My feeling is that, if Lasch’s analysis is correct about the consequences (broken families, loneliness, a perhaps ‘liberated’ but neurotic and anxious sexuality, incessant conflict, psychological disorders, an explosion of gangs, and so forth), he is not correct about the causes. Lasch is practicing economic reductionism when he attributes the present social catastrophe to ‘libertarian neo-capitalism’ (i.e., the non-authoritarian materialist consumer society). We see here that Lasch has not abandoned all traces of the Frankfurt School Marxism he inherited.
I have always been a partisan of cultural and ideological rather than economic explanations. In my view, we are witnessing the secularisation of Christian individualism propagating itself quasi-virally and, paradoxically, ending by destroying stable marriage for the benefit of an adolescent union: sexualised, egotistical and ephemeral — no matter that the Church defends conjugal faithfulness and condemns divorce! The ‘libertarian neo-capitalism’ that idolises consumerism and cuts the young off from family authority for the benefit of the social jungle is also a consequence of the assumption of the solitary Individual above group identities and carnal belonging; an assumption which is present in germ in Christian moral theology, founded on the autonomy and equivalence of Individuals.
This is the great paradox of Christianity, observable in many other domains: the Christian mentality has sown the seeds which develop and finish by destroying — eating away from inside — the Christian social order sought by the Church.
The equilibrium of the nineteenth and early twentieth century — between conjugal fidelity, marriage for love, sexual attraction, and a mostly patriarchal family order in which the wife enjoys respect, protection, and a field of authority — was especially fragile, unstable, and difficult to perpetuate. The major issues called into question are these: Are a stable couple and durable marriage (forming part of a lineage) compatible with the absolute equality (or rather equivalence) between husband and wife? Are they compatible with current permissive legislation: divorce by mere repudiation, cohabitation almost completely equal to marriage, the lack of legal distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring? Are they compatible with a union founded on sexual love and an eternal, transparent sexual fidelity? Are they compatible with the collapse of parental authority and the transmission of values no longer connected with family tradition but with the dominant ideology propounded by the schools and the media?
Let us take as an example something which will make beautiful progressive souls smile, but which is a dramatic issue for the lineage of indigenous Europeans: starting in adolescence, boys and especially girls (in which case the issue is even more serious) are beyond the influence of any tradition and any family authority in matters of sex, romantic relations, and thus the choice of a future spouse. The strategy of choosing a spouse endogamously, according to socio-ethnic proximity (the normal and natural law among all fruitful people) is replaced by fanciful and erratic choices founded on individual caprice — indeed, on fashion, snobbery, ideological conformism, or media influence. Hence the rapid growth among the rising generation of inter-ethnic and inter-racial unions — usually ephemeral, of course, but which give rise to two disorders: the dilution of the family tradition and lineage — in fact the disappearance of the family altogether — and the explosion of racial mixture, that is, the dissolution of the biological stock.[20]
Now, this phenomenon of disordered exogamous unions, along with the erosion of conjugal and familial solidarity and fidelity is indeed the virulent consequence of the Christian hyper-individualism which proclaims that one should marry whomever one loves, irrespective of their origin. The economic infrastructure of the commercial and consumerist society has nothing to do with it, despite what Lasch thinks. The proof is that in middle class Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim families (among others) — who live entirely submersed in this libertarian mercantilism — the custom of intergenerational transmission is preserved, and interethnic, exogamous marriage is combated, unlike in families of Christian heritage.
* * *
The proportion of bachelors has never been as high as today — fifteen million in France, over 30 percent of adults. Divorces become the rule, as do extra-marital unions and births. Reconstituted families give rise to incessant social drama.[21] In their old age, individuals find themselves alone, without ‘loved ones’ (for friends never replace ‘relations’, blood ties — apart from exceptional cases). Homosexual unions are rarely viable long-term, any more than heterosexual cohabiting couples, within which conflict is endemic. Presently, among indigenous Europeans (I am not speaking of Muslims), we have witnessed an unprecedented social revolution since the 1960s: the stable and lasting married couple has become the minority. Individuals are either isolated or change partners constantly as if they were ‘channel surfing’, which obviously provokes an off-centre collective psychology in which each person pursues ‘emotional happiness’ without success, like Orpheus after Eurydice. Of course, the consequences for the birth rate are enormous. As for the progeny, left on their own without any family structure, they will constitute a formless, deracinated mass, heavily blended, without historical memory and weakly educated and acculturated (for school breakdown is compounded with family breakdown), unable to pass on the baton of a declining civilisation which has lost its identity. They shall fall prey to all possible tyrannies, and thus, by heterotelia[22] (as always), liberation will be metamorphosed into totalitarianism.
