Freedom and the Family: the Family crisis and the future of Western civilization.

AuthorBaskerville, Stephen
PositionEssay

In April 2009, Dr. James Dobson stepped down as head of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family with a pessimistic message about his years in the "culture wars." "We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict," he declared. "Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles." (1) Dobson's words were widely taken as an admission of defeat. His statement highlighted a trend that now seems inexorable: In the Western World the traditional family continues to unravel, and its defenders are increasingly giving way to resignation and despair.

Yet an historical perspective reveals that the conflict over the family may only be beginning and that we may be on the verge of a wider confrontation that will decide not only the survival of the family but fundamental questions about the scope and nature of the modern state.

At first glance, it appears that history may not be on the side of the family. Today's crisis originated well before the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s. A sobering perspective on how family decline undermines our civilization may be gained from realizing how limited awareness has been of the nature and dimensions of the decline over decades and even centuries and from realizing how today's awakening--still partial at best--comes at the eleventh hour.

As early as 1933, Christopher Dawson, in "The Patriarchal Family in History," drew a parallel with the declining stages of Greek and Roman civilization. (2) Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman elaborated in Family and Civilization (1947). (3) At a time when the "baby boom" was occurring and few people were disposed to listen to Cassandra warnings of a crisis for the family, Zimmerman described long-term reality: the traditional family had been deteriorating since the Renaissance and was nearing the point of no return. Like Dawson, Zimmerman noted unmistakable parallels with Greece and Rome.

Dawson and Zimmerman make thought-provoking reading today because they wrote long before the political and sexual radicalism of the 1960s launched an open and direct ideological attack on the family and placed it on the public agenda.

Moreover, popular culture is not the only family solvent. From the start of the modern era, political culture has included a strain of hostility to the family. "The attack on the family in modern political thought has been sweeping and unremitting," writes political theorist Philip Abbott. "If the family is to survive as an institution ... the major thrust of modern politics must be altered." (4) Virtually every theorist in the modern Western canon has had something to say about the family, often to its detriment, including Erasmus, Milton, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, and Freud. Dissenters, like Louis de Bonald, author of On Divorce (1805), have been relegated to obscurity.

The family crisis, in other words, is not simply a product of the sexual and feminist revolutions, though they certainly accelerated the pace of deterioration. Family decline may be inherent in what is commonly called modernity.

Political theory might seem only to compound the dangers posed by television, movies, rock music, videos, and other elements of popular culture, but the battle of political ideas is one that family defenders cannot ignore. By retreating into "culture" (though in a rather cramped sense) to the neglect of politics, family advocates may have invited precisely the political paralysis Dobson laments. "If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture," writes political scientist James Q. Wilson of single motherhood, "you will realize that there is very little one can do." (5)

Without neglecting culture, Dawson and Zimmerman were much more explicit than today's family advocates in emphasizing the power wielded by government. "As in the decline of the ancient world, the family is steadily losing its form and its social significance, and the state absorbs more and more of the life of its members," Dawson wrote. "The functions which were formerly fulfilled by the head of the family are now being taken over by the state, which educates the children and takes the responsibility for their maintenance and health." Dawson wrote this in 1933, which makes his next observation even more startling: "The father no longer holds a vital position in the family," he noted. "He is often a comparative stranger to his children, who know him only as 'that man who comes for weekends.'"

Zimmerman pointed out that the state views the family as a threat, eviscerates the family, co-opts its critics and sponsors family-hostile intellectuals, and demands supremacy over society in general and the family in particular. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, "the state helps to break it up." The state constantly aspires to reduce the family to its instrument. "The state wishes to have only enough family power left as is needed to achieve the functions of government." In the United States during the nineteenth century, "law piled on law, and government agency upon government agency" until by 1900 "the state had become master of the family." The result (in 1947!) is that "the family is now truly the agent, the slave, the handmaiden of the state."

Today the situation has evolved to the point that we might well regard 1947 as a golden age for the family. One of Zimmerman's most telling observations regarding the family is that "[t]hese changes came about slowly, over centuries, and almost imperceptibly." (6) The atomization of the family has proceeded so incrementally that each generation has become acculturated to the changes, contributed more changes of its own, and passed them on to the next generation.

Each generation thus accepts as normal what would have shocked their grandparents had it happened all at once: premarital sex, cohabitation, illegitimacy, divorce, same-sex marriage, daycare, fast-food dinners. Indeed, shocking the previous generation is part of the thrill of what might be said to amount to the institutionalization and politicization of filial rebellion.

Warnings about family decline will, to the extent that it involves "culture," simply sound to the liberal and the young as "no big deal": these are the perennial lamentations of the hopelessly old-fashioned--the old and conservative bemoaning the good old days. Things change: "Deal with it!"

But this kind of cultural development is not all that has become accepted as normal. Filial rebellion has a political dimension. Zimmerman describes destructive family policies enacted not only during the French and Russian revolutions, but also following the American. What might shock even the liberal and the young, yet today barely disturbs the conservative and the old, are destruction of constitutional protections and intrusive invasions of personal freedom and family privacy by the government's ever-expanding family machinery. Here we see something highly consequential, but perhaps also more susceptible to redress than what is indicated by Wilson's cultural despair, that is, the heavy hand of the state.

G. K. Chesterton once suggested that the family was the main check on state power and that weakening it would destroy freedom. Chesterton was writing about divorce, and here another critical difference emerges between today's debates and the way the issue was framed by Dawson and Zimmerman and theorists they cite. While homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and other cultural issues on today's family-values agenda do appear in their writings, they are not central. The recurring issue throughout Western history that seems to be the most direct cause of marriage and family breakdown is divorce.

Most Americans know from personal experience that the most direct and common threat to the family today is not the marriage of two homosexuals but divorce within families. Divorce now threatens most families and every society in the Western world. Not only is it multiplying single-parent homes among the affluent as welfare did among the poor; it now poses a serious threat to privacy, civil liberties, and constitutional government, as children are forcibly taken from their parents on a variety of divorce-related pretexts and parents who resist are taken away in handcuffs. Most people know someone whose children and private life...

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