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Defining our terms. Those of you in the audience who have
been entertained by the American and international media
with accounts of the little operetta that we call “The White
House Follies” will remember one of the deeper philosophical
questions that emerged. The American president— whom, for
purposes of this discussion, we shall leave unnamed— said,
in effect, that everything depends on what is meant by “is.”
In one pseudo-scholarly paper written to parody the
situation, supposedly presented at a world meeting of “isicists,”
one contributor argued that “is” does not exist, or exists
only for an infinitesimally tiny instant, for we pass
instantaneously from “was” to “will be” with only the
briefest of seconds as “is.”
Definitions: Globalization, family. When I confront the
topic that has been assigned to me, I sense a similar
perplexity. Globalization is a scientific- or
mathematical-sounding term, and perhaps it can be defined
precisely. We might define it as meaning the situation in
which national and regional loyalties become subordinated to
the affairs of the entire globe. It is commonly used to
refer to economic change, the integration of production and
other economic activities across national boundaries, but it
can also mean social, cultural, linguistic, and even
religious integration.
But let us leave “globalization” aside for the moment: what:
is meant by “family”? Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter,
who ruled, or did he reign or merely preside, from January
1977 to January 1981, summoned a White House Conference on
Families. This conference, among its other accomplishments,
sought to define precisely what is meant by the word
“family.” Like certain other words, until now everyone had
thought that we know what it means. The purpose of the White
House Conference was to build up and strengthen families and
to reaffirm “family values.” Suddenly it appeared that we
were not quite sure what it was that we were supposed to
build up and strengthen. To avoid accusations of favoring
the “traditional family” —two parents, children, perhaps
with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all related by
marriage or by blood— a new definition was proposed. The
conference came up with a rather generic definition of
family as “a group of people living together.” This could
enable us to consider a college fraternity, an army platoon,
or even four convicts sharing the same prison cell a family.
Perhaps here in Geneva we could call ourselves, for four
days at least, one big family. I think that we are more
precise, and whether we think primarily of the so-called
nuclear family of husband, wife, and children, or of the
extended family, including grandparents, uncles, aunts,
cousins, and in-laws, we think of a group of people bound
together, more or less for life, by covenants, both formal
and natural. And thus when I seek to examine the phenomenon
of globalization in its influence upon the family, this is
what I too mean by family.
When we come to globalization, I am reminded of a statement
made years ago in a book by Peter Berger and Richard John
Neuhaus. In the late 1960’s the word and idea of revolution
was “in.” Berger and Neuhaus believed that most people who
used the word had no idea of what it really means. They
said, in effect, “When they (i.e. student radicals) think of
revolution, they think of something fine and noble. When I
think of it, I think of dead children in the streets.” When
its advocates think of globalization, they think of
universal equality and universal harmony, of something like
a universal Disney World, in which everyone has a beautiful
costume, all is smiles and there are no paper plates and
styrofoam cups left lying on the grounds at night.
When I think of globalization, I think of something more
like Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, in which the
building pressure of the impoverished millions of East Asia
and the cowardly indecisiveness of the rich nations of
Europe lead not to universal prosperity but to worldwide
misery. Instead of the benefits of science, industry,
education and wealth being expanded to spread around the
globe, the starvation, sickness and ignorance of the poorest
nations overflow the world.
Globalization is not meant to work that way (and neither was
revolution intended to lead to dead children in the
streets). It was to mean the extension to the entire world
of freedom, of liberty, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau
presented as one of the two essential goals of every
government (the other being equality). But notice how he
defines liberty and its implications.
“Liberty, because every particular dependency is that much
power taken by force from the body of the State, and
equality, because liberty cannot exist without it.”[1]
Every particular dependency? Is not particular dependency
precisely what is meant by family? Every particular
dependency robs and weakens the State? Then liberty in his
sense is incompatible with the survival of the family in the
traditional sense. Rousseau’s concept of liberty involves
breaking every interpersonal and intergenerational tie,
mankind everyone dependent on no one, on no one, that is,
except the State. Implicit in Rousseau’s words is the
abolition of the family; indeed, we know that he himself
turned his own children over to public welfare.
Within families there are rights, duties, and
responsibilities of each member to the other members,
established either by formal covenant, as in marriage, or by
natural ties, as in the relationship of parents to children.
The family is a small community, and it can exert and
maintain itself far better within a context of slighter
larger, but still small communities than within the very
large and absolute community called the State.
