Time was when society was a fairly simple arrangement. There
were Noah and his wife and the three sons and their wives. That
mini-society obviously worked well, because in just a few hundred years, human
beings found the time to build giant monuments. Babel complicated
things, but still, people split up and went their own ways and continued to
populate the Earth. But now there are close to 320 million of us in
this country alone, the internet has us all sitting in each other's laps, and
our ability to function intelligently and cohesively is getting lost in the
shuffle.
And
time was when most of us in this nation operated on similar religious and moral
standards. We believed in Truth. We all wanted to
survive, to thrive, to build a free nation. Even with the awfulness
of slavery and the question of how to handle the native tribes, the majority of
us marched forward toward the shared goal of a free and noble nation.
We
did that by starting with the family as the main organizing
factor. The family is one of the four divine institutions and has
always been a mainstay in human society, so we knew how to do it: you have a
father and a mother, and they produce children for whom they are responsible
until those children marry and produce their own children and the original
parents grow old and become the responsibility of the grown
children. It's a pretty slick system.
But
that time is no more. We've dismantled such a large percentage of
our families through welfare, through redefining marriage, through relaxed
mores about adultery, that the family is no longer the foundation of many of
our communities.
Human
beings seem programmed to work best in small groups; we self-divide into
manageable clusters. Either society is separated into families as
per the divine institutions, or it's divided into groups of its own making:
blacks vs. white, Jews vs. Gentiles, men vs. women, citizens vs. illegals,
Muslims vs. everyone else, etc. Creating ad hoc identities wreaks
havoc on a society. We can see this just looking around us.
Instead
of a nation of cooperating adults working toward a common goal, we become a
group of squabbling children fighting over the available toys. When
society divides into traditional families, children are raised to get along, to
work together to accomplish common objectives, to find a way to fit in with
other families. When the groups are instead gathered by superficial
commonalities that pit them against other groups, the result is a fragmenting
of society – an us-against-them mentality that produces nothing but vitriol and
complaint. We are not Americans anymore, but conservatives or
liberals, Christians or atheists, pro-Trumpers or anti-everything leftists.
Since
groups organize merely by yelling the loudest or creating the most guilt, they
multiply. It won't be long before we'll have, in addition to gay
pride parades, adulterers' pride parades, and then the shoplifters and the
prostitutes will demand their due respect – oops, forgot Stormy Daniels, guess
that's already happening. Now even pedophiles are claiming what they
think is their due. There's nowhere to stop, no group too
objectionable to support or too specialized to gain a hearing.
And
since groups are self-forming and there are no guidelines for determining their
shape and no list of qualifications for membership, a person can claim group
affiliation regardless of reality. Men can claim to be women; whites
can claim to be American Indian or black (remember Rachel Dolezal, the white
woman who claimed to be black?).
To
further snarl things, many people find themselves in multiple special interest
groups. A person, we'll call her "Jane," can easily be
black, gay, and female all at once. What sociology professors call
"intersectionality" happens, and poof! like rabbits, the number of
special interest groups increases exponentially. Now Jane belongs
not only to her original three groups, but to the group that is both gay and
black, the group that is both female and black, and the group that is
lesbian. Each group has its own set of issues and grievances and each
group is competing with the other for attention and money. Where
does that leave Jane? More discontented than ever, because she now
has to face off against white lesbians, against Christian blacks, against white
men more than black ones. Can she be friends then with a white
Baptist preacher? Or with a Muslim? No – her social life
gets both complicated and limited.
This
gets to the next point: issues and grievances. Families don't have
to gather around the drumbeat of shared miseries – they're already connected by
blood. But these synthetic groups need to have a common cause, so
victimology is inevitable. Groups tend to face off against one
another, far more than families do, and this behavior increases when there are
payoff funds to vie for and nothing helps more than a super-sad list of
atrocities the group has suffered at the hands of what they imagine to be the
rival group. "He wouldn't bake my
cake!" "I make less money than he
does!" "My great grandmother had to sit in the back of the
bus!"
Groups
just as often organize themselves around an issue that doesn't necessarily
directly affect their members. Very few of the angry demonstrating
college kids have any real iron in any of the fires they set. They
are aligned by ideology rather than by skin color, ethnicity, or
sexuality. They are motivated more by hubris than by righteous
indignation. They believe in socialism, and so they fight the
capitalist. They think the Earth is being destroyed, so they fight
pipelines and plastic straws and beef. They are lesbians in favor of
abortion or men outraged over women's issues or whites drowning in assumed but
unnecessary guilt. Cross-reference this type of group with the
racial-ethnic divides, and the issue of intersectionality becomes acute.
We
see this all the time – feminists who are pro-Muslim immigration, or men who
are anti-gun but also pro-Hollywood shoot-'em-ups, or pro-choice where abortion
is the issue but anti-choice where religion is at stake. It becomes
impossible in a society like that to be a coherent thinker. A
groupist finds himself constantly having to swing several hula-hoops at once,
each spinning at a different speed, and often going opposite directions.
We
can no longer have intelligent conversations partly because we can no longer
express a rational thought, but also because we are talking no longer as
individuals, but as members of a soulless group – BLM, or Antifa, or LGBT, or
La Raza, or NOW. Thinking for ourselves is no longer an option, so
adopting the latest talking points is all that is possible. No
problems get solved that way because groups don't think; individuals think, and
because to focus on the problem, the supposed injustice, does not produce
solutions. Negativity never arrives at the positive.
Speaking
of which, what do we do about it? We've made a good start by
electing Donald Trump – a man who strongly believes in family. We've
made other good starts by going back to teaching our own children, another
reinforcement for the family. Let's go forward and undo the welfare
restrictions that remove the male from the household. This policy
has destroyed the black family. Let every step we take going forward
be a step to bolster the health of the family. After all, the family
was God's idea, and He generally knows what He's doing.
Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She
is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in
southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.
