Relevance of Family or Household for Politics - Essay Example

FAMILY & POLITICS It is a question that has troubled billions of people since the dawn of time: how should a person lead a good, meaningful life? There are as many theories as there are grains of sand on the beach, but some ideas over the years have been more popular than others. Some people are born into religions where these questions are largely answered for them. They know from an early age what their god tells them is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing. Others question their faith and try to revise their morality, bringing in parts of other religions or philosophies. Still others have no real faith and try to build a moral foundation out of their personal experience adding rules and content to it as the years go by. Morality is the basis upon which societies and civilizations build their politics upon, and how we educate our children determines how these politics will be established and developed. And where are children first brought up with a sense of the world’s morality, the rules and laws, by which we live within our polity? The answer, as explained so cogently by both Plato and Augustine, is the family. The family is where we first learn how to behave, how to interact with others, and what is fair and just. In the course of this essay I will examine what these great thinkers, and others like them, have to say about family, education, politics, and society. Children are impressionable. They are starting their journey on the path of life and are deeply sensitive to the world around them. They seek patterns and they seek to understand why certain patterns have certain results. Although they may not understand the huge complications underwriting our society, they nevertheless have an inkling of how are world is structured and determined, the politics that make the world turn. How then should they be educated by their first guardians, their parents? To this, Socrates has a convincing suggestion: ‘Now, do you appreciate that the most important stage of any enterprise is the beginning, especially when something you and sensitive is involved? You, that’s when most of its formation takes place, and it absorbs every impression that anyone wants to stamp upon it. . . . Shall we, then, casually allow our children to listen to any old stories, made up by just anyone, and to take into their minds views which, on the whole, contradict those we’ll want them to have as adults?’1 In the Republic, the guardians are educated as children by the stories they are told. These stories provide moral justification for the actions and inactions of the people around them and are instrumental in their understanding of their own role in the world. But they must not be poems or fanciful stories, Socrates insists. They must tell young people about the truth of the world, not of lies. But the kind of family that will inculcate these values is, according to Plato and Socrates, very different than one we would recognize today. The speakers in the Republic may be discussion abstract political philosophy but their discussions have real implications. They talk about a society that is ruled by guardians, people with a natural leadership virtue. How these people are education and raised and how their family units are established are the subject of Chapter VII and of some heated dispute. Should the children be educated in common and shared (along with the wives) amongst the guardians? What is the natural human structure of a family? What is the best way to raise political astute and virtuous citizens? To begin with, equalit—a very important political virtue—can be infused at an early age, Socrates says. Men and women guardians should be educated in the same way. Although men may be good at some things, women are good at other; the contribution of both is required. This is indeed a very modern seeming proposition, and one that some cultures in this contemporary world of ours would do well to heed. For Augustine, the answer is somewhat different when asked about questions of family and politics. In The City of God, he writes of the father of a family: Primarily, therefore, his own household are his care, for the law of nature and of society gives him readier access to them and great opportunity of serving them . . . This is the origin of domestic peace, or the well-ordered concord of those in the family who rule and those who obey . . But in the family of the just man who lives by faith and is as yet a pilgrim journeying on to the celestial city, even those who serve those whom they seem to command; for they rule not from a love of power, but from a sense of the duty they owe to others . . . because they love mercy.2 Instead of plain and obvious instruction in true stories. Young people, in Augustine’s view, must be brought up to understand that the rules of a polity are outlined by God and religious faith. There are two cities—a city of God and a city of man—but they are fused together in a believing family. I was brought up in a religious family and was baptized in the church. Not all of my family was very religious, but my mother and my brother and sister were. I was instructed in the Sunday school with the typical Christian moral precepts: the Golden Rule, love they neighbour, the Ten Commandments. But these ideas seemed to me to be much more like common sense than any idea that needed to be divinely revealed. I didn’t really understand why a god was required to supervise or implement these rules as it seemed to me that most people basically followed them anyway. I did, however, become interested in the way that this sort of