CHILDREN

We all come into the world as egoists; it is our job to get over it. It is our parent's job to help us, and it is our responsibility before God to assist our children in every way possible in this most difficult and most important of tasks; C. S. Lewis portrayed the ego as multiple layers of thick, tough, knobbly, scaly skin which obscure our true personality, but we identify it as our personality. Shedding this skin is the most painful thing possible, for it feels to us like the death of our person, of everything which goes to make us a personal being.

I generally say that the way to discover the truth of any issue is to find out in detail what the modern world teaches, and then contradict it point by point, and this is especially true when it comes to the subject of child rearing, for the World indeed has told nothing but lies to us on that subject; that is, it has told lies to those of us who intend to raise our children as Christians. It has told the truth about how to raise a certain kind of child; if you want to raise an egotistical pagan, a self-satisfied narcissist, destructively self centered and self nurturing, being at the same time utterly dependent on the forms the contemporary world has invented to contain these impotent egos, then you can follow no better course than the one the world has laid out for you. If you follow the advice the world has given you for producing the kind of children it wants, and foolishly take it as a sound program for producing the kind of children you want, whose fault is that? We seem to have this very strange idea that we can take advice from those whose motives and ideals are utterly alien to us, and productively fit it into our Christian worldview without seriously distorting our Christian universe, but of course this is not possible.

What kind of child should we, as Christians, wish to produce? Of course, we want a child that will be submissive to God in everything, unhesitatingly laying down his own will before the Divine Will; but how does one go about raising a child like that? In a word, Obedience; Obedience, we are told, is the key to all the other virtues. When we practice obedience, we act as if we are a part of something larger and more important than ourselves; when we are disobedient, we proclaim in a language everyone understands that we are the largest thing in our Universe.

Our time is unique in that many (if not most) children fail to follow the values of their parents. This represents a failure of parenting on a vast scale. The State practices effective parenting in its self-appointed role of One True Parent, (to which the child's natural parents are subservient). As the State does not wish for the caretaker/parents to erect effective obstacles to its efforts to form the minds and wills of the children, Parents are in many ways obstructed, and even forbidden from practicing effective parenting.

Many parents wish to instill obedience in their children, but few in our day are successful. Why is this? Perhaps partly it is because we have confused obedience with getting our kids to do what we want them to. Children who obey grudgingly and only after much haranguing, and who go back to doing whatever it was they were doing the moment your back is turned are not being instilled with a spirit of obedience; children who have to be bribed constantly, in many and sundry ways, are not being taught obedience, but are being turned into little mercenaries. We need to teach our Children the value of Obedience, so that they can be inspired to acquire that virtue; once, when my daughter was being over-argumentative I simply turned to her and asked, "Do you intend to obey, or not?" (I wouldn't recommend this for those whose children have been raised without effective restraint). Because she really did, deep down in her heart, (really deep!) wish to be obedient, that was enough (for the moment).

Our children also live in a social environment which preaches relentlessly to them the supreme value of the unfettered will, and there is no way to shield them from this totally; there are however, things we can do, and they all need to be done in conjunction, or we have done nothing. It's like trying to contain water in a bowl with holes in it; if you plug only one hole, the water will just leak out of the others. So if you choose to homeschool, and yet watch T.V., you have essentially done nothing; if you use your television only for watching movies you must be very careful if you are to avoid exposing your children to the full panoply of modern social propaganda. Almost all contemporary children's movies have very explicit pedagogic messages woven intricately into the story; unfortunately, most parents are primed to pass a movie for consumption as long as it doesn't have too much gratuitous bloodshed or explicit sexuality, and if the language isn't too bad. These aren't even the first things I look at as a parent; the most important thing is, what's the moral? I have known parents to reject a movie that actually had a rather wholesome treatment of human relationships because it showed a little "skin", while accepting a movie for the consumption of their teenagers that portrayed a very perverse view of sexuality because it didn't. You also have to be careful of your child's friends (a common piece of parenting advice in the past that has gone way out of vogue) or they will get all the influences of public school and television through the mouths of their playmates.

The most important reason parents aren't successful in forming their children is that we deny ourselves the necessary tools, or so circumscribe their use, and use them so inconsistently, that they are ineffective for any long-term purpose. I am speaking here primarily of the much-despised "corporal punishment" (I used to tell people that in my view, parents should use capital punishment only in extreme situations). In our day, spanking is looked on as extremely barbaric, (I have even been told that I was evil for advocating it). What is it, in our time, that produces this extreme aversion to what, after all, is only one of the constant realities of human existence? Until recently, corporal punishment was commonly used on adults for many offences against the law. As Christians, we accept many aspects of the temporal world as Divine chastisement of sin; we are sentenced to death and a vast assortment of painful circumstances by a just God whom we also confess to be merciful.

