HOW THE CONCEPT OF “HOME” HAS EVOLVED.
By Roberto Prado
Los Angeles,20 January 2019
Revised, Los Angeles, 06 December, 2022
How far we’ve come since those early days, before time was counted; when thoughts were still newly formed on our lips and sounds gave way to words! How different are we now? When we stare into a flame, do we still lose ourselves in its depths? Beyond all of our civilized presumptions, we still know those early sounds, we feel them.
Just one syllable.
… Home.
…or,
…How Did We Get Here?
“There’s no place like home.”
– L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
Is it a surprise that one of the most prosaic statements in the English language is coined by a little girl from Kansas, …while in the land of Oz?
Along with “Home Sweet Home”, I am willing to bet it is one of the most often embroidered bits of text in the English language.
“Home” is deceptive in its simplicity, yet brings with it primordial associations far beyond its current dictionary definition as being “of or related to the place where one lives”.
The word “home” has had a very long and extraordinary journey from its Danish and German roots to the modern day.
Just a single syllable; there’s no embelishment, no compound root; it can be spoken with a single breath, but somehow evokes all of the sentiment of a lifetime, of generations even of a whole people. It speaks of comfort, security.
Home is shelter, family, tribe, protection.
Home is where one finds compassion, understanding, acceptance.
Home.
Homeland.
Ancestral home.
Family home.
We leave home. We return home.
Home base.
If we reach home, we are safe.
We can be far from home.
Or we can be home …less.
Following it back beyond the relatively new English language to its Germanic root “heim”, it is even more intricately woven into the fabric of the language and the culture. “Heim”, “ham” and its variations, anchor tribes, families and people, e.g. Mannheim, Tondheim; thus “Birmingham” means “the settlement of Beorma’s people”, i.e. “the settlement of the Beorminga tribe”
It predates the concept of nations and empires and reaches back to our tribal past, to the birth of language itself.
OF HEARTH AND HOME
Home has a more modern companion: hearth. Fire.
“Hearth and Home”
This is intimate.
It is not coincidental to associate the two. Fireplaces are still built into modern homes, even though we long ago ceased needing them for heat or cooking.
But the association of fire with home is very old, very, very old. While most other languages use words for “home” that mean “house”, quite a number also use words relating to fire. Fire is central. Fire is home. Fire is why your tribe is not cat food.
We are never far away from some sort of fire.
Hogar, Fogar, Fuego, Fire.
All of the Romance languages derive the word for “hearth”, from the Latin “focis”, from which is derived the English word ”focus”. “Focis” means fire in Latin. So important is the concept of fire to man, that the Latin word for it has come to mean a concentrated point.
Our abstraction of fire is best seen now in our use of electricity. Fire in its most subtle and abstracted form is still at the core of our civilization. There is a reason why I mention this here, and it relates to the concept of “hearth” and its relation to our concept of “home”.
Stare into a single candle flame and it is not difficult to see how our distant ancestors would stare into their all-important, life-preserving fire, and see meaning in the dancing, flickering images of the flame and the shaodws it cast on the walls and floor.
Cave paintings in France and Spain, come alive when viewed in torch-light. Their authors positioned each line with care, so as to create the illusion of the thundering hooves of the auroch they hunted. In the hushed silence of the primordial night, one can imagine the impression these early shamen made on the youth of their day, as the firelight brought these horned beasts to life.
Fire wasn’t just protection, fire told stories, fire gathered the tribe at the end of the day, when the the shadows beyond the firelight became ever more menacing.
We have gathered around fire since we learned to tame it. Whether one’s ancestors gathered around a ceremonial flame deep in the safety of an underground cave, or around a small cooking fire outside of a tent made of animal skins, with the wind of the steppes howling like wolves around their huddled forms, this was home.
When we began to build more permanent structures to replace the makeshift shelters of our more nomadic past, we placed the fire in the heart of all of them. From temple to lowly hut, the fire was contained within.
We have brought the fire with us, always. As we moved through the centuries towards the modern age, fire has been our constant companion. We did not just tame it, we transformed it, used it, abstracted it. Stoves evolved from crude clay mounds, to sophisticated machines with more circuitry than early spacecraft. Not content to stare into a fire and tease out images and meaning, we made fire produce those images with ever increasing clarity. From magic lantern to motion pictures, television, and virtual reality, we have made those images come to life.
Electronic media disrupted the position of the hearth in modern homes. Even after the introduction of wood stoves and gas lighting, the fireplace continued to be the gatering place for families at the end of the day. Radio was the first to threaten the hearth as the focus of the family. Television followed and this produced a curious phenomenon.
