Why their football team is more important that their family

Social nature’s triumph derived from a partial transcendence of biology. Its form of ‘belonging’ can be chosen and self-conscious, in a way the familial source itself rarely required. Hence individuals may come to feel more strongly – and less ambivalently – about their clan, football team or nation, than about the parents, siblings and cousins who directly helped to form them.

literature of dissent.

This  does not mean we are in the barbarian hinterland

And this isn’t necessarily irrational. The broader framework pr0vides enhanced meaning and status, as well as powers far greater than those of natural family groups (there are exceptions, admittedly, like the Bush, Castro, Windsor and other dynasties). Behind this enhancement lies a powerful, indeed fundamental force. One might call it the enabling boundary. 

The import of Chomsky’s ‘deep grammar’ of communication is societal: meaningful voice is the crucial ‘institution’ that allows the formation of extra-familial units extensive enough to construct and transmit a plurality of second natures. Once constituted, these natures depend on ‘imagined communities’ in Anderson’s celebrated sense. Such communities are a decisive survival tool, because they embody what Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, in Not by Genes Alone (2004), have described as ‘ultra-sociality’.

Human ultra-sociality is quite different from the communal networks formed among so many other species. As Durkheim showed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, homo sapiens gains its distinctive powers from a systematic projection of social capacities: that is, by inventing a ‘sacred’ dimension, which in turn both allows and demands a greater than familial entity, a ‘congregation’ or church. Far from being ‘irrational’, this tendency, as Durkheim suggested, may be what makes possible the emergence of ‘reason’, abstract thought and comparison. Richard Dawkins’s despised ‘God delusion’ must always have sustained the amplified forces of extra-kinship society – a far greater co-operative force than any extended family nexus could supply.

This particular signpost has additional merits: it points to a recent turn in theoretical speculation about family structure, away from the Freudian interest in parent-child relations and the pathology derived from them

The perils of fratricide and parricide have always darkened fraternity, and yet are largely absent from sorority. a society for female students in a university or college.