I believe the root of our contemporary aversion to these harsh realities does lie in the progress of western culture, which in many ways can be seen as the rebellion of the rich and comfortable against the idea that the pains of mortal life are dictated by God for our improvement. Obviously, it is going to be more comfortable for those who have made themselves comfortable to believe the pains of life are more or less accidental, and that the purpose of human society is to alleviate as many of these discomforts as possible. This necessitates removing God from the picture as One who is in control of all aspects of our life, either by eliminating him entirely, or removing Him a great distance from mundane affairs by positing Him as a "Grand Architect" who, after drawing out the plans left their completion to lesser, fallible hands. Much of the modern hostility against God is because of the pain in the world.

How can we recognize God's righteous chastisement of our misdeeds, and not recognize that it is right to punish children when they misbehave; are we more righteous than God? Obviously, we are less competent; it is nevertheless our responsibility to form the character of our Children in the pattern of godliness. We also know that if they do not learn responsibility that they will suffer many things in their encounters with the world, that if they grow up selfish there will be pain in all their social encounters, that if they do not acquire self-discipline they will be thwarted in all their endeavors by their own weakness of will.

Knowing all this, what is it that prevents parents from training their children to act responsibly? We love our children, and it is hard for us to punish them; we worry that if we strictly impose punishments we will loose the love of our children. This is not true, by the way; it is typically the indulged child that despises his parents. This is necessarily so; the indulged child is one thoroughly in thrall to his ego. For such a child, the parent is only a hateful object that stands in the way of the fulfillment of his wishes; the properly disciplined child loves his parents. There were some boys at one of the churches I once attended who tended to make things a little "lively" at times. Their father's entire notion of parental discipline was to sit them down and have a heart-to-heart chat with them. The kids would sit there, faces aglow with adoration, saying, "O.K. daddy; we love you, daddy". My daughter would then tell me the kinds of things they said about him when his back was turned; "Stupid old man; we sure pulled one over on him". It is a very bad thing to let your children grow up thinking you're dumber than they are.

Despite our love for our children, it is our responsibility to make sure they are able to win the battle over the ego, and we do this by chastising the serpent whenever it shows itself; it is our love for our children that should powerfully motivate us to do so. The problem is that parents have very tender feelings for their children; these feelings are commonly confused with love. It is not our job to indulge our parental feelings, but to love our children with strong, active love that stands beside our children to help them fight their battles, the kind of love God has for us; not weak, trumpery love that will not act to gain any benefit, but is only a languid feeding on the sweetness of our own feelings. God judged Eli because he did not bring up his sons in righteousness, and would not act to restrain their wickedness; there are many contemporary Eli's. Our time looks upon itself as being possessed of a very special tenderness of heart, but what it has is only a very pronounced weakness of stomach, an inability to deal effectively with any of the harsh realities of life. The refusal to discipline is one aspect of the modern rebellion against authority, and against God, the source of all good authority. We cannot fully recognize God's just authority over us unless we first recognize the principle of godly authority and its operation in bringing order to the world.

Modern children are essentially over entertained, over socialized, and way too divorced from the context of adult life, and the reality of Family as a working community. Because they are over entertained, they cannot take an interest in what is going on around them, hence the ubiquitous childish boredom whenever they are not involved in some sort of game, and resentment whenever life itself is not made into a game for them. I know kids who are unable to take an interest in anything that isn't a video game. My daughter had time to play, but the only entertainments available to her on a regular basis were books and piano; consequently, she was interested in books and piano. I made sure not to have too much "children's" literature around (that staple of Public Schooling's anti-literacy campaign). She was able to take an interest in what was going on in the family because her consciousness was not deluged by fabricated entertainments (the sugars of the intellectual diet); I largely attribute to this the fact that she was able, at the age of sixteen, to seriously desire to enter the rigors of the monastic calling.

