Failed fashions vs the future of the family
By Ann Farmer | 2 October 2024
Winkle-picker shoes, miniskirts or, for that matter, frock coats and farthingales no longer brighten our daily lives. Fashions come and go, but some things, we like to think, last forever; however, for this reason, we tend to take them for granted.
And the signs are that if we do not take it more seriously, one day the family may be as obsolete as breeches and bustles. The “safe space” where new life is nurtured may in future be a thing of the past.
For decades now, “progressives” have regarded the traditional family model as an archaic leftover of more primitive times. One modern feminist has even suggested that “marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy”; she maintains that traditional marriage “is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States.” Apparently, the family is not only sexist but racist. In real life, however, it is the non-traditional human grouping that poses the greatest danger to children.
And in allegedly more “primitive” times, most adults were trustworthy; neighbours would act as surrogate parents and grandparents when the need arose. Nobody was too busy to help out in times of need; door-keys were left under mats. But with the rise of the broken family, this sort of cohesive community is becoming vanishingly rare.
The decline in respect for the family has coincided with a decline in religious adherence, which in turn has coincided with a decline in fertility; God’s injunction to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28) seems forgotten. And for those who have problems starting a family, increasingly, reproductive technology rather than adoption and/or fostering is seen as the answer, although the outcomes are uncertain and wastage of unborn life horrendous.
The Bible teaches that God adopted the Jewish people, and Christians were adopted in their turn. St Joseph is the archetypal foster father; the baby Moses was adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, and adoption of an informal nature features strongly in the Bible — Ruth even “adopts” her mother-in-law. In modern times, abortion has been made much easier than adoption; but what will happen to all the children from broken families when unbroken families are a thing of the past?
Marxists have always seen the family as a capitalist engine of exploitation and oppression, relying as it does on unpaid labour, although, as G K Chesterton remarked, “it cannot possibly be more economical to pay [women] to mind each other’s babies”. Marxists would be happier with mothers being paid to look after each other’s children by the state, but that simply means other taxpayers. And is institutional childcare which can elevate children’s stress levels better for them? More fundamentally, does it raise the child’s self-esteem to be cared for by a paid assistant, or the person who performs that function solely out of love? Children know the difference, even if Marxists don’t.
However, with “stay-at-home mothers” treated as “economically inactive” compared to those working outside the home — despite raising the next generation of taxpayers — the solution to declining birthrates is said to be mass migration, and even more paid childcare. As one commentator remarked in satirical vein, “The foundation of a healthy, and sensible society is a belief that the state always knows better than the parent. First, social workers are actually paid to care about children, so there is no ulterior motive.”
Even if Marxism is not popular at the ballot box, global institutions like the World Economic Forum and the UN seem intent on breaking the family, although, ironically, post-Communist Russia has defended the family from Western attempts to airbrush it from the world’s future. But with memories of Soviet Communism and the Iron Curtain fading fast, we cannot afford to allow the ghastly realities to be forgotten; it is always harder to fight a ghost.
In contrast, Nazism is remembered but, ironically, the memory of fascism is hijacked to stamp out free speech, on the pretext that criticising certain cultural trends and public policies “may lead to fascism”. Any view with which the “progressive classes” disagree — especially involving their failed policies — is swiftly branded “right wing”; and since such criticism “may lead to hate”, it must be suppressed. “Censorship zones”, formerly operating around abortion centres, are being imposed countrywide, but rather than guaranteeing “the right to choose”, in criminalising offers of help, they will ensure that women lack real choice when it comes to pregnancy. Even silent prayer is being effectively criminalised, with Christians subjected to serial arrest and legal harassment. Left-wing “tolerance” is beginning to look eerily like fascism.
In yet another irony, this unprecedented clampdown on free expression stems from the supposedly freedom-enhancing Sexual Revolution — actually a top-down revolution in morals that placed the self, however disordered, at the centre of everything. The universe became the “you-niverse” and, in a post-Christian world, I am became “I am, therefore I should do whatever I want”.
