Marriage and Morals/Chapter XIII

The reader may by this time have forgotten that in Chapters II and III we considered matrilineal and patriarchal families, and their bearing upon primitive views of sexual ethics. It is now time to resume the consideration of the family, which affords the only rational basis for limitations of sexual freedom. We have come to the end of a long parenthesis on Sex and Sin, a connection not invented by the early Christians, but exploited by them to the uttermost, and embodied now in the spontaneous moral judgments of most of us. I shall not trouble further with the theological view that in sex as such there is something wicked which can only be eliminated by the combination of marriage with the desire for offspring. The subject we have now to consider is the degree of stability in sex relations demanded by the interests of children. That is to say, we have to consider the family as a ​reason for stable marriage. This question is far from simple. It is clear that the gain which a child derives from being a member of a family depends upon what the alternative is: there might be institutions for foundlings so admirable that they would be preferable to the great majority of families. We have also to consider whether any essential part in family life is played by the father, since it is only on his account that feminine virtue has been thought essential to the family. We have to examine the effect of the family upon the individual psychology of the child—a subject dealt with in a somewhat sinister spirit by Freud. We have to consider the effect of economic systems in increasing or diminishing the importance of the father. We have to ask ourselves whether we should wish to see the State taking the place of the father, or possibly even, as Plato suggested, of both father and mother. And even supposing that we decide in favour of both father and mother as affording the best environment for the child in normal cases, we still have to consider the very numerous instances in which one or other is unfit for the responsibility of parenthood, or the two are so ​incompatible that separation is desirable in the interests of the child.

Among those who are opposed to sexual freedom on theological grounds, it is customary to argue against divorce as being contrary to the interests of the children. This argument, however, when used by the theologically minded, is not a genuine one, as may be seen from the fact that such persons will not tolerate either divorce or contraceptives, even when one parent is syphilitic and the children are likely to be so also. Cases of this sort show that the appeal with a sob in the voice to the interests of little children, when pushed to an extreme, is only an excuse for cruelty. The whole question of the connection of marriage with the interests of children needs to be considered without prejudice, and with the realization that the answer is not obvious from the start. At this point, a few words of recapitulation are desirable.

The family is a prehuman institution, whose biological justification is that the help of the father during pregnancy and lactation tends to the survival of the young. But as we saw in the case of the Trobriand Islanders, and as we may safely infer in the case of the anthro​poid apes, this help, under primitive conditions, is not given for quite the same reasons which actuate a father in a civilized community. The primitive father does not know that the child has any biological connection with himself; the child is the offspring of the female whom he loves. This fact he knows, since he has seen the child born, and it is this fact that produces the instinctive tie between him and the child. At this stage, he sees no biological importance in safeguarding his wife’s virtue, although no doubt he will feel instinctive jealousy if her infidelity is thrust upon his notice. At this stage, also, he has no sense of property in the child. The child is the property of his wife and his wife’s brother, but his own relation with the child is merely one of affection.

With the development of intelligence, however, man is bound sooner or later to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He becomes aware that the child springs from his seed, and he must therefore make sure of his wife’s virtue. The wife and the child become his property, and at a certain level of economic development they may be very valuable property. He brings religion to bear, to cause his wife and children to have a sense of duty ​towards him. With children this is especially important, for although he is stronger than they are when they are young, the time will come when he will be decrepit, while they will be in the vigour of manhood. At this stage, it is vitally necessary to his happiness that they should reverence him. The Commandment on the subject is deceitfully phrased. It should run: “Honour thy father and thy mother that their days may be long in the land.” The horror of parricide which one finds in early civilization shows how great was the temptation to be overcome; for a crime which we cannot imagine ourselves committing, such as cannibalism for example, fails to inspire us with any genuine horror.

It was the economic conditions of early pastoral and agricultural communities that brought the family to its fullest fruition. Slave labour was, for most people, unavailable, and therefore the easiest way to acquire labourers was to breed them. In order to make sure that they should work for their father, it was necessary that the institution of the family should be sanctified by the whole weight of religion and morals. Gradually primogeniture extended family unity to collateral branches, and en​hanced the power of the head of the family. Kingship and aristocracy depend essentially upon this order of ideas, and even divinity, since Zeus was the father of gods and men.