Supremacy of the Anti-Familial Ideology
The model of the monogamous couple, without divorce, who give birth to a structured, disciplined family, was one of the central pillars of European and Western civilisation. This model has not been that of all civilisations, and was not always that of Europe before modern times. But what characterises our age is that the decline of this model — of the monogamous, lasting couple and the ‘semi-patriarchal’ family has not given way to any new model of conjugal and familial organisation. The end of the stable couple and family has resulted in emptiness, chaos, disorder, and improvisation. As in many other realms, the individual finds himself alone, isolated, handed over to his own unsatisfied caprices, facing a tutelary State that is both overly powerful and impotent.
In Western Europe much more than in the USA,[23] most ideological discourse, television shows, and advertisements implicitly denigrate stable couples and large families. Such a family, especially if it is indigenous European, structured, and hierarchic, is never held up as an example. It is often ridiculed as a laughing stock, an obsolescent fossil.[24] ‘Familist’ ideology is even suspected of various horrors such as White natalism. The slogan of Vichy France is cited with horror: Work, Family, Country. It is also accused of oppressing woman and transforming her into a housewife cum broody hen.
Above all, the dominant ideology never ceases to inculcate the imperative according to which love is more important than the family. From the psycho-sexual advice of women’s magazines to the columns of gossip magazines, by way of cinematographic and audiovisual productions and popular song lyrics, the idea has been broadly diffused that it is legitimate to leave one’s spouse if one finds one’s great love elsewhere, home and family be damned. It’s the precedence of the ego and its right to happiness, especially sexual-emotional happiness, over the claims of family and lineage. As soon as one no longer ‘loves’ one’s spouse (in the immature, adolescent sense of the world), one has the right to leave him or her and, sometimes, one’s offspring with him or her. Paradoxically, one continues in the same movement to wax lachrymose over children — preferably those of the third world.[25] The legitimacy of ‘starting one’s life over’, acceding to one’s ‘right to happiness’, comes before any conjugal duties. These latter are treated materialistically, in terms of monetary damages, food allowances, and so on. But in all cases, the concrete couple and family come secondary to the fantasies and desires — or rather whims — of the individual in quest of ‘personal f
ulfillment’, the highest source of legitimacy.
The entire ideology of these last decades, whose mass-propagators are the audiovisual media, has striven pretentiously to discredit and make ridiculous the bourgeois family — disciplined, balanced, fertile, and united — above all when it comes to ‘traditional’ families of indigenous Europeans. Recall that Phillippe de Villiers was lampooned because he himself was the head of a large family of practicing Catholics.[26] A mother of a numerous indigenous European children is much less telegenic, much less acclaimed by the irresponsible prigs who run the media than various profiles in human degeneracy. In the vast majority of television series, for example, the model proposed is not that of the large and united family, happy and balanced, but the world of shabby, unhappy, problematic people. They seem to be at once pitied and held up as an example, as if the dominant ideology, supposedly the dispenser of liberation and happiness, itself recognises that its only end results are sordid chaos and the hell of loneliness. On the other hand, those who are anti-natalist when it comes to Whites seem to adore and rave about large foreign families — a result of the fatal mixture of ethnomasochism and xenophilia.
Consequences of the Deterioration of the Monogamous Couple
In the West today, couples break up over anything and everything. In urban areas, the divorce rate (or separation rate of couples ‘living together’) involves one out of two couples after seven years together. Breaking up (made easy by their being no law of mutual repudiation) occurs as soon as problems, even quite surmountable ones, start to crop up. The children don’t matter. Individualism and egoism are the masters, despite the humanitarian discourse that innervates the ideological atmosphere. One of the causes of this phenomenon is, as we have seen, the generalisation of the hasty, superficial romantic union founded on psychological immaturity, adolescentism (that is, the prolongation into adulthood of the romantic psychology of adolescence; a psychology of the fluttering heart which does not think about the future). Most men and women over thirty years old act like they were still fifteen.
Presentism, neglect of the future (along with forgetfulness and contempt for the past) is the paradoxical characteristic of a society and elites who have nothing but the words progress, innovation, modernity on their lips in every domain, including the economic.
As soon as one is no longer ‘in love’ as depicted in television shows, as soon as sexual desire fades, one separates from one’s current partner. Marrying for superficial reasons, one separates for superficial reasons. Moreover, this compulsive and immature sort of behaviour is found not only in relationships but also in eroticism and sex in general, always under the sign of speed, immediacy, and instant gratification. Conjugal love and even sex are no longer savoured but consumed or indeed devoured, as if by fire.
Despite a form of pseudo-maturity demanded in all domains, especially sexual, and an ideology of liberation, Westerners since the 1960s (the baby boom generation to which I belong) have had difficulty proceeding to the psychological stage of adulthood, that of building for the long-term. This is true even in fields very different to those of sex and relationships, and include those of politics and economics. It is the generalised reign of immaturity and improvidence. Marriage is then conceived as a sort of game, and it ends as soon as one blows the final whistle. Unrestrained enjoyment, the slogan of May ‘68,[27] inspired by a cheap, boorish hedonism, has actually passed into our mores.
