A civilization lives or dies in accordance with its ability to produce families.
This may sound absurdly dramatic to the modern ear. After all, what does the nuclear family have to do with the survival of Western civilization?
Our present age is one of unprecedented wealth, technological power, medicine, education, and social safety nets. We’ve conquered diseases that historically killed millions and have built machines capable of communicating across the globe instantaneously. Why, then, should the fate of civilization depend upon something as ordinary as a husband, a wife, and their children?
The answer is that civilization is indeed far more fragile than it appears, and it cannot be preserved by technological prowess and hegemonic dominance alone.
Civilization is ultimately sustained by human beings who are capable of transmitting a moral order from one generation to the next. And thus, before there is a citizen, there is a child; and before there is a citizenry, there is a family.
The family, in other words, is not merely a private institution, but the first institution of civilization, and the primary institution to be attacked when civilization begins to decay…
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Family as Foundational
As modern Westerners today, we’re radically individualistic compared to our pre-modern predecessors. Taking cue from John Locke and the Founding Fathers, we believe that the individual is sovereign, and societies are fundamentally about protecting individual rights — because the state is but a collection of individuals who gathered in agreement to protect their rights as an escape from the bloody state of nature.
And yet, this view of the political is a sharp departure from the classical and Christian understanding of politics.
When Aristotle wrote his Politics, he said it wasn’t the individual but the household was the foundational unit of political society. He said that in politics, a foundational unit must be capable of generating life and sustaining itself, which a husband, wife and children can do, but an individual cannot.
Therefore, the household is the foundational unit of politics and is seen as a microcosm of the state. Learning to lead a family was the beginning of true statesmanship.
Just as important was the telos of politics. Aristotle said man is a political animal, meaning by nature he is social and creates civilization to practice virtue in the shared pursuit of the good. In other words, politics for Aristotle is not about protecting rights, but helping man communally perfect his nature via a shared pursuit of the good.
Christianity would later adopt Aristotle’s views. Taking a note from Scripture that, “it is not good for man to be alone,” they agreed the family is the foundational unit, and that the role of the political was a shared pursuit of Goodness of the pilgrimage to beatitude with God. The family then, grounded by a sacramental marriage, in which husband and wife become one out of selfless love for each other and their children, move in a shared pursuit and agreement of the good. The family is the microcosm of the state.
Now let’s examine where modernity took its radical departure away from this view of the family.
The Rise of the Individual
When the Founding Fathers espoused the American Dream of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, they had a mixture of Locke and Aristotle in mind.
They agreed with Locke that the individual is sovereign because he is made in the image of God, and therefore politics began because individuals wanted their rights protected and needed the advantages of trade for economic necessity.
But they synthesized Locke with Aristotle — a civilization can only survive if it has a shared account of the Good and pursues virtue. As John Adams said, “America is only fit for a religious and moral people,” meaning a people with a shared account of God, morality, and the meaning of life. Man cannot collectively pursue the Good if they disagree about the nature of the Good.
While this vision was admirable, the modern world took a dramatic departure from it in the 19th century. This departure was formalized through the philosophy of John Stuart Mill in his work On Liberty. Here, Mill argued that individual liberty ought to be preserved from the state, even the liberty to act immorally, so long as it doesn’t impede another’s liberty.
This philosophy would take hold in the West, and lead to an explicit embrace of individual sovereignty as the foundational unity of society, rather than the family.
To appreciate the difference in simpler terms:
Aristotle’s concern is, “What kind of family produces virtuous human beings and a flourishing polis?”
Mills’ concern is, “Why should the state interfere with whatever arrangement consenting adults choose?”
This has since become the normative view of politics in the contemporary era. The family has been replaced by the individual. The selfless willing of the good of one’s spouse and children in shared pursuit of virtue has been replaced by the exaltation of the individual to do what he wishes.
As admirable as this is, however, it opened the door for some of the most pernicious attacks on human civilization. Once the individual becomes sovereign, the family itself can soon begin to look like an oppressive obstacle to be overcome. And yet its the very dismantling of the family that risks the complete destruction of civilization as we know it.
Here’s why…
