The contemporary world has given morality a rough ride. The word itself evokes all we distrust most: the intrusion of impersonal standards into our private lives, the presence of judgement where judgement does not belong, the substitution of authority for choice. When a politician moralises we suspect that he or she is searching for an excuse not to pay for something. When a religious leader moralises we fear the imposition of certainties we no longer share, and we suspect that fundamentalism is not far behind. When a particularly newsworthy crime or social trend provokes ethical debate, it will not be long before voices are heard dismissing the conversation as “moral panic.” We have come to share George Bernard Shaw’s conviction that morality is one person’s way of disrupting someone else’s innocent enjoyment, or as H. G. Wells called it, “jealousy with a halo.”
But this cannot be the whole picture. We do still care, and care passionately, about concerns that are essentially moral. We are disturbed by legal injustice and extreme economic inequality. We care about war and famine and their toll of innocent lives. We are distressed by our destruction of the environment in pursuit of economic growth. We are not indifferent to the suffering of others or to the harm we may be laying in store for future generations. We are as moral as any other generation. Perhaps more so, for television has exposed us in the most vividly immediate ways to sufferings that in a previous age we would hardly have known about, let alone seen. And our greater affluence and technological prowess have given us the resources to address ills – physical and economic – that an earlier generation might have seen as something about which nothing could be done, part of the sad but natural order of things. We are certainly not amoral. We remain sharply aware of the difference between what is and what ought to be. Morality matters to us now no less than it did to our grandparents. But undeniably its agenda has changed. That is what deserves reflection.
Many reasons have been advanced as to why the concept of morality as a set of rules beyond the self has suffered an eclipse. We have become less religious, and religion was the classic source of our belief in a revealed morality, commandments engraved on tablets of stone. We have become more culturally diverse, and we now know that what seems wrong to one group may be permissible in a second and even admirable in a third. We have inherited, however indirectly, a set of ideas from Marx and Nietzsche, that what passes for morality may be the mask over a hierarchy of power, a way of keeping people in their place. From psychoanalysis we have developed a suspicion that morality is a way of suppressing natural instinct, and as such is an enemy of self-expression. Perhaps, after the horror of two world wars, we simply reached the conclusion that previous generations had led us into the wilderness instead of the promised land, and the time had come to try another way. Each of these analyses has truth to it, and there may be many more.
But there is, I suspect, a political dimension too. The twentieth century has witnessed a vast expansion of the power and presence of the State. Things that were once the province of families, communities, religious congregations, voluntary organisations and co-operative groups have been appropriated by governments; among them education, health care, and welfare. In part this was motivated by economic and political necessity. The modern nation-state needed a mobile population, one whose members shared a common culture and education. As women joined the workforce, care facilities had to be provided by the State. The standardisation required by industry and war spelled the break-up of more local traditions and associations. But there was also a profound moral dimension to the growth of the State, namely a terminal dissatisfaction with the inequalities of privilege. Why should some people but not others have access to the best schools and doctors? Could a decent society allow families to languish because of poverty and unemployment? These were, I believe, the right questions at a certain period in the development of western democracies, and they led to the caring State.
But even the right decisions have long-term consequences, not all of which are benign. The growth of the State meant the atrophy of many of those local institutions, from the family outwards, where people learned the give-and-take of human relationships and the subtle codes of civility without which it is difficult for people to live closely together for very long. More importantly it broke the connection between what we do and what happens to us, which is of the essence of moral responsibility. A child “going wrong” in the past would be supported by family and friends, but they would deliver an unmistakable moral rebuke. Continued support came with conditions. The caring State can deliver no such message because a State is neither family nor friend. It is of its essence impersonal. It is there to help with few strings attached. It cannot, may not, make moral judgements. It is beyond its competence and remit to make distinctions between the sufferings that befall us and those we bring upon ourselves. No one sought to have the State undermine moral responsibility. But inevitably that has been its effect. It left it redundant and unemployed.
The story of the late twentieth century is one of the displacement of the community by the State and hence of the replacement of morality by politics. That is why our moral agenda has changed. Our concerns – with inequality and injustice, war and famine and ecology – go deep. But these are issues to be addressed to governments. We are willing to make sacrifices on their behalf. We join protests, sign petitions, send donations. But these are large-scale and for the most part impersonal problems. They have relatively little to do with what morality was traditionally largely about: the day-to-day conduct between neighbours and strangers. Instead, in our personal relationships we believe in autonomy, the right to live our lives as we choose.