That children are over-socialized is sufficiently demonstrated by the kids you see with cell-phones, who feel they must constantly inform their friends of what they're doing; "Hi, I'm at the Mall; now I'm going to get lunch; now I'm waiting at the crosswalk; now I'm crossing the street.....". Peer Pressure is social addiction, and the consequent inability of over-socialized children to resist any movement of their peers. This kind of socialization is what Public Schooling was invented to produce (It didn't really have anything to do with education). It used to be that socialization took place mainly in family groups; that is, families gathering together for some social function or another. Of course people tended to roughly congregate in age-groups, but the point is, socialization was done in the context of the Family, and consequently people had social contact with people of all different ages. When Public Schooling imposed its grid on the development of children universally, you immediately begin to see a very different kind of socialization emerging; sausage-link socialization, in which each age group socializes primarily with those of the same age, and has little social contact with any other age-group. This is the environment the social engineers of the early 20th century desired to produce, an environment in which the opinions of one's peers are not only an important factor, but almost the only factor. Each link thus segregated from the others provides a tasty meal for propagandists, who are then free to devise social experiments on each age-group independently, without interference from those who have enough life-experience to be somewhat resistant to manipulation. My daughter was raised apart from this model of socialization by intent; it was really my most important reason for homeschooling. This made her kind of an odd duck; she really didn't fit into the groups where the kids were locked together in a social embrace after the public school pattern. I don't really think she missed much. She developed into a young woman who liked very well to be with children her age, but wasn't dependent on it. I think the kids who were involved in that type of socialization were much sillier and much less emotionally mature, and (incidentally) much less truly self-reliant.

Children aren't meant to live in a Never-land world made especially for them, but to fit into the context of adult life, and learn to function in that context. The Family is the most basic unit of social order, and as such it is a living, working community in which each of the inhabitants needs to have a productive place, not a dormitory for detached individuals on the way to their various destinations; consequently, the children need to be managed in such a way that it doesn't make the smooth and efficient accomplishment of daily tasks impossible. Many, if not most, families are entirely dominated by the children, and so any productive purpose is entirely suspended, as the daily activity becomes to keep the children barely within the most minimal bonds of civility. Adult life should not come to an end whenever the children are present, therefore children have to be made to behave in such a way as to make Adult concourse possible in their presence; the old rule "Children should be seen and not heard" was a real necessity back in the day when most everyone had eight children. Can anyone even remotely imagine what a gathering of families would have been like back then under today's conditions? The mind reels!

Children are a mirror, reflecting the whole range of human passions with the utmost clarity. In them we may most plainly see what the human creature is, with selfishness, greed, lust, and cruelty alternating with the innocent expression of love, trust, pity, and what can only be described as a primordial hunger for the Kingdom of Heaven; like clouds covering the face of the sun and passing on, so are the alterations of childish moods. They have not yet learned the arts of subterfuge and self-deception at which adults become so adept.

Children need solidity in their environment, and they will run tests to make sure it is solid. They push the boundaries not because their deepest wish is for there to be no boundaries, but to establish that the boundaries are firm; they know adults say many things they don't really mean. When an adult means something strongly enough to make a child comply with it, this establishes the importance of that thing in the child's mind, or at least how important the adults in his life really think this is, despite what they say; think of the difference in the reaction of parents when their child runs out into the street versus their reaction when the child, for instance, doesn't want to go to church, or say prayers. In the former instance, the parents are likely to be angry, and they will make sure the child does not run out into the street; in the latter, there may be a manifestation of some concern, but it's not as likely to be treated as a big deal. Children, who intensely study adult reactions as clues to the nature of reality, read: "Physical dangers are real, but spiritual dangers are illusory"; Indeed, this is what the parents have communicated, and possibly what they, in their heart of hearts, unreflectively believe.

The forlornness of a child who has his own way in everything can sometimes be observed; everything he has set his will against has proven unsubstantial, and he is left standing in the nothingness of his own will; children engage in intensive battle to establish the supremacy of their will, and are intensely unhappy when it is established. A child doesn't have the capacity to order his own universe, so when outside order evaporates, he is left to the chaos of his own impulses. They are little lawyers who relentlessly examine and press each article of the parental command, compulsive gamblers who will risk all over the possibility that maybe this time he will get away with it. This is why persistence and consistency in discipline is so necessary; if you punish nine times for a particular offense and the tenth time let it go, the memory of the one time he got away with it is enough to push him over the edge. Children also develop internal and symbolical resistances to authority; when I was little and got my hand slapped for something, my mother noticed that for some time afterward I would pick at the place that had been slapped, and fling my arm in the air. When she asked me what I was doing, I said, "I'm taking it off, and throwing it away". I just barely remember the incident, and believe that was my private way of internally rejecting the reprimand; my parent could slap my hand, but I was not going to accept it. Of course, if you just settle for superficial compliance you're treating the symptom, not the disease; in order to effectively parent, you have to be inside the mind and soul of your child.