Interior design magazines in the 1980’s and 1990’s began to struggle with the positioning of fireplaces and televisions. Articles were written debating the polemic, which carried much deeper implications than just those of furniture placement. What was being displaced from the central position in gatherings was the fireplace …the hearth. Flat screen televisions helped many to resolve this conundrum, by just placing the television above the fireplace. While this proved a suitable temporary solution to the puzzle of where to put the television, it set the stage for a transformation.
Domus, Domicile, and Domestic
The Greco-Roman concept of “domus”, from which we derive “domicile” and “domestic”, was a structure for family activity. The domus was ordered according to the customs of the time and became a metaphor for the family itself. “The House of Tudor” does not refer to a dwelling, but the Tudor family itself.
Here we begin to see the first abstractions of the concept of “home”. Tribal structure has given way to imperial structure and the tribe has been assimilated into a kingdom, or an empire. Tribal names become the names of countries or provinces and people begin moving around.
As tribes are absorbed into bigger structures, family becomes the basic organizational unit.
Thus, families of Gutes from what is now Sweden, become the Gutierrez as their Visigoth descendants migrate south from Gütland (gute-land = gute-terra+ ez, “ez”=“son of”).
Home is now portable.
People are making new homes.
Homes becomes “houses”.
We have evolved a new concept of home, a generational concept of home: sons and daughters would reach adulthood, marry, and establish a new home. Usually not far away.
The Machine Age changed all of that and acient concepts like home and family were ground up in the gears of the new machines. This was the next great transformation of hearth and home.
The Machine Age and the Nuclear Family
In the film “Modern Times”, Charlie Chaplin is gleefully caught in the massive gears of the machines, the servicing of which is his job. Wrench in hand, ever tightening one or another bolt or nut, and with a happy smile on his face, he is sucked up into the machine and absorbed by it.
Ortega y Gasset observes that, once upon a time, a young man would reach adulthood, marry his sweetheart and find a plot of land from which to carve out an existence and raise a family. He continues that, such is not the fate of undustrial man, who must instead pass through a process of academic selection until receiving a diploma or certificate which then allows him or her to prepare a résumé. This is then shown to numerous individuals at divers businesses, until one of them offers the youth employment.
Home is not included in that equation.
Family isn’t either.
Famine, floods, earthquakes, wars and empires have caused whole nations of man to migrate across continents for millenia and tribal origins have long been forgotten in the dotted line quiltwork of modern maps. As Iron Age becomes Machine Age, maps are redrawn again and Nation States amalgamate tribal Nations under mono-cultural umbrellas, giving birth to the National Republic. Colonization becomes nationalization.
The machine age created another new phenomenon: two world wars featuring increasing technological innovation and producing unheard of levels of barbarity.
Oh, and – rapid transport.
The movement of massive amounts of people and goods did not stop after the wars. The effects of this sudden globalization were profound, on both “home” and “family”.
The whole of the world was accessible and the world cities were dominant.
Oswald Spengler writes that the creation of world cities: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, diminshed the relevance of provincial, cultural, capitals. World cities, he continues, abstract things, and indeed, they do. From art, music and architecture, to political theory, economics and even currency itself, modern world cities have abstracted every aspect of human existence. They have done so to such an extent that none of these are intelligible outside of the world cities. Even a painting by Picasso evokes quizical looks today, over a hundred years after its creation at the dawn of the machine age.
The concept of “home” was not spared.
In architecture “domus” gave way to the concept of a “machine for living” and Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus, de Stijl and their contemporaries replaced old construction techniques with new, standardized techniques. Houses could be mass produced from interchangeable parts. So could skyscrapers.
The Industrial Migration
From 1950 to 1970 a full one-third of the US population moved from the countryside to the cities. They were migrating there, fresh, young hopefuls from farms across the country, in search of well paying jobs in the industrial centers. This phenomenon rippled across the industrialized world, and family farms were abandoned as a whole generation of young people left home for a new life in the new cities.
Families were separated not by a handful of miles, but by hundreds of them. Whole economies shifted from being primarily agricultural, to being primarily industrial. Businesses were no longer limited to their home city or province, but could access customers around the world. All of this new enterprise required a new way of looking at things.
By 1980 people were changing cities for reasons of employment every few years. Families were raised far from grandmother and grandfather and aunts and uncles lived in far away cities, or even in other countries. The divorce rate skyrocketed, climbing to over 50% and, in some places today, an astounding 75%.
