And why is an ascendant statist/globalist political culture so hostile to the family? The crisis of the family is not simply a result of changed sexual mores or feminist ideology, while they contribute to it. It has far deeper roots. The family has lost its social significance because to the State, the family is a threat. As a precursor and basic unit of life it preceded the state and always balanced its interests.
But in the last fifty years, the welfare state has done everything in its power to break it up. Dividing families, encouraging divorce, supporting abortion, coercing fatherlessness, and building dependencies, the state has not idly watched in the demise of the family structure: it has been the active and primary cause of its very plight.
As one pundit put it, “the State became master of the family; the result is that the family is now truly the agent, the slave, and the handmaiden of the State.”
The nations themselves are no longer the collection of their many member families but have become a centralised Babylon, known as Brussels, the unionised functional state over all states.
At this point religion has certainly been relativized and fully privatised, if indeed it still is practised in Europe. The so-called bureaucratic elites or ‘experts’ in government and education (the new high priests) determine all policy—including that affecting the family. As a result of their policies, the family is a victim of the culture war.
In other words, by failing to note the mediating structure the family is, we have killed the baby. Indeed the bourgeois family is among all else, the source of attitudes — dare we say virtues — individuality, privacy, enterprise, thrift, discipline, and propriety, which are synonymous with western values and of modernization.
Loving life means realising and multiplying the gift of life. The place where that takes place is the family. Aristotle himself taught that family represents nature in its clearest manifestation. He said, “The family is the basic cell of all human society, the primary association of human beings.”
Reproduction is no longer popular, it appears; people wait or forego having children altogether because they want their own careers and see the ever escalating costs of child rearing. Some have no confidence in our future; still others believe in the planet or its environment more than the human species.
So to put it rather bluntly: a grossly disproportionate number of the people making serious decisions about Europe’s future have no direct personal sibling, child or grandchildren’s interests at stake in that future. They are not part of a family and have come to see all their attention focused on one dominant and all-powerful social unit to which they pay obeisance and give their complete and devoted attention: The State.