It is important to start early; expectations are established at a very early age, and have to be painfully refuted once rooted. I know someone who had a child with a very loud cry; this baby was treated differently from their other children. As soon as the child started to cry, it got what it wanted, just to stop the noise; of course, the child developed with the expectation that when he said "jump" everyone else was to say only "how high?". The parents have been battling that one out for the last several years.

Saying "They're only children" is the blanket excuse for any kind of misbehavior; as if you can't be held responsible for the behavior of your children as long as you persistently remind everyone that they are children (as if we thought they were Senior Citizens). Now, it is true that we need to remember that children have small attention spans, and have to be reminded of things, but they should be expected to behave in a civilized manner. Drawing mustaches on the Icon prints on the church bulletin-board is not something that should be excused by their being children; they should know what inappropriate behavior is. If they don't know, they should be taught. Many children don't appear to think it necessary to listen when they are being spoken to, and the magic words "I forgot" make everything O.K. . I can tell you, when a child is held responsible for hearing and remembering what you said, both hearing and memory improve by about 150%.

We should be aiming to produce children who behave well; the highest ambition of many parents appears to be to produce children that only a mother could love, and who regularly press her to the limits. If we were truly concerned about self-esteem, we would discipline our children; a child whose behavior is so bad that it is a penance to be around him is going to feel this disapproval, whether it is articulated or not, and this will influence his self-esteem. A child who learns to discharge tasks swiftly and competently will have better self-esteem; this may seem like a mystical statement to those whose minds dwell in the dense mists of modern psychology, but self-esteem, if it has any substance to it at all, and is not just a kind of gas with which we regularly have to pump up the psyche, depends upon really being esteemed, and those who are esteemed are those who comport themselves in a way that is esteemable.

Children have to be trained to focus before they will be able to regularly and competently carry out any task; a child that is not required to focus his attention on the task-at-hand, won't. It is much easier to let your thoughts tumble around in LaLa Land, if you know that you are not going to be held responsible for the hash that results because you're not paying attention. The only way to focus a child's attention that I know of is to have some kind of awful penalty, and of all penalties, the one which seems to hold the attention most is the afore-mentioned corporal punishment. This, of course, makes sense; we are conditioned to be influenced by pain. Pain is designed by our beneficent Creator to be the teacher-of-last-resort; when we feel pain, it tells us, "this is bad; I'd better stop doing this". It sets up internal resistances and inhibitions which are a great aid in later life in resisting various seductions, and in attaining the degree of self-compulsion which is so necessary in becoming a responsible person; there are, of course, other ways to learn, but none so deeply emblazons itself on the memory, as indicated in the adage, "The burned hand teaches best". The only way other forms of learning can be effective is if some amount of self-discipline has already been acquired. Pain also educates on a deep level; it is relatively easy to get a person to adapt their superficial behaviors, but painfully difficult to educate on a moral level. This, of course, is where it is determined what kind of person the child is to be. If a parent does not carry the battle into this arena, they effectually cede influence in the child's moral development to outside influences, i.e., the World.

Though Parents expend their best efforts, it is still necessary for the child to choose. It takes a great effort of the will to overcome lessons reinforced with painful consequences, though. This makes it a moral thing, for the will is involved on a conscious level in choosing right and wrong, not just overridden by the strength of passions which have never received an effective check. It is necessary for those for whom the wrong lessons have been enforced to choose against their upbringing, and of course a child may choose to reject a good upbringing despite all compulsion; but it should be made easy for children to choose the right, and difficult to choose the wrong. The undisciplined child is hag-ridden by his own will, and will choose his own way even if he dimly perceives he is leaving happiness behind in so doing. Choosing one's own way is the direct road away from God; it is the path Adam and Eve chose in the Garden which led them out of Eden, and it has been leading the Human race through an infinite diversity of sordid hells ever since.

One weapon the Psychobabblers use to great effect against the Modern Parent is the idea that, if they do not utilize great care, they will irreparably damage their children by inflicting them with low self-esteem. Once a child recognizes his parent's concern in this area, he will play this card over and over again to avoid punishment, and can even leverage it into a series of rewards for bad behavior designed to bolster his self-esteem; life is good for a child whose parents read Pop Psych literature. What low self-esteem is, of course, is wounded pride; it used to be called "the sulks". The path to esteem is for one who does not succeed to try harder, and if success still doesn't come, to recognize that you are one of few and poor abilities, but as a child of God your life's fulfillment comes in using your talents, such as they are, in His service, without finding it necessary to determine the exact order of magnitude of your abilities in the galaxy of God's Kingdom. Children used to have to function as members of human communities, and became able to discharge adult responsibilities at a young age; this is true self-esteem, being a valuable component of human society, using your abilities for the love of others, and being loved by them in return.

