The Subordination of Industry to the Family Life is necessary, therefore, from a social point of view. Industry, as we have seen, was primitively an adjunct of the family life, and all modern industry, if rightfully developed, should be but an adjunct to the family life. Industrial considerations must be, therefore, subordinate to domestic considerations, that is, to considerations of the welfare of parents and their children in the family group. One trouble with modern society is that industry has come to dominate as an independent interest that oftentimes does not recognize its reasonable and socially necessary subordination to the higher interests of society. There can be no sane and stable family life until we are willing to subordinate the requirements of industry, that is, of wealth-getting, to the requirements of the family for the good birth and proper rearing of children.
SELECT REFERENCES
For brief reading:
HENDERSON, Social Elements, Chap. IV.
DEWEY AND TUFTS, Ethics, Chap. XXVI.
ADLER, Marriage and Divorce, Lecture I.
For more extended reading:
BOSANQUET, The Family.
SALEEBY, Parenthood and Race Culture.
CHAPTER IV
THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY
We must understand the biological roots of the family before we can understand the family as an institution, and especially before we can understand its origin. Let us note, then, briefly the chief biological facts connected with the family life.
The Biological Foundations of the Family.—(1)The Family rests upon the Great Biological Fact of Sex. While sex does not characterize all animal forms, still it does characterize all except the simplest forms of animal life. These simplest forms multiply or reproduce by fission, but such asexual reproduction is almost entirely confined to the unicellular forms of life. It may be inferred, therefore, that the higher animal types could not have been evolved without sexual reproduction, and something of the meaning or significance of sex in the whole life process will, therefore, be helpful in understanding all of the higher forms of evolution. Biologists tell us that the meaning or purpose of sexual reproduction is to bring about greater organic variation. Now variation, as we have seen, is the raw material upon which natural selection acts to create the higher types. The immense superiority of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction is due to the fact that it multiplies so greatly the elements of heredity in each new organism, for under sexual reproduction every new organism has two parents, four grandparents, and so on, each of which perhaps contributes something to its heredity. The biological meaning of sex, then, is that it is a device of nature to bring about organic variation. From the point of view of the social life we may note also that sex adds greatly to its variety, enriching it with numerous fruitful variations which undoubtedly further social evolution. The bareness and monotony of a social life without sex can readily be imagined.