A profound political change took place in the 1980s. It surfaced as Thatcherism in Britain, Reaganomics in the United States, and most significantly in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. It was as if the realisation had dawned in many countries simultaneously that what had once been a solution – the hyperactive State – had now become a problem. The pursuit of equality interfered with liberty. State intervention inhibited economic growth. High taxation thwarted enterprise. Collective spending was less satisfactory all round than individual spending. The government should do and take less, the individual should do and keep more. It was one of those swings of the pendulum that occurs periodically in human affairs, from centralism to localism or vice versa. But what has become increasingly clear in the 1990s is that the “State” and the “individual” are not two opposed forces. They belong to one another. They are twins. Without the modern State the modern individual could not have come into being. They have grown together like ivy against a tree.
The modern individual is defined by his or her independence from long-term commitments to the past or the future. Authority is not vested in the past, in the form of parents or traditions or communities of belonging. Even Philip Larkin’s wonderfully embarrassed description of mid-twentieth-century religious awe – “Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence” – is too pious for us now. Nor are we comfortable with the idea of personal responsibility towards an open-ended future. Marriage and parenthood have become contractual and conditional rather than “till death do us part.” Individualism of this order could not have existed without a powerful and all-present State. Collectivism and individualism, though they seem opposed, are two sides of the same coin. The responsibilities shouldered by the one give the other the freedom to be what it is.
The eclipse of collectivism and the retreating tide of the State form our foreseeable political future. On this, parties on both the left and right of the political spectrum currently agree. And just as people of moral conviction welcomed the advancing State as an answer to deep social injustices, so they can see in its subsequent retreat other moral gains. The Judaeo-Christian tradition places great weight on individual responsibility and liberty. Government is necessary, but the less the better. That is the consistent message from Samuel to the last of the prophets. The more responsibility we delegate away, the less we are called on to act as the image of God, shaping our world individually by His will. Virtue is greater for being uncoerced. Better the good deeds that grow from below than those which are imposed from above.
What, though, has now become clear is that political change has moved far in advance of moral change. The tree has been removed, leaving the ivy unsupported. We have abandoned collectivism but not yet the individualism which was its symbiotic partner. As the State withdraws part of its protective shelter, many people find themselves suddenly exposed. Single-parent families, the unemployed, inhabitants of inner-city ghettoes and others become the casualties. It is, and will continue to be, a traumatic experience whose pain only the most heartless can ignore.
A world in which, in many areas where we had grown used to seeing it, the State is not there will be one in which we will have to re-learn many of the moral habits which came so naturally to our ancestors but have come to seem strange to us. We will have to rebuild families and communities and voluntary organisations. We will come to depend more on networks of kinship and friendship. And we will rapidly discover that their very existence depends on what we give as well as what we take, on our willingness to shoulder duties, responsibilities and commitments as well as claiming freedoms and rights. The “I-It” relationship of taxation and benefit will increasingly be replaced by the “I-Thou” of fellowship and community. And we may well come to see that the eclipse of personal morality, which dominated the consciousness of a generation, was a strange and passing phase in human affairs, and not the permanent revolution many thought it to be.
If so, I welcome the future. For it promises to restore to human relationships the compassion and grace, the mutuality and faithfulness, which the Hebrew Bible saw as a lasting ideal – more than that, as the way we bring the divine presence into our lives. The unattached society of the past thirty years has been one of unparalleled personal freedoms. But it has also been one of growing incivility and aggression, of exploitation and manipulation, of temporary alliances rather than enduring loyalties, of quick pleasures over lasting happiness. It has been, quite simply, immature. So long as someone was there – the omnipresent State – to pick us up when we fell, it was overwhelmingly seductive. But it has become dysfunctional and cannot be sustained.
Morality matters. Not because we seek to be judgemental or self-righteous or pious. Not because we fondly recall a golden age that never was, the world of Jane Austen perhaps, when men were chivalrous, women decorous, sin discreet and all ranks of society knew their place. It matters not because we are fundamentalists, convinced that we alone possess the moral certainties which form the architecture of virtue. Nor is it because we wish to relieve ourselves of responsibility for the pain, suffering and injustices of the world by blaming them on the victims who made the wrong choices. It matters not because we wish to impose a tidy-minded order on the chaos of human imagination and experiment, nor because we are ignorant of autre temps, autre meures and of the fact that ours is not the only way people have chosen to live.