Up to this point, the growth of civilization had increased the strength of the family. From this point onward, however, an opposite movement has taken place, until the family in the Western World has become a mere shadow of what it was. The causes which brought about the decay of the family were partly economic and partly cultural. In its fullest development, it was never very suitable either to urban populations or to seafaring people. Commerce has been in all ages except ours the chief cause of culture, since it has brought men into relations with customs other than their own, and has thus emancipated them from tribal prejudice. Accordingly we find, among seafaring Greeks, much less slavery to the family than among their contemporaries. Other examples of the emancipating influence of the sea are to be found in Venice, in Holland, and in Elizabethan England. This, however, is beside the point. The only point which concerns us is that when one member of a family went on a long voyage while the rest ​stayed at home, he was inevitably emancipated from family control, and the family was proportionately weakened. The influx of rural populations into the towns, which is characteristic of all periods of rising civilization, had the same kind of effect as marine commerce in weakening the family. Another influence, perhaps even more important where the lower strata of society were concerned, was slavery. The master had little respect for the family relations of his slaves. He could part husbands and wives whenever he felt so disposed, and he could, of course, himself have intercourse with any female slave who pleased him. These influences, it is true, did not weaken the aristocratic family, which was kept coherent by the desire for prestige, and success in the Montague-and-Capulet brawls which characterized ancient city life as much as the city life of Italy in the latter Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Aristocracy, however, lost its importance during the first century of the Roman Empire, and Christianity, which ultimately conquered, had been at first a religion of slaves and proletarians. The previous weakening of the family in those social classes no doubt accounts for the fact that early Chris​tianity was somewhat hostile to it, and formulated an ethic in which the place of the family was much less than in any previous ethic, except that of Buddhism. In the ethic of Christianity, it is the relation of the soul to God that is important, not the relation of man to his fellow men.

The case of Buddhism, however, should warn us against an undue emphasis upon the purely economic causation of religions. I do not know enough of the condition of India at the time when Buddhism spread to be able to assign economic causes for its emphasis upon the individual soul, and I am rather doubtful whether such causes existed. Throughout the time when Buddhism flourished in India, it appears to have been primarily a religion for princes, and it might have been expected that ideas connected with the family would have had a stronger hold upon them than upon any other class. Nevertheless, contempt of this world and the search for salvation became common, with the result that in Buddhist ethics the family holds a very subordinate place. Great religious leaders, with the exception of Mahomet—and Confucius, if he can be called religious—have in general been very in​different to social and political considerations, and have sought rather to perfect the soul by meditation, discipline and self-denial. The religions which have arisen in historical times, as opposed to those which one finds already in existence when historical records begin, have been, on the whole, individualistic, and have tended to suppose that a man could do his whole duty in solitude. They have, of course, insisted that if a man has social relations he must perform such recognized duties as belong to those relations, but they have not, as a rule, regarded the formation of those relations as in itself a duty. This is especially true of Christianity, which has always had an ambivalent attitude towards the family. “Whoso loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” we read in the gospels, and this means, in effect, that a man should do what he thinks right, even if his parents think it wrong—a view to which an ancient Roman or an old-fashioned Chinese would not subscribe. This leaven of individualism in Christianity has worked slowly, but has tended gradually to weaken all social relations, especially among those who were most in earnest. This effect is less seen in Catholicism than in Prot​estantism, for in Protestantism the anarchic element contained in the principle that we ought to obey God rather than man came to the fore. To obey God means, in practice, to obey one’s conscience, and men’s consciences may differ. There must, therefore, be occasional conflicts between conscience and law, in which the true Christian will feel bound to honour the man who follows his own conscience rather than the dictates of the law.^[1] In early civilization the father was God; in Christianity God is the Father, with the result that the authority of the merely human parent is weakened.

The decay of the family in quite recent times is undoubtedly to be attributed in the main to the industrial revolution, but it had already begun before that event, and its beginnings were inspired by individualistic theory. Young people asserted the right to marry according to their own wishes, not according to the commands of their parents. The habit of married sons living in their father’s house died out. It became customary for sons to leave home to earn their living as soon as their education was ​ended. So long as small children could work in factories, they remained a source of livelihood to their parents until they died of overwork, but the Factory Acts put an end to this form of exploitation, in spite of the protests of those who lived on it. From being a means of livelihood, children came to be a financial burden. At this stage, contraceptives became known, and the fall in the birth rate began. There is much to be said for the view that the average man in all ages has had as many children as it paid him to have, no more and no less. At any rate, this seems to be true of Australian aborigines, Lancashire cotton operatives, and British peers. I do not pretend that this view can be maintained with theoretical exactness, but it is not so far from the truth as one might be inclined to suppose.

