Thatʼs because when we
were born, despite the millions of other children in the world,
irrespective of our merits (we didnʼt really have any), our parents and
wider family made the decision to take care of us: to devote huge
amounts of time, love and money to our well being: not because we had
done anything to deserve it – at that time, we were barely capable of
holding a spoon let alone saying hello – but simply because we were
related to them.
Nepotism is what ensures that a series of tantrums will be forgiven; that

unpleasant traits of character will be overlooked; that weʼll be supported
as we rant and rage in the small hours; that parents will forgive children
who have not been especially good – and that children with somewhat
disappointing parents will still, despite everything, show up for the
holidays.
Because of the existence of family, we all have an experience of

belonging not based on our beliefs or accomplishments or efforts (all of
which may change or fail) but on something far purer and more
irrevocable: the fact of our birth. In a world in which our employment
generally hangs by a thread, in which we are judged swiftly and

definitively by almost everyone, in our families at least, we know that we
canʼt be sacked, even if we donʼt make very special conversation at
dinner and have failed dismally in our careers. Given how fragile our
standing in the eyes of others generally is, this is a source of huge
ongoing emotional relief.
Within families, thereʼs often a welcome disregard not just for demerits,
but for merits as well. Within the family, it may not really matter how well
or how badly youʼre doing in the world of money and work outside. The
daughter who becomes a high court judge is probably not going to be
loved any more than the son who has a little stall in the market selling
origami dragons; the steely negotiator and demanding boss in charge of
the livelihoods of thousands will be endlessly teased by their relatives
for their poor taste in jumpers and tendency to belch at inopportune
moments.
Although nepotism is genuinely misplaced at work, some version of

nepotism is extremely important in our emotional lives overall because,
however competent and impressive we might be in certain areas, there
are inevitably going to be many points on which weʼre distinctly feeble –
and around which we urgently need at least a few people to be reliably
patient with our failings and follies, to give us a second chance and a
third and a fourth and to stay on our side even though (from a strict
point of view) we donʼt really deserve it at all. Good families arenʼt blind
to our faults; they just choose not to use these faults too harshly against
us.
Once we define family like this, a strange thing can happen: we realise
we donʼt have to restrict the concept of family to its basic biological
limits. In reality, anyone who takes a deeply supportive attitude towards
us is automatically, in an extended sense, part of our ‘familyʼ – and we in

our turn become a family member to anyone we treat in this reliably
generous way. That is why the highest ethical goal remains stunningly
simple in structure even if it is extraordinarily demanding in practice: to
strive to treat all of humankind as if they were what they in fact already
really are: members of one enormous family.
– Knowledge
Our family members are probably the only people in the world who ever
deeply understand key bits of us. Perhaps we donʼt always get on better
with them than with other people. They might not know the details of our
current friendships or the precise state of our finances. But they have a
knowledge of the underlying atmosphere of our lives that others will
always lack.
When we make new acquaintances in adult life, we are necessarily

meeting relatively late on in our respective developments. We might
learn the broad outline of their childhood, but we wonʼt know what the
holiday caravan or the beach house were really like, we wonʼt
understand the details of the jokes, the smells, the textures of the
carpets, the favourite foods, the finer-grained aspects of the emotions
in circulation.
With family members, the knowledge tends to be the other way round.
They might not know too much about our present and they werenʼt
necessarily always ideally wise or intelligent witnesses, but they were
there – which gives them a definitive edge in grasping a lot about who
we might be. Relationships in adult life are so often complicated by a
lack of knowledge of our respective pasts. If we had been the brother or
sister to the loud, domineering figure over dinner, we would of course
have understood that they were, still – at root – trying to get heard by
their inattentive mother. And, as a result, weʼd know the perfect
response ( ‘Iʼm listening nowʼ) that would instantly calm them down. Or
if we had shared a bath with the tough exacting chief financial officer
when we were three, weʼd know that their highly rigorous, inquisitorial
approach (which can appear so off-putting) was really nothing more
than an attempt to stave off the chaos that surrounded him at home
after the messy divorce. The full facts would make us so much readier to
forgive.
At the same time, it is precisely the superior knowledge of family

