In the back of my mind, I’ve been pondering a strange blind spot in mainstream modern historians and political commentators since reading Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly in May of 2013. It seems to me that she saw clearly the somewhat complex and fluid balance of forces between individuals and families or other tightly knit communities when she wrote the chapter about the Renaissance popes, but then turned to a narrative ignoring those sorts of family and class ties when discussing the American disaster in Vietnam. Were there no powerful families influencing events in the American follies in the 1960s and 1970s? Was David Halberstram wrong in The Best and the Brightest when he discussed a depressingly long list of New England blue-bloods who brought to bear the patronizing views of their class, attitudes covered with scraps of facts and phrases of reasoning and enshrined as truth in the halls of Harvard and Yale? Yet, it could be said that much of that odd mixture was imbibed with mother’s milk in the prosperous and not-so prosperous households of those belonging to what was once called the Eastern Establishment. It was reinforced not just at Harvard and Yale (and a multitude of prep-schools before that) but also in the boardrooms of Wall Street and Boston law-firms and Wall Street investment firms.
In my essay, The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding, I discussed an early display of this Puritan belief that reality had to conform to their worldview during King Phillip’s War.
During the war of the American government upon the Vietnamese peoples, were the profiteering oil-companies and engineering companies, armament-companies and aerospace companies, not involved with Neil Mallon and Prescott Bush (and his son, George H W) and other New England blue-bloods sent to form ties with the newly rising barbarians of Texas (and California and Florida and so on)? Were not the investment banks of Wall Street heavily in the business of financing profligate governments such as that of the United States as it fought the war against communists who probably wished they were as powerful as portrayed in the New York Times and against poverty—an absurdity almost beyond ridicule, and a failed absurdity in the end.
Many know these powerful families and classes and institutions exist and are willing to sacrifice the wealth and lives of common citizens to gain their goals, yet it remains hard to speak of such things as applying to American history because we are taught a strange history of a non-Darwinian people, one perhaps acceptable to the preachers of colonial Boston but strangely at odds with what we know of the histories of Chinese and Russian peoples, of ancient peoples of the Bible or those of Athens or Rome.
Extreme individualism, including that found in American herd-life, is a denial of some of the strongest of human characteristics—not all attractive—and would put the human race on the path to extinction for reasons given by the sociobiologist, E O Wilson, in countering Camus’ claim that suicide is the act at the center of modern life:
Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. They hypothalamus-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism. In this one way the philosopher’s own emotional centers are wiser than his solipsist consciousness, “knowing” that in evolutionary time the individual organism counts for almost nothing. In a Darwinist sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier. [page 3 of Sociobiology, The Abridged Edition]
From a slightly different but compatible viewpoint, the “central question of philosophy” is how to live moral individual lives and how to form morally well-ordered communities given the type of creatures we are and the type of world we inhabit. Our genes aren’t our slave-masters but they determine our basic characteristics. From a Christian viewpoint, the problem is how to form the Body of Christ from the available human material and not from some strange creature found in the imagination of utopian or dystopian thinkers of the left or the right. Extreme views of man as an individual (often combined with an advocation of something like totalitarian governments) can be either utopian or dystopian in this sense. Whether seen as depraved sinners alone in front of an angry God or as creatures inclined to do good if not corrupted by traditional institutions, men are seen by too many modern thinkers as only accidentally attached to families or other human communities, only voluntarily attached to families or other human communities if the Puritanical or modern liberal reformers can do their work. Men are seen in those terms even when they are obviously different.
We know that individual men and their communities are the result of complex evolutionary processes which also produced wolves and the wolf-pack. That is, evolutionary processes produced specific forms of individual being and, in some species, also communal being. Evolutionary processes produced the parental loves which are the primal bonds of families of various sorts in at least the social mammals. It produced human families which grew into tribes and clans bound tightly in a hostile world so that those human animals outside the tribe or the clan were often seen as lesser sorts of human beings and sometimes as non-humans.
Yet, families and classes—true families arising from our deepest selves—have disappeared from most of the modern efforts to understand the modern world—the noble acts and crimes alike. Why? Are the oh-so scientific academics and commentators of the modern West afraid to deal with such blunt expositions of the importance of blood-ties as Wilson’s works on sociobiology or the book of Genesis? Are they blind or are they afraid to stray from the mainstream?
I think many modern thinkers in the fields of history and politics imagine, if only implicitly and unconsciously, that we’ve outgrown families and classes and other groupings with ties of blood or marriage. The sociobiologists, such as E O Wilson, are reminding our oh-so modern selves that we still are moved by the same primitive emotions or desires as those to be found in particularly clear form in the early books of the Bible.
In the sometimes noble and sometimes criminal or exploitive acts of families and fraternal societies or religious groups or others, we are seeing a part of the maturing processes of the Body of Christ or sometimes a rebellion against those maturing processes.