The position of the family in modern times has been weakened even in its last stronghold by the action of the State. In its great days, the family consisted of an elderly patriarch, a large number of grown-up sons, their wives and their children—perhaps their children’s children-—all living together in one house, all cooperating as one economic unit, all combined against the outer world as strictly as the citi​zens of a militaristic modern nation. Nowadays the family is reduced to the father and mother and their younger children, but even young children, by the decree of the State, spend most of their time at school, and learn there what the State thinks good for them, not what their parents desire. (To this, however, religion is a partial exception.) So far from having power of life and death over his children, as the Roman father had, the British father is liable to be prosecuted for cruelty if he treats his child as most fathers a hundred years ago would have thought essential for a moral upbringing. The State provides medical and dental care, and feeds the child if the parents are destitute. The functions of the father are thus reduced to a minimum, since most of them have been taken over by the State. With advancing civilization, this is inevitable. In a primitive state of affairs, the father was necessary, as he is among birds and anthropoid apes, for economic reasons, and also to protect the young and their mother from violence. The latter function was long ago taken over by the State. A child whose father is dead is no more likely to be murdered than one whose father is living. The economic ​function of the father can be performed, in the well-to-do classes, more efficiently if he is dead than if he is living, since he can leave his money to his children, without having to use up part of it on his own maintenance. Among those who depend upon earned money, the father is still economically useful, but so far as wage-earners are concerned, this utility is being continually diminished by the humanitarian sentiment of the community, which insists that the child should receive a certain minimum of care, even if he has no father to pay for it. It is in the middle classes that the father is at present of most importance, for so long as he lives and earns a good income, he can give his children those advantages in the way of an expensive education which will enable them in their turn to preserve their social and economic status, whereas if he dies while the children are still young, there is a considerable chance that they may sink in the social scale. The precariousness of this state of affairs is, however, much diminished by the custom of life insurance, by means of which, even in the professional classes, a prudent father can do much to diminish his own utility.

In the modern world, the great majority of ​fathers are too hard-worked to see much of their own children. In the morning they are too busy getting off to work to have time for conversation; in the evening, when they get home, the children are (or ought to be) in bed. One hears stories of children who only know of their father as “that man who comes for the week-end.” In the serious business of caring for the child, fathers can seldom participate; in fact, this duty is shared between mothers and education authorities. It is true that the father often has a strong affection for his children, in spite of the small amount of time that he can spend with them. On any Sunday, in any of the poorer quarters of London, large numbers of fathers may be seen with their young children, evidently rejoicing in the brief opportunity of getting to know them. But whatever may be the case from the father’s point of view, from that of the child this is a play relation, without serious importance.

In the upper and professional classes, the custom is to leave children to nurses while they are young, and then send them to boarding-school. The mother chooses the nurse, and the father chooses the school, so that they preserve intact their sense of power over their off​spring, which working-class parents are not allowed to do. But so far as intimate contact is concerned, there is less, as a rule, between mother and child among the well-to-do than among wage-earners. The father has a play relation with his children in holidays, but has no more part in their real education than a working-class father. He has, of course, economic responsibility and the power of deciding where they shall be educated, but his personal contact with them is not usually of a very serious kind.

When a child reaches adolescence, there is very apt to be a conflict between parents and child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The opinions they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret. It cannot be said, therefore, that at this stage most parents are much use.

So far we have been considering only the ​weakness of the modern family. We must now consider in what respects it is still strong.

The family is important at the present day more through the emotions with which it provides parents than for any other reason. Parental emotions in men as well as in women are perhaps more important than any others, in their power of influencing action. Both men and women who have children as a rule regulate their lives largely with reference to them, and children cause perfectly ordinary men and women to act unselfishly in certain ways, of which perhaps life insurance is the most definite and measurable. The economic man of a hundred years ago was never provided in the text-books with children, though undoubtedly he had them in the imagination of the economists, who, however, took it for granted that the general competition which they postulated did not exist between fathers and sons. Clearly, the psychology of life insurance lies wholly outside the cycle of motives dealt with in the classical political economy. Yet that political economy was not psychologically autonomous, since the desire for property is very intimately bound up with parental feelings. Rivers went so far as to suggest that all private property ​is derivative from family feeling. He mentions certain birds which have private property in land during the breeding season, but at no other time. I think most men can testify that they become far more acquisitive when thev have children than they were before. This effect is one which is, in the popular sense, instinctive, that is to say, it is spontaneous, and springs from subconscious sources. I think that in this respect the family has been of incalculable importance to the economic development of mankind, and is still a dominating factor among those who are sufficiently prosperous to have a chance to save money.

