There is much talk about the destruction of the family; Christians regularly shake their heads over “attacks” on the thing. And admittedly, the world outside the walls of domestic bliss seems increasingly intent on reducing it to a bizarre lifestyle choice, in which men and women devote ten years to buying consumer goods and warming up for a good, loud divorce. Tough times, these: every husband carries digital prostitutes in his pocket; every new mother is asked, kindly, and by a clean and well-educated nurse, whether she wouldn’t like to kill her child, should he have some defect; and every child that survives his doctors learns to yearn for an eighteenth birthday, after which he leaves the family and embarks on a hero’s journey of debt accrual.
But it would be too much to say, of the powers of this earth, that they desire the annihilation of the family. The family is not threatened with death, but allured by slavery, a condition in which the activities of the family are utilized, not for the sake of the family, but for the sake of another.
Even the Right’s current, family-destroying bogeyman, Cultural Marxism, should rather hesitate to wipe the family from the face of the earth. Its Bolshevik progenitor hesitated, pivoting away from an attempt to “abolish the family” and towards a conservative family policy by the 1930s, in which “divorce was more difficult, abortion banned, and homosexuality criminalised [while] ideology encouraged monogamy, disciplined parenting and careful housewifery.” [1] And this makes good sense. It is rather hard to have Marxists without having children; rather expensive to indoctrinate toddlers into the obscurer points of dialectical materialism without mothers to get them on board in the first place.
Obviously, there is no human power that does not rely, at its base and for its perpetuation, on the continued existence and basic health of families. Those who would “attack the family” come from families, and there is no social arrangement that is not an arrangement of sons, daughters, uncles, and nephews, who, even at this late hour, still retain the backward habit of being born of woman. Whether principality or throne; whether government or corporation; whether an amassment of wealth or a stronghold of strength; whatever army, navy, factory, or landlord strikes fear in the hearts of others, ordering them to act this way rather than that, it necessarily relies on the regular, ordered production of new and relatively healthy people for its power.
This explains why even the darkest powers justify themselves as existing for the family. Planned Parenthood, as much as it kills children, maintains itself in power by having children to kill, a fact that necessitates they plan families, rather than attack them outright, leaving some to kill and others to rely on their services. This is true of every anti-familial power, be it state or corporation, individual or institution. As Jesus puts it, the “rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,” but the family produces the “them” over which to lord and rule, procreating, in great pleasure and difficulty, the mass of people whose common subjugation is the source of tyrannical strength.
This means that the object of the “attack upon the family” is not destruction, lest the powers of earth saw off the high branch on which they sit, so much as reduction — an attempt to make the family behave as something less than what it is; namely, a unit of reproduction.
Reproduction
Now you have heard it said that men and women, given a few drinks, tend to engage in reproduction — but it is not true. People do not reproduce. Animals reproduce. Every baby born is a unique creation of God, and this is a mode of being quite unlike that of the other animals, which crawl, swim, and fly about the sphere as reproductions, repetitions, and instances of their species.
And this means more than the conception and birth of an animal that looks an awful lot like its dad. Each animal birth reproduces the behavior typical of the animal species. A new turtle is born with all the instincts of the turtle species, and the behavior of, say, crawling toward the sea and swimming therein is reproduced within its shell. But human beings are those kinds of creatures for whom behavior is no guarantee of birth. Humanity begins again with each generation. A man may labor all his life to build the Communist state, but neither he nor nature will reproduce his work within his children — who may, after all, become capitalists. Mother Nature, who never worries over her newest fruit-flies, worries outside of the nursery, anxious to see if the latest batch of humans beings will take up the language, habits, and activities of their parents. They may not. The existence of a single suicide means that even the drive of self-preservation is in no way assured to the human race; rather, the human species has the distinct honor of being the only animal to contain the genuine possibility of killing itself, ending the whole show tomorrow.
Animals reproduce what it means to be their species, but the human being must be educated into the specificity of what it means to be human. He does not have language as he has arms, rather, he receives it as a gift from another, who does not know precisely what use he will make of it. He is not born repeating such phrases as “all men are created equal,” nor imagining his life to be worth living — he must be taught to believe it. It is not nature, but a laborious handing-on that produces anything like generational repetition, and even in his most faithful imitation of the traditions of his fathers, the human person cannot but modulate their activities into his own pitch. A unique creation of God can only produce unique acts.
