Don's Reviews > Radical Intimacy

Read the Left Book Club edition. Interesting piece which seems to be written in the emerging 'salvage' current (works which salvage lessons and experiences of second-half 20th century progressive social struggle). In this case what is being revisited is the interest in moving beyond the confinement of human intimacy to the bourgeois nuclear family and liberating it to a position where if can be experienced in wider communal contexts.

Rosa opens up the argument with a lament about the worsening state of mental health in contemporary life and the growing role of a dubious 'happiness' industry in providing sticking plaster care. And that is only the soft focus end of the business. For those who can't afford an app that links them to an online therapist there is the Mental Health Act, which empowers the police to enter homes and restrain, arrest and detain anyone going through an episode of distress. The Anti-psychiatry movement that flourished in the 60s and 70s had seen the way the wind was blowing and offered an alternative explanation for poor mental health, which was seen as having its roots in the emotional repression of the nuclear family. 'Wellness' - meaning the right to be well (?) - was seen as a common good which had to be struggled for collectively.

From this point the book moves on to look at the ideology of romantic love between, ideally, a man and a women, which establishes the structure in which babies can be born and children raised. More might have been said about the his history of romantic love and how seldom it has appeared across the generations as a practical form of living life. Its heyday in countries like the UK, from where Rosa draws most of her examples, was in the 1950s and probably didn't last much longer than this brief period of years. Itself the product of a generation of men whose normal lives had been interrupted by having to go off and fight in wars and women who had lived through the years of deprivation and terror bombing, when the hope that all might be redeemed by collapsing into the arms of the pre-destined 'right one'. By the 1960s many of these marriages were coasting towards acrimonious separation or sustained with the aid of alcohol or Valium.

Rosa surveys how things stand with the marriage market as it currently exists, replete with commercial dating apps and a dream of finding Mr/Ms Right fuelled by Love Island-type reality shows. When the relationships established by these means goes to bust the wreckage is picked over in the law courts to establish whether blame can be attributed to either party, using the ancient concepts of betrayal and adultery to mete out the appropriate forms of punishment. Meanwhile society moves further and further away from any concept of a mutually sustaining relationship with facilitates rather than impedes the capacity to live out the hope of freedom.

Then onto the children who are raised within the constraints of the nuclear family, or whatever remains after it has broken down. The evidence that children are more likely to flourish in communal households with adults other than the biological parents on hand to provide attention and care is abundant but this presumes types of housing, with multiple rooms and large shared spaces for dining and recreation that few of us can afford. The advantage of these extended relationships is acknowledged in the cliche about it 'taking a village' to raise a child but less is said about the work of the past century to whittle down communal intimacy and reduce everything to the binary ideal of a man and woman as care providers. The practices of aboriginal people as the providers of these enriching experiences is simultaneously exoticised and marginalised in industrialised societies, with the communities that withhold these traditions deprived of their lands and resources that enable them to be lived out.

A final chapter precedes the books conclusion which delves in the way overdeveloped countries deal with advanced age and the inevitability of dying. Society has used religion to soften the hard facts of our personal extinction but to many these seems like evasion - hiding behind the claim for a life after death - rather than truth-telling. The book argues that even the finality of life can be faced up to by facing it as collective experience, in which the dying person is accompanied through the final stages by others with whom they have shared parts of the whole of their lives, with all the appropriate forms of care, including ritual, which might bring the subject to the final end.

In keeping with do many books which urge radical rethinks of social practices, the book calls for 'abolition' of the oppressive feature being considered - in this case, the family itself. It acknowledges the likely reaction to this as a slogan, with resistance from those for whom family life in its present form is experienced as sustaining, and in any event a better option than the alternative, which is likely to be loneliness and isolation and loss of opportunities for sexual relations and the affections gleaned from have a partner and raising children. Insisting on abolition in the face of these moods seems overly purist and the argument can be advanced equally well by calling for the transformation of the family by embedding it within a communal setting. But the book's central points, that intimacy is critical for human happiness and would be more rewarding if experienced in more extensive networks of care and affection, remains solid and convincing.