The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage.

THE SUBVERSIVE FAMILY

An Alternative History of Love and Marriage

Ferdinand Mount 

Free Press, $24.95, 282 pp.

Ferdinand Mount's pleasingly iconoclastic defense of domesticity and romance courts few predictable allies. He is as stinging in his condemnation of the church's meddling in family life as he is of the more straightforward rationalistic assaults on the traditional family by most Marxists and many feminists. In a mischievous but penetrating rebuke to the "carefree attitudes of the Sermon on the Mount," he presses hard on the conflict between faith's call to trust in God's earthly providence (..."Take therefore no thought for the morrow"), and the more prosaic concerns of any responsible parent to lay up treasure for the care of children. "The Sermon on the Mount is a wonderful, intoxicating sermon," Mount slyly acknowledges. "But it is a sermon for bachelors."

Mount is hard on bachelors, but there is hardly a dull page in his sermon on the mutlifarious virtues of coupling. The editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Mount covers an enormous amount of historical territory, briskly disposing of what he judges to be erroneous assumptions about the evolution or plasticity of the family in Western culture. The nuclear, not the extended family, has always been the norm; most ordinary people have always married for love; women have enjoyed equality and authority within marriage; a caring and affectionate attitude toward children is not a modern invention; the sharing, "sensitive" contemporary father has a good many historical precedents. And so on. With typical and nearly persuasive bravado, Mount even argues that modern rates of divorce (followed, of course, by remarriage), because they reflect a devolution of authority from the state and church to individuals, is in fact further proof of the popularity and stability of traditional family arrangements, not of their decline.

Mount attributes the prevalence of "myths" about the family's changeableness to what he calls "simple-minded progressivism," the modern intellectual assumption that basic social institutions evolve from primitive to higher and more complex forms. This pervasive bias blinds us to the humanity, passion, and wisdom embodied in the traditional arrangements by which men and women have sought love and affection and in which children are best cared for. From Christianity to radical feminism, the family has been the object of concerted assaults by the enemies of individual freedom and choice, Mount contends. Its remarkable survival, he concludes, is the result of the fact that "it has a life of its own, that in some sense the family is natural."

The Subversive Family can border on the proselytizing, and Mount's intellectual energy rarely flags. He is most impressive, to my mind, in his defense of the family's particular and exclusive relationships against the abstract and universalizing schemes that can animate the state or the church.

Especially telling is his analysis of the dilution of human feeling inherent in the search for some sense of fraternity or solidarity outside the family. Bruno Bettelheim's elucidation of the shallowness that besets relationships on the kibbutz is put to good use here. Idealistic notions of social "brotherhood" and undifferentiated equality cannot be reconciled to the essentially private, hierarchical, and historically continuous structure of family life. "Intimacy always entails personal authority," Mount writes. "In a truly intimate relationship one person makes unique claims upon another, claims for services, affection, respect, and attention which can be supplied only by that other person....the authority is both partial and reciprocal....that the claims may be different for the two sides of the relationship, 'asymmetrical' in the modern jargon, does not alter the fact that there are two sides." Mount does not deny the reality or value of a broader sense of community or solidarity. But he insists we not seek the satisfactions characteristic of intimacy in the larger arena of politics or society. "If you insist on equality, freedom, separation, you must accept the consequences, and recognize that you have created an entirely new world which cannot be kept warm by the old love."

For all its verve and clear-eyed analysis, The Subversive Family, like all families, has limitations. As Christopher Lasch demonstrated in Haven in a Heartless World, the family cannot thrive merely as a refuge from an otherwise impersonal, competitive, and individualist culture. As every parent knows, eventually one must send one's children off into that world. There is no simply private solution to the problem of family life--the world comes home with us every day. Without a meaningful larger world to receive us, the freedom and privacy Mount rightly extols degenerates into crushing isolation.

Mount's complaint against Christianity, his facile way with a scriptural reference, is not merely an idiosyncratic grudge. The strong ascetical dimension to Christianity can easily obscure its reciprocal and equally powerful affirmations of human life, love, and affection. But incarnational religion, after all, is about the consecration of the body, not its denial. Mount's spirited attack on the church's "threat" to the family falls to come to terms with the fact that this supposedly antifamily religion is about a God born of a human mother and raised in an unexceptional little nuclear family. Similarly, if Mount attributes the longevity of the family to its unique ability to meet the human need for intimacy, to what does he attribute the longevity of Christianity? Here he seems to want to convict the church of an unparalleled record of historical oppression that, when issued as a Marxist or feminist indictment, he sensibly dismisses out of hand. Given the historical allegiance of families to the church, the hostility that Mount claims exists between these two venerable institutions is not plausible.

PAUL BAUMANN is associate editor of Commonweal.