The Natural Family

By Thomas Fleming

"Man is by nature a zoon politikon, a political animal." Aristotle’s definition is among the most misunderstood statements ever made by a philosopher. It does not mean that man likes to play politics or even that human beings cannot live without the political mechanisms of the modern state. The Greek word polls hardly ever meant state or government: it is used to describe the people of a city and its territory—perhaps community comes closest in modern tongues. What Aristotle did mean is that our human nature is essentially social—that we are born to live with one another in a commonwealth. The earliest form of association, says Aristotle, is the household, defined primarily as a union of man and woman, and from this union comes the children who represent the future, both of the parents and of the community. Villages, city-states, great nations and empires—all of them rest upon the fundamental unit of the family, which a later philosopher called the seed-bed of the commonwealth.

To be human, then, is to be born into a family, and it is only by living in a family that we are capable of becoming good neighbors and citizens. Men in isolation become monsters or lose all contact with reality, and children deprived of the affectionate care of parents rarely develop into responsible citizens. This seems obvious enough, and I might stop here if it were not for all the social theorists who have tried to imagine a time in history before there was a family. In fact, the evidence of anthropology reveals that there is no such animal. The human species might be called not Homo sapiens (so few of us are wise) but Homo familiaris. Every enduring society that has been studied (I am not including prisons, college campuses, or the European Parliament) has a recognizable marriage structure based on the natural differences between men and women and a family structure whose object is the care of children.

Nature, even without the support of divine revelation, can tell us a great deal about the family. The natural man is, for example, "mildly polygynous," as a great biologist recently described us, meaning that statistically most of us live in monogamous households, even though here or there a few powerful men might accumulate a larger number of wives. Group marriage, a situation in which many men and women are married to each other, has been described as a "figment of the Victorian imagination." Feminists are fond of talking about polyandry—the marriage of one woman to several men—but this custom is attested in only a few highly unsuccessful societies, where it is necessary to kill many girl babies in order to balance things out.

The differences between males and females, we now know from researches into genetics and endocrinology, are fundamental to human nature and social life. The fact of life is that human males invest a great deal less in their offspring than mothers do. Women produce few but large eggs in the course of a year, while men produce millions of gametes. A woman can hardly conceive and bear one child a year, while a man might beget dozens without trying very hard. Once conception occurs, the mother not only carries the child for nine months, but she is the primary source of nourishment and care for many years. Fathers are, of course, important to the moral health of the child, but they are not so indispensable, and even in the best of all worlds, fathers cannot spend as much time with their children.

Because mothers and fathers have quite different roles to play in the begetting and rearing of children, their brains and temperaments are formed differently, giving men the qualities necessary to be warriors and mathematicians and turning women into caretakers and careful observers of detail—whether they exercise these abilities as mothers, doctors and nurses, or even as novelists who understand the human heart. The differentiation of male and female begins even in the womb, when the brain development of boys and girls begins to take different paths; these distinctions deepen during adolescence as powerful sex hormones kick in, causing the development not just of physical changes but of the intellectual and moral qualities that distinguish men from women.

Men and women are more distinct than male and female chimpanzees, and what is more, the higher civilizations of Greece, Rome, China, and medieval Europe all gave greater emphasis to sexual distinctions than are commonly found in more primitive cultures. However, throughout this century—a century in which mankind has stepped back into savagery—the ideologies of communism, socialism, and feminism, in trying to ignore or minimize these differences, have struck a blow at the heart, not just of the family itself, but also of all human social life.

The other family myth—or rather lie—has been propagated by social historians such as Philippe Aries and Lawrence Stone, who have pretended to discover that the permanent things were invented yesterday. They argue, for example, that until the 17th century, men did not love their wives or that sexual exploitation of children was normal. In the famous sentence of one such historian, "Childhood is a nightmare from which mankind is just beginning to awaken." The roots of this kind of pseudo-history lie in Marx and Engels, who believed that both private property and the family were invented as devices to subjugate women and the poor.