Morality matters because we cherish relationships and believe that love, friendship, work and even the casual encounter of strangers are less fragile and abrasive when conducted against a shared code of civility and mutuality. It matters because we care for liberty and have come to understand that human dignity is better served by the restraints we impose on ourselves than those forced upon us by external laws and punishment and police. It matters because we fear the impoverishment of significant groups within society when the only sources of value are material: success and wealth and physical attractiveness. In most societies – certainly ours – these are too unevenly distributed to be an adequate basis of self-worth.
Morality matters because we believe that there are other and more human ways of living than instinctual gratification tempered by regret. It matters because we believe that some projects – love, marriage, parenthood – are so central to our being that we seek to endow them with as much permanence as is given to us in this unpredictable and transitory life. It matters because we may not abdicate our responsibility for those we brought into being, by failing to provide them with a stable, caring environment within which to grow to maturity. It matters because we believe there are other routes out of the Hobbesian state of nature – the war of all against all – than by creating a Leviathan of a State. It matters because as long as humanity has thought about such things, we have recognised that there are achievements we cannot reach without the collaborative bonds of civil society and the virtues which alone make such a society possible.
Morality matters, finally, because despite all fashionable opinion to the contrary, we remain moved by altruism. We are touched by other people’s pain. We feel enlarged by doing good, more so perhaps than by doing well, by material success. Decency, charity, compassion, integrity, faithfulness, courage, just being there for other people, matter to us. They matter to us despite the fact that we may now find it hard to say why they matter to us. They matter to us because we are human and because, in the words of Sir Moses Montefiore, we are worth what we are willing to share with others. These truths, undervalued for a generation, are about to become vital again; and not a moment too soon.
The Future of the Family
A friend told me the following story. He and his wife had had an argument. They were happily married – in fact their marriage is one of the strongest I know – and the difference was soon resolved. But that night his nine-year-old son sought him out on his own. He asked: “Does this mean that you and mummy are getting a divorce?”
It shook me as it shook him. They were, as I say, a strong family. They were deeply religious Jews. Their son went to a religious school. Until recently this was a world in which divorce was relatively unknown. But it had now begun to strike even here. There were children in his son’s class who had experienced family break-up. It had left them, as it always does, traumatised and disturbed. The other children in the class, strongly bonded by their shared faith, had tried to help and had taken on some of their pain. They too now knew that divorce was not just a theoretical possibility, something that happens to other people far away. It had entered their world, and destabilised it.
They had discovered that in this new world parents were not people who were always there. Sometimes they split apart, emotionally splitting apart their children with them. Suddenly, even for the children from stable families, a disturbing reality had dawned. Arguments of the kind all families have took on a new significance. Was a quarrel what divorce is, or at least how it begins? Instead of learning what they might have learned – that marital happiness consists in negotiating conflicts, in being able to have an argument and yet resolve it, love intact – they now felt fear. The marital bond was no longer like the familiar mug that you use cheerfully, knowing that when you accidentally drop it, it will not crack. It had become a cup of the finest china that you are reluctant to drink from for fear of breaking it. Divorce, my friend concluded, now affected everyone, not just those who were divorced.
I have written and spoken much about the family. It has seemed to me to be the arena of the central moral crisis of our time. The family is not one social institution among others, nor is it simply one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations, and for enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we acquire the skills and language of relationship. It is where we learn to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. Of all the influences upon us, the family is by far the most powerful. Its effects stay with us for a lifetime. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next and ensures the continuity of a civilisation. Nothing else – not teachers or schools, not politicians or the media – so shapes us and what we have a chance of becoming as our experience of early childhood. For any society, the family is the crucible of its future.
In ours, it is beginning to crack. In Britain, and throughout the liberal democracies of the West, family norms have disintegrated with astonishing speed. Today, three of every ten children are born outside of marriage. One in five is brought up in a one-parent family. Almost four in ten marriages end in divorce. There are inner-city areas in Britain and the United States where the stable nuclear family is almost unknown. A few years ago a vicar in Newcastle told me that throughout his working life he had gone into schools, teaching children about religious faith, and about “God our father.” Now, at the end of his career, he discovered that he could no longer do so. The children did not know what he was talking about. The word they did not understand was not “God,” but “father.”
