CHAPTER XXII THE FAMILY OPINION on the relation between the family institution. and social progress runs clear through the spectrum, from the deepest indigo of those who see in the family a sacrosanct divine institution, the chief pillar of order, religion, and the state, the fountain of every virtue, public no less than private, to the violent red of those who find it the adamantine rock which bars the path to race perfection, to a higher morality, a nobler concept of property, a more fully developed state, a finer sense of civic responsibility, which stifles and freezes the fine emotion of love and debases it to the grossest ends. The scientific attitude finds itself somewhere about the middle of this color scale. While discarding the idea that human society as we know it has developed out of some prehistoric family as the single germ or cell, or that it is now the fundamental social unit, the claims of the family for services rendered in the past to social development are not thereby disallowed. From a biological standpoint it has been and still is indispensable as the conserver of child life: it is in no mere metaphorical sense a sort of extended placenta. Through assuring to the child a longer period of infancy it permitted the little one to absorb its social inheritance and to elaborate its mental outfit, while at the same time it enforced a valuable social discipline upon its parents. Incidentally it saved the time and strength of parents by cutting down a wasteful birth rate and by postponing the period of sexual maturity. As an economic device it was no less significant in the specialization of occupations, in the history of agriculture, trade, and the manufacturing arts, in stabilizing the institution of private property, in developing the arts of consumption and saving. As a cultural device its chief significance grows out of the fund of leisure created by a lessened birth rate, and out of its share in the intellectual elaboration of youth. Its political services have been on the whole negative and conservative, if not quite negligible: there is no sound evidence to show that the family ever was the parent of the state. While it cannot be revered as the mother of all the virtues, its contribution to ethical development has been large: the virtues of sympathy, patience, tenderness, self-sacrifice, obedience, foresight, and courage, to name only a few, strike their roots deep down into the homely strata of domestic life. As I have elsewhere been at considerable pains to show, the family has not been in all ages par excellence the supreme and basic educational institution; but it has always been an extremely important element in the educational machinery of a normal social group. The family has served in all these directions; but it has hindered in others. Largely, it appears, because of a certain inherent passivity and conservatism. In all ages it has tended to take on the form and content imposed by the general living conditions to which human groups have been subjected. At the same time domestic institutions lean backwards and tend to perpetuate archaic forms and relations long after the original conditions which evoked them have been supplanted. The mother-clan family may be cited to illustrate how domestic forms can hinder social development. Under such a clan system communism with all its limitations prevailed. Domestic solidarity itself was impossible. Chil dren belonged to the maternal clan; consequently were pitted against their father in case of strife between his clan and his wife's. The transition to the father-clan illustrates on the other hand not only how a type of domestic organization may insure greater social strength, but also how domestic institutions depend upon other social contingencies. The father-family is the result of the growing concept of private property, sedentary life, domestication of animals, discovery of metal-working, and a more precise knowledge of the procreative processes, hence a refinement in the ideas of kinship and inheritance. While on the whole the father-family has been a distinct gain to the race, in certain forms it also threatened to hinder our advance. The patriarchate, with its insistence upon centralized and despotic control of the property, religion, education, and lives of every member of the family group, checked individuality, bred a sort of self-sufficiency and intolerance in education and religion, hindered the growth of varied arts, and prepared the necks of men for the yoke of Oriental despotism and the theocratic state. An aristocracy of birth with its strong sense of family ties and prestige usually retains many of these characteristics. The perception of this fact led the Head Master of at great English school to declare, "The chief manufactories of caste, so far as I can gather, would seem not to be the public schools with which I am acquainted (where indeed we have in existence the chief forces which make against this) but rather the homes from which pupils come to us." The family in all ages, then, has been a rather passive and conservative institution, and has served the cause of progress both positively and negatively in a way by that very staticism. Fortunately, however, it is not dead in its conservatism, but is on the whole a highly flexible insti tution. In the present era of transition and destructive criticism the family has lost much of its ancient authority. What it will prove to be in the future as a progressive force, it is impossible therefore to predict. The steady preëmption by the state of the fields of education and child welfare means a corresponding shrinkage in the parental domain. The state as Over-Parent may still further 'interfere with the traditional relationships between parent and child. It may even go so far as to establish certain restrictions upon marriage, or otherwise step between men and women in their sexual relationship. But the family cannot be broken up. It must be accepted for better or for worse. So long, however, as it is regarded primarily as a device for extinguishing lust or satisfying it cheaply; so long as children are born largely as the uncalculated aftermath of passion or in response to artful social suggestion; and so long as home life is the sphere of unlimited monarchy, of despotism, physical, mental, and spiritual; so long but little can be expected of the family by way of serious contributions to social advance. If we want to utilize the inherent power for social discipline, for affection, for altruism, which resides in the family institution, we must see to it that conditions are maintained in which decent, rational home life can thrive. This means, in the concrete, adequate family income, education for domestic life, real equality between parents, a decent house (domestic morality is said to be a matter of square feet), and leisure to devote to the business of home life and parenthood: all of which means, in turn, shortening of the working day, education for leisure, and the application of scientific management to home keeping. The family will serve progressive ends, then, if it is not called upon to do things for which it is inherently unfitted, and if it is given means and conditions appropriate to its highest functioning. CHAPTER XXIII GOVERNMENT It is frequently asserted that religion, classes, economic organization, education, and other dynamic social agencies depend upon political forms. Or, in other words, that education, law, philosophy, economics, and ethics are only the formulation of current needs and tendencies of the ruling classes in terms of social structure. This is obvious enough and true enough when you stop to consider that only those individuals and social classes having a clear vision of their common interests are sufficiently coherent and organized to impose their will upon their fellows who are more foggy-minded and less closely knit. From the standpoint of social structure ruling classes are distinctly superior to unorganized masses; hence genetically and functionally should be expected to leave their stamp upon the whole fabric of social life. But this is far from saying that ruling classes express their will only through political forms; ie., government; or that government is merely a synonym for ruling classes. Ce need not bolt entire the Prussian concept of the state to lay hold of the idea that government is wider than any class, that in fact it is all of these in the complementary attitude of agent and subject. We need only recall that society is a ceaseless struggle between invention and convention, in which every human individual is both participant and spectator, in order to grasp that political sovereignty or control is inalienably vested in all the normal free members of the social group. Only by fiction, or inertia, or expediency can it be conceived as lodged elsewhere. Hence from the |