BOOK REVIEW - Carle C. Zimmerman,
Family and Civilization
Stephen Baskerville, 05-06-09
Stephen Baskerville is associate professor of government at Patrick Henry
College and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and
the Family (Cumberland House, 2007).
Society (2009) 46:page 380–382
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g3232524710725l2/fulltext.pdf?page=1
A society grappling with a declining birthrate, proliferation of single-parent
homes, and government policies that undermine parents and families will find it
sobering to learn that some were sounding the alarm decades ago, even in the
apparently family-friendly post-war years, and that the trends were developing
long before that. Even more disturbing is that the same ills plagued ancient
civilizations—shortly before they collapsed.
A publishing event of major importance is the re-issue of Family and
Civilization by Harvard sociologist Carle Clark Zimmerman (1897–1983).
Originally published in 1947, the book is a classic of family scholarship,
though as Allan Carlson explains in the introduction, it has largely been
ignored by the academic elite.
Zimmerman demonstrates how the fragmentation of the family in Greece and Rome
preceded the disintegration of those civilizations and how similar trends now
threaten our own. Writing as the post-war baby boom (a temporary aberration, it
turns out) was just beginning and the family appeared to be on a major upsurge,
Zimmerman identified long-term trends that are only now reaching general
awareness.
Polybius noticed “a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population” in
Greece during the second century BC. In modern Europe birth rates have been
falling since the late nineteenth century and were below replacement level by
1930. This falloff reflected a larger renunciation of the family as a social and
personal institution, what Zimmerman calls “familism.” “The extinction of faith
in the familistic system in Europe in the last two generations is identical with
the movements in Greece during the century following the Peloponnesian Wars and
in Rome from about 150 AD to 250 AD,” he wrote: “In each case the change in the
faith and belief in family systems was associated with rapid adoption of
negative reproductive rates, increased acceptance of perverted forms of sex
behavior, and with enormous crises in the very civilizations themselves.”
One can come away from Zimmerman’s book very pessimistic—from the realization
that today’s trends have been developing not for decades but for centuries, from
knowing that our Greek and Roman predecessors were unable to prevent similar
crises, and because the demographic and cultural trends seem beyond the reach of
public policy. Readers witnessing continuing family deterioration six decades
later may conclude that the prognosis for Western civilization is bleak indeed.
And yet while demography and culture are major themes, they are not wholly
determining. While he does not state it explicitly, a striking feature of
Zimmerman’s analysis, and one that offers some hope, is that the decline of the
family—really, the attack on the family—is not a matter simply of impersonal
forces but the direct and conscious work of the state. Over and over, Zimmerman
points out how the state views the family as a threat, how the state eviscerates
the family, the state sponsors antifamily intellectuals, the state seeks
supremacy over the family and society in general.
Zimmerman writes of the “relation between the type of family and strong central
governments,” arguing that historically it was in their absence that the family
developed most extensively. Later, “Strongly developed central governments made
the internal cohesion of family groups less and less necessary.” Whenever the
family shows signs of dysfunction, “the state helps to break it up.” The state
constantly aspires to reduce the family to its instrument. “The state wishes to
have only enough family power left as is needed to achieve the functions of
government.”
In Greece and Rome, as in “many modern states...since the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries,” the state claimed “almost the exclusive authority to
govern the family.” “Any other authority—such as that of churches, either
Catholic or Protestant, which formerly dominated the families—is permitted only
to the extent that it does not interfere with the absolute power of the state.”
Particularly in the USA, “law piled on law, and government agency upon
government agency” until by 1900 “the state had become master of the family.”
The result (recall this is 1947) is that “the family is now truly the agent, the
slave, the handmaiden of the state.”
By contrast, family advocates today tend to emphasize the role of not the state
but culture. Zimmerman’s own evidence supports the truth that long-term trends
like demography and culture are more fundamental than shortterm politics. Even
in 1947, culture, society, and even the economy are being engineered around
family decline: “The advertisements, the radio, the movies, housing
construction, leasing of apartments, jobs—everything is individualized.”
