If you’re like me, you never thank your parents enough for all the gifts they gave you when you were growing up, but your humanity itself is the greatest treasure they conferred upon you.Photo by: Erin
But the sequence is interesting:
individuality => marriage => family => civilization
The => symbol denotes implication, not value, and in this case also sine qua non (without which not) causation: There cannot be a workable marriage without fully-individuated spouses. There cannot be an enduring family without a working marriage. And there will not be a civilized community without enduring, stable families.
Why? Because this ranking of implications is also a rank-ordering of defensible values:
A man who will not defend himself will not defend his marriage, his family or his community. If you are at this moment puffed up with feminist empowerment, pause to consider that Fantine and Cosette are wolf-bait in the state of nature. Without serious, rigorous philosophical fatherhood, there will be no marriage, no family and no civilization worth living in.
I wrote Saturday and preached Sunday about why the default-state anti-familialism of libertarianism – represented at its worst by Stefan Molyneux but present everywhere – is ultimately pro-Marxist in its end-results.
But family is not the thing that seems so desperately to be holding you back when you are trying to achieve that state of full individuality – which can be easily identified in practical ontology, when you can say these words and make them stick: “My house, my rules.” Instead, your family is the thing that made it possible for you to bitch about your family in the first place.
Your life as a human being is an artifact – a man-made thing, not a product of nature. It was crafted iteratively by you over the decades, but that crafting was initiated, cultivated and nurtured by your parents, and, had they not done these things, you would not be a human being.
Topical Molyneuvian defooing and systemic libertarian anti-familialism are both ultimately anti-identity in the sense that both doctrines insist implicitly that parenting can be decried, derided and dismissed yet children will somehow still come into existence anyway, arriving on the scene as fully-formed, full-armed college freshman, ready at last to learn the awful truth about their horrible upbringing.
From Man Alive:
I told you I use the words “human being” as a term of art. Here is why: Because there is a valid and valuable distinction to be made between a genetic Homo sapiens (the surviving issue of the recombination of genes) and a human being (a genetic Homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated the gift of mind). A genetic Homo sapiens can have the potential to become a human being – although this capacity or its existential realization can have been damaged or destroyed by disease, injury or birth defect. But until the mind has been cultivated within a particular genetic Homo sapiens, that entity will not be a human being.
A human life is an artifact, a man-made thing. The existence of a genetic Homo sapiens is a manifestation of nature, just as with any tree or reptile or kitten. But the existence of your life as a human being is a consequence of a vast number of conceptually-conscious choices made by your parents and other human beings when you were just a baby. Had they failed to cultivate the gift of mind within you, you might have survived as a genetic Homo sapiens, but you would never have become a human being. You owe your biological life to nature, but you owe your life as a human being to choices made by other human beings.
It’s funny for me to listen to abortion ideologues, pro and con, argue about when human life begins: Conception or birth? The truth – as a matter of ontological fact – is that, for normal children raised in normal circumstances, human life begins at age four or five. The transition from toddler to child is slow and gradual, but the distinction is obvious once you know what to look for. A toddler is little more than a very smart dumb animal – an exceptionally talented dancing bear. He does amazing things, compared to the clumsy efforts of trained animals, but like a trained animal, he does not understand conceptually what he is doing or why. A child, by contrast, is a small and relatively inexperienced human being. He thinks in concepts, and he can name the reason for everything he does.
And that’s the bright-line distinction, of course: Thinking and choosing in concepts. Mammals have sense organs, obviously, and they can perceive the world around them. They can recollect some of their perceptions at some level of organization, and they can even draw crude inferences about those perceptions – pattern matching. They can communicate by bodily signaling. They can want, make no doubt, and they can pursue their wants quite willfully. What they cannot do is collect their perceptions into conceptual categories, reason proportionately about those categories and make informed choices on the basis of that reasoning. No mere animal can do this, no matter what breathless claims are made for its “uncanny” Dancing Bear behaviors.
That kind of cognition – rationally-conceptual volitionality – is found only in human beings – only in a normal genetic Homo sapiens child or adult within whom the gift of mind has been cultivated – by the repeated, persistent, fully-conceptually-conscious choices of the adult human beings who raised that child. If you’re like me, you never thank your parents enough for all the gifts they gave you when you were growing up, but your humanity itself is the greatest treasure they conferred upon you – and I expect they didn’t even think twice about that, at the time they were doing it.
Mainly, they cultivated your potential simply by delighting in it. You learned motor skills by playing “patty-cake,” and you learned to speak – in a sort of verbal semaphore, at first – by being spoken to. You learned to categorize by sorting among the many toys they gave you, and you taught yourself the laws of identity and causality by playing with those toys – taking the same simple actions over and over again and observing the results. You learned to think subjunctively – to think about things not immediately in evidence – by playing “peek-a-boo” and “which-hand.” This exploration of the subjunctive was honed by a hundred-dozen lectures about bad behavior from your parents and other adults: “Would you like it if little Tommy took your toy?” You came to be a human being by being raised as a human being by human beings. Your capacity for a human level of cognition was natural, in-born – a function of that great big brain in your cranium, the brain that, not-coincidentally, no other kind of organism possesses. But the cultivation of that capacity was the product of thousands of choices made by your parents in the process of bringing you up.
Parents are raised by parents, and humanity is caused by human upbringing. If parenting is inherently defective, then all human beings are inherently defective. If the family is something to be destroyed, then humanity is also to be destroyed, since the family is the sine qua non cause of humanity.