When families exist in small communities, such as villages,
there are additional rights and duties established by custom
and tradition binding the families to one another. Other
kinds of small community, such as communities of faith, also
know such ties, and ethnic groups and nations feel them as
well. The smallest community, the family, can be at home in
the somewhat larger community of the village or town. It is
harder in the rather larger community of the nation, where
it is in danger of being only a little molecule in the midst
of Prof. Arendt’s atomistic mass.
In the process of globalization, as the size of the
“community” approaches the infinite, or at least, as our
world population has just done, when it passes the number of
six thousand million, six billion according to American
usage, the place of the family shrinks; it becomes so tiny
on the scale of the world as to be invisible. The size of
the little “particular dependencies” approaches zero and
there ability to survive and live meaningfully disappears.
What we are saying here is that whatever real benefits
globalization may confer, the concept and the process are
inimical to the health of the family. Big fish eat little
fish, and a fish big enough to cover the globe is big enough
to devour all of the little fish of the world. Ideally, the
family is a source of identity, of self. This, the smallest
intermediate structure, is clearly most at home in small
communities, where such things as family names and maiden
names can identify and create associations. Within the
larger community of the State, the individual ceases to be
identified as a member of such-and-such a family, as
so-and-so’s daughter, son, or husband, and is recognized
only by a number, in the United States, the Social Security
number.
Globalization is the concept or ideal that tells us not that
small is beautiful, but that small is pitiful and out of
date. The nation replaces the family, as in the U.S.A.
public welfare replaces the father, and instead of
individual nations, each functioning for better or for worse
in defense of its own “national interest,” we shall create a
“world community.” There are two prominent reasons for a
world community, a “global village,” as some enthusiasts put
it: the first is economic, namely, efficiency, the second
ideological, harmony.
Look at the economic benefits. As customs barriers and
customs duties disappear, the free market will cause
production to be concentrated in areas where it is cheapest
and most efficient. Goods and services become more readily
available and at a lower price throughout the world. This
benefits the consumer society of the developed nations, but
it is also not without its cost for them, for there wages
and the cost of living are high. The globalists and free
marketeers assure us that ultimately everyone will be better
off because of it.
The second reason is ideological, perhaps in a sense
theological. National, religious, cultural and ethnic
divisions must fall. The nations must shed their claims to
distinctiveness, to nobility, to particular religious truth.
In a sense globalization fosters the cult of Man, Man in the
abstract, not the men, women and children who are at home in
the family but hopelessly adrift in a world without borders
and frontiers. The difficulty with this is that in
attempting to liberate people from the constraints of
family, town, church, and even nation, it will make them, in
Daniel Elazar’s words, “naked before the State,” or in this
case, before the global magistrates. In the effort to make
the world equally and without distinction the home of all,
globalization can end by making all homeless, bereft of
family, community, language and nation.
The reverse sense: how good words conceal evil purposes, how
good causes lead to bad ends. In his remarkable book, La
tête coupée, “The Severed Head,” the French mathematician
Arnaud-Aaron Upinsky helps us to understand why something
that seems so good, that promises economic prosperity and
world harmony, globalization, is capable of compromising
that simplest of institutions, the family, without which
neither prosperity nor harmony can long exist. “The great
systems of the modern era function, in fact, in the reverse
sense of what they say: the majority is only a minority,
equality implies inequality, la volonté ciénérale, the
general will, is only that of one party, etc. etc.”[2]
If we apply Upinsky’s concept of the reverse sense, we will
ask ourselves whether the concept of globalization actually
will bring the opposite of what it is intended to bring,
namely, isolation. We say, “Globalization,” and think that
we know what we will be getting. What we actually will be
getting is quite different. Examples of Upinsky’s reverse
sense are easy to find. One is expression that has come up
so often in connection with the disturbances in Yugoslavia,
East Timor, Pakistan, and elsewhere, “international
community.” What the news accounts say is, “The
international community desires.” What is this
“international community”? Is there a volonté internationale?
What these words really mean is that NATO, the United
States, or perhaps only the American president desires. As
Upinsky wrote, majority means minority, and la volonté
générale means the will of one party, or perhaps even of one
man.
What are the implications of this “reverse sense of
language” for our topic? They lead us to the paradox of
globalization: promising one thing, it produces the
contrary. Promising unity, it promotes the break-up of the
structures that are most important in giving unity to human
society, replacing them with the impersonal, anonymous
“atomistic mass.”
