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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

Family legacy is quite obsolete in modern society.

Not every society wants to be modern.

Modern society cuts family ties which is a lot of times not so great, but on the other hand it saves lots of people from abusive relationships.

Once you can leave abusive parents or siblings, whole world of opportunities opens. Then again on the other hand not everyone can deal with such a freedom.

Yet still I am personally supportive of modern approaches where people can choose their destiny and not being tied to a family legacy.

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At least in France, it means the father leaves and the kid doesn't have enough money to study — and we're transitioning to the workplace providing the funding for studies (apprenticeships where the company pays 10k€ per year, empoverishing the worker).

I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.

We will probably find out very soon why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.

Please don't vaguepost on hn. It's hard to guess if this is an attack or a defense of the nuclear family (us other commenters would have to guess if you know how recent that phenomenon is).

Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.

To me, it's very clear GP was writing in support of traditional values, of which nuclear family is one.

Yes, same here. But i should admit that i hold somewhat conservative values compared to modern 2016+ societies values.

I consider my values to be very centrist and common sense, however every year i learn more and more that what i consider to be common sense isnt very common.

Yes that was one thing I had in mind, but I also think even older patterns, like the whole tribe contributing to raising the children of everyone, is something worth thinking about. Why did every society did it? And things like that. We have some of those in a modified form today, like daycare, but I feel like we’re straying a bit too far into unknown territory without considering the consequences.

Please don't gatekeep hn posts. Comments with little interests will receive little replies and others will rise. You adding a reply helps the post you dislike rise over others.

You really can’t understand what I mean when I say humans used to organize themselves in certain ways? Just read about the topic then, humans almost always had a very similar pattern in how society worked which only broke with the transitions from hunters gatherers to agriculture around 10,000 years ago in most regions (though some still haven’t transitioned) and then to industrial society, around 250 to 100 years ago depending on the region. The current era where everyone has electricity and water and all sorts of devices to help with labor is really recent, just less than 100 years. It allowed us to experiment with society building in ways we just couldn’t imagine before. However, we just don’t know if the things we’re doing now are sustainable as we have not had hundreds of years of stable societies to know that. My comment was referring to that. The decline in population growth, rise of loneliness and other problems we have now just didn’t exist before. The changes we made to society are to blame , no question about that, and I think we are still learning just that older societies can’t just be rearranged the way we feel like just because we can, without suffering unpredictable consequences. Does that clarify things for you or should I explain how those pre industrial societies functioned?

>Just read about the topic then >Does that clarify things for you or should I explain how those pre industrial societies functioned?

This level of condescension paired with an equivalent level of ignorance is astounding, especially as the only reason I asked you was because I wanted to steelman your position, but it was so vague that this was hard to do.

I originally asked if you meant the nuclear family with your statement "why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.", because I wanted to know if you are aware that the nuclear family as a dominant structure is _a lot_ younger than that.

But in another reply, you said that you meant to talk about the nuclear family and the raising of children by the whole tribe. These are very different from each other, and that's why I asked you to clarify. Now I know that you just wanted to express a general feeling of regret that things aren't the way you image them to have been in the past, and your comment didn't contain any real content besides that, I can move on with my life.

The idea of surnames is an anthropologically recent tradition. Humans living in small communities had no practical need for multiple names. Surnames mostly arise in societies with relatively strong centralized states so that the government has an easier time tracking its citizens (census-taking, tax collecting, etc.).

The idea of being named after your father (or your husband for that matter) is much older than surnames. Don't know exactly how old, because written history is only available for strong centralized states, but at least biblical times.

Yes, but the context of this thread is about taking your father's surname specifically. Even "modern societies" where wives might have the option to not take their husband's surname aren't moving away from naming sons after their fathers, as far as their given name goes.

I meant the "John son of Jack" thing. It was extremely common for thousands of years across pretty much every European culture, and Jews (likely other people too but IDK). Eventually it transformed into surnames by Jackson. The important part is that surnames didn't introduce the idea of father's name being part of your name even if you're not named after him. This was already widely practiced, surnames just streamlined the process and made ancestry more trackable (though some countries still use the old rules to this day. Spain I think, and Iceland maybe?)

Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.

That is a bit cliché isn't it? According to INSEE in France 12% of the kids were in shared custody and that is the mean. At 10 y old it is around 15%. And around 24% of the fathers get full custody.

So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.

Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.

So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.

But then if a child succeeds despite whatever failure his father was he is stuck with that looser name.

Why not have him take the Maiden name so everyone can know the mother who failed him?

Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.

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