RoR: Forum

This quote says it all:

We affirm that the natural family, not the individual, is the fundamental unit of society.

Reading material like this makes me want to purchase bulk copies of The Virtue of Selfishness and pass them to anyone with a pulse. Bastards!

Post 1

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 1:16pm

Nature,

I tried to read this thing, but I don't have the time to go through a 42 page church sermon, even in large font. I saw that there was no real "story" in the "story of family" section, so I skipped to the end, where the religious/family goals are pretty well laid out.

(yawn...)

You wrote:

Bet you didn't know that pro-family means anti-individualism and anti-capitalism.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree at all with this conclusion - unless you are referring to a specific formal pro-family organization that actually is all this anti-stuff.

Family has been an organizing force of mankind since time immemorial. It fulfills structure needs for human reproduction, property and love of very much individual human beings.

Nowadays as compared to before, there is tremendous prosperity all around us and social organization is vastly more complex. Yet the family stays on for a variety of valid reasons (inheritance, child rearing, etc.)

We live in an amazing time where we can now open the concept of family to include all kinds of alternative life-styles. (How about even an interspecies family, say, like with a Kitten?) //;-)

To simply try to throw out the whole institution is a mistake I see repeated over and over with pro-individualists.

Objectivism-wise, the issue of defining family and its different roles with respect to rational egoism could use a lot more work. Maybe there already is a lot of good stuff out there on this. I am still doing a lot of catch-up reading.

Who knows? Maybe if we start by defining an individual as one special form of family will stop pro-individualists from feeling threatened by it. In terms of law, that certainly makes sense to me.

But setting up a religiously oriented organization as the spokesman for family, then rejecting the whole concept of family by rejecting that organization, is throwing the family baby out with the bath water.

Michael

Post 2

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 1:35pm

I believe in the natural family, as in families that meet the needs of human beings based on their natures, as in based on reason. I hate it when people appropriate words and twist them all around. There is nothing natural about some people getting together to procreate and then indoctrinate their young with ideas that will hurt them!

Kelly

Post 3

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 1:41pm

I'm sorry, but I don't agree at all with this conclusion - unless you are referring to a specific formal pro-family organization that actually is all this anti-stuff.

Like the one whose material I'm linking to, you mean?

But you're right—I should have put scare quotes around “pro-family” to make it clear that I'm using the term in the sense that they mean it. The description of the article has been updated accordingly.

There is, of course, a vast difference between acknowledging families as important, and making the family the foundation of an entire sociological and ethical theory.

This is probably the most explicit statement out there of the principles of the “family values” crowd. This idea of the family as the basic unit of society—and the corollary idea that it is everyone's duty to form into families—is the philosophical basis for the opposition to contraceptives, abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, etc. I'm posting this because I see it as important that individualists recognize their opponents as having a coherent philosophical system and confronting them on those terms.

Who knows? Maybe if we start by defining an individual as one special form of family will stop pro-individualists from feeling threatened by it. In terms of law, that certainly makes sense to me.

I don't know about keeping pro-individualists from feeling threatened, but that would certainly grant the “pro-family” crowd their premise of the family as the base unit of society. The individual isn't a special type of family—the family is a special type of voluntary organization of individuals. (Special because some of the individuals involved might not be independent yet, but the implications of that have been debated at length elsewhere and I don't want to get into that on this thread.)

Post 4

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 1:45pm

Interesting. When reading Hong's article "My Father" I found what looks like a good comprehensive website on China. On this page:

http://library.thinkquest.org/20443/g_way_of_life.html

Under a paragraph with the title "Traditional values" I found the following statement:

" Parents also expected their children to show unquestioning obedience. A father could legally kill his children if they disobeyed him."

Is this the "natural" result of defining the basic unit of society as the "family"?

Post 5

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 2:22pm

Yes - but only if you realize that this idea of the family evolved from one of two fundamental worldviews of our ancestry - the patriarchial view, which stemmed from the harsh conditions of what we refer to as caveman times....

But - there was another realm of familial development, which evolved from the matriarchial worldview, which predated those of the patriarchial societies.... and, with surprise to those socialist femenists, were individualistic in structuring, and 'value for value' in their social aspects..... this older view got lost in pre-civilization because when the patriarchial group descended from the north, and came upon these matriarchial societies, there was an obvious recognition that the two could not ever co-exist - that it had to be one or the other..... as history shows, the patriarchial groups won...

I've much more on this, in my yet-to-be-published manuscript, but until those parts dealing with the 'issue of evolution' are published here [parts 1-3 were posted to moderator over a week ago], the rest will have to wait....

Post 6

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 2:23pm

Nature, you wrote:

This idea of the family as the basic unit of society�and the corollary idea that it is everyone's duty to form into families...

This is where the issue gets side-stepped a little. Duty doesn't exactly apply.
.
I can't help observe that "family" is present in all social organizations I am familiar with. I conclude from this that it fulfills a need of man's social nature. There is certainly a category of law - family law - that is present in all modern governments that I have had contact with.

There is a wonderful quote from an article by Ron Merrill called Eddies Enigma: Objectivism and Human Nature that I find pertinent:

If I encounter one duck, and it quacks--well, maybe it's a freak. If I look at several ducks, and they all quack--well, maybe their quacking is due to a disease. If I continue by examining dozens of local ducks, and they all quack--well, maybe somebody taught them to quack. But when I look into the matter thoroughly, and find that ducks in their hundreds and thousands and millions, domestic and wild, from all over the world, all quack--the most compelling hypothesis is that quacking is in the biological nature of ducks.

Instead of trying to force the base concept of family under the concept of individualism or free choice (or worse, non-initiation of force!), I try to look at what exists. All human beings are individuals. That is true. But all human beings are human beings too. They belong to a species - and that species has attributes that are manifest throughout history.

Ignoring this... ignoring the nature of human beings is not the best way to define "individual" to me. It leads to looking at something like "family" and then dismissing it it as nonessential, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

(To be absolutely clear, I am not advocating traditional Christian family values or anything like that - I am stating that people organizing into families, regardless of the specific form of family, derives from man's nature - and I do not even deny exceptions like hermits.)

That is why I keep saying that there is a strong need for work on this from an Objectivist viewpoint.

Michael

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 4/14, 2:26pm)

Post 7

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 5:15pm

Harry Browne provided some excellent ideas about family in How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World in the form of clearly maintaining separate property and so forth. His notion that one can simply put children up for adoption begs too many questions, though, such as: "Who will adopt them if everyone else does the same?" In any case, no rational person can deny the need for clearly articulated principles for bearing and raising children.

Nature critiqued the subject document for good reason: It employs the scourges of religion and statism to justify extremely confining definitions, laws and regulations that destroy all other possible and beneficial ways to raise good kids. In that sense, it definitely serves as an anti-liberty -- and therefore anti-individualistic and anti-capitalistic -- manifesto. I do not wish to address its flaws point by point, but I can understand the source of the accusations Nature has leveled against it.

Post 8

Thursday, April 14, 2005 - 8:44pm