The Paradox of Globalization. Thus we come to the
realization that globalization is a paradox. The idea of the
brotherhood of man is exalted by many religions and
proclaimed by many secular leader, but it functions only
when it is actually allowed to work as an ideal ought to
work, and is not mandated by governments. When the attempt
is made to enforce it by government rule and bureaucratic
measures, reinforced by media complicity, the idea of
universal brotherhood achieves the opposite of what is
intended. When all are forced to behave as brothers, then no
one will actually have his or her own brother or sister.
Indeed, the very concept of brother will lose all that it
traditionally meant. When the Apostle Peter writes, “Honor
all. Love the brotherhood” (I Peter 2:17), he obviously
makes a distinction between “all” and the brotherhood, his
brothers and sisters in the faith. If all are brothers, then
the word brother comes to mean nothing. I submit that the
idea of globalization, carried to its logical conclusion,
ends in a contradiction in terms.
Globalization means isolation. Globalization means
isolation: how can we justify saying this? Carried to its
logical conclusion, or should we say, to its logical
absurdity, globalization will not mean, as the American
motto has it, “E pluribus, unum”: out of many, one, but
rather, “E pluribus, chaos,” out of many, chaos[3],
the “bellum omnium contra omnes,” the war of all against
all. It will not be “concordia,” agreement, but “discordia,”
discord and disharmony.
The idea of a world community is counter-intuitive. If it is
universal, it is not community. It is as counter-intuitive
as the thought of a global language. When everyone speaks at
the same time, each one in his own language, you have not
harmony but cacophony, not colloquium but pandemonium.
Ideally, a global order should have a global language. Then
there would be no confusion? But how can we arrive at a
global language? Only by suppressing the hundreds of
languages and thousands of dialects that currently exist, by
requiring everyone to speak one mandatory language, perhaps
a variety of English, perhaps an artificial language such as
Esperanto. This will reduce the number of orators who may
speak out at the United Nations and other world bodies, for
not all will learn the new obligatory language quickly or
easily.
Even more significantly, it will eliminate what we might
call linguistic intimacy for all but a few. We can sense
this when we think of something concrete, that we all use,
language. We should also sense it when we think of an
abstraction, globalization. Let me cite the first lines of a
little German poem, Muttersprache, Mutterlaut, mir so
wonnesam, so traut, Erstes Wort, das ich gehoret, erstes,
süsses, Liebeswort.
In my own unrhyming English version, this will read, Mother
tongue, mother sound, for me so pleasurable, so dear, First
word I ever heard, first sweet word of love.
Admittedly, should there ever be one mandatory world
language, mothers could not be made to use it with their
children, and they would not do so. It has proved difficult
and for the moment impossible, for even the most powerful
nations to impose their favored language on home and hearth;
the Russian czars could not do it by force, and the United
States have more or less given up any attempt to enforce
English, the language of the majority, as the national
language. The problem is evident. The attempt to impose a
global language would weaken and destroy existing
communities, from families to nations, long before it
succeeded, if ever it could do so, in creating a global
community.
Upinsky considers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose thinking
influenced both the American and the French Revolutions, to
be a major contributor to the growing perversion of
language. In these last months of the second millennium, it
is taken for granted that the whole world loves liberty,
would like nothing better than to have it. But there is
liberty and liberty, and we must be sure that we know what
kind of liberty is being offered. To say “Nothing is
forbidden,” may come in practice to mean, “Everything is
obligatory.”
It is Rousseau who frankly stated that the proclaimed goal
of liberty does something that few of its devotees expect.
Liberty in his sense “liberates” by destroying the bonds
that bind individuals to one another and to small groups and
puts them entirely at the disposal of the State. Rousseau
assumes that the goal of every system of government must be
the achievement of the greatest common good, which will be
reduced to two principal objects, liberty and equality. If
we have a truly globalized world, then those concepts,
liberty and equality, must be the goals for the entire
world. If all are to be free, then no one can be tied. That
implies the destruction of family, of every tie that binds
husband to wife, parent to child, brother and sister to
brother and sister.
Globalization does not intend to mean the break-up of all
bonds, isolation, and does not yet mean isolation, any more
than “Liberté, égalité, fraternité!” was intended to bring
the Reign of Terror. It was not meant to do so, but it did,
and it brought it in 1793, only four years after the year
when the Declaration of the Rights of Man was published.
Were we paying attention when M. Upinsky told us what
noble-sounding words, liberté, écialité, fraternité really
meant?