members that can make us want to run away from them. The past they
have to hand is in danger of crushing our present possibilities and
hampers our attempts to develop in new ways. Yet after sufficient
freedom and a satisfying number of clean starts, we may come to a
resolved, distinctive gratitude towards our families; those unparalleled,
imperfect but superlative archivists of our pasts; those who were
always there.
– Safe Strangeness
One of the reliable horrors, but also profound advantages, of families is

that they force us to spend time around people we would otherwise
never have known about, wanted to meet, or thought we could get along
with.
Our friendships and professional networks are hugely, but harmfully

efficient at keeping us closely tied to a particular age, income and
ideological bracket. We subtly yet firmly expel all those who do not
flatter our world view. Family life does the opposite. Itʼs because of the
unique structure of a family that an 82 year old woman and 4 year old
boy can become friends or that a 56 year old dentist and an 11 year old
schoolgirl can have an in depth conversation about a song or splash
each other while swimming at the beach.
The family creates an environment in which there is enough safety to

allow for encounters with radical strangeness. A brother-in-law will
bring us into contact with life in the Russian diamond market; in families,
the university researcher who has just published a paper on the carbon
cycle in the Takayama forests of Japan gets to sit down for a long lunch
with an accountant specialising in insolvency cases. Families create
settings in which points of connection can be found amidst the obvious
differences. We are led to do the dishes with someone whose political
views are pretty much the opposite of our own but discover we agree
deeply about how to rinse glasses properly. We rescue the picnic from
an unexpected downpour – with someone who earns 83 times more
than us serving as our loyal assistant. Prompted by our nieces and

nephews, we get into an adults vs. children water-gun fight, supported
by a cousin whom our friends would dismiss as a long-haired loser and a
waster but whom we realise is really rather lovely and great at spotting
an opportunity for an ambush.
Families, at their best, hold out against generational segregation: we get

to hear the political views of a great-aunt and encounter convictions
that were widespread in 1973. We receive an update on the dramas of
the junior hockey league; a younger cousin is agonising over school
exams and tentatively exploring what they might like to do after turning
21; an uncle has recently retired and is trying to come to terms with a life
without work; at the funeral of a grandparent thereʼs an eighteen month
old niece crawling around – and weʼre temporarily connected with the
world of changing nappies and messy spoon feeding.
So often, otherness – other stages of life, other attitudes, other outlooks

– are presented to us in tricky guises that make it hard for us to engage
confidently with them. Itʼs not surprising, or intrinsically shameful, that
weʼre often awkward around people who seem not at all like us, but our
picture of them (and hence also of ourselves) thereby gets
unfortunately impoverished and inaccurate. When family life goes well,
we are continually exposed – at first hand, and in a warm way – to ranges
of human experience that might otherwise only ever be presented to us
in caricatured and frightening ways in the course of our own lives. In its
ideal versions, the wider family does two crucial things: it makes us see
how interesting apparently off-putting people can be, if one gets the
chance to go below the surface with them; and it connects up the whole
long story of life, which it is otherwise so hard for us to keep properly in
mind in the blinkered present.
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Why Family Matters

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Por qué importa la familia: la escuela de la vida 8/16/23, 1)47 PM

Why Family Matters

One of the things that makes families so important and so meaningful is

Historically, the idea of nepotism in Europe was particularly associated

Titian, Pope Paul III and His Grandsons, 1545–46

young grandson (also called Alessandro) to the influential and lucrative

Nepotism is what ensures that a series of tantrums will be forgiven; that

Because of the existence of family, we all have an experience of

generally hangs by a thread, in which we are judged swiftly and

Although nepotism is genuinely misplaced at work, some version of

us is automatically, in an extended sense, part of our ‘familyʼ – and we in

When we make new acquaintances in adult life, we are necessarily

At the same time, it is precisely the superior knowledge of family

One of the reliable horrors, but also profound advantages, of families is

Our friendships and professional networks are hugely, but harmfully

The family creates an environment in which there is enough safety to

than us serving as our loyal assistant. Prompted by our nieces and

Families, at their best, hold out against generational segregation: we get

So often, otherness – other stages of life, other attitudes, other outlooks

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