Conservatives and the Family

Published by Conservatives Do Care, Monograph No. 3 (Houston, Texas, 1984).

When elections come round, liberal politicians profess their affection for the family, the most basic of human institutions. They promise vaguely to confer marvelous benefits upon private households. Nevertheless, during the past half century—an era dominated by liberals or socialists in most of the western world—the difficulties of the family have increased.

For conservatives, the family is not merely a unit in the census, to be subsidized out of national funds on the principle of “spend and spend, elect and elect.” The thinking conservative knows that the family is the source of all social order and the guardian of love among human beings. The only alternative to the family is the universal orphanage. Therefore public policy, when the family is in question, ought to be undertaken with extreme care. For it is possible to work great harm to the family by measures which allegedly are designed to assist families: it is quite possible to kill through pretend kindness.

“We learn to love the little platoon we belong to in society,” Edmund Burke said two centuries ago. The family, as Burke put it, is “the germ of our public affections.” We move from kin to kind: that is, beginning with love of family, we learn to love our community, our state, our nation.

By this term “family,” conservatives mean something more than a household composed of man, wife, and children. Properly apprehended, “family” signifies many generations and connections. It extends backward to ancestors and forward to posterity. Indeed, a true family may be called a community of souls, comprehending not simply direct ancestors and descendants, but also a host of kin joined by their blood—or, in modern phrases, by genetic inheritance and by common obligations. A true nation is a family vastly extended.

Once upon a time, the conservative knows, the family provided much besides affection and a common domicile. It was the means for defense against sturdy beggars and masterless men, for education and training of the young, for maintaining the old and infirm, for securing material sustenance. Nowadays the family has not wholly ceased to fulfill these other functions, but the scope of these activities has been reduced—not always to the advantage of the person and the republic. Should the family forfeit much of its remaining domain, or be deprived of its remaining functions, the sum of human happiness would be hideously diminished.

Liberals of our time have been endeavoring to politicize everything—even the family. An unpleasant example of this was the attempt, in 1971, of Senator Walter Mondale and others to enact a gigantic scheme for federal day-care centers, the practical consequence of which would have been to encourage mothers to neglect their small children. (The Mondale “baby bin” plan would have been available to every mother, regardless of financial need.) Congress was persuaded to vote for the proposal, under pressures from the “welfare lobby.” But Mr. Elliot Richardson, then Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, said that this bill would establish “second-rate baby bins in which children were stored away, neglected, or abused.” President Nixon vetoed the bill, in his veto message mentioning the “family-weakening implications” of the scheme. Had the baby bin system commenced operation in 1972, by this time mobs of adolescent boys and girls, deprived since infancy of most parental affection and guidance, would trouble our schools and our streets.

A provision of Mondale’s Senate version of this child-care bill was that no funds should be granted to any center in any way connected with any church. So much for Mr. Mondale’s recently-proclaimed affection for the family and for religion.

Such “help for the family” measures have their models in the vast state nurseries of the Soviet Union and of Communist China—where tiny children can be thoroughly directed and indoctrinated, whether their parents relish it or not. Well-organized day-care centers, imaginatively conducted, may be a blessing—for such children and parents as truly need them. But a gigantic national network of such centers, bureaucratically operated, would come to resemble the ruinous mass nurseries of nineteenth-century Britain. Those institutions did enable a great many mothers to work as factory hands; but they did incalculable damage to the minds and sensibilities of the unhappy children. Knowing something of history, and taking long views, conservatives set their faces against such attempts by centralized government to usurp the family’s essential functions.

Bureaucratic fussiness, oppressive public maternalism undertaken by political authority, is one of the baneful influences that have produced the afflictions of the modern family. Paying mothers out of public funds to destroy their own offspring in the womb is one interesting result of political meddling with the family. Among the conspicuous governmental efforts that have amounted to killing by kindness—during the Johnson administration, chiefly—has been the sweeping away of whole districts of cities by miscalled urban “renewal.” Hundreds of thousands of decent families thereby were driven into new high-rise slums.

O for salutary governmental neglect of that ancient institution the family!

Many voices inform us that the average American family has sunk into an unhealthy condition. Conservatives believe that renewal and reinvigoration must come from within the family itself, or from the churches, or from the imagination and right reason of private persons. About all that government can do to relieve the distresses of the family is to take back some of the fatal presents it has thrust upon the family.

A few months ago, this writer addressed the Seventh International Congress of the Family, meeting in Rome. Speaker after speaker at that Congress remarked the invasion of familial concerns by the centralized state; there were no demands for more funding of more political programs to relieve the family of its responsibilities.

