Bill Muehlenberg

The family, said Spanish philosopher George Santayana, is "one of nature's masterpieces". Indeed, it has been enjoyed by millions of people around the world for many centuries. The family unit is a major force of social cohesion and stability, the ideal means to raise and nurture children, and the best means of dispensing social services, such as education, health and welfare. No social invention comes close to comparing with the institution of the family, and its close companion, the institution of marriage.

Yet the institutions of marriage and family have come under heavy fire recently, with hostile salvos coming from all sides. This is especially true in the political arena As Philip Abbott has put it, "The attack on the family in modern political thought has been sweeping and unremitting. Although the critiques vary in their intensity, dissatisfaction with the family is nearly universal in modern political thought".

Sociologist Robert Nisbet echoes these thoughts: "It should be obvious that family, not the individual, is the real molecule of society, the key link in the social chain of being. It is inconceivable to me that either intellectual growth or social order or the roots of liberty can possibly be maintained among a people unless the kinship tie is strong and has both functional significance and symbolic authority. On no single institution has the modern political state rested with more destructive weight than on the family. From Plato's obliteration of the family in his Republic, through Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Marx, hostility to family has been an abiding element in the West's political clerisy."

And as Nisbet remarks elsewhere, governments are often the source of greatest danger to the family: "From Burke on it has been a conservative precept and a sociological principle since Auguste Comte that the surest way of weakening the family, or any other vital group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family's historic functions."

Critics of the family claim that marriage and family are repressive, patriarchal, selfish, inward-looking and enslaving. Some critics go even further, alleging that the traditional family is basically dead, that few people live in traditional families any more, and that the traditional family was just some invention of the 1950's.

Indeed, how often do we hear today from anti-family spokesmen that those of us who seek to promote family values are just trying to turn the clock back to the fifties? It is as if the family was born in America some time in the fifties, and died a few decades later.

This claim that the traditional family is only a recent "invention", something which is no longer relevant, has been made by many detractors of the family. Various feminists, homosexual activists and civil libertarians have repeated this claim, and repeated it so often, that now it has almost become the accepted wisdom.

Take for example a speech given recently by a Professor of anthropology from Charles Sturt University, Albury campus. The Professor said that today's nuclear family is an "aberration" left over from the 40s and 50s. "It's not functional now, and it never has been. That is why this type of family is surrounded by so much legislation and moral discourse. It needs propping up because it's not a natural unit."

"It has not arisen from biology or an imperative from human nature," she continues, "but was structurally created to promote gender, sexual and racial order." Even in its prime form in the 50s, it was only a minority, she claims. "No other society that I am aware of has ever tried it . . .it was basically a white middle-class Anglo celtic family that was part of the new postwar economic and gender order."

Perhaps the good professor needs to become more widely read: the historical, anthropological and sociological record gives a much different picture. The traditional family unit, cemented by marriage, has been the predominant form of family life in most cultures throughout history. The evidence is all too plain for anyone without ideological blinders to see.

Just a few examples will suffice to show that the family is clearly not a recent 'invention,' nor is it a localised institution. Late Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman's historical overview of the family shows that the nuclear family is the heart of society. He demonstrates that when families break down, so do societies.

Boston University sociologist Peter Berger has said, "Recent research into the history of the family, both in Western Europe and in northern America, shows that the nuclear family, far from being a product of modernization processes (such as urbanization and industrialization), antedates these processes by centuries".

Bronislaw Malinowski was the first great anthropologist to live among primitive peoples. After years of research and painstaking observations of the daily habits of these people, he came to see that the family was a universal institution:

"Indeed, at first sight, the typical savage family, as it is found among the vast majority of native tribes . . . seems hardly to differ at all from its civilized counterpart. Mother, father, and children share the camp, the home, the food, and the life.... Attached to each other, sharing life and most of its interests, exchanging counsel and help, company and cheer, and reciprocating in economic cooperation . . . the individual, undivided family stands out conspicuous, a definitive social unit marked off from the rest of society by a clear line of division."

Another important anthropologist, Robert Lowie, notes that communal arrangements in sexuality and child rearing are the exception, whereas families are the universal norm: "Sexual communism as a condition taking the place of the individual family exists nowhere at the present time; and the arguments for its former existence must be rejected as unsatisfactory . . . we are justified in concluding that regardless of all other social arrangements the individual family is an omnipresent social unit.... [T]he one fact stands out beyond all others that everywhere the husband, wife and immature children constitute a unit apart from the remainder of the community."

Anthropologist George Murdock's exhaustive investigation into 250 human societies revealed this elementary conclusion: "The nuclear family is a universal human social grouping. Either as the sole prevailing form of the family or as the basic unit from which more complex familial forms are compounded, it exists as a distinct and strongly functional group in every known society. No exception, at least, has come to light in the 250 representative cultures surveyed for the present study. . . In no case have we found a reliable ethnographer denying either the existence or the importance of this elemental social group. . . The nuclear family is always recognizable and always has its distinctive and vital functions."

More recent research by Peter Laslett of Cambridge University has confirmed Murdock's claims, that the nuclear family is universal. Says Laslett, "In England and elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe the standard situation was one where each domestic group consisted of a simple family living in its own house, so that the conjugal family unit was identical with the household . . . in spite of the important differences which comparison reveals . . . this standard situation seems to have obtained to a remarkable extent everywhere else."

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni has put it this way: "There never was a society throughout all of history . . . without a family as the central unit for launching the education of children, for character formation, and as the moral agent of society."

As the Times Literary Supplement Editor, Ferdinand Mount has commented, "The family is not an historical freak. If the evidence we have put together is correctly interpreted, the family as we know it today - small, two generation, nuclear, based on choice and affection...is neither a novelty nor the product of unique historical forces. The way most people live today is the way most people have preferred to live when they had the chance."