But surely, you object, this is precisely not what
globalization intends to bring, not the end of all families,
but one big happy family, when “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,”
“All men become brothers,” as Friedrich Schiller wrote in
his Ode to Joy and Ludwig van Beethoven celebrated in his
Ninth Symphony. But one big happy family cannot exist when
all the little families are gone, and that is what the ideal
of globalization really means, if it does not consciously
intend it.
The idea of globalization is, as the Germans say, “in aller
Mund,” on everyone’s lips, or at least of the lips of all
those who are politically correct, and is intended to do
that which centuries of proclaiming the Golden Rule has not
yet accomplished, to spread peace on earth. But consider
this: hardly any country, with the exception of a few of the
smaller ones, has succeeded in establishing real social
peace even within its own frontiers. Has anyone questioned
how it can be expected that the world as a whole, this vast
agglomeration of six thousand million peoples, of two—or is
it twenty thousand— tongues, of one hundred fifty-odd
ostensibly “united” nations, can accomplish on a planetary
scale what even a small country such as neutral Switzerland
or “felix Austria” —happy Austria—has barely been able to do
on a small scale?
The concept of globalization presents us with a development,
or perhaps a program, that is supposed to bring the greatest
benefits to the entire population of this planet, a
population that has now attained, we are assured, the height
of six thousand million, to use the European way of
counting, six billion in American parlance. I can well
remember a World Almanac of my youth citing a world
population of less than two thousand million, less than two
American billion. In other words, for every person on this
earth in 1950, there are three here now — and this has taken
place in the context of the most murderous century in all
human history—200 million killed by direct government
actions, not counting the fifty million killed in war.[4]
We laud growing globalization, speak reverently of
pluralism, multiculturalism, and the like, but what do we
expect on a world-wide basis in the light of our failures at
the local, cantonal, state, and national level?
Aithusius and “Politica”. I would like to conclude by
drawing your attention to two different visions of
government, that of Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century and
of Johannes Althusius in the seventeenth. For both, all
authority is derived from God, but they differed
dramatically about who it is to whom God assigns it. For
Bodin, authority is delegated by God to the monarch, who
then assigns it to his ministers and their subordinates,
until it reaches the lowest level of the family and the
individual. Bodin’s doctrine is consonant with the divine
right of kings, but also, appropriate changes being made,
with other autocratic forms as well. Indeed, although the
hoped-for global community may well not recognize God, it is
destined to act as though, like Bodin’s king, it is divinely
endowed with absolute and irrefragable authority.
Authority from the top down, or from the bottom up. In his
Politica, Aithusius too begins with God, but he sees God as
delegating authority to individuals, not to institutions.
God’s covenant promises “terminate upon persons,” not
structures, to use an expression of the American
Presbyterian A. A. Hodge. Human individuals, called to
embrace a covenant relationship with God according to the
ordinances of the Ten Commandments, enter into or find
themselves in covenantal relationships with one another. The
simplest and most primary covenant is the marriage covenant
that unites man and woman, and the natural covenant that
exists between parents and children. Individuals agree
together to pursue a common goal, creating collegia, which
in terms can covenant to create towns, provinces, and
ultimately a commonwealth. Note that this differs from
Rousseau’s idea of the social contract in that in Rousseau,
individuals create a contrast with one another to grant
authority to a sovereign, bypassing all “particular
dependencies,” creating the liberty of what Hannah Arendt
calls “the atomistic mass,” with individuals like atoms, not
bonded to others -- that would be “molecular” -- but only
related to the central power, the State, or as Betrand de
Jouvenel used to say, the Minotaur.
In Althusius’s view sovereign authority is neither divinely
appointed nor democratically granted to a single authority,
is built up step by step. The sovereign authority that we
call the State arises by the covenanting together of lesser
communities, with the family as the smallest and most basic
among them. Inherent in this view of reality is the
importance of each of the several levels of intermediate
institutions or mediating structures.
The effective guarantees of freedom and dignity, with which,
according to the American Declaration of Independence, we
have been endowed by our Creator, do not derive from the
State nor its constitution, if it has one. They come from
the Creator, but they must be maintained, if they are to
survive, by the presence of intermediate institutions,
institutions whose members are committed to each other and
to each other’s welfare. “Peace on earth,” if it can come in
the midst of this “perverse and crooked generation,” will
not come through a homogenization of the nations in
globalization, but through an up building, step by step,
from the smallest self-respecting units, the families, to
larger units, to the level of nations that can respect one
another because they themselves are based at each level on
faithful covenants and mutual respect.
Endnotes
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