There is a conservative or capitalist parallel to the Marxist view of the family as a social invention. This is the myth of the bourgeois family. This myth takes many forms, but all of them say, essentially, that what we understand as the institution of the family was created by the bourgeois Protestants described by Max Weber. The human male, they say, is by nature a sexual predatory who could never content himself with one wife if the laws did not bully him into monogamy. This is either adolescent fantasy or wishful thinking, since few men over the age of 25 are able to devote themselves to sexual gratification.

Even in France, supposedly an erotic paradise, a large majority of husbands claim to be entirely faithful to their wives. Unlike the Marxists, the propagators of the bourgeois family myth do not want to destroy the family, but they do see it as a fragile social construction which must be supported by profamily legislation: stiff laws against fornication and divorce, as well as an indoctrination process designed to tame the raging male hormones.

But both these theories rest on false assumptions. Here, again, real research reveals a completely different picture of the family as a universal human institution in which children are the object of affection. Whether we study the ancient Greeks and Romans, Europe in the Middle Ages, the high civilizations of the Chinese and the Japanese, or the precivilized cultures of aboriginal Australia and America, the picture that emerges is the same. By and large, everywhere in the world, even in the unhealthy conditions of postmodern Europe and America, men have loved and cherished their wives and taken care of their children.

Let us look at a few examples that illustrate the range of family forms. The extreme case, for antifamily Marxists and Freudians, is that of the Roman father, who had power of life and death over his children, and yet current studies by Roman historians reveal a pattern of family life that most of us here would admire. A recent book on Roman marriage concludes that "a particularly close relationship between man and wife" was regarded as "normal and desirable." The Roman ideal of family affection also extended to children, who are consistently depicted in art and literature as objects of parental adoration. Exposure of defective or unwanted infants was permitted (although it was apparently regarded as shameful), but we who live in countries that not only tolerate abortion but celebrate it as an act of virtue, we are in no position to point an accusing finger at virtuous pagans.

Rome was a highly developed society with an elaborate political structure. At virtually the other end of the scale are stateless societies, which have neither government nor formal leadership. But among such peoples as the Nuer of the Sudan, the family is a cohesive unit: the father is a patriarch, who has the power to beat, exile, or even kill his dependents. But in practice, Nuer husbands and fathers are loving and indulgent. The anthropologist Evans-Pritchard never saw a Nuer man strike his wife.

I could spend this entire conference going over recent scholarship on Medieval Italian cities, English villages, or American frontier settlements land and the conclusion would be the same. In any normal or stable society, the rule of family relations is affection and support, and this rule is applied without any encouragement or coercion from government. Children, in particular, represent the future of the family, the natural immortality of husband and wife. To kill or abuse one’s own child is, therefore, the same thing as suicide.

Here is the one central point I wish you to take away: that man is by nature a family man, and that the strength of other social and political institutions rests upon the health and independence of the family.

That this institution is in danger, no one here in this beautiful city has any doubt. The economic system of advanced societies has tended, for the past two centuries, to destroy the old ideal of the self-sufficient household. The law of the family is love, which means acceptance of children, parents, and siblings. There is little regard for their abilities or wealth, but the transformation from a farming economy to an economy based on industrial labor has driven fathers, mothers, and children into the marketplace, where law is competition and where people are judged by results. This is not to say that the family and the marketplace are antagonists; they are far from it. But each is a reflection of something essential in human nature, and each has its separate sphere.

In encroaching ever more on the familial sphere, the forces of greed, consumerism, and ambition are diminishing the viability of the family as a social institution. The social disruptions caused by industrialization led, inevitably, to a longing for an older, more medieval social order; but it also led to the Marxist repudiation of property, the family, and all social order, and it led to their insane desire to recreate a primitive egalitarian world that never existed, even among chimpanzees.

I am not exaggerating. Chimpanzee mothers are typically affectionate and protective toward their offspring, and they are often assisted by their female relatives, who act as babysitters. The senior males, who are collectively responsible for paternity, not only protect the babies and children from aggression, but they can also be seen holding and caressing them. Divine law commands us men to love our wives as Christ loves the church, and to take care of our children. But even as natural creatures, we are designed to fulfill our obligations as parents. The family is an expression of our nature, and so long as we are human, we are familial.