And this unique difference is entirely obvious until some silly, fascist scientism blasphemes the human person as nothing but a vessel for the reproduction of his species, describing his freedom as merely ornate biological slavery. It is obvious that only animals reproduce: animals never do anything new. The swallow, unless I’ve missed it, does not innovate in the building of its nest. The gorilla, for all his adaptability, has yet to invent a celibate form of gorillahood. The whale is a clever lump, but can only surprise us in our ignorance of what the whale species is capable of — not through the new, creative act of the individual whale.
That the species is reproduced in the individual is what makes a science of animal activity possible — one can know, to a greater or lesser extent, what every cat will do, by observing two or three cats. That the human species is not reproduced in the individual human being is why a science of human behavior is impossible — one can generalize like a philosopher or lie like an economist, but at the end of the day, one can never know what free men will do.
Tyranny needs family
This is a source of great terror to the powers of the earth. For no matter the degree to which a man amasses wealth, takes property, controls the government, convinces the people, develops domineering institutions, or otherwise carves out a lordly position, still, he will hear the word whispered to all tyrants: “I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them” (Isaiah 3:4). For whatever systems or structures one builds in order to amass power over others, the continuation of this power is unassured, weak, helpless, and horribly contingent upon new persons being raised into the same forms of behavior which support and create that same, tyrannical amassment.
The powers of this earth, whatever profit they make from a mass of men, would have a hard time profiting from a mass of babies. One might attempt to order them into a workforce; threaten them into orderly, legal behavior with various rewards and punishments; give each baby a credit card in the hopes of starting a baby-food economy, amassing unto some CEO-class. But it wouldn’t work. A prerequisite for the oppressive amassment of power is that children become capable of being oppressed.
This seems paradoxical, but it is obviously true. If a capitalist would extract the labor of the worker, he is dependent upon the love of a parent who raises his useless squawk into something from which labor can be extracted. If a state will utilize the threat of violence to create an ordered society, it must rely on the non-violent love of the parent to produce, sustain, and educate the kind of child who can subsequently fear the threats of the state, obeying its laws in order to preserve himself in being. It is no accident that criminals, who most obviously do not fear the state unto orderly behavior, tend to come from “broken” homes. It is only by raising children to love their lives, to desire the good, to live in communion with others, and to tend towards perfection that a tyrannical state can effectively motivate action by threatening one’s access to the good, one’s desire to live and live well, one’s relationships with others, and so forth. Prison is only a threat to beings for whom there is a world of peace which prison takes away. Social ostracization is only an effective motivator of good behavior if one first has a society from which one is not ostracized. The political point is simply this: in order to reproduce the conditions of tyranny from one generation to the next; in order to keep power, however accrued; one cannot use the same tactics of tyranny, its violence, threats, and rewards, by which one first established dominance. A man may rule by striking fear into the hearts of his neighbors — striking fear into the heart of a baby doesn’t produce any particularly good results. For fear to be effective, it cannot crush. If it is to order a society, it must motivate particular actions, not reduce human beings to quivering lumps, unable to act. The tyrant who would rule by fear relies on parents to first rule by love. Merely screaming at babies ruins them; giving laws to infants, instead of love, simply kills them; trying to raise children by forcing them to compete within the market is plainly stupid. All tyrannical power is bowed before the family, waiting on it to reproduce the conditions for its rule, which it cannot possibly produce for itself. Its sovereignty is a pose.
To double business bound
This subservience, and not some hatred of bright and beautiful things, motivates all “attacks on the family.” The tyrant always fears those on whom he relies the most. And the family is not simply an institution that may or may not serve tyrannical power. Its very existence is a scoff against the attempt to rule through fear. It simply cannot raise children except through love, gift, sharing, care, and the development of real sources of authority and fidelity that are not the state, the company, or whoever culls power from the great mass of men. Ironically, the tyrant can only be a tyrant insofar as he sows the seeds of his own destruction — allowing enough love and loyalty to exceed him in order to produce the next generation of people capable of being ordered through his threats to that same love and loyalty.