MARRIAGE

Despite the relentless proclamation of female superiority at present, I believe men and women to be essentially equal, both possessed of foibles characteristic to their gender; the masculine abuse of sexuality tending in the direction of rape, the female toward prostitution. These, however, are the grosser perversions of human sexuality, and there are all sorts of unhealthy attitudes and practices between these two extremes; but human sexuality itself is blessed of God. It is a temporal virtue; we are told in the Fathers that sexuality exists because of God's foreknowledge of Man's fall, that it is a provision for Man in his fallen condition, and even that the close association between the procreative and urinary organs are an indication that sexuality comes of the corruption of mortal life. Nevertheless, it is a provision, and almost a necessity; it is very difficult for most to turn away from the yearning for a sexual relationship even to pursue a higher virtue, for the pleasure associated with it, even in its most corrupted forms, is very intense and poignant. Therefore it must be guarded by discipline from taking over and dominating the life of a human creature. Because of the pleasure associated with it, Modernity elevates sexuality to the very pinnacle of priority, and aggressively promotes a sexuality that is unfettered and insatiable, but it is Pleasure that Modernity worships; it has very little use for fecundity or any other aspect of sexuality. If it did take these things seriously, it would produce inhibitions in its singleminded pursuit of pleasure. The Paganisms of the past did seriously worship sexuality, and so set bounds on it (though they were inconstant observers of these proprieties). True Christianity, though, does not worship sexuality; fecundity is for a purpose higher than itself, and must be directed toward those ends to be truly good. Consequently, it is set in an environment structured to promote these purposes.

Marriage is the form of discipline sanctioned by God for governing the passion of sexuality. In explaining these things to my daughter when she was on the eve of Young Womanhood, I compared marriage to a fireplace, which is the only safe place in the house to build a fire; if you elect to build it in the middle of the living room floor, it will likely spread uncontrollably, reducing the entire house to ruin, and possibly even involving the neighbors in the catastrophe. Marriage is the only way I can truly love my neighbor in the context of sexuality; apart from it, the fires of my lust will spread perpetual grief in my community. In marriage a man and woman moderate each other's characteristics, bringing one another closer to balance.

What is marriage, essentially (apart from the sacramental aspect introduced by Christianity)? It is the recognition by a human community of the relationship between a man and a woman, and a public sanction of this relationship. In this light, it is apparent that what most modern people practice is not marriage, but a kind of conventionalised fornication, because we're not asking anyone's permission for anything; marriage is no longer an expression of obedience, but of self-will. In the past it seems like marriage generally worked; in our time, though, we seem to be in a condition in which marriage generally does not work, even if the couple, for whatever reason, never does actually separate. This was brought to my attention when I was attending an Evangelical church in Denver; I could remember (I'm such an old fogey) a time when married couples seemed like a single entity. Though there were still older couples in the church where that seemed to be the case, most of the married couples in our community seemed more like loosely associated individuals, each with their diverse interests and activities, with a broad demilitarized zone between them of issues that they realized couldn't be approached without conflict. This was even in couples which would generally be characterized as having a "happy" marriage. Every once in a while, the equilibrium a couple had maintained for years would fall apart, almost always resulting in the termination of the relationship. It seems like we should be looking to older marriages for information on how to heal contemporary marriage; why could they survive anything when we can survive nothing?

Perhaps it is really so that marriage has a particular structure which makes it work, like any other aspect of reality, and to conform to that structure produces a working arrangement, and to depart from it results in friction, the overheating of the components, and the resulting breakdown of the arrangement. I think especially of the imagery of the husband as the head of the family; I know lots of women bristle when that is referred to, but why does everyone need to be a head? This can arise only out of the perception that the head is the only important thing, assisted mightily by the fact that we all really want to be in control. It shouldn't be a threat to female dignity to recognize the man as the head of the family, so long as it is clear that she is the heart of the family. The Family has traditionally been viewed as a corporate unity. A body needs a head and a heart, but it does not need two heads or two hearts, neither are they interchangeable; each part must function where and how it was meant to, or the integrity of the system breaks down. A favorite mantra of the Feminists of the last generation was "Biology is not destiny". Excuse me; for a human creature, biology is destiny. To affirm the contrary is simply to say "I do not have to be what I was created to be"; at the extreme edge of this attitude toward life are those who hate their own gender, and either act out sexual roles appropriate to the opposite sex in one way or another, or even, with the aid of modern surgical technology, seek to physically alter their gender.

