Family, Household, Climate, Weather

The title will make sense only if the four words are taken as two dyads and these two are juxtaposed: Family vis-à-vis Household and Climate vis-à-vis Weather. Let me do that then.

We keep hearing about families going nuclear. No, I do not mean that they are aiming nukes, at whoever and whatever! The sense is that the family has shrunk. Is this true?

Not from my perspective. And, my perspective is not grounded in the movie Honey, I shrunk the kids either. It is somewhat deeper and I hope I got at least some of it right.

The family, in the older Indian traditions (not more than, say, 70 or 80 years ago) is the basic unit that took strategic decisions, in consultations the various households that comprised it. The family carries the connotation of strategy. But, a household is more of a tactical unit. True there was an autocrat at the helm of the family, but he or she was considered more benevolent than evil.

Over time it is the multiple households that fissioned themselves away from the family. The household, besides being a tactical unit, has also taken over many strategic functions. Earlier, “a wedding / birth in the family” meant something, but today, it is more like “a wedding / birth in the household”. However, when it comes to deaths, the family does tend to come together, at varying degrees, of course. The family is more realized in deaths than in weddings and births, as I see it. I hasten to add that there are exceptions to the above generalized observations.

If a household takes on strategic functions, does that make it a family? I do not think so. For one thing, I have always cringed at the phrase, “the extended family”. My disquiet on this front was the counter question, “Can a family be non-extended?” I had answered no.

The question is, then, extended to, “Can there be a nuclear family?” The obvious answer, no.

In the current context, the household is the family and the family is the household because the functional distinctions between strategic and tactical decisions have vanished. But, there is one way in which the phrases “extended family” and “nuclear family” can be legitimized.

Think retronyms.

Before electric guitars came there were no acoustic guitars! Before digital watches came there were no analog watches. Likewise, before the households took on strategic functions, there were no extended families! And, once you have extended families, the extension to nuclear families from households is a natural step!

In a sense I am extending this argument on retronyms to the current confusion between weather and climate. People experience a super-hot summer and cries of “global warming” rend the air. A mild summer – it is “global cooling” and “Al Gore is wrong!” This is a misreading of both climate and weather, just as the terms family and households have been misunderstood.

As an aside, I cringe, again, when I hear people say, “After the marriage”, when they mean, “After the wedding”! Wedding is short-term and marriage, ostensibly, long term.

Weather is akin to households; tactical, in the sense the time frame of reckoning weather is short – today's weather, tomorrow’s weather. But, climate, like the summer climate, had a longer perspective, more related to strategy. The climate was more stable over seasons, but the weather, date-wise year-on-year was not so.

But, for whatever reasons including possible global warming, even climate is being subjected to significant variations, over time and also spatial extent. This summer has less in common with last summer but may be a near replica of the summer of four years ago. Last year the monsoon was too early. This February in north India felt more like the November of a decade ago. Beijing is flooded like it had not been in a hundred years. And, so on.

When it comes to climate, my layman thinking says, that we should look out for variations in seasons between years, with a zoom-out perspective. It is not in the details of the weather the pattern of climate is embedded. It indeed may be the other way round. Therefore, if anyone mocks at your ideas of climate change and projects weather data as proof, you have the last laugh. Weather is weather and climate is climate.

But, if the climate starts behaving like the weather, what will you attribute it to? That is climate change. The parallel with the family-household dyad is stark. While the household started behaving like the family, in the climate-weather dyad the arrow is reversed: the climate is behaving like the weather. But both involve drastic changes. In the former it is a phenomenon of social change and in the letter, it is one of man’s imposition on the environment.

I then conclude that if you want to understand climate change, begin with the difference between family and household. You will be on the right track.

Raghuram Ekambaram