For when the state aspires to accomplish much more than its ancient and indispensable function of restraining human appetites and passions, great confusion commonly results. Consider the now-entrenched system of payments from the federal treasury for the support of mothers and children who lack, respectively, husbands and fathers—the ADC program. Charitable though the motives for adopting this program were, the practical effects of ADC have been ruinous. Rates of divorce and bastardy have been mightily increased by ADC misconceptions in policy—in recent years somewhat modified—and the ignorant and bored generations subsidized by ADC are the biggest single source of violent crime in this land. In effect, ADC has been the worst enemy of the family among the urban poor.

Once upon a time, the conservative knows, the family provided much besides affection and a common domicile. It was the means for defense against sturdy beggars and masterless men, for education and training of the young, for maintaining the old and infirm, for securing material sustenance. Nowadays the family has not wholly ceased to fulfill these other functions, but the scope of these activities has been reduced—not always to the advantage of the person and the republic. Should the family forfeit much of its remaining domain, or be deprived of its remaining functions, the sum of human happiness would be hideously diminished.

For if the family disintegrates, there remain only two modes of existence. The first of these is an atomic individualism, every man and woman isolated and self-seeking, suffering each from too much ego in his cosmos. Such loveless individualism, however, does not endure long: for, as Aristotle put it, man is a gregarious animal. We yearn to love and to be loved, to belong to something bigger than ourselves. We are made for cooperation—like the hands, like the feet, Marcus Aurelius says. So it is that if the family structure dissolves in an irresponsible solitary individualism, such a phase is transitory merely. It is succeeded, ordinarily, by the second alternative mode.

This latter condition is compulsory collectivism. The state becomes all in all: only in its most rudimentary and deprived aspect is the family tolerated. Children become the wards of the state, reared for the state’s purposes; marriage survives simply to reduce the consequences of promiscuity. Mere production and consumption, under direction of the state apparatus, become the exclusive ends of human striving.

Such a prospective extinction of the family is not fanciful merely. It has been the deliberate policy of the Communist regimes in China and Cambodia—though already the masters of Beijing have found it necessary to make concessions. It was the design of the Bolshevik ideologues of the Russian Revolution, although the vestiges of Christian belief and custom among the Russian people have impeded the fulfillment of this aspiration. And we would be foolish to ignore a strong drift in what we call “the West” toward the supplanting of the family by the Universal Orphanage.

In America, the forces hostile to the traditional family are examined in a recent temperate book by two well-known sociologists, Brigitte Berger and Peter Berger, The War Over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground. The Bergers write that “roughly comparable alignments can be found in other Western industrial societies.” They discuss the complex recent background of hostility toward the traditional family, and of professed concern for the family as a “problem.” The Bergers distinguish certain groups or movements that form vague alliance against the oldfangled family: the feminists of Women’s Liberation zealots; professional-bureaucratic agents of the welfare state; and the “knowledge class” of people “who derive their livelihood from the production, distribution, and administration of symbolic knowledge.” Perhaps the most formidable adversaries of the traditional family are those “professionals,” bureaucrats and university theorists, who profess their desire to help the family—but who argue that the family is “under stress” which can be relieved only by altering basic societal structures.

“This approach,” the Bergers write, “(most characteristic of the Carnegie Council for Children) now links help to families to a comprehensive political agenda of a clearly ‘liberal-left’ bent. A ‘comprehensive family policy,’ of which the society is supposedly in urgent need, now includes attacks on the problems of income distribution, unemployment, environmental deterioration, as well as attacks on outmoded moral values in such matters as sex roles and the work ethic. It is not altogether clear what should be done with the concrete problems of families ‘in the meantime’—that is, until this great revolution is accomplished—but one gathers that the authors in question are much more interested in the grand revolutionary design than in the petty difficulties that bother most people. One revealing category in the discussion of family policy in these circles is that of ‘universal entitlements’—that is, a legal guarantee of access of all families to the basic resources of society.”

And the Bergers comment, “The objective consequence of this notion of a ‘comprehensive family policy’ is to harness the family to political purposes that, in themselves, have nothing whatever to do with the concrete problems that trouble ordinary people.”

In short, some of the folk who talk most about their concern for the family have ulterior motives; their object is a collectivist society, or at least a vast enlargement of the welfare state. Their pretended concern for the family is a means of attracting support for their designs among the unwary.