Some early Marxists preached free love and the destruction of the family, and in the early days after the Russian Revolution, these sentiments were not uncommon. They were destabilizing, however, and in the end the Soviet government realized that it could more successfully undermine the family by making it dependent on the government and by driving mothers into the workforce. Above all, the Communists sought to break up the extended family, which afforded protection against the government. They were then able to use the nuclear family as "a training ground for submission."

In the West a similar result was achieved by a sinister coalition of feminists, socialists, and big business interests. By putting women to work, men’s wages could be lowered; in accepting social insurance, the middle classes became dependent upon government; in sending their children to government schools, parents gave up their fundamental right to rear their children according to their religious traditions; and in paying the taxes to support all these programs, families lost the economic independence which is the necessary foundation for family autonomy. Perhaps the most destructive force has been the mobility that characterizes modern American society: American workers and executives are sent from one end of the country to another, and in moving, they break their ties with their extended families and are unable to put down roots within a new community. As a result, they are vulnerable and dependent both upon the employer and on the state.

Most of you know all this, but still, even good Christian defenders of the family are tempted to look to national governments and international agencies for help. In Europe and the United States, profamily conservatives are busily drawing up political plans to save the family. But the modern state—both in its capitalist and in its communist forms—has devoted itself to wrecking the family.

The only help it can give is to leave us alone, by drawing a line at the threshold of the home—a line beyond which the state will not step—so that every home can be, as in the English proverb, a man’s castle. Even the devil himself cannot enter a house unless he is first invited, and in asking the state to define the family or support it with economic assistance, we are inviting a legion of demons to enter our homes and take up residence.

We must not be in a hurry to save the family from the state. No social structure can endure if it undermines its own foundations. Soviet communism made war upon the family, and the Soviet empire is fallen. Socialist nations like Denmark have such low birthrates that before long there will be neither Danes nor Denmark. And if democratic capitalist nations continue to suck the vitality out of family life, they, too, will perish and be replaced by less advanced peoples who still understand the fundamental things of life.

The entire social order of nations and even of the international community rests on the solid foundation of millions upon millions of families who learn and practice virtue within the privacy of their own homes. This is not only the reality of everyday life, but it is also the social vision of Christianity and Judaism, which rest upon the commandment "Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord God giveth thee." In other words, so long as the family is honored and left alone to do its work, our social order will succeed. But once we interfere with laws and tax policies, scheme to liberate wives from husbands, or seek to protect children from parents, the social order will collapse.

The situation is not so desperate as it may seem. Despite the perverse restraints imposed by governments and customs, nature always wins out in the end. In his 1920 play RUR, the Czech writer Karel Capek imagined an international economy dominated by robots—a word he coined.

These robots are not machines but an engineered species of dehumanized workers, capable of total exploitation and devoid of all human pleasures and affections. By their efficiency, they turn all the workingmen out of their jobs, they mechanize agriculture, and they make the practice of charity unnecessary. In fact, human beings become so irrelevant that no children are born, dooming the human race to eventual extinction. The robots, however, do not wait; they rise up and murder all the human beings but one.

In the advanced nations of Europe and North America, Capek’s nightmare is fast becoming reality, but even his robots, after they have destroyed the human race, discover the self-sacrificing love of man and wife. The last man on earth tells them, "Go, Adam; go, Eve. The world is yours."

The inventor who created the robots was looking for something greater than a cheap labor force. As Capek explains, "He wanted to become a sort of scientific substitute for God. . . . His sole purpose was nothing more nor less than to prove that God was no longer necessary." This ambition to replace God is as old as the serpent who tempted the first Adam and as up-to-date as the plans to clone human beings.

Man was born to live within the communities of family and nations. As Aristotle concluded, a man outside of his community must either be a god or a beast. In building a society that is not based on the family, modern man is sinking lower than the beasts themselves, who at least continue to propagate their species. We shall only recover our full humanity, when—like Capek’s robots—we love each other as man and wife and as mother and child.

 Thomas Fleming, classicist, poet, and philosopher, is the editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by the Rockford Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of The Politics of Human Nature. His thought, like that of Aristotle and Aquinas, is focused on human relationships rooted in the natural realities of life—faith, blood, land—rather than in abstractions such as liberty, equality, fraternity.