The Destructive Power of the Family, From Oedipus to the Godfather

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Family has been an inexhaustible source of conflict for writers from the ancient to modern worlds – maybe even more inexhaustible than war. From Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles to Confucius, family is a source of both self-destruction and self-actualization. In this episode, we explore how family dynamics have changed over the centuries but have surprisingly universal characteristics across time and space. We are joined by Krishnan Venkatesh, host of the “Continuing the Conversation” podcast. We being with a journey deep into the heart of Thebes—where King Laius has died at the hands of his own son Oedipus, and Oedipus has unwittingly married his mother Jocasta—and a subtler journey into the world of 20th century Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, where a happily domiciled father and daughter, Somiya and Noriko, will be ripped apart by the norms and expectations of tradition. This is an exploration of the nature of family, the tension between the safety and anxiety that family creates, and the rich and multiple ways that different societies express these insights.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:08.0	Aristotle argued in his political philosophy that the basic cellular unit of all human society
0:13.8	is the family.
0:14.8	Hounds, states, empires, art and sense just an extension of the family.
0:19.4	That's a good abstract idea, but when a stake completely falls apart, it's also true.
0:24.8	Many people in total civil breakdown only have their family to rely on, and if you lived
0:29.5	on a borderland, far away from any government protection, they really were your only means
0:33.6	of support or welfare or protection or justice.
0:36.4	But what happens if your family is dysfunctional?
0:39.3	What happens if the leader of the family is a destined?
0:41.3	In that case, you're basically living in the microcosm of the Civil War or a tyrannical
0:45.3	dictatorship.
0:46.3	In this episode, we're going to be looking at how different family structures across history
0:50.4	have produced these sort of power dynamics and they've made for great drama.
0:53.9	I'm joined by Cristán Venkatesh from St. John's College who's a host on the continuing
0:58.3	conversation podcast.
0:59.9	We look at how Greek dramatists, like Sophocles, who wrote Edepis the King, showed that
1:04.2	family is an inexhaustible source of conflict, self-destruction, but also self-actualization.
1:09.2	We also see how these themes play out more recent fiction, like the Godfather, the films
1:13.2	of Japanese director Yashijiro Ozu, and Breaking Bad.
1:17.2	Characteristics of family life have changed significantly over the millennia, from broad
1:20.6	extended family networks and kin networks to the smaller nuclear family, where there
	...

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