As commerce became increasingly global, so did the workforce. World cities had long ago grown accustomed to foreign faces, but now whole populations were emerging in cities around the world. Interracial and inter-cultural marriages became more common, which further blurred national and cultural distinctions. Mom and Dad have two distinct, possibly even incompatible, homelands, while their children are being raised in a third, very different culture. Santa Claus begins to transcend his germanic, Christian, roots and becomes a global marketing phenomenon – which borders on the surreal, if one thinks about it.
The concepts of “home” and “family” needed to be reconsidered in this environment.
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch …
Of course, all of that was concentrated in the industrial centers, which were, in an ever increasing way, dictating the cultural transformations of their respective areas. Back home on the farm, cultural stalwarts from sheep farmers and aboriginal chieftains, to small town parish priests could only try to adapt the old ways to the onslaught of the new. Home seemed to be a forgotten concept.
Once upon a time, everything was in its place. Suddenly, everything was every place. Benjamin R. Barber refers to this phenomenon as “McWorld” in his book “Jihad vs. McWorld” where he discusses the effects of globalization on local culture, producing radical nationalism.
The same blue jeans, the same hamburger, the same pizza, the same …wait a minute, my people never ate hamburgers.
As the world was brought closer together, it began to fall apart.
The refusal to participate in this global cultural assimilation into a homogenized, very Western, very secular, doctrine emerged. Benjamin Barber refers to this employing the term “jihad”. For him, the term refers to any cultural group or subgroup that actively, even violently, refuses to identify with McWorld. Berman states that the desire to separate from McWorld can be so extreme as to be self-destructive.
And Then …
“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
The thing about paradigms is that they change in much the same way that the character Mike goes bankrupt in The Sun Also Rises. We are now at the beginning of the “suddenly” part of what is proving to be the most significant paradigm shift of human history. Like the previous Enlightenment, this transformational change in global society will have a profound effect on almost every aspect of life, from how we grow food, transport ourselves and our products and produce energy, just to name a few.
The acceleration of technological evolution, which kicked into high gear with the advent of the machine age, has left all gears and sprockets behind in its ever increasing speed.
In the 21st century, we will experience the equivalent of ten thousand years of technological evolution.
The algorithm for the frequency of technological innovation is now also growing algorithmically and we are evolving along with it. As we reach for the stars and beyond, we are, at the same time, reaching deep into the smallest bits of matter, and then teasing them apart.
We can print a human jawbone or femur, grow perfect blood vessels and replace every piece of the human body. We are testing spacecraft for the purposes of tourism. We can print a house.
Our world cities are more cosmopolitan than ever. There are 144 languages spoken in the city of Los Angeles alone and it is home to the second largest population for 62 countries, making Los Angeles their second largest city. New York City and London are home to similar numbers of nationalities.
Home is now… situational.
The Age of Crisis
Ortega y Gasset also wrote that man is man, and his circumstances.
While at one end of the bell curve, our species is teasing apart the fabric of space-time and printing blood vessels, the vast majority of the species lives in a different reality.
The city landfill outside of Manila, in the Philippines, has a population of over 25,000 people. The number of refugees and migrants is growing at an exponential rate as is the birth rate in the most blighted parts of the planet.
Millions are dispossessed. Far from home and with no new home in sight. For these unfortunate souls, home has been reduced to the primordial fire, the shelter of a tent, if that.
For many of our fellow human beings, home has become time. Either a time in the future, or a time in the past. The present, for them, has no home, or, rather, home is once again a fragile and temporary shelter from the very menacing world beyond the firelight.
And …Oz
Back in the first world, driving the sweep of a new age of industrialization poised to either save or destroy life on earth, we are no less dispossessed. With the birth rate of the top industrialized countries in decline, population growth has been, in very large part, due to immigration. A very large percentage of the homes in all of the industrialized countries speak more than one language, with the language spoken at home being different from that spoken outside.
Our families, friends, and business associates are scattered around the world. We have compensated by further abstracting our good friend fire – now in the form of global communications networks that every day can better emulate reality. Hearth is now in the palm of our hands and home is a soft network of communications. We are abstracting reality itself.
“There” and “here” dissolve into a ubiquitous now and the historical record is written in real time by its seven billion participants – or, at least those with a smartphone. Home and homeland are poised to become home planet, provided that, as we come closer together, we don’t fall apart.
Is there still no place like home?
We left Kansas a long time ago, Dorothy.