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A philosopher and a visiting professor of philosophy of
religion at the University of Budapest and holds a Ph.D. in
philosophy from Columbia University. He is the author of over thirty
books in French and English on a variety of subjects including
religion, politics, and education. Among them are Politics and the
State: A Catholic View and The Church, Pilgrim of Centuries.
In this brief contribution I try to bring together the symptoms
of decay among which the crisis of the family is the most profound
but is not the only one. In every society the family is the
center-piece of social stability and change, the Archimedean lever
from which the social structure can be manipulated for good and
evil. Family life is in a natural fusion with society, religion,
myth, law, and culture; the family is also the basic mechanism which
directs economic life and productivity, social mobility, and
division into social classes; it is also the paradigm for the life
of culture.
Thus whoever undertakes the radical transformation of society
must first elaborate a family-model opening on a new society.
He must control the family: its structure, its partnership,
its mobility or stationary character, the role of parents and
children. The means of restructuring the family arena central
surveillance, demographic manipulation, the sexual education of the
child—and of course the economic pressure. In regard to the
latter, modern industrial society claims the power of a wider
structuralization than the previous models which were paternalistic,
feudal, Christian, or bourgeois. Industrial society which
regulates production and distribution cannot afford incalculability
on any level; in its conception the family must be planned,
the number of members regulated, their ambitions guided and
channeled.
The manipulative project for the family, thus for the demographic
calculus, influences and determines the entire society. The social
engineer targets the family in order to create a new society down to
its precise elements—a kind of definitive version of family
coexistence, just as industrial society as such is also regarded as
the final stage of mankind’s evolution. The end of history.
Technological society thus prescribes the family structure more
severely and more "mathematically" than any previous model
where spontaneity and self-determination (by the family unit) played
a much greater role, and where the family was guided by such factors
as religion, morality, tradition, inheritance, respect of natural
ties. Today (late 20th century), when mechanical thinking prevails
and the collective idea1 narrows the family options, the social
engineering aims at the strict regulation of the family for fear
that too much freedom and spontaneity may jeopardize society’s
precise functioning. Hence there appear such mechanisms on the
family level as central control, legal abortion, bio-genetic
experimentation, sperm banks, contractual relationship between
parents and children, and school curriculum whose task is to
condition children according to industrial society’s requirements,
nothing beyond.
While the professed goal is, among others, the "well-being
of the family," it is obvious that the control increasingly
gained over society diminishes the significance and uniqueness of
the family model. Mankind’s alleged objective points today to the
mechanical ideal to which the family too is sacrificed in the name
of an ultimate in history. The consequence is the near suppression
of natural forces and aspirations, so that parents are considered
from the industrial-economic point of view: reduction of the number
of children below the desirable threshold, vast program of abortion,
preference at conception for this or that sex, sperm banks for the
production of "geniuses," sex education encouraging a
hedonistic and controlled view which helps bypass the birth
of spontaneously conceived children. The result is that in the name
of a "scientifically directed" mankind, social engineering
eliminates such considerations from family life as religious belief,
moral imperative, parental function based on love, the pleasure of
having a large family. Instead, the family is reduced to molecular
components and contractual partnership and is increasingly
controlled by what is called "science."
Totalitarian societies are of course easiest to manipulate, but
they may be said to present the naked model of what other industrial
societies also adopt, even if with more hesitancy and attention to
other considerations, called humanistic or humanitarian. In China
under Mao, supervisors of the countryside separated husbands from
wives, lodged them in different barracks, and organized collective
visits on certain days, so as to produce the necessary number of
children. Later, even after Mao’s death, laws regulated the number
of children allowed to be born; the rest were aborted and utilized
in the substitution of organs or for industrial purposes. One
consequence was that families murdered their newly born girls,
granting life to boys only. Such a procedure is well-known in
Western democracies, too; it is a common feature of modern
industrial society and its ideology of absolute, mechanical
supervision over family, the birth of children, the social model,
and sexualization. The little regard in which the family is held can
be ascertained when legislation admits marriages between members of
the some sex; it shows the antifamily orientation, the purely
mechanical role of the parents in "founding" the family,
the adoption of children by homosexual couples, and the dissolution
of natural relationships. Social engineers and ideologues in the
Soviet Union used to complain that all the "enlightened"
efforts to modernize the family failed on the grandmother’s
resistance who taught the children that there is a God, moral
commandment, good and evil, and other superstitions weakening the
child’s Soviet loyalty. Some critics attribute the Soviet collapse
to the "subversive" influence of the older generation,
active within the family while the parents were working throughout
the day.