Moreover, the process of state aggrandizement contains a powerful cultural
component. Zimmerman highlights the “alliance of state and philosopher”: “the
state philosopher emerges as the eventual regulator of the family.” Among those
singled out are Erasmus, Bacon, Rousseau, Comte, and Marx. Eighteenth-century
philosophers in particular “secularized the conception of marriage
and...separated the state as a family power from the church and joined forces
with the state for the regulation of the family.” What he calls “deification of
the state” was promoted by “Hamiltonianism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and
socialreformism.”
Modern political thought is especially corrosive of family integrity. With
contract theory, “the family, like the state, became a contract and was
considered breakable.” For the USA Zimmerman seems to see this as seminal,
suggesting that our pursuit of “a more perfect union” in the state encouraged a
similar quest in the family. “Just as John Locke, J.J. Rousseau, Thomas Paine,
and a number of the Founding Fathers of our own nation could hold that the
social compact—government—if it became unsatisfactory to the body of the people
could be abolished for a new form, so the developing school of family
negationists could hold that unsatisfactory family types had been, are being,
and will continue to be abolished.”
At the same time, a cultural or demographic determinism can be self-defeating if
it closes off solutions. One might conclude from Zimmerman’s book that, as John
Q. Wilson writes with respect to out-of-wedlock births, “If you believe, as I
do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can
do.” Or, as editor James Kurth concludes, the answer to the question of “what is
to be done about reviving the Western family and Western civilization is that
God only knows.”
Kurth’s answer is not defeatist, for as Zimmerman demonstrates, since the fall
of the Roman Empire familism has been inseparable from Christian faith. From its
inception Christianity “has maintained a constant position regarding the
importance of the family.” The thought of St. Augustine in particular “was a
complete crystallization of the church’s primary concern with the family.” The
formula was proles, fides, and sacramentum, or as Kurth describes the
connection, “faith in one’s God, faithfulness in one’s marriage, and faith in
the future of one’s next generations.” The inseparable trilogy means that, as
Kurth insists, “a successful revival of family and civilization must also entail
a return to fidelity.”
Zimmerman’s own solution—to appeal to scholars and even government
commissions—is certainly the weakest and most criticized part of the book, for
reasons Bryce Christensen describes in his important essay in the same volume.
But in a larger way, Zimmerman may hold out hope. For if cultural and
demographic determinism can lead us to ignore how culture translates directly
into public policies, awareness of those policies offers a point from which we
might begin to reverse the trend.
Here we turn to the indicator that dominates his argument, though here too he
does not call attention to it. For another arresting feature of Zimmerman’s
warning is not how opposed it is to the values of today’s family-hostile elites,
but how little it is reflected in the agenda of today’s pro-family advocates.
Zimmerman does not dwell on the issues dominating today’s “family values”
agenda: popular culture, pornography, homosexuality, or abortion (though he
recognizes their dangers). The clearest demonstration of how family breakdown
leads to civilizational decline is the one that even today poses the most direct
threat to marriage and the family but is conspicuously ignored: divorce.
“From the first to the third centuries of our era, the family relationship was a
free [i.e., disintegrating] one like ours,” wrote Zimmerman. His evidence?
“Divorces were easy and frequent” (p. 2). He quotes David Hume that “when
divorces were most frequent among the Romans, marriages were most rare” and “the
exclusion of polygamy and divorces sufficiently recommends our present European
practice with regard to marriage.”
Of his major trends indicating family deterioration in the nineteenth century,
the first is “the rise and popularization of absolute and ‘causeless’ divorce.”
“Causeless,” or what we now call “no-fault” divorce, essential repudiates any
concept of justice in family law: “‘Cause’ in divorce changed from objective to
subjective factors, from major to minor reasons, and from what may be called
fundamental breach of marriage bonds to purely personal grounds.”