The family unit is the preferred way of living for most people. It is also the best. No other social relationship comes close to the family unit. It is in the family that all other social relationships are learned and developed. Without the family, social cohesion would be much more difficult to achieve. As late Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has said, the family is the "first fundamental form of social relationships".

Marriage is also an historical given. Commentators old and new have noted this fact. In an important article written by J D Unwin of Cambridge University, marriage is seen as the crucial element in the development and maintenance of healthy societies: "Marriage as a life-long association has been an attendant circumstance of all human achievement, and its adoption has preceded all manifestations of social energy.... Indissoluble monogamy must be regarded as the mainspring of all social activity, a necessary condition of human development."

Monogamy, not communal or group relationships, has been the long-standing norm. As Mount says, "Anthropologists have firmly denied that group marriage was the rule in primitive society....Westermarck in his History of Marriage (1891) asserts that, on the contrary, monogamy is the rule almost everywhere; even where polygamy or any other variant of sexual, parental and social relations is found, monogamy continues to be the normal rule of life."

Or as Brandeis University anthropologist David Murray put it: "Cultures differ in many ways, but all societies that survive are built on marriage. Marriage is a society's cultural infrastructure, its bridges of social connectedness. The history of human society shows that when people stop marrying, their continuity as a culture is in jeopardy."

James Q. Wilson also emphasises this point: "In virtually every society, the family is defined by marriage; that is, by a publicly announced contract that makes legitimate the sexual union of a man and a woman. Even in societies where men and women have relatively unrestricted sexual access to one another beginning at an early age, marriage is still the basis for family formation. It is desired by the partners and expected by society. Marriage, in short, is not simply a way of legitimizing sex, and so it cannot be dispensed with just because sexual activity need not be made legitimate. Marriage exists because people must take responsibilities for child care and assume economic obligations. Marriage, and thus the family that it defines, is a commitment."

Mind you, the marriage spoken of here is not same sex-marriage, as some are now pushing, but the traditional male-female form. Even the evolutionary biologists, like C. Owen Lovejoy have acknowledged that the paleo anthropological evidence makes clear that male-female bonding in lasting pairs was the critical step in human evolution.

Indeed, the argument for same-sex marriage and adoption rights ignores the historic, sociological and anthropological evidence. Families always have been defined by the male/female relationship, and children have almost always been raised within that unit. Few exceptions can be found.

As Bronislaw Malinowski put it, "I know of no single instance in anthropological literature of a community where illegitimate children, that is children of unmarried girls, would enjoy the same social treatment and have the same social status as legitimate ones. The universal postulate of legitimacy has a great sociological significance ... It means that in all human societies moral tradition and the law decree that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is not a socially complete unit. The ruling of culture runs here ... it declares that the human family must consist of a male as well as a female."

The raising of children has in most cultures taken place within that male/female relationship. This was one of the discoveries made by Margaret Mead: "When we survey all known societies, we find everywhere some form of the family, some set of permanent arrangements by which males assist females in caring for children while they are young."

Not any old relationship will do here. As Wilson puts it, "A family is not an association of independent people; it is a human commitment designed to make possible the rearing of moral and responsible children. Governments care - or ought to care - about families for this reason, and scarcely for any other."

Malinowski puts it this way: "Through all societies there runs the rule that the father is indispensable for the full sociological status of the child [and] that the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is sociologically incomplete and illegitimate.... The most important moral and legal rule [in primitive societies] is that no child should be brought into the world without a man - and one man at that - assuming the role of sociological father, that is guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community".

Not only is marriage and family defined by the male/female relationship, but by a life-long commitment as well. Says Mead: "No matter how free divorce, how frequently marriages break up, in most societies there is the assumption of permanent mating, the idea that the marriage should last as long as both live.... No known society has ever invented a form of marriage strong enough to stick that did not contain the 'till death us do part' assumption."

Modern legal and political documents have always - at least until recently - acknowledged the importance of marriage and family. Consider but four statements:

"Marriage is defined as the civil status, condition or relation of one man and one woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex."

The family has been acknowledged by the United Nations in its Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as "the natural and fundamental group unit of society entitled to protection by society and State." Also, "Men and women of full age, without limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and found a family." Marriage is defined by the Marriage Act (1961) and the Family Law Act (1975) as "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others voluntarily entered into for life".

The faulty use of historical fact by the Charles Sturt University Professor is not all, however. Indeed, one is left wondering which is greater, her capacity to mislead and misinform, or her intense dislike of 'traditional' families. She says "While some privileged people can look back to a happy childhood or a fulfilling career in motherhood during the 1950s, for many others that same family structure produced and hid violence, isolation, depression, despair and the truncation of opportunity for the women so central to them."

The fact is, however, for the overwhelming majority of Australians, the nuclear family is the ideal, if not the norm, a source of great joy and warmth, not the dysfunctional mess that the Professor makes it out to be. One can only speculate as to why she seems to hate the family so, but we have a clue when she goes on to discuss "alternatives to the idealised nuclear family," including "same-sex partner families".

Perhaps it is this agenda - this attempt to redefine the family to include various "alternative lifestyles" - that explains her apparent disregard for historical and social fact, and her loathing of traditional family life.

But of course she is not alone in this attempt to redefine the family. It has been tried by many others. But as the brief remarks above indicate, the traditional family is not so easily disposed of. It remains an historical and social reality, which will not easily succumb to its enemies. The truth is, of course, it is not the family which is an aberration. The real aberration is the various groups who seek to denigrate and/or overthrow the family.

(Note: References available upon request.)