The family

I'm reading Don DeLillo's book, White Noise, and love his writing, the way he describes people, events, thoughts, with original imagery while always digging deeper at the meaning of everything in life. I'm quoting a few words he puts in the mouth of a professor who spews out ideas continuously, and reminds me of manic, neurotic Woody Allen.

"The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fiction proliferate … Not to know is a weapon of survival ... Magic and supersitition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted." Don DeLillo - White Noise

I see an element of lucidity in this comment which at first seems distorted. It makes one certainly ponder about the family unit, about how it's gong to survive in this century. It's already moved from the extended to the nuclear family. And now we hear of families as dysfunctional, and divorcing, splitting into even smaller units while raising children in a creative array of domestic combinations. Does the strong family unit really create its own limited world, and promote ignorance to survive in this increasingly knowledge-bound world? I think it's a bit over-simplified but there's something there worth thinking about.