All this is manifest in Western society, too, since control over
technological society implies mechanization of the human response,
its predictability, its schematization. In purporting as
naturalness, freedom, and spontaneity, but also the attraction of
transcendence, are removed from individual and community existence,
two factors play roles in the demographic situation. One is that
so-called socioeconomic imperatives tend to limit the number of
children, as it is obvious when we compare the industrially
developed with the so-called "archaic" societies. In the
latter there is an abundance of births, in spite of Western
propaganda of cutting fertility by birth control, operations, the
distribution of paltry presents in the Gandhi family’s India, for
example, to those who undergo sterilization. In developed societies
where the fear of scarcity and the drive to consume have become
traumatic, birth control has become a social must, and social ethics
regards the large family as antisocial, even obscene.
Comparisons may be heard by fashionable young women that the
fetus is like a cancerous growth in the female body. And another
common argument is the feminist claim that women’s rights include
free and legal, even collectively funded, abortion. In short, the
new social value is directed, 1ike in the case of the Gnostics two
millennia ago—then again of the A1bigentian heretics in the south
of France—against human reproduction. The consequence is the
tragic multiplication of aging populations in Western countries—a
sure sign of decadence and of the drive to migrate by other races:
first in the quest for jobs, then for territorial conquest.
We thus face a deconstructed family, in which not only
industrial/social excesses, but also the secularization of life and
its values, play a decisive role. Conceiving offspring is one of the
basic realities of life, and even though human beings possess in
this respect a much wider choice than animals and plants, they too
are ordered according to this basic requirement of existence. If the
process is interrupted at certain historical moments, the reason is
either an aggressive annihilation by conquest, massacre and
genocide, or the collapse of the will to live in a given community.
Such a collapse seems to have spread over much of Western mankind,
and the modern ideology finds innumerable pretexts to justify it,
even to regard it as a positive sign. We have tried above to list
the responsible factors; let us summarize them, although we must
admit that what we call the "demographic implosion" is
finally as inexplicable a phenomenon as are the other great
movements of history.
Statistics, questionnaires, and other sociological studies do not
present an adequate answer; they are stamped by the modern mentality
which shuns natural impulses, on the one hand, and depreciate
spiritual loyalties, on the other. In the middle there is the
tendency to regard society as struggling for absolute autonomy,
self-regulation, individual rights. From such expectations there
follows the modern imperative to work out short-lived satisfactions,
notably in the domain of instant happiness: sex exclusively for
pleasure, the taking of drugs, excesses of ideological militancy,
limitless pornography, the grotesqueries of a certain cultural
achievement. When the Bulgarian "artist" Cristo wraps the
great monuments of the past (bridges, palaces) in nylon, with
authorization by the local government, we find just another
manifestation of a pure arbitrariness which is present also in the
refusal to have children, legalized marriage, and laws protecting
the family. We call all these phenomena by the name modernity,
emancipation, human rights, pursuit of happiness, when in fact we
face the collapse of culture—and beyond a vast unknown.
It is questionable whether the adequate response can be given by
an entire community. The latter’s social essence is inertia; it is
commended primarily by routine. This was true in the age of faith
and its social moves and gestures, it was true in the age of the
bourgeoisie, and it is true again under the impact of technology and
the expectations attached to it. Waiting for collectivities and for
governments to act in defiance of the prevailing cultural habits is
to underestimate the latter’s opportunism and commitment to the
world-democratic structure in the state of gradual emergence.
Let’s bear in mind also that reforms today are as hard to perform
as ever; responsibilities are passed on to heavy social mechanisms
hiding behind the false efficacy of slogans. We believe in a
gigantic machine.
The response to the tragedy of
demographic implosion can only be given by the relentless insistence
and counter-practice of families and small groups. One may, of
course, engage in lobbying at international organizations and
congresses, and some recent events have demonstrated the benefits of
such a mobilization. Yet these moves are underlined and justified by
the decision of families which try to reverse the trend, welcome
children, demand the protection and support of the state. There may,
of course, come a moment in which Western nations, following the
Chinese example, curtail birth and officially impose penalties in
proportion of "extra" children. While this may or may not
happen, families ought to act according to their deepest desire with
regard to giving birth to offspring. The resulting population growth
would oblige governments to build more housing, multiply work
opportunities, provide for large families. The crisis of the family
is perhaps the only form of social decay which may be arrested and
eventually reversed by sheer human will. |
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