The Subversive Family by Ferdinand Mount

Author:Ferdinand Mount
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1992-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE FAMILY THEN AND NOW

9

THE FAMILY-HATERS

The family is not an historical freak. If the evidence we have put together is correctly interpreted, the family as we know it today—small, two-generation, nuclear, based on choice and affection (or as near as we can manage in the face of Church and State and scarcity)—is neither a novelty nor the product of unique historical forces. The way most people live today is the way most people have always preferred to live when they had the chance.

But, as we look at the historical arguments, we become more and more aware of the other criticism of the family, which is far older than the historical one. Indeed, we begin to get the impression that the historical arguments have been dredged up only in the past hundred years, partly in order to support these other, older criticisms (although the two critiques cannot both be true together).

The older criticism is a moral objection. The family is said to be selfish and materialistic, inward-looking, indifferent to the sufferings and struggles of the outside world. People devote to their families the ardour and effort that ought more properly to be showered on God or nation or community or class.

What a long way back this complaint goes. In Plato’s Republic, as we have seen, all citizens are to be taught to regard one another as brothers. 1 The community of wives and children is said to be the source of the greatest good. It is the natural complement to the community of property. The guardians will not tear the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’; the citizen will not drag his private property off into a separate house of his own, where he has a separate wife and children and private pleasures and pains. 2

Over and over again, we find repeated the view that communism and free love are more delightful and/or morally superior to family life. In the second century B.C., the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described the Isles of the Blessed:

All citizens have the same perfectly healthy constitution and the same perfectly beautiful features. Each takes his turn to perform every necessary task as hunter or fisherman or in the service of the state. All land, livestock and tools are thus used in turn by every citizen and therefore belong to nobody in particular. Marriage is unknown and sexual promiscuity complete; the tribe is responsible for bringing up the children, and this is done in such a way that mothers cannot recognize their own. 3

In the Recognitions of Clement, a curious kind of travelogue of the third century A.D., the following opinions are recorded:

… a very wise Greek, knowing these things to be so, says that all things should be in common amongst friends. And unquestionably amongst ‘all things’ spouses are included. He also says, just as the air cannot be divided up, nor the splendour of the sun, so the other things which are given in this world to be held in common ought not to be divided up, but really ought to be held in common.

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