There is apt to be on this point a curious misunderstanding between fathers and children. A man who works hard in business will tell his idle son that he has slaved all his life solely for the benefit of his children. The son, on the contrary, would much rather have a small cheque and a little kindness now, than a fortune when his father dies. The son notices, moreover, quite correctly, that his father goes to the city from force of habit and not the least from parental affection. The son is therefore as sure that his father is a humbug as the father is that his son is a wastrel. The son, however, is ​unjust. He sees his father in middle age, when all his habits are formed, and he does not realize the obscure, unconscious forces which led to the formation of those habits. The father, perhaps, may have suffered from poverty in his youth, and when his first child was born his instinct may have made him swear that no child of his should endure what he had had to suffer. Such a resolution is important and vital, and therefore need never be repeated in consciousness, since without the need of repetition it dominates conduct ever after. This is one way in which the family is still a very powerful force.

From the point of view of the young child, the important thing about parents is that from them the child gets an affection not given to any one else except his brothers and sisters. This is partly good and partly bad. I propose to consider the psychological effects of the family upon children in the next chapter. I shall therefore say no more about it at the present moment than that it is clearly a very important element in character formation, and that children brought up away from parents may be expected to differ considerably, whether for better or for worse, from normal children.

​In an aristocratic society, or indeed in any society permitting of personal eminence, the family is, in regard to certain important individuals, a mark connected with historical continuity. Observation seems to show that people whose name is Darwin do better work in science than they would do if their name had been changed to Snooks in infancy. I conceive that if surnames descended through the female instead of the male, effects of this kind would be exactly as strong as they are now. It is quite impossible to apportion the shares of heredity and environment respectively in such cases, but I am quite convinced that family tradition plays a very considerable part in the phenomena which Galton and his disciples attribute to heredity. One might give as an example of the influence of family tradition the reason said to have caused Samuel Butler to invent his doctrine of unconscious memory and to advocate a neo-Lamarckian theory of heredity. The reason was that for family reasons he felt it necessary to disagree with Charles Darwin. His grandfather (it seems) quarrelled with Darwin’s grandfather, his father with his’ father, so he must quarrel with him. Thus Shaw’s “Methuselah” is what it is, owing to ​the fact that Darwin and Butler had ill-tempered grandfathers.

Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children. If a man were going to have no property in his child, and no opportunity of affectionate relations with it, he would see little point in begetting it. It would, of course, with a slight change in our economic institutions, be possible to have families consisting of mothers only, but it is not such families that I am considering at the present time, since they afford no motives for sexual virtue, and it is the family as a reason for stable marriage that concerns us in the present work. It may be—and indeed I think it far from improbable—that the father will be completely eliminated before long, except among the rich (supposing the rich to be not abolished by socialism). In that case, women will share their children with the State, not with an individual father. They will have such number of children as they desire, and the fathers will have no responsibility. Indeed, if the mothers are at all of a promiscuous disposition, fatherhood may be impossible to determine. But if this comes about, it will make ​a profound change in the psychology and activities of men, far more profound, I believe, than most people would suppose. Whether the effect upon men would be good or bad, I do not venture to say. It would eliminate from their lives the only emotion equal in importance to sex love. It would make sex love itself more trivial. It would make it far more difficult to take an interest in anything after one’s own death. It would make men less active and probably cause them to retire earlier from work. It would diminish their interest in history and their sense of the continuity of historical tradition, At the same time it would eliminate the most fierce and savage passion to which civilized men are liable, namely, the fury which is felt in defending wives and children from attacks by coloured populations. I think it would make men less prone to war, and probably less acquisitive. To strike a balance between good and bad effects is scarcely possible, but it is evident that the effects would be profound and far-reaching. The patriarchal family, therefore, is still important, although it is doubtful how long it will remain so.