Nothing so contradicts our new secular mythology – that life is made of unfettered individual choices through which we negotiate our private paths to happiness – than this. In his The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith forged an image which has dominated our age. It was the image of the free market which, as if by an “invisible hand,” turned the myriad self-interested decisions of the economy into the collective good. Each sought his or her own gain but somehow, through the positive energies released, everyone benefited. Since the 1960s we have acted as if that metaphor were valid for personal relationships as well. We forgot what Adam Smith so convincingly remembered, that alongside The Wealth of Nations lies The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. Smith believed that the market was sustained by institutions whose inner logic was the reverse of the market, above all else the family. It was here that we learned sympathy and fellow feeling, sociability and altruistic love. The family is the oil in the engine, the fluid which saves the system from frictions which would destroy it otherwise.
For a time it could be believed that the “invisible hand” operated in relationships too. The values invoked by those who criticised the family and its conventions were positive enough. They spoke of personal freedom, experimentation, liberation. They touched a chord. Who would not be attracted by the prospect of pleasure without responsibility, relationships sustained by personal attraction with no attached bill of lasting commitment? One of the early advertisements for credit cards exactly caught the new moral mood. The card – it said – “takes the waiting out of wanting.” The long-standing basis of morality, the capacity to delay instinctual gratification, seemed no longer necessary. This was a new world of instant consumption, governed by a law of inexorable growth. Economies grow. Incomes grow. Happiness grows. They grow by getting, using and expending, and then making more. The more you discard, the more you produce and therefore the more there is.
The turning point came when we discovered that, even for the economy, Adam Smith’s metaphor had limits. Economic growth is not open-ended, nor does it operate in a self-contained system. It too rapidly consumes finite natural resources. It puts at risk the delicate ecological balance. It is subject to uncertainties, inflations and recessions. Unexpected changes in trade and technology can leave whole groups of people devastated and unemployed. If that is true for the economy, it is even more so for relationships. A generation after the planting of the new morality we are left with a harvest of new pain. Men have suffered. Jack Dominian’s researches have shown the brute physical effects of divorce, more marked for the husband than the wife. They show in the doubling of heart attacks and strokes and other symptoms of depression such as alcohol and cigarette consumption. Women have suffered more. Overwhelmingly they remain the carers, and in single-parent families they are left to carry a double burden, of economic and emotional support, that is hard enough for two. Too often they live in poverty, struggling to make do on an inadequate income and trying constantly to control children who, in the absence of a father, have grown unsocialised and wild.
Unquestionably, though, the greatest victims have been children themselves. Professor A. H. Halsey, summarising the research on children from broken or one-parent families, came to the following conclusion: “On the evidence available, such children tend to die earlier, to have more illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered.” Halsey, himself a sociologist and “ethical socialist” of immense distinction, once said to me, “Our age is often referred to as the Century of the Child. I do not believe it is. I think it has been the Century of Child Neglect.”
If there is a fracture at the heart of our collective conscience, it is this. There have been protests in full measure against economic inequalities. But there have been far too few against the greatest inequality of all, that which condemns a significant and ever-growing proportion of our children to lasting disadvantage in almost all spheres of life. In The Times in 1993, in a piece subsequently taken up by politicians, I wrote: “Nothing more threatens to return Britain to Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ than a division of the population into those who have known a stable caring childhood and those who have not.” The controversial American thinker, Charles Murray, later wrote a long analysis in the Sunday Times. He spoke of a deepening rift in the social fabric of modern societies. The more educated and affluent classes were beginning to realise the mistake of the 1960s and were returning to conventional marriages. The less well-off, particularly those trapped in inner-city ghettoes, were not. The pattern of single-parenthood was replicating itself and extending its hold into a new generation. He spoke of a schism between the “new Victorians” and the “new rabble.” It was, like so much of his writing, a brutal and unlovely analysis. But it rang true. For years his has been a lonely voice warning of the centres of self-sustaining disadvantage at the heart of our cities, which have grown worse not better through the interventions of the State. He, like a growing number of others, has seen family breakdown at its core.
There have been protests, too, against the erosion of the natural environment, and they have been loud and long. But there has been no equivalent protest at the erosion of our human environment, the world of relationships into which we bring our children. How, I have often asked, can we devote our energies to saving planet earth for the sake of future generations while neglecting our own children who are our future generations? The ethical issue of the environment is a genuine one. But it is also a relatively abstract one. It is about long and unexpected sequences of cause and effect. The connection between using an aerosol spray and global warming is distant in both space and time. Yet it has caught the moral imagination in a way that the disintegration of marriage has not. Nonetheless, if anything is a moral issue, this is. We did not bring the planet into being, but we bring children into being. As John Stuart Mill rightly said, “The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life.” And if the ought of responsibility is there, so too is the can. Our individual acts have little effect on the environment. Only in the aggregate do they make a difference. But our individual acts as parents have a decisive influence on our children. In fact, they make almost all the difference there is.