Zimmerman is accurately predicting no-fault divorce laws that no one at the time
was proposing, and he is doing so based on the larger trajectory of Western
thought and practice. Even at the time of their enactment more than 20 years
later, those laws were never publicly debated. The prior historical context
Zimmerman provides makes these laws appear less a deliberate act of public or
legislative will than, again, the almost inevitable consequences of the larger
march of modern political culture against the family.
Zimmerman reveals how much of no-fault divorce was already becoming
institutionalized in both culture and public policy prior to its codification.
He emphasizes “omnibus divorce clauses” and the “divorce mills” or easy divorce
states that were springing up even before the Civil War but which really took
off in the twentieth century. “Our whole social organization is geared to a
situation where causeless divorce is easy and is becoming the modal type.” Of
course, it is now almost universal in the West.
After World War I, “there was a noticeable tendency to the acceptance of it as
an integral part of American life.” He insists that divorce takes place “in
certain specific conditions,” especially those of social and political
instability: “in new countries...upset by revolutions, wars, and other factors
destructive to tradition and family relationships.”
Zimmerman’s warnings have been vindicated. His observation that the dominance of
“purely romantic love” created the “theory that marriage exists primarily for
the partners and secondarily, if at all, for the bearing of children” has become
relevant to our controversy over same-sex marriage. He quotes his fellow
sociologist Pitirim Sorokin that “the family as a sacred union of husband and
wife, of parents and children, will continue to disintegrate.”
Divorces and separations will increase until any profound difference between
socially sanctioned marriages and illicit sex-relationship disappears. Children
will be separated earlier and earlier from parents. The main sociocultural
functions of the family will further decrease until the family becomes a mere
incidental cohabitation of male and female while the home will become a mere
overnight parking place mainly for sex relationship.
All this points to something very troubling: “These changes came about slowly,
over centuries, and almost imperceptibly.” This is key, as seen even in the gap
separating Zimmerman’s time from ours. The atomization of the family has
developed so gradually that we do not notice it and become inured to it,
perceiving as normal what would have shocked previous generations had it been
enacted all out once. Zimmerman shows that nineteenthcentury family legislation
had highly destructive effects that few foresaw and none debated. “Most of this
hastily conceived family legislation, which few read and fewer still paid
attention to, was made for and by people who do not have or do not desire to
have families.” Precisely the same might be said about the subsequent enactment
of nofault divorce in the 1970s.
Here again, political ideology is critical, since radical changes in the family
almost always accompanied radical changes in the state. During both the French
and Russian revolutions, “Divorce was established at the will of either party
without the consent or even the knowledge of the other.” The same change evolved
more gradually following the American Revolution and was exported to other
Western democracies. We have enacted—again, without public debate or even
awareness—the family legislation of the Jacobin and Bolshevik regimes.
This suggests a difference separating Greece and Rome from today. While their
intellectual class adopted antifamily lifestyles, it did not have an anti-family
ideology. While Zimmerman notes that “Greek and Roman mothers refused to stay
home and raise children,” there was nothing so systematic as feminist ideology,
now diversifying into gay rights, children’s rights, and more. This ideology is
not simply corrosive of the family; it is consciously hostile to it. Further, it
is almost entirely unchallenged. For the divorce machinery, unlike other aspects
of the sexual agenda, provokes no organized opposition.
So perhaps in the end Zimmerman is correct that intellectuals are critical. It
is they, whose Christian predecessors such as Augustine once led the revival of
the family, who are not only the first to turn against it but the first to lose
the knowledge of what the family is. And once they lose it, there is no one else
to provide it. “When the ruling groups—those with prestige—abandon familism,
there is simply no agency which can understand the situation or do anything to
remedy it” (p. 188). That is why this book is of such enormous importance: It
provides precisely the knowledge of the greatest crisis facing Western
civilization today, of which our intellectuals have almost no clue.