An image of the Family that has helped me in thinking about the issue is that of a wheel; the Father being the rim of the wheel, built to handle the shock of contact with the world's rough exterior, the Mother being the hub of the wheel, possessed of a different kind of toughness, which absorbs the stresses generated by the operation of the wheel, and children the spokes which bind them together. Obviously the hub must be in the center to function, and in order to function well, it has to be a real piece of work. It is clear to me that a woman is a more complicated piece of equipment than a man; this does not confer superiority either (modern people being always ready to assume that when you are saying that two things are different you are saying one of them is superior), for a thing need be only as complex as it needs to be to perform the function for which it was designed (excessive ornamentation might interfere with the flight of an arrow). Referring to the analogy of the fireplace, in another way the Mother herself is the fire at the center of the home, the source of warmth and comfort. Femininity is a vital energy, badly needed in our homes and communities; I think the social fabric of communities has begun to decay since women's flight (or, in many cases, forced march) to the workplace. There is hollowness in the community since women have abandoned the home; the one who formerly tended the domestic fire is gone, and the convivial glow of communal life has gone out as well.

Another necessary thing for the integrity of the family is that all its components be moving in the same direction; this, it seems to me, is the primary way in which families in past and present differ in their observable operation. When man was the breadwinner and woman the homemaker, their tasks were different, but their goal was the same; they were both working on the same project. Now, the tasks are the same, i.e., to bring in a bit of income by working for someone else, and come home tired in the evening to try and pull together the neglected and disordered strands of domestic life, (now largely consigned to weekends), but their careers pull them in different directions, producing many conflicts of interest, and the children are also all going different directions between school and various activities; even those who intend to be stay-at-home mothers end up going in a hundred different directions a day, just trying to ferry everyone to their various social activities. This is not a Family, but a boarding house for detached individuals who happen to be of the same blood. News Bulletin: the "Soccer Mom" is not a traditional mother, just at the opposite pole of the corporatist social economy from the working mother. The assumption that everyone must be perpetually entertained is destructive of family life, for a family is designed to be a working community. More on this theme in my next post (when and wherever that may be).

Here we arrive again at the question of authority. In order for any group of people to move in the same direction, it is necessary for a single hand to be on the tiller. Also, (a small snippet of reality here) all effective social authority is established by force; sad, but true. You simply can't get people to do as they should consistently unless somewhere there is a strong, forceful figure who says, "If you cross this line, there will be painful consequences.". The reason why we still have Police forces and Armies is that we still know this, in the back of our little democratic, egalitarian, anarchistic minds whenever it comes to a question of an authority we believe really must be preserved (such as the idea that strangers shouldn't be permitted to sack my house). Now, as a Christian I believe that somewhere in the insanely complicated workings of the Universe, there is reason behind everything. I believe the reason Men are made larger and stronger than Women, and Parents larger and stronger than Children, is that this is a conference of physical force to bolster the natural authority dictated by God for the ordering of fallen human society. Obviously, large measures of injustice and pain have sprung out of this arrangement, just as they do from the exercise of all earthly authority; injustice and pain are the fruit we elected to eat as our daily bread when we tasted the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Obviously, the more godly a couple becomes, the less onerous is this authority; the more obedient the wife, the more responsible the husband, the more gentle, and almost invisible become the bonds of authority. I cannot understand why any woman would surrender to me the intimacy of her body if she felt she couldn't trust me not to tyrannize over her.

When I say that a Wife is under authority I do not take it to mean that she is a child, and not an equal partner. A woman has her characteristic insights and influences necessary for the health of the Family; a woman under tyranny is one unable to do her part in the functioning of the God-given entity of the Family. In Modernity, we labor under mistaken ideas of authority (well, we labor under mistaken ideas of almost everything). The only possibilities present to us seem to be Tyranny and Anarchy, but classical philosophy knew both of these to be aberrations of authority, not examples of the good exercise of authority. Before the Modern period, the idea of good monarchical government (examples of perfect goodness being rare to come by in History) was of King ruling in Council; this Council was not a modern Parliament which abrogated kingly authority, but an assembly of wise men who used their talents to bolster and uphold kingly authority by their sage advice. It was understood that a king is probably not the wisest man in the kingdom, and so for a king to habitually disregarded the advice of his council would likely lead his kingdom to ruin. So in the Family; a man disregards his wife at his peril. Many foolish men have been saved from ruin because they heeded the council of their wives; does this mean that the wife should become the authority if the husband is foolish? Any medieval person would tell you what results if a Council rebels against the King because he does not follow their advice; years of social disorder and bloodshed. Obviously, something to be considered in only the most extreme circumstances.