Our conscience has been extraordinarily selective. Nothing so characterises the contemporary moral landscape as Dickens’ portrait of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, a lady of “rapacious benevolence” who spends her life in good works for the natives of Africa while utterly neglecting her own children. She could almost be us. Our moral sentiments have been inverted. Adam Smith used to say that the closer a disaster was to us, the more our sympathies were enlisted. Today the opposite seems to apply. Our moral antennae are attuned to distant famines and wars, remote rainforests and threatened species. To the things closest to us, our children and their appeals to us for attention and stability, we seem curiously ambivalent and defensive.
Our attitudes are inverted in another way as well. The things we are least able to affect – global phenomena like the economy and unemployment – we are most vociferous in wanting to change. In the thing we are most able to affect – our way of life – we are most insistent in rejecting calls to change. Whenever the call is heard summoning us back to the traditional family, a host of columnists and commentators is readily to hand, arguing that it is gone, never to be recovered. The genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste has left the tube. Those who argue for the return of the stable nuclear family, they say, are like Canute trying to turn back the waves. It is crucial to understand that this is self-evidently false. If there is one thing we can change by our own decisions it is the way we act as spouses and parents. The argument of the commentators is a moral one masquerading as a fact. It is a claim to the right to leave all living arrangements uncriticised, however harmful their consequences for others. What is, is what ought to be. There is no right and wrong, only alternatives. What needs to be said about this never fully articulated line of thought is that if it is true, there is no morality of personal relationships. And if there is no morality of personal relationships it is hard to see how there can be morality of any kind. It is untrue. But it is significant that it is said, and said so often as to have become a cliche.
Melanie Phillips, a journalist who has stood out against the trend and has shown great courage in doing so, related a telling personal incident in an article she wrote in The Tablet. She had been to a seminar at which Professors Halsey and Norman Dennis surveyed some of the research data on the harm caused by family breakdown. She was impressed by the strength of the case, and wondered why the material was not better known. She telephoned another social scientist to ask him about his hostility to the claims advanced by the two men. The following then ensued:
He released a stream of emotional invective, calling into question the mental faculties of those distinguished academics and asking excitedly, “What do these people want? Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?” After being pressed repeatedly to identify the research which repudiated the Halsey-Dennis thesis, he said, in summary, this: of course it was correct as far as the research was concerned, but where did that get anyone? Nowhere! Was it possible to turn back the clock? Of course not! And why were they so concerned above all else for the rights of the child? What about the rights of the parents, which were just as important?
This surely is the heart of the matter. In the field of personal relationships two systems of thought, two ways of life, have collided, one which speaks of interdependence, the other of independence. The battle against the family has been conducted in terms of rights, the rights of men to have relationships unencumbered by lasting duties, the rights of women to be free of men, the rights of each of us to plot our private paths to happiness undistracted by the claims of others, willing to pay our taxes in order to be able to delegate our responsibilities to the State and otherwise to be left alone.
But something happens in this scenario to make it unsustainable. Assisted by birth control, abortion, new work patterns and the liberalisation of all laws and constraints touching on relationships, we have divorced sex from love, love from commitment, marriage from having children, and having children from responsibility for their care. That extraordinary institution, marriage, which brought together sexuality, emotional kinship and the creation of new life and wove them into a moral partnership suffused by love, has been exploded as effectively as if someone had planted a bomb in the centre of our moral life. What remains are fragments, chance encounters, temporary attachments, terminable and contractual arrangements, unpredictable sequences in which our lives are thrown together without expectation, hope or emotional investment. Above it all hangs the smoke of war, conflicts of gender and liberation, turning our most intimate relationships into the potential battlefields of date rape, sexual harassment and divorce.
John Stuart Mill defended liberalism on the grounds that there were things – above all personal relationships – that were inherently private. Since his claims have been put into practice all that was once private has become massively public: in films, pop concerts, law cases, newspaper reporting, explicit speech and graphic portrayal. On university campuses the most casual relationships have become subject to codes of political correctness as casuistic, intrusive and relentless as any Victorian manual of propriety; worse, since the censoriousness of public opinion has been supplanted by litigation and the courts. The I-and-Thou of male-female relationship has been turned into a confrontation of Us and Them.
