I just saw this graphic over at X:
...and it put me in mind of one of my favorite bits of wisdom from the Great Lawgiver:
There are many human achievements, including some of the finest, which need more than a single lifetime for completion. The individual can compose a symphony or paint a canvas, build up a business or restore order in a city. He cannot build a cathedral or grow an avenue of oak trees. Still less can he gain the stature essential to statesmanship in a highly developed and complex society. There is a need for continuity of effort, spread over several generations, and for just such a continuity as governments lack. Given the party system more especially, under the democratic form of rule, policy is continually modified or reversed. A family can be biologically stable in a way that a modern legislature is not. It is to families, therefore, that we look for such stability as society may need. But how can the family function if subject to crippling taxes during every lifetime and partial confiscation with every death? How can one generation provide the springboard for the next? Without such a springboard, all must start alike, and none can excel; and where none can excel nothing excellent will result.[C. Northcote Parkinson, The Law, Complete. Emphases added by FWP.]
If you’re familiar with the work of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, your acquaintance with him probably started with his First Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” It was a potent insight, gleaned from Parkinson’s scrutiny of the behavior of British bureaucracies. Yet it’s a pity that so many stop there, and never become acquainted with his later oeuvre. In total, they mark him as one of the master-intellects of the Twentieth Century. He deserves the same stature and worldwide recognition as any other more frequently praised genius. The citation above is one example – one of the most penetrating yet overlooked observations of the tragedy of the Nightmare Century.
I’ve written in other places that the family is the indispensable building block of the free and stable society. A society largely made up of intact, cohesive families will be highly resistant to attacks on its values and norms. That might be called the horizontal-in-time view of the family. But if we rotate the time-axis ninety degrees for a vertical-in-time view, we see something at least as important and probably much more so: the steady growth of family dynasties, each of which conserves and nurtures its family’s greatest strengths. Hearken to Hope’s foremost sociologist:
“Families are the fundamental building blocks of a stable society. Extended families—clans—are the best conceivable environment for the rearing of children, the perpetuation of a commercial forte, and the germination of new families and their ventures. A clan like yours, Miss Albermayer, conserves a brilliant genetic line and a priceless medical specialty at the same time. A clan like yours, Mr. Morelon, makes possible a benign agricultural empire and produces natural leaders one after another while connecting Hope to its most distant origins. And all healthy families, which cherish life and bind their members to one another in unembarrassed love, can find far more to occupy and amuse them than they need.”
“When Earth’s regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them.”[Arne Stromberg, holder of the Edmond Genet Chair of Sociology at Gallatin University, the foremost center of higher learning on Altus, the northern continent of Hope.]
Proceeding from Professor Stromberg’s insight, I have come to regard the aim to create a numerous, well-tutored family dynasty as one of the most praiseworthy of all ambitions. But how does one do that? With what sort of structure does he begin?
It’s almost childishly simple: He begins by accepting and honoring one of the free society’s greatest strengths: the division of labor. He “hires:”
- A “breadwinner:” usually himself.
- A “procreation and nurturance expert:” a wife / mother / homemaker.
- A squad of “perpetuation engineers:” their kids.
Moreover, he refrains from insisting that any of those “specialties” take on the labors of any of the others. Each dedicates himself to the refinement of his particular specialty and practices it assiduously, deaf to outside critics.
And over several generations, a cathedral or an avenue of oak trees just might result.
The above probably looks a bit facetious to my Gentle Readers. It’s not; it’s how the great ones of our society were produced. Ironically, the mighty family dynasties that produced them are seldom studied; all the attention goes to the “great man.” But he is a resultant. He didn’t spring forth fully formed from conception, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It probably took three, four, or five generations of families, each building upon the legacy of its predecessors, to produce him.
The Founding Fathers had a better grasp of this than contemporary Americans:
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”[John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife]
Young readers (if I have any): Give it some thought.
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