[StBernard] Progressive Inhumanity, Part One: The State against the Family

[Westley Annis]

Progressive Inhumanity, Part One: The State against the Family
by Anthony Esolen

When they were casting for the old western The Rifleman, one small boy was
brought into the room after another, to meet the star Chuck Connors and the
director.  Then young Johnny Crawford came in, a little gangly in the arms
and legs, with tousled hair and large brown eyes.  "That's the son of Lucas
McCain," they said at once.  Connors remarked years later that the best
thing about the show was the relationship between the widowed father and the
son, because that was genuine; shooting bad guys in Hollywood style was
strictly secondary.  He was right about that.  The elder McCain didn't give
the law so much as embody it, make it human and real, as fallible as he
could sometimes be.  The warmth the man and the boy expressed for one
another was also real, and Johnny Crawford remained very close to his
pretended father, until Connors passed away some years ago.

Great artists too have seen what these homely purveyors of popular culture
once saw.  The heroine of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, a
passionate and headstrong and self-willed young girl, rejects her father's
solid and sensible choice for a husband, and takes to her bed the dashing
but irresponsible swordsman Erlend.  Yet Kristin cannot escape the
authority, and the generous goodness, of her father Lavrans.  It is not so
much the local priest who embodies for her the Christian faith, and how
people are to be treated, and what must be done and what must not be done,
as that once handsome and burly father, who loved her so dearly, and whom
she disappointed so deeply.  Many years after her ill-advised marriage,
after Lavrans has long been reconciled with his son-in-law, the old man lies
on his bed of death, welcoming and thanking all the servants and the
neighboring folk who visit to bid him farewell.  He breathes his last with a
sudden surge of will, looking upon the cross that his old friend the priest
holds before his closing eyes.  I too, even in these days of spiritual
aridity, returned to my home in Pennsylvania to be at my father's side, in
our living room, as he died, his eyes looking upon us all.  I had no idea at
the time that he would be present to me more fully in the years to come than
he had when I was young and foolish.  For when I think of the law, I think
of him, standing upright on the aisle-end of the pew, next to my mother, and
glancing with half-mischievous reproof should my brother momentarily forget
where he was.

Thus is the law made human; thus does it become for us not only a restraint
but a potency, not only an object to obey with fear, but a person to heed
with love.

Pope Leo XIII saw this.  The beauty and the divine order of the family is
the very soul of his social teaching, because it is there, within the walls
of the home, that society begins.  Thus we hear him declare, against the
statists of his time, that by the command of God "we have the family; the
society of a man's house - a society limited indeed in numbers, but no less
a true society, anterior to every kind of State or nation, invested with
rights and duties of its own, totally independent of the civil community."
This is the doctrine of subsidiarity at its core.  The Pope does not justify
the family on utilitarian grounds.  He does not affirm (what is true in any
case) that there are many things the family can do that the State cannot do
as well, or cannot do at all.  Instead he founds the rights of the family in
nature, and the God of nature.  It is a society both human and divine.  It
is within those bonds of love or duty that children and parents both put
faces upon law that would otherwise remain abstract, distant, sometimes
threatening, sometimes impotent, but always extrinsic, and therefore not
quite real.  It is there, and only there, that law and love may be found
growing together.

And it is there that we first, when we are children, and most effectually,
when we are grown, exercise our practical reason in attaining the common
good.  It combines the best of monarchy and aristocracy and democracy and
even at times a merry anarchy, and, if it does not transgress against its
own natural purposes, the family "has at least equal rights with the State
in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its
just liberty."  There we dicker in council, make strategic alliances, adjust
the punishment to fit the crime, correct the sinner, commend the patriot,
sing with the comrade, struggle on the field and laugh thereafter, make
obedience into gifts and gifts into praise, remember those who have gone
before us and follow in their wisdom, and fall to our knees in worship of
the common Father of all.  We occupy space in a city or county, those
geographical fictions, but there in the family we dwell.  Nations and
parties pass away, but not the souls of those whose faces we never forget.

At this point it seems to me coarse to turn to the political; but fittingly
coarse.  As jarring as it feels now to refer to so petty a thing as the
leviathan, so unnatural it is for the leviathan to attempt to destroy or
enfeeble or absorb the family.  So says the Pope: "The contention, then,
that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise
intimate control over the family and the household, is a great and
pernicious error."  True, a destitute family without friends must be
assisted by public aid, and parents who pervert the true ends of the family,
by gross neglect or abuse, should be brought to justice, "for this is not to
deprive citizens of their rights, but justly to safeguard and strengthen
them."  Yet we tread here upon hallowed ground.  "The rulers of the State,"
says Leo, "must go no further: here nature bids them stop.  Paternal
authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the
same source as human life itself."  Just as each one of us is an
unrepeatable instance of the goodness of the Father, so too each child
"takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality
as member of the family in which it is born."

The family, then, is that natural society where individual liberty and the
common good are most nearly reconciled.  To deprive it of its rights is to
rob people of a great part of what it is to be human.  It is repressive.
The judgment of Pope Leo could hardly be more sternly expressed: "The
Socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State
supervision, act against natural justice, and break into pieces the
stability of all family life."

With what indignation, and even nausea, must we then regard the
never-ceasing intrusions of the State!  In Alberta, the "conservative"
government has forbidden even homeschooling parents to teach their children
that homosexual acts are unnatural.  It does not occur to the lawmakers that
their own edict is itself unnatural.  In no school district in my area do
parents have the least authority in determining what their children will
learn; they are thwarted by buffers of bureaucrats, those within the schools
and their friends on school committees, not to mention by the deliberately
inculcated arrogance of teachers, who take it as their sacred mission to
separate children as best they can from those beliefs of the parents that
they do not share.  Planned Parenthood, that money pit for the production of
porno-twaddle and the destruction of life, peddles salacious "educational
tools" to children, and never says, "You had better talk these things over
with your father and mother," or, "You should honor the laws of your faith,"
or, "You might wish to take counsel from a wise clergyman."  No, that would
be the advice of people who actually understood the harmony between law and
love, and the just claims of the society into which we are born.

Mass entertainment, that drivel that trickles from the jowls of leviathan
while it snores, has the same end in mind: to render us less human, by
separating us from family and faith.  After all, just as a strong family is
a bulwark against the predations of the State, so too, as the entertainers
have finally learned, is it a bulwark against the predations of the media.
At least it can be a bulwark; its members can turn aside from the glaring
screen and, rubbing their eyes, glance at one another.  Its members can ask,
after a long muddle, why they should attend to idols so stupid and ugly and
impotent, and not to the God who made heaven and earth.

There has never been a calamity that someone or other has not profited from.
So I will be asking, in this series, cui bono?  Who profits from the
dehumanization?  More on this to come.