* * *
Since the 1960s, Western societies have experienced a number of apparently distinct phenomena that are in fact connected with one another: the disintegration of the traditional family, the phenomenal rise in the divorce rate, the appearance of single mothers in the workplace or on the dole, unstable reconstituted families, the spectacular increase in the number of bachelors and persons living alone (8.6 million in France in 2007, including five million women), the isolation of aged persons (often consigned to retirement homes), and an impressive explosion of illiteracy and crime among the young. This last phenomenon is, of course, largely due to uncontrolled immigration, but not entirely. For it is obvious that a society or family model that has now lost its traditional structure can no longer assure the supervision of minors, and the State cannot act as a substitute for either of these.
Because of mass immigration from the third world, we are also threatened by the reappearance of the tribal family, which has nothing in common with the European family founded on the monogamous couple. Among African communities, for example, there is no need for a stable family in order to procreate — quite in contrast to those of indigenous Europeans. The 3.4 fertility level of African women living in Europe, the 4.0 level of Turkish women and the over 3.0 level of Maghreb women contrasts with the demographic curbing of European women, who have not been renewing the generations for a long time now.
In France, if one takes into account mixed-race babies, various clandestine studies and the observations of obstetricians, as well as looking at the first names on municipal bulletins, one finds that the birth rate of non-European babies has probably already passed the 50 percent mark. In the USA, where racial statistics are openly practiced, the word is ‘non-White’.
All the aid and subsidies granted to African tribal families (judged according to European criteria) and in general all that is afforded to extra-European immigration in the name of the secular religion of the Rights of Man could quite easily go towards supporting indigenous French families.
The Destruction of the Bourgeois Family Results in Chaos
Between arranged marriage (practiced within the tribal family where the woman is undervalued and oppressed) and unbridled individualism, European civilisation was able to find a sort of equilibrium: the monogamous family, called ‘bourgeois’.[28] A stable couple, an assured lineage, respect for women, legal prevalence of marriage, balanced families as the primary cell of the social organism; these things may have come at the price of a number of hypocrisies, but this model constituted a relatively successful compromise. But it was highly fragile. It was blown to smithereens over the course of the twentieth century, destroyed by the deep thinkers of an irresponsible Left-wing intelligentsia (at work in the world since the end of the eighteenth century), but also by the disintegration of mores and social disciplines which individualism fosters.
This ‘liberation’ which resulted from the destruction of the bourgeois family as the majority model was nothing but a fool’s bargain, like everything which comes from egalitarian ideologies of emancipation; these always result in the opposite of what they claim to be bringing about. Under the pretext that the bourgeois family was reactionary and oppressive, it has been replaced by the current model, which has never fulfilled any of its promises of ‘happiness’, but impressed the naïve with the stupid and fetishistic concept of modernity.
The current model is chaotic: unstable reconstituted families, divorce by simple formal repudiation, de facto disappearance of marriage in the name of various ephemeral forms of concubinage, child-mothers, abandoned children, the collapse of education within the family, the traumatisation of children deprived of a stable family environment, equality between fragile homosexual unions and heterosexual marriage (homosexual marriage will soon be authorised in France, do not doubt it[29]), explosion in the number of lonely bachelors, weakening of protective family bonds which the State welfare system cannot replace, the abandonment of aged persons, a low birth rate, and so on. The current landscape is a field of ruins upon which only psychologists prosper.
However, this anarchic situation is animated by an extraordinary hypocrisy echoed constantly by the dominant ideology and its media: the cult of the child. All the while, the child is the principal victim of the sinking of the bourgeois family!
* * *
Certainly the bourgeois family also relied on a series of hypocrisies, but these are indispensable for social life, and they were well managed, with one example being se
xual fidelity. Discreet adultery and the authorisation of brothels allowed for impulsive sexuality to be managed at the time when the couple’s libido was declining. Adultery was tolerated because it was manageable, but divorce was proscribed, considered an ultimate and catastrophic solution. Moreover, from the moment sexual desire no longer exists between spouses, sexual jealousy disappears. The adulterous liaison must not result in serious feelings. The hidden mistress or lover was ephemeral, and was not ‘loved’. The bourgeois family constituted an equilibrium point which did not last long: a sort of apogee in the history of the couple.
Without falling into arranged marriage, bourgeois marriage tried to balance the love and sexual desire of the spouses, involving mutual choice within a necessary degree of social proximity. No one married simply because of an adolescent romantic impulse, like today; but, of course, psycho-physical attraction existed. You made a beginning, you made love out of passion, then out of duty, ever less frequently. But things arranged themselves: you stayed together in spite of temporary lovers and mistresses; whereas the strictly romantic — indeed, libidinal — union of today can only be ephemeral, since it is strictly individualistic.
The bourgeois family presupposed a discipline of each of its members, an idea totally foreign to contemporary morals. Feminists reproach the bourgeois family with the charge of oppressing women, which is false, for it replaced solely paternal authority by being able to integrate parental authority and the absolutely equivalent rights of the spouses. Divorce was allowed but difficult. So let us not exaggerate the oppression of women within the bourgeois family.[30]
Sex and Deviance Page 4
