"Family and Civilization"

Yesterday's mail brought in an amazing book from ISI: "Family and Civilization" by Carle C. Zimmerman. ISI has reprinted this 1947 (!) work of sociology, with accompanying essays by Allan C. Carlson, James Kurth and Bryce Christensen. I'd never heard of Zimmerman, and am not terribly interested in sociology. But once I opened the book, I found it very hard to put down. Here's why.

Zimmerman was a prominent Harvard sociologist whose topic in F&C is to investigate the connections between the kind of family that predominates within a civilization, and the vitality of that civilization. He says there are three basic social types of family: 1) the trustee family, which is close-knit, tribal and clan-like; 2) the domestic family, which is centered around the nuclear family, but which maintains close ties to the extended family; and 3) the atomistic family, in which ties outside the nuclear family have been greatly attenuated. Dynamic civilizations pass from one to another at various stages in their ascendancy, and many civilizations have all three present at any given moment in their lifetime. But at the current moment, the atomistic family is the predominant type in the West. It was in 1947 when Zimmerman wrote this, and certainly is today, even moreso.

This is not good news at all from a historical and sociological point of view, Zimmerman writes. Greece and Rome both passed through all three stages before their respective final collapses. Why does the social predominance of the atomistic family form presage civilizational collapse? Basically, because of children.

Zimmerman argues from the historical record and from sociological analysis that the atomistic family is the form least likely to produce enough children necessary to keep the civilization going. The trustee family is too smothering for the kind of freedom that makes the kind of creativity needed for cultural and material progress possible, but it does produce a lot of children, typically. The domestic family is the optimal form balancing individual freedom and social stability. But history shows this form inevitable gives way to the atomistic family, which cannot maintain a civilization over time.

In fact, when a society comes to see family as primarily a contractual relationship between autonomous individuals, and abandons the traditional family form in favor of, well, whatever, then this, writes Zimmerman:

is so devastating to high cultural society that these atypical forms can last only a short while and will in time have to be corrected. The family reappears by counterrevolutions. All of these facts strike directly at most of the family sociology which seeks to hold that the 'unrestrained individual' is the end of society and the family is his primary agent.

A single blog post can hardly begin to do justice to Zimmerman's thesis, understand, and I'm radically simplifying. Just wanted to say that up front. Now, Z. argues that "familism" -- the idea that a fundamental purpose of civilization is the empowerment and enabling of the family -- is absolutely key to the health of any civilization. He further says that the absolute key to the health of familism is ... religious faith. Not Christian faith specifically (this is not a religious work), but real faith in divine purpose. Nobody undertakes to have a large family because it's fun, or, in advanced societies, because it's economically beneficial. They do it because they believe that's what people do. In other words, they believe that children are a blessing from God, and that we humans are participating in the divine will by begetting children and raising them up to carry on our civilization. Absent a real belief in a transcendent source of life and morality, one that sanctifies material and personal sacrifices necessary to propagate children, a society will begin to overvalue material position and advantage, and will stop having children -- or at least enough children to guarantee the long-term health of the civilization. Decay inevitably follows, and can only be reversed when the suffering civilization finds its way back to familism.

Here's a passage that I found stunningly prescient. Remember, this was written in 1947. Zimmerman is talking about how Europe and the US had already stopped having enough babies to grow their civilizations. The US only grew because of immigration:

This is exactly what happened in Greece and Rome. Once again, as in those cultures, the social consequences were delayed by the immigration of peoples from the more familistic districts. There is also a further identity in that when the sources of immigration (what the Romans called the "good barbarians") also became exhausted, the family crisis reached its grand finale within one or two generations. Between 1820 and 1920, the United States imported forty million immigrants from Europe. These are now no longer available. When the United States has exhausted the surplus population of the French Canadians and the Mexicans --almost the only fertile peoples of the Western world now available to us -we too will begin the grand finale of the crisis.

What Zimmerman did not anticipate -- what few sociologists did -- was the postwar Baby Boom. That appears to have been only a speed bump on the road to our dismal demographic destiny. Of course the Quebecois birth rate collapsed, with the Roman Catholic religion, in the 1960s. And now, Mexico is headed rapidly toward an infertile future. In fact, UN demographers say that in this century, population in 3/4 of the world will shrink as women cease to have babies at replacement level or above.

You might say: well, fine, at least the decline we're going to suffer will remain relative to everybody else's. There's something to that, but it overlooks some important facts. First, knowing others have it just as bad elsewhere hardly ameliorates the real suffering that our society will have to deal with as it ages, without a sufficient number of people to care for the aged. Second, if decline is across the board, then in the demographic race to the bottom, the last group with people left standing inherits what's left of the civilization. Given the fertility rate and religious confidence of Europe's Muslims, Europe's native populations ought not to be sanguine.

Back to Zimmerman. He was rather pessimistic about our future, and thought his own profession was making matters worse by hiding facts from people for ideological reasons:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far-reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

This process of atomization is hastened by the Pollyanna stories and pseudohistories given by the family sociologists. They believe that the family is getting better and better all the time.

Ouch. That's awfully judgmental. But as regular readers know, I spent some time recently in the inner city of West Dallas, talking to a missionary who works with kids there. He's a white guy from the richest part of Dallas (I write of our conversation in this coming Sunday's Dallas Morning News) who gave up his plum position to go live with the poor and serve them. He said that the thing most white people outside of the ghetto cannot understand is the degree of social dysfunction in his poor minority community. Eighty-five percent of the children there have no father at home. Their lives are hard, random, chaotic and often violent. These children come into a world in which the adults have failed them. There is no family structure to speak of, and by any measure, theirs is a failed society.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan discovered, we are not supposed to talk about the collapse of moral values and the resulting collapse of the family as principally causative of inner-city suffering. But there it is. And don't think this is just a black thing. Hispanic out of wedlock births are skyrocketing in this country. Moreover, by the same statistical measures the 1967 Moynihan Report predicting the collapse of the black family used, white America is where black America was before the bottom fell out.

What can be done? Zimmerman seemed resigned to the belief that nothing much could stop this process, though he rather weakly expresses a hope in the final pages that intellectuals will understand the forces driving the phenomenon, and work to turn things around. It's a curious conclusion coming from a man who excoriates in the same pages intellectuals and academics for turning a blind eye to the realities around them. For someone who identifies religious faith as vital to familism, and in turn to civilization, he seems curiously unwilling to imagine that a revival of faith could turn things around. In his accompanying essay, Bryce Christensen says Zimmerman's friend and Harvard colleague Pitirim Sorokin, who founded the university's sociology department, saw that only a revival of religion could resurrect Western civilization from the collapse he view as inevitable. From Christensen's essay:

"Nobody can revive the dying sensate order," Sorokin admitted. He therefore anticipated that the collapse of the sensate [materialist] culture would mean "tragedy, suffering, and crucifixion for the American people." but he envisioned a future in which a chastened and humbled people would recover strong marriages and strong family lives as they listened to "new Saint Pauls, Saint Augustines, and great religious and ethical leaders."

Ah, where have we heard this before? From our old friend Alasdair MacIntyre:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age . . . and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. . . . What they set themselves to achieve—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another—and doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

One last point. The Christian religion is all but deceased in Europe, but America is held up as an example of a place where religion is still vital to the life of the society. That being the case, why are most American Christians not having any more children than anybody else? What does that say about the nature of American Christianity? I bet Philip Rieff would have an answer to that question.