Both Masculinity and Femininity have their specific powers. A good father strengthens the character of his children; a good mother soothes her children, reconciling them to their duty. A bad father alienates his children; a bad mother spoils her children. Here is a long-standing argument. At a church I used to attend, some of the ladies, when disagreements arose on how to handle the children, would accuse me of suffering from "Testosterone Poisoning" (that favorite diagnosis of Feminists). I, in turn, would shoot back, "Motherhood is a Sinful Passion". Well, there we have the conflict in its essence. It is possible for men to let their characteristic reactions run away with them; Motherhood is a passion, and it takes not very much of a push to turn it into a sinful one. Both Men and Women need each other to moderate the characteristics of their gender, and they need to be held together in a stable relationship to give one the chance to act on the other. My maternal grandparents were very different people; my grandmother was a very vociferous woman, who would loudly and often voice her opinions. My grandfather was a taciturn individual, accustomed to uttering about five sentences a day. My grandmother had a lot to say about every issue, but when my grandfather finally said "This is what we're going to do, and that's the end of it" my grandmother would accept this. Women need to actively advocate their viewpoints, and they have; women in the past were not the brow-beaten, downtrodden caricatures presented to us by Feminists, but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision, or there will be no peace. I think if my grandmother were a woman of our generation, she would have made herself and everyone else miserable by ceaselessly clamoring for her own way; because she had the good fortune to be born before the revolution, she was able to live a relatively happy and productive life. There are, of course, also men whose character is stabilised by their wives. There is this difference; I believe Men are somewhat prone to be influenced by Women. After the initial infatuation, I do not believe the same can be said of women generally; an "equal" relationship between the sexes is dominated by the woman, nine times out of ten. There are people I know who illustrate this perfectly; she rules the husband, the kids rule her, and the result is perpetual chaos. All my experience tells me that a Woman must be the moderating, not the controlling influence, or there will be no moderation, and the influence of the masculine gender, just as badly needed as that of the female, will be lost. The energies of femininity are too fierce to be permitted to rage uncontrollably; if the Mother of the family is the fire, the Husband is the fireplace. If properly contained, the whole family may draw close to the warmth of maternal love, nurtured by the feminine sensitivity and care for those she loves; if not, everyone gets burned. Only in the Insect World is the Female made larger and stronger than the Male, and the entomological romance typically ends with the male being devoured by the female; there are a lot of Insect marriages in our time.

I think we should make some effort to remember exactly what are the problems of sexual fulfillment in the course of nature. First of all, the idea that the order of society reflects Patriarchal domination is sheer, raving lunacy; just look what kind of order you get when men are left to themselves. That's right, male oriented society is just a glorified hunting camp. Once this is understood, it becomes obvious that ordered society is a response to the needs of women; for order to exist in society, it is not only necessary for men to make peace among themselves, it is necessary to make peace with the women, a much more arduous task.

What are the needs of the normal man and woman? The needs of the man, it appears to me, are simple; he requires various diversions, male comrades to share it with, and sexual/romantic encounters with women. These can be brief; a few evenings at home, and he can gallop back to the hunt, fully satisfied. The needs of women are more complicated, and harder to satisfy; for one thing, she needs for men to be something beyond their superficial nature. She needs to access and call forth a deeper nature in men that usually will not emerge independently, at least not until later life; she needs for him to be a husband and father. The problem is that it is perfectly possible for most men to meet their needs by a series of unentangling romantic encounters; a man must be seduced into domesticity, if he is not socially trained for it. This is something the women of the past knew that present-day women have forgotten, or have rebelled against; in our utopian mindset, we tend to think that everything ought to happen as we think it should, or that there should be some simple social adjustment that will make everything work. Welcome back to Reality, folks! It really isn't working. I read that in Japan, in particular, large numbers of men do not wish to marry, because Japanese women have abandoned traditional roles; it is hard enough to get your normal young man to give up his independence even when it means having a nice home, a "girl to come home to", and a variety of domestic comforts. When marriage typically means having a wife that you see mainly on weekends, housekeeping chores when your day at work is done and a woman to insist that you do them, plus a house full of noisy, uncontrolled children at all times, then marriage can begin to seem like selling yourself into perpetual slavery on singularly unattractive terms.