During the Sexual Revolution, contraception and abortion were offered free of charge to help individuals escape the consequences of their own actions. In this sexual “you-topia”, the idea of sin has been abolished and, in the anti-Christian hierarchy of victimhood, it is not the unborn child who is the most vulnerable but those who might be prevented from disposing of that child by the “threat” of abortion restrictions. By the same reasoning, the helpless elderly, along with the disabled, are not at risk of euthanasia, but in danger of being “denied the right to die”.
In another Nietzschean “transvaluation of values”, the innocent unborn baby found guilty of being disabled in the womb faces pre-birth euthanasia if their parents can be persuaded that abortion is really the merciful option. And despite the progressive left’s preoccupation with historical racism, ethnic minorities are most at risk of this “final solution”, since they are disproportionately affected by pre-birth genocide. The victims of the Sexual Revolution are said to be exercising choice, but really they are self-harming, although anyone attempting to warn of the inevitable consequences risks being charged with “hate crime”. How good it would be to hear about the difference between right and wrong — perhaps even from the Catholic Church!
But as well as top-down Revolution, the West has seen an overall increase in prosperity, and where material goods are plentiful, people become less important; however, technology is a poor substitute. Even aside from the horrors of pornography, now ubiquitous on the internet, and the unpleasant and unhealthy output of TV and cinema, mobile phones, meant to “connect people”, have instead isolated people, especially children. Technology is a good servant but a bad master, and human beings who attempt to form a relationship with a machine simply turn into machines.
Meanwhile, those relationships that humanise us are portrayed as a drag on personal autonomy: from being a source of joy and consolation, having children is now seen as an expensive private hobby. Once regarded as an asset to the poor, children are seen as a drain on personal resources, especially when most couples rely on two incomes.
Historically, the neo-Malthusian population controllers believed that getting women out to work would help curb the birthrate; and although the modern welfare state aids the less prosperous in having children, it is funded by the taxpayer at enormous expense. In yet another irony, the taxpayer-funded welfare state has helped to exterminate the future generations on which it depends, in what might be called the “TPP” — the Taxpayer Prevention Programme.
The welfare state has succeeded in making the poor expensive; but in the early twentieth century, those who promoted the welfare state idea maintained that the provision of birth control would help to pay for it, since there would be fewer poor people to claim the proposed benefits. Admittedly, the high infant mortality, common among the poor in those days, has been vastly improved by the kind of public health system they advocated; but it has been replaced by a high pre-birth mortality rate: legalised abortion.
No doubt those who wished to “manage” the quantity and quality of the population assumed that marriage would always exist, but as Chesterton observed, “frivolous divorce” has led to “frivolous marriage”; and since marriage is the foundation of the family, and the family is the foundation of society, society has succeeded in undermining its own foundation, with fewer and fewer taxpayers to fund the state.
But when marriage finally disintegrates, to be replaced by transient, serial relationships producing fatherless children, we may be forced to do what the cultural Marxists always wanted: to “collectivise” the human family, with all children “held in common”. This would fulfil the neo-Malthusian population control project — with fewer children being born — but also the eugenics project, since those children would be subject to “quality control”.
The Church, always counter-cultural, has always been condemned by its enemies, as Jesus warned; now, under the religion of “woke”, Catholicism is condemned as “intolerant”, especially for opposing “sexual diversity” and promiscuity, contraception and abortion; it could be that, with its lack of emphasis on traditional Catholic teaching, the new education programme of the Bishops of England and Wales, Life to the Full, is aimed at trying to combat this reputation.
But such false teaching will not help the Church win friends among its confirmed enemies, especially when the progressive “you-topia” becomes a dystopia, with increases in crime, disorder and mental instability — the result of trying to abolish the human soul. And we cannot rely on the progressive classes, whose misguided beliefs shape public policy, to do an about-turn. Progressives never change their minds; they just change the subject.
Even the worst efforts of progressive churchmen will not be enough to appease the enemies of truth, who are also the enemies of the family. The “tolerant” are not so tolerant, but that does not mean we must tolerate their lack of tolerance. Our confidence in some of the guardians of the Faith may falter, but while we hold to that Faith, and moreover, continue to state the case for life, liberty and common sense, the family will rise from the dead, like the Founder of the Faith. He promised St Peter that “on this rock I will build my Church. And the gates of Hell can never prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). While the Holy Family continues to guide the human family, mere fashion will never succeed in abolishing it.