It was so at the Democratic National Convention, in July, 1984. Leading speakers at that Convention expressed their high and selfless concern for the American family—somewhat surprisingly, for few of them had said much on that topic before. Those speakers did not make clear what they intended to do for the family. But an examination of the platform adopted at that Convention suggests their intention: more “entitlements,” greater dependence upon federal largesse and more interference with familial and neighborhood concerns by the welfare bureaucracy. That way lies the family’s decay.

Not through malice, but rather through poverty of imagination and from grandiose notions of a magnified welfare state, American public policy in recent decades has worked against the thriving of the traditional family. Yet there are measures which government, at its several levels, might undertake to relieve the American family of disabilities imposed by the state itself. Such measures caring conservative recommend.

Prudent but sharp revision of methods of taxation, including income taxes and real-property taxes, could do much to save the family as a beneficial economic undertaking—and to preserve family continuity. Family businesses on a small scale might be exempted from a tangle of regulations, requirements, and restraints.

Imaginative reform of the cumbersome, counter-productive, and vastly expensive “welfare” apparatus could make possible restoration of family patterns and virtues among a mass of people now condemned to broken homes and general apathy.

Conservatives already have accomplished something of importance in this endeavor: sweeping revision of federal inheritance taxes, enacted early in the Reagan administration, which virtually abolishes inheritance taxes upon family farms and other family enterprises. This prudent reform arrests what had been the swift progressive dwindling in the number of economic undertakings owned from generation to generation by healthy and energetic families.

We need not despair of the family’s survival; we need not endorse the argument of the left-leaning “professionals” that the family has become a “problem” to be dealt with by social re­construction. Because it is natural, the family is resilient, with marvelous powers of reinvigoration. A human body unable to react is a corpse. But the family, even in lands less fortunate than the United States, retains powers of reaction.

In the long run, though the topless towers fall and the captains and the kings depart, two human institutions will endure in one form or another: the family and the church. In the long run, the Chinese family (the most intricately knit of all familial systems) will outlast the hideous folly of Mao; in the long run, the Russian family (rooted in Orthodox piety) will survive the sinking of the Gulag Archipelago. Everywhere, in the long run, the family will reassert itself, despite busybody endeavors to kill it with kindness.

Thinking conservatives mean to help in this reassertion of the family. Peter and Brigitte Berger list six major features of a sound general family policy, summarized below.

First, recognition of the primacy of the family. This means the bourgeois family, much as it reached its fullness during the nineteenth century.

Second, restoration of the private. Private concerns should not be converted into public problems.

Third, respect for pluralism. Public policy should recognize the diversity among families, and not endeavor to impose a single familial pattern upon all classes and groups.

Fourth, autonomy and empowerment. The family should be enabled to take control of its own problems, including the education of children; the intervention of the state in such matters should be reduced, not increased.

Fifth, restoration of parental rights. Fathers’ and mothers’ authority over children should be shored up, and the interference of public “professionals” restricted to essential protections.

Sixth, maintenance of community. The “mediating structures” of voluntary communities should be respected and permitted to shelter and nurture the families embedded within them—rather than subjecting families to the immediate ministrations of centralized political authority.

Conservatives hope to give flesh to the spirit of those six wise recommendations.

It is some comfort that in the long run the advantage in the struggle between the lovers of family and the detractors of family lies with those who love. For out of love arises vitality and hope. The family is as much a means for generating love as for enduring physical survival. The enemies of the family, on the other hand, being loveless, must subsist upon malice—which is not heart­warming. Those moved by malice rather than love find it difficult to reproduce their own kind, cloning not yet being practicable.

During the twentieth century, the family has been badly knocked about. Like human nature, the family always has been imperfect. Were it not so, the family would be boring. So it is with society: although revolutionaries have it in their power to create an earthly hell, they are unable to form an earthly paradise.

Human nature, imperfect though it be, is a constant. Out of our human nature grows a healthy reaction against the degradation of the family. For love, which is stronger than death, also is stronger than the enthusiasts for copulation without population, stronger than arid humanitarianism, stronger than the computer, stronger than Caesar. And the family is the child of the fertile union of love with necessity.

Adversity, good for the soul, also may reinvigorate the family. A widespread longing for membership in a true family is more apparent nowadays than it was half a century ago. Spiritual isolation and a sterile “autonomy” do not satisfy the deep longings of human nature; while the modern state manifestly grows less and less effectual in its struggle to restrain the violent, educate the young, cheer the old and sick, or even to assure sustenance. For those offices, as for love and common lodging, once more we begin to look to “the little platoon we belong to in society.” The big battalions have failed us.

Conservatives, members of that little platoon, are warm defenders of the family.

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