morality influenced American politics and how many of the principles of the constitution seemed to be based of Judea-Christian values. I totally agree with the French history Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited American hundreds of years ago and wrote: The principles of New England … now extend their influence beyond its limits, over the whole American world. The civilization of New England has been like a beacon lit upon a hill…. … Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories. …Nathaniel Morton, the historian of the first years of the settlement, thus opens his subject: “we may not hide from our children, showing to the generations to come the praises of the Lord; that especially the seed of Abraham his servant, and the children of Jacob his chosen (Psalm cv. 5, 6 ), may remember his marvellous works in the beginning … “ … The general principles which are the groundwork of modern constitutions, principles … were all recognized and established by the laws of New England: the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of the agents of power, personal liberty, and trial by jury were all positively established without discussion.3 I think the presence of religion in the American Revolution was the reason why it succeeded and why the more secular, atheistic French revolution failed. People need to have a bedrock belief to believe in in the middle of all the chaos of a revolution. You can expect everyone to just restart their clocks and begin a new. Only a very few people are capable of doing something like that. A strong religious belief is important if you want to live in the City of God, according to Augustine. Indeed, this leads into a big issue in the philosophy of morality and one that is discussed by both Socrates and Augustine. What should ground morality especially when it comes to politics? Politics is all about morality: what laws should we pass, how should we run our country, what leaders do we want to lead us into the future, how should our families be structured? When we look at countries such as the United States and France—when we look at events such as the American Revolution and the French Revolution, we can see two strains of morality going forward into the future. The first is successful, the second melds into Communism and leads to the deaths of millions of people. This latter version is now basically dead but has morphed again this time into moral or ethical relativism. I think this second idea would be equally abhorrent to Socrates and to Augustine. Communism is the opposite of what both men are talking about: it denies the value of the family and the immoral consequences follow. Part of the reason for this is that the problem for existentialists and relativists, etc, is when they do get into politics and start organizing people they need to impose a kind of morality on their system of governance. Usually, they choose one that they think is in some way neutral of tradition or value: utilitarianism. This idea comes from a philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham who believed that only pain and pleasure values to be reckoned with in the world. There is no interest in family values or the inculcation of morality at an early age, and certainly no emphasis on faith. Bentham came up with what he called the rule of utility: good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The later philosopher James Stuart Mill picked up many of these ideas. In his book Utilitarianism, Mill argued cultural, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures are worth a lot more than physical pleasures because the former are valued higher than the latter by competent judges. A competent judge, Mill said, is someone who has experienced both the low pleasures and the high ones. So this is a form of elitism. We can see it is anti-democratic in the end, because the judges would probably be self-appointed and would decide what pleasure you can have and can’t have. Some philosophers, like Peter Singer, think that this idea is innately hardwired into human beings and that it is part of our evolutionary success. He also believes that it is forcing to expand our mortality to include everyone—people in foreign countries outside of our communities, but also other species and living things. If I have seen that from an ethical point of view I am just one person among the many in my society, and my interests are no more important, from the point of view of the whole, than the similar interests of others within my society, I am ready to see that, from a still larger point of view, my society is just one among other societies, and the interests of members of my society are no more important, from that larger perspective, than the similar interests of members of other societies… Taking the impartial element in ethical reasoning to its logical conclusion means, first, accepting that we ought to have equal concern for all human beings.4 This is an attractive idea on the surface, but it may be going to far. We have yet to establish an ethical standard for people; Singer’s reasoning would lead us to keep going to animals, spreading ourselves too thin morally. One of the best ways to re-establish a morally correct system of politics is to shrink the circle back to the size of the family and to concentrate on first principles. Works Consulted Augustine. The City of God. Ed. Marcus Dods. 1871. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Chapter II. New York: Signet, 2001. Peter Singer. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. Plato. The Republic. Ed. Robin Waterfield. London: Oxford University Press, 1998. Read More