When the family presented itself to the world as a united front, the man was seen as the public representation of that unity, and husband and wife were bound together by economic necessity. I'm not quite sure we are better off with these bonds being loosed; bonds, of course, by their nature are confining, but before loosing any bond, it seems one should examine exactly what it is that is being bound together. It may be that we are destroying the raft which keeps human society afloat. So, welcome to life in the 21st century; our families are scattered and divided, fewer are electing to marry, and autoerotic and homoerotic alternatives are endlessly promoted. The government will act as the husband of any woman who is tired of her current relationship; a woman I used to know somewhat intimately now proclaims she doesn't even desire a man. The government provides the needs of she and her children, (though not lavishly) and this way she gets to make all the decisions.

Ochlophobe made a point over at his blog about the kinds of relations we have pretty much following and being dictated by patterns of technological development, but alteration in the patterns of social relations appears to me mainly to have been accomplished deliberately as a way of preparing the ground for further socio/political developments; I guess I don't really believe social change has been dictated by technological development so much as that technology has been used as giant earth-moving equipment to sculpt human society into a previsualized pattern.

Marriage today, along with all other aspects of life, has been severely damaged by utopian thinking; this causes us to believe that if there is a non-ideal aspect to something that we should scrap it and try to invent something better. Chesterton characterized many modern innovations as going out in a rainstorm with an umbrella and a watering pot and watering the garden; in other words, creating an artificial device for meeting a social need which doesn't, in fact, accomplish the purpose nearly as well or as completely as the natural processes we are interrupting in order to interpose our devices. Unfortunately, we sometimes don't recognize the deficiencies in our machinery until we have already disabled the natural systems; having induced universal drought, we find that we just can't keep up with our little watering cans. Men and women today, I believe, are in a condition of almost universal frustration; being told by society that they must modify their sexual behavior in response to certain social theories, they have become awkward and conflicted in their responses. Men are told to curb their chivalrous instincts so as not to appear sexist, and so develop in a way in which they really respect women much less than they formerly did; Women, on the other hand, really seem to, in the depths of their being, want a strong man, but they are trained to strenuously resist anything that looks like male domination. So they go from the strong man to a more "sensitive" type, and have only contempt for him because he is not strong.

So men and women rebound off one another in confusion and pain, going through their serial divorces looking for the one that will meet all their needs, but the thing that men and women most need to discover is that they can't completely meet one another's need; there is this tendency in the West, with our influence of romanticism, to build a shrine to human love as the summit of all earthly beatitude, but only God can completely meet our needs, and we are all sons and daughters of God, no matter what our relations to one another on Earth. I think the person who drifts from relationship to relationship never learns this; he says, "This woman didn't make me happy; maybe that one over there will". Much divorce springs from these romantic ideas; when we find our spouse does not make us perfectly happy, we decide the marriage was a mistake, but marriage is not supposed to be a picnic in a field of flowers, but a mission-field, and yes, it does sometimes resemble a battlefield (perhaps the close affinity between the words Marital and Martial isn't entirely accidental).

These things should really be unspoken; sexuality only functions normally when its operations are unconcious, but in our time, under influence of the presumtuous utopianism which regards all conventions as machines that can be pulled apart and reassembled in superior configurations, they do need to be discussed. The true pattern of sexuality as it has been from the beginning must be archaologically unearthed and carefully preserved against the rampaging hordes of barbarism, for it is the primordial and most basic unit of social order, and if it is ripped from us, then night will indeed fall upon our world.

Human sexuality is like a pool in the middle of a desert, which is unfortunately somewhat polluted. There is a sign on the banks of the pool which warns travellers of the pollution, and suggests it might be best to wait until out of the desert to slake one's thirst; however, if one feels he must drink, for whatever reason, instructions are given as to what parts of the pool have the purest water, and suggestions for filtering procedures to remove most of the contaminants. Through centuries, thousands have drunk with safety from this pool by carefully following these instructions, but many have also set their sights hopefully on the far side of the desert where they know are rivers of the purest waters, and rather than risk ingesting poison trudge hopefully on. In our time, however, tons of festering garbage have been dumped into the pool by the enemy of souls, and I think it is a real question now whether any can drink these waters without damage. Nevertheless, if one lacks the stamina to walk out of the desert, he is still safest in following the instructions governing human sexuality, and entering into the discipline of Christian marriage.