“In the war between government and
parents over who will steward children, government is winning. That's bad for
everyone.”……
Among the
elites, for centuries it has been a deliberate tactic to get children away from
their parents as early as possible so parents cannot pass down “provincial and
outdated ideas” like their religion and love for home and country. No
lesser inciters to mass murder than Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin advocated such policies.
I see the attempted prohibitions against student-initiated school prayers as
part of this pattern, but so are pushes for government preschool and early
childcare. (Understand, I am not saying government preschool leads to mass
murder, although it’s very clear that America’s young mass murderers and would-be mass murderers are
linked to broken homes. I’m saying the two have philosophical linkages.)
A
mother and father are the first and most primal gift any child has. They
desperately need that bond to be reinforced, not attenuated.
A mother and
father are the first and most primal gift any child has. They desperately need
that bond to be reinforced, not attenuated. But statists rightly see
family bonds as an obstacle to their control of society. They understand
there are basically two ways to manage children. One is for parents to be the
primary caretakers and decisionmakers. The other is for the state to be the
primary caretaker and decisionmaker. This division is as old as ancient Sparta,
which took children from parents at an early age (and
dissuaded adults from younger marriage) because the leaders there considered
all children property of the state whose upbringing had to be directed to the
state’s service. Plato advocated even wackier parent-child separation to serve his
centralized state.
Right now, our society is choosing which of these two kinds
of family arrangements we uphold. We may not think we are deciding, but we
are. Public policy either strengthens families, or it strengthens the
state. Culture either strengthens families, or it strengthens the state. Myriad
little niggling annoyances and regulations that attenuate family life also
strengthen government power, as Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw:
Thus, After
having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful
grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over
the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small
complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds
and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.
The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are
seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.
Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not
tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people,
till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and
industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Governments do not have hearts. They
cannot hug a child. Only a mother and father have a biological compulsion to
love a little child in the way he desperately needs. No state-appointed
substitutes will ever be even close to as good en masse. If we want to have a
populace that doesn’t feel hair-trigger raw in the way Noonan described, or
constitute the flock of timid animals Tocqueville described, we must not
straightjacket and harass the parents.
