Patriarchy as the Basis of Civilization

Not too long ago I picked up a book entitled Dynamics of World History by Christopher Dawson.  It has been a bit of a revelation for me.  Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) wrote widely on the subjects of culture and religion and how the former is dependent upon the latter.   Dynamics, itself, is actually a collection of essays by Dawson and every one of them repays reading.  But one, in particular, struck me very hard.

In The Patriarchal Family in History, Dawson describes the manner in which the patriarchal family made high civilization possible.  Only when men are harnessed to family and when this male-headed institution is made permanent in law and custom can great deeds of civilization can be done.  Human beings, as such, are not given to discipline and hard work and only the school of family can condition inherently lazy people to strive beyond the basic necessities.  He also describes how the loss of this institution is devastating to society.  As we watch our own civilization decay we must keep in mind that this is not the first time our form of family has fallen on hard time – towards the end of the Greco-Roman era, the patriarchal family had also disintegrated:

…the patriarchal family failed to adapt itself to the urban conditions of the Hellenistic civilization, and consequently the whole culture lost its stability. Conditions of life both in the Greek city state and in the Roman Empire favoured the man without a family who could devote his whole energies to the duties and pleasures of public life. Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality or by relations with slaves and prostitutes.

This aversion to marriage and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire, where the citizen class even in the provinces was extraordinarily sterile and was recruited not by natural increase, but by the constant introduction of alien elements, above all from the servile class. Thus the ancient world lost its roots alike in the family and in the land and became prematurely withered…

Sound familiar?  The modern family was devastated like that – the introduction of a highly mechanized way of life and being crowded in to large cities where the common man owned little or no property broke down the family.  As the family started to break down we saw all that Dawson described – men engaging more often in sexual promiscuity; homosexuality becoming more common and socially acceptable; a greed for wealth and power replacing a desire to raise children and be a good husband.  The difference between ourselves and those ancient Greeks and Romans is that while such folly was mostly confined to the male upper stratum of society, we have democratized disintegration – middle and lower class men participate in this to the limits of their ability, and women have also been drawn in to the process of decay.

Now, why did we choose our path?  Why, that is, after spending ages rebuilding the patriarchal family on Christian lines – which greatly liberated women from the subjection (indeed, degradation) they often suffered under Greco-Roman civilization – did we then decide to repeat the process on an even wider and intense scale?  Well, we broke up, as it were – we ceased to be Catholic; that is, universal.  My Protestant brothers and sisters won’t like this, but it has to be said:

In Protestant Europe…the Reformation, by abandoning the ideal of virginity and by the destruction of monasticism and of the independent authority of the Church, accentuated the masculine element in the family. The Puritan spirit, nourished on the traditions of the Old Testament, created a new patriarchalism and made the family the religious as well as the social basis of society. Civilization lost its communal and public character and became private and domestic. And yet, by a curious freak of historical development, it was this Puritan and patriarchal society which gave birth to the new economic order which now threatens to destroy the family.

By accentuating that part of of the masculine which strives for personal gain and neglecting the part of service (as best shown in Catholic culture by those virgins – men and women – who renounce all in order to serve others), we made a pretty fundamental error.  With a warped view of the world, we went out and warped our world.  Our machines got larger and more efficient while we, as people, got smaller and more incoherent.  We turned in upon ourselves – and everyone, left entirely to private judgment, started to wonder why anyone owed anything to the past – to tradition, that is, and the wisdom it embodies.

This is not to say that Protestants are inherently bad.  No more, that is, than anyone else is.  But it is to say that as we make our decisions about where to go from here, we must pay heed to what has gone before.  We must, that is, think about where we are, how we got here and where we want to go.  It does us no good to ignore the plain fact that in our development over the past two centuries or so, we’ve gotten it very wrong.  So wrong, in fact, that in America today it is common – and entirely unremarkable – for a man to have children by several different women, none of whom he ever bothered to marry.  Nor does a woman automatically reject the advances of a man who has those several children.  Nor does anyone bat an eye at a man ditching his old wife to marry a younger, prettier girl.  All of this is the result not of some evil visitation from outside, but from the facts we have ignored and the decisions we’ve made based upon falsehoods.

Our civilization is dying.   Some, perhaps, think that the civilization can die and yet the parts people like will remain.  It doesn’t work that way.  The reason we have respect for the individual and limited government is because of Christian beliefs.  Those beliefs were infused in to the family and, out of the wreck and ruin of Rome, a new civilization was built – a civilization which surpassed the ancients in morality, art, literature and science.  It was better than what came before – and better than what has come with its decay.

We can already see the slipping away of the trappings of Christian civilization.  Human life is no longer respected.  Outrages which would have provoked our great-grandfathers to issue forth on a crusade against evil are passed over in silence.  The worth of liberty is questioned.  No limit is placed upon the power of government over the lives of the people.  Religion is despised; Christianity (which made our civilization) in particular – and Catholicism is doubly so (not only as the maker of the old civilization, but as its last bulwark).  And the family is held so low that some argue a man “married” to a man is a family as much as any other grouping of people.

To restore what we had – to save our civilization – will require some hard choices on our part.  First and foremost, Christian men are going to have to step forward and start acting like Christian men.  Women are already doing it (in fact, some of the strongest leaders of our revival are now women), but they can’t do it alone.  Unless and until men take a leading roll, all will be for naught.  We, as men, have to discipline ourselves – and turn in fury upon those of our fellow men who fail to live up to the ideal.  The patriarchal family is the basis of all high civilization – the Christianized, patriarchal family is not only the foundation of high civilization, but also the  means by which people are turned in to citizens of the commonwealth, able to control government and business because they are able to control themselves.  He who would enjoy liberty in this world must first learn discipline in the family – and that presupposes there is a family, led by a disciplinarian, at the start of it all.

Reading that, I can see the shudder it will evoke – “discipline”!  What a horrid word to our modern earns.  But, what are we if not disciples?  If we are Christians, then we are at least attempting to be disciples of Our Lord – putting ourselves under that discipline so that we may be free.  And so we must do it – we must restore discipline to our tired, sad world.  The family must be rebuilt, from the ground up, in order that our civilization can be saved.

Practical proposals?  Sure – make divorce harder to get; make birth control harder to obtain; progressively restrict abortion with a mind towards its ultimate extinction.  Reform the economy so that one man can support his wife and children without outside aid.  Spread ownership of property so that a man may be secure in his own and have something to transmit to his children.  Attack the pornography and degradation in our popular culture so that we are no longer relentlessly propagandized in to being insensate beasts in our appetites.  Plenty of things to do – and all of them call for men to stand forward, in courage, and proclaim that they won’t allow it to be otherwise.

Nothing is set in stone except the Word of God – all we do will pass away, but that won’t.  This means, of course, that even our current degraded state will pass away.  We will go under discipline, again – it will either be self-imposed, or imposed upon us.  It will either be a discipline of free men, or the lash of a slave master.  We can reverse this – we can fix what ails us, if we but choose to do so.  Many elements are already coming together to make possible this change – so many young people are waking up from the stupor of modern life and are seeking truth, and finding it in God.  The raw materials are there; will we men pick them up and build?

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