The Perseverance of the Family

...From Rousseau to Stalin, a man is defined only as citizen or comrade...

...The family's relationship with that other crucial institutional arrangement, private ownership of property, is inescapable...

...At best, such competing institutions are regarded as derivative sovereignties, drawing legitimacy, power, and meaning from the party and the party's state...

...The faceless bureaucrats and Hitler were the foundations of men's lives...

...It has been a hallmark of totalitarian parties that ultimate sovereignty has been ascribed to the leader, for it is he who is the incarnation of the spirit of universal meaning (Volkgeist, the proletarian class, the forces of history, etc...

...Rush-doony has pointed this out in his study, Bread Upon the Waters: "Biblical law places power and authority into the hands of the parents, especially the father, and, as long as the family has liberty, liberty based on the power of property, the parents have authority...

...It is the error of modern thought (and has been for three centuries) to elevate change to the position of ultimacy, thus relegating stability into the realm of the abnormal...

...Nazi Germany has been described as a "confusion of private armies and private intelligence services," in which the traditional army, the Reichswehr, was confronted with, first, the S.A...

...Conservatives, almost by definition, are institutionally oriented...

...Property is power, and when the state grows in its controls over property, it grows in the same degree towards totalitarian power...

...Totalitarian systems deny the validity of alternative institutional sovereignties, for these operate as buffers against central political power...

...Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community...

...the total financial gain to the state by means of inheritance taxes is small...

...Similarly, transfer of power over education, income, and property from the family to the state has undercut parental power and authority...

...Every country that weakens the independence and liberty of the family and property moves steadily into totalitarianism...

...For some reason, this fact seems to bother libertarians...

...Conservatives rest the case for human freedom on the existence of legitimate multiple sovereignties, each with the authority to express itself by means of establishing instititutional restraints on members and on each other...

...The conservative would argue that Stalin was forced to return to at least a somewhat conservative position with respect to the family because the very nature of human society demands acknowledgement of this most crucial of institutions...

...There is an order that is built into creation that must be respected by men...

...ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE: Gary North The Perseverance of the Family PERSPECTIVES is a new Alternative feature, in which articulate spokesmen are given the opportunity to argue the pros and the cons, the highs and the lows, the light and the serious of any significant issue...

...The result is totalitarianism...

...Individual creativity, and a society's ability to appropriate and use such creativity, require the existence of stabilizing institutional supports...

...It is the primary agency of social welfare, as well as education...

...Some of them - at least those conservative enough to defend the family - actually try to deny the obvious...

...Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy...

...Without the emotional stability provided by these associations - which Tocqueville said were so fundamental in American life in the 1830s - men are left to find meaning and purpose as social atoms...

...Thus, the premise of absolute totalitarianism is the simultaneous existence of radical individualism (i.e., social atomism) and the total integration of each human personality into the overarching sovereignty of the leader and his party, (cf...

...It is the structure which teaches children original attitudes toward law, property, and other human beings...

...Men can be a part of several of them at any point in time, and each will impart a degree of meaning and stability into his life...

...That is why totalitarianism in its purest theoretical form cannot exist over the long run or over large geographical areas, for it negates the possibility of social control when it negates the possibility of society...

...In fact, the existence of the deadening bureaucratic hand will be the single sovereignty that can compete effectively with the capriciousness of the will of the ruler...

...he seeks to thwart it in the day-to-day affairs of his life...

...Furthermore, subordinate institutional arrangements, probably more fleeting historically, but of considerable importance to society, are such things as school, business (i.e., occupational calling), fraternal organizations, gangs, or any number of other voluntary associations...

...Because the modern state controls the education, income, property, and labor of all its citizens, it thus controls the totality of powers within the country...

...Randomness, if it is widespread, requires too much capital, both human and material, to deal with it...

...Steadily, as the state appropriates the functions of the family, a basic distortion of social life becomes manifest...

...Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism...

...The alienation of mankind which so appalled the young Marx- an alienation, within the framework of the Christian philosophy of the West, which stems from the ultimate alienation between God and man - flourished far more easily in the milieu of industrial Europe than it had in the more personalistic culture which had preceded it...

...The standard account of the basic components of society which might appear in any of a hundred conservative analyses would include family,' church, and state, generally in that order...

...The leader is the sole source of temporal meaning, the fountain of power, the source of legitimate change, the touchstone of community...

...As long as the state retains the control, it will retain the power and the authority, and it is naive to expect anything but tyranny...

...They suspect the motives and the sanity of all armchair social theorists who proclaim radical human autonomy as the foundation of their social analysis...

...It makes no difference in which country this occurs, and what laws the state passes as a restraint on itself...

...Family The family is the central lawmaking body in human society, not the civil government...

...They may again...

...forces under Roehm, and second, the S.S...

...deny it, and you deny both order and man...

...The family is essentially bureaucratic and socialistic in its internal structure...

...Robert Nisbet, the most influential conservative sociologist in this country (and perhaps the world-there are so few of them), writes in his book, The Social Bond, that the family, like the asylum, the prison, or the army, is a strongly authoritarian institution.rian institution...

...Therefore, as Robert Nisbet has argued so forcefully in his Social Change and History, stability rather than change should be the primary presupposition of sociological analysis...

...As Koestler has put it in Darkness at Noon, a man is defined as one million men divided by one million - a pure social atom...

...Those social functions that can best be ordered through the operation of a local, highly personal structure - one which is basically voluntary at its point of origin, i.e., marriage - become totalitarian and inefficient when appropriated by distant, politically controlled bureaucratic hierarchies that use coercion to gain access to their economic resources...

...The one institution which is universally acknowledged by conservative social analysts and philosophers as being inescapable for the maintenance of a free society is the family...

...Without it, and the stability, meaning, and purpose it brings to the lives of human beings, men cannot be productive, and even the communist state needs basic economic production more than it needs ideological consistency...

...Socialism: Statist vs...

...Deny the legitimacy of the family, and you deny the operational existence of human society...

...Stability is the setting of social change, not the other way around...

...The citizen is caught in the cross-fire between the impersonal cage of bureaucracy and the contingent world of the totalitarian leader...

...Scarce economic resources, especially time, are diverted from the task of positive creativity in order to subdue, in a negative fashion, the contingency of life...

...Total per-sonalism doing battle with total im-personalism, with the individual citizen crushed in the middle...

...No political program can stop this growth unless it restores to the family its control over property, income, and education...

...no other membership has any legitimacy...

...forces under Himmler, and few men ever knew where they stood in relation to the various bureaucracies...

...It is therefore not surprising that the Soviet Union officially abolished the family as a legal entity until 1936...

...Destroy the system of plural sovereignties, each with its own legitimate realm of authority, and society faces the creation of a vast bureaucracy...

...The "anomie" of modern industrial life, as Durkheim called it at the end of the last century, results from just this kind of social fragmentation and atomization...

...It should be emphasized that the opinions and values herein expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor or The Alternative staff...

...Men participate in community, thus bringing purpose into otherwise autonomous, contingent lives, through the leader and the party...

...They can, and they have...

...The primary purpose of the inheritance tax has been to destroy this parental power...

...Randomness is a threat to man...

...This does not mean, however, that attempts to abolish the family by totalitarians and radical anarchists (who work together initially to tear down the fabric of existing society) cannot cause great social havoc...