A good op-ed in today’s Washington Post gets at the ways in which globalized modernity (or modernized globalization) undermines traditional family structures and engenders new social practices.  The author, Harold Meyerson, focuses on the divergent experiences of different social classes:

…Taking into account all households, married couples with children
are twice as likely to be in the top 20 percent of incomes, Harden
reported. Their incomes have increased 59 percent over the past 30
years, while households overall have experienced just a 44 percent
increase.

To be sure, the ’60s, with its assaults on traditional authority, played some role in weakening the traditional family.

But
its message was sounded loudest and clearest on elite college campuses,
whose graduates were nonetheless the group most likely to have stable
marriages. Then again, they were also the group most likely to have
stable careers.

They enjoyed financial stability; they could plan for the future.

Such
was not the case for working-class Americans. Over the past 35 years,
the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American
workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count
on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and
health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades,
workers’ individual annual income fluctuations have consistently
increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new
economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again
health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic
futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic
security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

     Instead of seeing this as marriage causing economic prosperity, he sees it as economic difficulty causing a decline in marriage.   And that has significant policy implications.  Instead of urging marriage on working classes, as some American conservatives are wont to do, he would suggest changing economic policies to make it easier for lower income people to get married.  That makes sense to me.  It is very easy to see how economic struggle can place unbearable stresses and strains on a married couple.   Meyerson pushes the political point:

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new,
more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry
the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The
right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and
union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned
American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the
decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as
the night the day.

      His invocation of "flexibility" alludes to the notion of "flexible accumulation," which I usually associate with David Harvey’s book, The Condition of Postmodernity.  I would disagree with some of Meyerson’s policy prescriptions (kind of hard to see how we avoid a certain level of outsourcing), but I think his nod toward Harvey (or at least my reading of his nod toward Harvey) places family policy in a global political-economy context.  And I think that is a level of analysis we must keep in mind when thinking about transformations of marriage.

      It is also something we must keep in mind when we think about what ancient Chinese philosophy might be able to say to us today.  My general impression is that globalized modernity makes is hard out there for a Confucian.  The anti-commercial, anti-profit stance of the Analects is virtually impossible to realize in the contemporary world economy.   That doesn’t mean Confucianism is irrelevant – I obviously do not believe that.  Rather, it suggests that what we might expect from a (post)modernized Confucianism must be rather different from what Confucianism was in pre-modern contexts.

      Another thought: it is easier to adapt Taoism to conditions of postmodernity.  "Flexibility," while certainly a part of Confucianism (its ethics have a situational sensibility), is more central to Taoism.  Reacting to changing conditions, without much worry for historical precedent or common practice, is something that should come naturally to a Taoist. 

     Last point: modern Confucians can prefer, but cannot demand, the reproduction of traditional family structures under conditions of postmodernity, but must, instead, seek to understand the political-economic context within which well-meaning individuals are struggling to do the right thing.  Humanity can remain the goal, but might look different now.