Mill himself spoke of the need to conduct “experiments of living.” His concept of liberty was related to his understanding of science. But science, as Sir Karl Popper has taught us, is a matter of conjectures and refutations. An experiment has been tried, and has failed. The family turns out to be not one stage in the evolution of mankind but the permanent condition of its happiness. It is, as Winston Churchill said about democracy, the worst system we have, apart from all the others. Ways of life are susceptible to refutation. The clearest sign that one has failed is that it cannot reproduce itself; it cannot sustain its own continuity. No society can survive the breakdown of half its families, the vehicles of its own journey across the generations. No society ought to survive, which provides its children with so little stability, security, attention or love. The family is the refutation of individualism.
Fortunately, it can be recovered. One of the most striking findings revealed by research is how firmly the family remains at the apex of our aspirations. What we do turns out not to be the measure of what we want. Overwhelmingly we still value the concept of a stable, lasting relationship. Most single parents do not choose to be single parents. Many divorcees marry again. This may be, as Samuel Johnson called it, the “triumph of hope over experience” but it is significant that we continue to hope. Making a documentary on the family recently for the BBC, I visited Sherborne House, the centre for young offenders described by Roger Graeffin in his book, Living Dangerously. I was struck as he was by the fact that these young men, most of whom came from broken homes, were fiercely attached to the ideal of family and wanted desperately to be good parents. It is not that we no longer value the family. It is that we have forgotten the disciplines that make it work.
The family can be recovered because it is, first and foremost, a moral institution. It is made or unmade by our choices. It is built on bonds of commitment, fidelity and self-restraint. In it a couple pledge themselves to one another, and through love bring new life into the world. Prosaic though its daily reality may be, it is vast in its moral power, weaving together the physical, moral and spiritual aspects of our being into a sense of the unity and continuity of life. It is more than a moral institution. It is the birthplace of the moral sense. It is where, as children, we discover who we are and develop a sense of personal worth. It is where, as parents, we encounter the most inalienable of responsibilities, for those who without us would not exist.
"Faith In The Future"
It is within the family that the three great ethical concerns arise: welfare, or the care of dependents; education, or the handing on of accumulated wisdom to the next generation; and ecology, or concern with the fate of the world after our own lifetime. As James Q. Wilson has pointed out, the family is our best guarantor of moral courage: studies of those who risked their lives in Nazi Germany to rescue Jews showed them to be people who had been particularly close to their parents and had learned from them the importance of dependability, self-reliance and caring for others. Nothing could be less just than Edmund Leach’s famous verdict, in his 1967 Reith Lectures: “The family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all discontents.” To the contrary, it is the most reliable training ground of sympathy we know.
The family is ultimately a religious institution. It is born of, and gives birth to, faith. It is hard to imagine a world of sexual chaos and random family structures responding to the idea of a morally ordered universe created in love. The biblical word emunah, usually translated as faith, means among other things “faithfulness” as in a marriage, and “nurturing” as in bringing up a child. God, for the Hebrew Bible, is one who brings us into being as Creator, who betroths us as covenantal partner, and having done so does not walk away. Religious and marital fidelity are almost inextricable in the biblical vision of the world. Only through the experience of secure childhood can we grow to see the universe as a place which answers to our trust.
The congruence between family feeling and religious experience is close. Seeing something of ourselves live on in our children is the nearest we come in this life to immortality. Seeing our children develop in unexpected ways is the nearest we will come to the pure mystery of creativity. Stephen Hawking was wrong in his A Brief History of Time. It is not through theoretical physics that we will approach an understanding of the “mind of God.” It is through the feelings we have when we watch our children playing and they are unaware that we are watching them.
Wittgenstein once said that the task of philosophy was to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The way back to the family is not closed. We have simply become trapped in a set of habits of short-term self-gratification that cause us and others great unhappiness in the long run. I have faith in the future of marriage precisely because mankind is a learning animal. We have survived by recognising and rectifying our mistakes. Moral habits may suffer a temporary eclipse, but we would not have come this far without an inner gyroscope that kept us from tilting into the abyss. Natural ecology has taught us to place limits on our patterns of consumption. Human ecology will teach us, no less surely, to set limits on our patterns of relationship and live within them.
Marriage and the family will matter more in the future, not less. For our children are now born into a world of unprecedentedly rapid change, economic, political and technological. They do not have what most people at most times have had: a set of stable expectations about what they will do and experience and become. Chaos theory is the most characteristic discovery of our age. More than any previous generation, our children need what Alvin Toffler calls “personal stability zones” that will sustain them in the midst of flux. Of these none is more powerful than the family. Far from being over, its greatest time is yet to come.
"Faith In The Future"