This is why regimes like the Bolsheviks’ begin with the task of doing away with the family and end by trying to support it through their policies. This is why Nazi family policy was such an insane hodgepodge: On the one hand, it sought to weaken the family as an independent authority, ideologically re-describing the pleasure of marriage as the joy of reproducing the nation, providing state-run brothels, promoting polygamy, and declaring extramarital sex as an ideal: “the National Socialist state no longer sees in the single mother the ‘degenerate’...It places the single mother who has given a child a life higher than the ‘lady,’ who has avoided having children in her marriage on egotistical grounds.” [2] On the other hand, the “introduction of family benefits and of income tax scales recognizing family burdens is an element of modern family policy originally introduced during the Nazi regime.” [3] This is why, at the level of federal policy, America is involved in the gymnastic effort of rewarding parents for having children while shelling out money for parents to kill them. It is not that tyrants are wooed by the cooing of children, rather, their regimes always depend upon the very love and peace that they threaten in order to rule. The pro-family tyranny, and not some individualistic fantasy, is the most stable form of unjust rule, and even it cannot maintain itself — it necessarily risks the production of beings who act out of love for their family rather than love of the tyrannical regime.
The best that the powers of earth can do is a balancing act: allowing just as much property, wealth, and freedom as a family needs in order to produce a generation of people capable of being oppressed, but not so much as to reveal the trick, granting families so much property, wealth, and autonomy that they are capable of challenging their tyrants, and making their order of peace and love the order of the day.
This is why regimes like our own are so anxious over homeschooling, large families, and familial resistance to digital technology and advertisement; why we are so quick to view as a cult (that is, as a coercive power which rivals the official state) any effort of familial independence; why there is something vaguely repulsive and stunted about a child whose fidelity to his father outweighs his fidelity to the norms of the state. Such acts operate as reminders that every child is raised, not as a reproduction of the citizen, nor a repetition of the beasts, but as receiving himself in and through the love of his family — through a love that can never be guaranteed to reproduce the right results.
A father may raise his children with the specific ideals of patriotism which ensure that the state will have its infantry — but he may not. A mother may raise her children to respect the opinion of medical authorities — but she may not. A community of peace may produce children that are fundamentally moved by advertisement into the consumption of mass produced goods, unto the power of Big Business — but they might decide to share. The powers of the earth hold their breath, waiting for the successful reproduction of current human behavior, over which they already exert some efficacious control, within the next generation, over which they do not. This reproduction which would be guaranteed if we were animals, but because we are human, it remains a risk.
I tend to think that this risk is the reason for the anxiety that undergirds our current efforts to mask children against the spread of covid-19, despite children being relatively unaffected by the disease, the likely vaccination-status of the adults ministering to them within the public schools, and the dearth of research proving that they’re doing any good. At base, it is not a question of science, but a question of the efficacy with which we reproduce our social order. In fact, precisely insofar as masking children is performed without clear reason, the act is concentrated into a pure symbol of transmission, a sheer doing of “what is done” — which is about as close to an image of reproduction that a human being can get.
The reproduction of the total social relationship of power and submission which we call “the state” hinges on the successful education of children into its values, punishments, and rewards. The fact that, despite our best efforts, parents are unwilling to identically translate mask mandates into the lives of their families is alarming, not so much because of its implications for public health, but because it reveals all human confidence in reproduction as something fantastic and deranged — effective for pets, but laughable when applied to those who own them. The unmasked child is a symbol of the contingency of all attempts at reproduction; of the fact that, after all, it might not take; that the next generation might not be a repetition, but, through the necessarily distributive and creative mediation of the family, some new thing. The fact that the family does not reproduce the state is simply a sign that, at every point, our social order relies, not on violence, but on love. The unmasked child is a reminder that even the masked child is only a contingent achievement of parents taking the state’s laws up and into their love. The non-reproduction of the social order in the lives of particular families — as exemplified in the explosion in homeschooling, which now makes up a shockingly substantial part of American life — is a sign of what we might call “regime change,” a failure to reproduce our society, and so the painful birth of a new one.
[1] Loroff, Nicole. "Gender and sexuality in Nazi Germany." Constellations 3, no. 1 (2011).
[2] Voegeli, Wolfgang. “Nazi Family Policy: Securing Mass Loyalty.” Journal of Family History 28, no. 1 (January 2003): 123–48.