Possibility of substitutes.
On the other hand, an opposite danger is present in this sort of speculation. Things now associated with the family may not depend upon it, but might flourish equally well in a different soil. The family being the earliest and closest society into which men enter, it assumes the primary functions which all society can exercise. Possibly if any other institution had been first in the field it might have had a comparable moral influence. One of the great lessons, for example, which society has to teach its members is that society exists. The child, like the animal, is a colossal egoist, not from a want of sensibility, but through his deep transcendental isolation. The mind is naturally its own world and its solipsism needs to be broken down by social influence. The child must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, rather than instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must become cognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturally is, sensitively, selfishly fanciful.
To break down transcendental conceit is a function usually confided to the family, and yet the family is not well fitted to perform it. To mothers and nurses their darlings are always exceptional; even fathers and brothers teach a child that he is very different from other creatures and of infinitely greater consequence, since he lies closer to their hearts and may expect from them all sorts of favouring services. The whole household, in proportion as it spreads about the child a brooding and indulgent atmosphere, nurses wilfulness and illusion. For this reason the noblest and happiest children are those brought up, as in Greece or England, under simple general conventions by persons trained and hired for the purpose. The best training in character is found in very large families or in schools, where boys educate one another. Priceless in this regard is athletic exercise; for here the test of ability is visible, the comparison not odious, the need of co-operation clear, and the consciousness of power genuine and therefore ennobling. Socratic dialectic is not a better means of learning to know oneself. Such self-knowledge is objective and free from self-consciousness; it sees the self in a general medium and measures it by a general law. Even the tenderer associations of home might, under other circumstances, attach to other objects. Consensus of opinion has a distorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values. A thing which almost everyone agrees in prizing, because it has played some part in every life, tends to be valued above more important elements in personal happiness that may not have been shared. So wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. The family might well be, to some extent, a similar idol of the tribe. Everyone has had a father and a mother; but how many have had a friend? Everyone likes to remember many a joy and even sorrow of his youth which was linked with family occasions; but to name a man’s more private memories, attached to special surroundings, would awaken no response in other minds. Yet these other surroundings may have been no less stimulating to emotion, and if familiar to all might be spoken of with as much conventional effect. This appears so soon as any experience is diffused enough to enable a tradition to arise, so that the sentiment involved can find a social echo. Thus there is a loyalty, very powerful in certain quarters, toward school, college, club, regiment, church, and country. Who shall say that such associations, had they sprung up earlier and been more zealously cultivated, or were they now reinforced by more general sympathy, would not breed all the tenderness and infuse all the moral force which most men now derive from the family?
Plato’s heroic communism.
Nevertheless, no suggested substitute for the family is in the least satisfactory. Plato’s is the best grounded in reason; but to succeed it would have to count on a degree of virtue absolutely unprecedented in man. To be sure, the Platonic regimen, if it demands heroism for its inception, provides in its scientific breeding and education a means of making heroism perpetual. But to submit to such reforming regulations men would first have to be reformed; it would not suffice, as Plato suggested, merely to enslave them and to introduce scientific institutions by despotic decrees. For in such a case there would be all manner of evasions, rebellions, and corruptions. If marriage founded on inclination and mutual consent is so often broken surreptitiously or by open divorce, what should we expect amongst persons united and separated by governmental policy? The love of home is a human instinct. Princes who marry for political reasons often find a second household necessary to their happiness, although every motive of honour, policy, religion, and patriotism makes with overwhelming force against such irregularities; and the celibate priesthood, presumably taking its vows freely and under the influence of religious zeal, often revert in practice to a sort of natural marriage. It is true that Plato’s citizens were not to be celibates, and the senses would have had no just cause for rebellion; but would the heart have been satisfied? Could passion or habit submit to such regulation?
Even when every concession is made to the god-like simplicity and ardour which that Platonic race was to show, a greater difficulty appears. Apparently the guardians and auxiliaries, a small minority in the state, were alone to submit to this regimen: the rest of the people, slaves, tradesmen, and foreigners, were to live after their own devices and were, we may suppose, to retain the family. So that, after all, Plato in this matter proposes little more than what military and monastic orders have actually done among Christians: to institute a privileged unmarried class in the midst of an ordinary community. Such a proposal, therefore, does not abolish the family.
Opposite modern tendencies.
Those forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion and practice incline in these days tend to transform the family without abolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and the children in any case would remain with one or the other parent. The family has already suffered greater transformations than that suggested by this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals and sentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Nor is it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invoke Christian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which are thus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is the cure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtue and the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with its non-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer, penance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. It has so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupation would be gone if once the sin could be abolished.
Individualism in a sense rational.
While a desirable form of society entirely without the family is hard to conceive, yet the general tendency in historic times, and the marked tendency in periods of ripe development, has been toward individualism. Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever social order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on conscious individuals. Man is of course a social animal and needs society first that he may come safely into being, and then that he may have something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal and has neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of such things is either to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, the more currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. It would be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of society in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it lent to individual happiness. If the individual may be justly subordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of a future freer generation, but permanently and in the ideal society, the reason is simply that such subordination is a part of man’s natural devotion to things rational and impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can be personally happy. Society, in its future and its past, is a natural object of interest like art or science; it exists, like them, because only when lost in such rational objects can a free soul be active and immortal. But all these ideals are terms in some actual life, not alien ends, important to nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to be sacrificed.