MARITAL TRIBES

Splintering along occupational, recreational and age lines, the society is also fragmenting along sexual-familial lines. Even now, however, we are already creating distinctive new subcults based on marital status. Once people might be loosely classified as either single, married or widowed. Today this three-way categorization is no longer adequate. Divorce rates are so high in most of the techno-societies today that a distinct new social grouping has emerged – those who are no longer married or who are between marriages. Thus Morton Hunt, an authority on the subject, describes what he terms "the world of the formerly married."

This group, says Hunt, is a "subculture ... with its own mechanisms for bringing people together, its own patterns of adjustment to the separated or divorced life, its own opportunities for friendship, social life and love." As its members break away from their married friends, they become progressively isolated from those still in "married life" and "exmarrieds," like "teen-agers" or "surfers," tend to form social enclaves of their own with their own favored meeting places, their own attitudes toward time, their own distinct sexual codes and conventions.

Strong trends make it likely that this particular social category will swell in the future. And when this happens, the world of the formerly married will, in turn, split into multiple worlds, more and still more sub-cultural groupings. For the bigger a subcult becomes, the more likely it is to fragment and give birth to new subcults.

If the first clue to the future of social organization lies, therefore, in the idea of proliferating subcults, the second lies in sheer size. This basic principle is largely overlooked by those who are most exercised over "mass society," and it helps explain the persistence of diversity even under extreme standardizing pressures. Because of in-built limitations in social communication, size itself acts as a force pushing toward diversity of organization. The larger the population of a modern city, for example, the more numerous – and diverse – the subcults within it. Similarly, the larger the subcult, the higher the odds that it will fragment and diversify. The hippies provide a perfect example.