grew ever more remote, even as those of their father grew less and less
rational.
Some thought it was this medical/mentational atmosphere that kept Evan
distant. Freida (not his mother, but a fellow-student, a few years ahead
of him, whom Evan had met during his law school studies) thought it was
something else. She thought that Evan's abstractions were not all
destined to remain mere distractions. Evan could no more practise law
than his father had been able to do so. Theodor, home-bound, had earned
money for as long as he could as a free-lance accountant, and Evan now
worked for one of his father's former clients as a full-time chartered
accountant. The only one of them who had ever practised law was Freda,
and that was only until she had her first daughter; then she typed
theses from home until word-processors put her out of business.
Freida, soon seconded by Freda, became increasingly convinced that some
of Evan's ideas were implementable. One in particular, that Evan had
told her about early in their relationship (Evan and Freida had become
lovers) was something he called "aggregates-in-flux." It was to be a new
way of rearing children, inspired partly by the Kibbutz experiments in
Israel, partly by Evan's ruminations when he had studied divorce and
child custody law, and partly by some things he had read about newborn
ducklings and Temple rhesus monkeys. His idea was that human selfishness
and favoritism -- and ultimately racism and xenophobia -- all originated
from early imprinting: We become attached to our family members, and
then we want to favor them, invariably at the expense of others, who are
not family members. We versus they.
Now the Kibbutz had tried to enlarge this "we", but that was all: A
bigger we against they. What was needed was a child-rearing system that
would never allow the boundary to be formed separating the "we" from the
"they." Children -- all children, so there would be no stigma or sense
of loss -- would be reared in different families, on a monthly, weekly,
or even a daily cycle, if necessary. This way, the only thing they could
"imprint" on was what was invariant in all that flux, namely, that these
were all human beings.
When Evan told this system to outsiders, they were shocked. "It would be
like putting everyone in foster care! And we all know how damaging that
is to the foster children." "It would be fascistic to take children away
from their parents and force them to be reared by constantly changing
strangers." Evan had always dropped the topic when people said such
things, not because he didn't believe in the idea or could not think of
a reply to the objections, but because he always found these expressions
of disapproval distressing.
But Freida did not disapprove; and after a while, neither did Freda. So
this particular system was nurtured more than the others. They worked