The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.
This unified theory of Fatherlessness is more useful than the one that focused on the individual human father alone.
From First Things, which in its current print edition has an interesting piece on demons. The Grey Mouser would approve of such attention to demonology.
15 comments:
Being Fatherless is a symptom. Its not the problem.
The Garbage Generation
By Daniel Amneus
This online book outlines the consequences of the destruction of the two-parent family and the need to stabilize it by strengthening its weakest natural link, the role of the biological father.
https://www.fisheaters.com/garbagegeneration.html
Enjoy
Greg
Being Fatherless is a symptom. Being Childless is a symptom as well.
The Alarming Fertility Decline Among American Catholic Women
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2021/the-alarming-fertility-decline-among-american-catholic-women
Greg
So, what I found to be the interesting insight was that the author goes beyond those individual father explanations -- which I've heard for years and years, and which are plausible enough. It was the inclusion of the patria and of God the Father as also being excluded from life that gives you the full effect.
That book you cite, for example, begins with an explanation of how single-motherhood correlates with criminality in the next generation. Women are not themselves usually criminals, not certainly violent criminals, yet the raise boys who are if they lack a man in the house (and ideally the father). The boy, exposed only to nonviolent women, become violent in the absence of more-violent men.
That's all a little mysterious. If you stick there, you end up having to conclude something like 'women are too weak to raise sons,' or 'men can only be raised by men,' or something like that.
This new approach makes more sense. The father is gone, so his direct moral authority is absent. But so also his physical presence, and with it the enhanced ability to get the boys out to do things that train them. The Boy Scouts were very important to me as a boy, and dad -- who was usually gone to work except on the weekends, and thus could only exert so much direct influence on me -- took me to the meetings once a week. He sometimes went with us on camping trips, and even did a stint as Scoutmaster. Therefore we had all that training in patriotism and service to country, citizenship and honor.
And so too is it easier to get a family to church if there are two parents to corral the kids, get the bathed and in the car on a Sunday morning. Therefore we had Sunday School and the general idea that morality is something centered on the things taught at church. If you wanted to be a good person, that was the kind of person you should try to be.
Remove Dad from the equation and, well, he was only around an hour or so at night and on weekends (when he was usually busy with car repairs or the fire department). But remove Dad and you also remove the Boy Scouts; Sunday School; Christmas pageants; and all the rest of it. Suddenly almost all of the moral training I received as a youth would have been gone.
The expanded concept of Father and patria are valuable additions to understanding. The lack of the individual father in the environment is not shown to be any worse than the genetics alone. If a man has children in two houses, the ones that he lives with have no better outcomes than the ones he does not. If the mother marries another man who is a demonstrably better father, it seems to do no good.
But this expanded cultural concept gets nearer the heart of things. She has mated with a man who will later reveal that fatherhood is of little importance, or he has mated with a woman who is not a possible mate - or both. And both of them live in a culture that accepts such things as normal and possible, so that it will happen ever more frequently. If women have children with poor fathers, and have fewer children overall, it is a simple mathematical necessity that good fathers will have fewer children, and the society as a whole will have less of that quality about, even as a backup or emergency plan. It just won't be available anywhere. (You can frame the pathology as either a woman problem or a man problem, but I think it is shared.) As Bilbo said in another context, it is like too little butter being spread across a slice of bread.
That is a brilliant take.
So it seems that once again we find that modernism and feminism took apart aspects of our cultural heritage that, it turns out, they did not fully understand, and were of rather great importance.
its not just moral training. its channeling violence. Fathers do that well. It's innate. Because liberty demands violence at times.
I have noticed how much you like the concept of Warrior Bishops...
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2021/06/we-could-use-few-warrior-bishops.html
Which reminded me of a post I read of Ann Barnhardt some time ago.
( and no, she is not crazy)
The post was about Jesus and guns and she struct down the current culture of pacifism with in Christianity by the tools of which translation of the bible you used
Here read it.
https://www.barnhardt.biz/the-one-about-jesus-and-guns/
Greg
Ah, thank you very much, Greg! I will certainly read that. That helmet has led me into some interesting places already, and this will take me further, I think. Perhaps it will all come together in another post eventually.
AVI: The lack of the individual father in the environment is not shown to be any worse than the genetics alone.
Interesting. A long time ago I saw some research to the contrary, but I haven't kept up with it. Could you give me links, titles / authors, or whatever would let me find the research you're referring to?
I have access to pretty much any online journal, so that shouldn't be a problem.
If it's cumbersome, you can email me at ecclesiastes_9@yahoo.com.
Thanks!
Greg,
Thomas Doubting posted the Bishop thing, but you'll find plenty here from me on the topic as well. There are almost twenty years of archives now; it's a lot to read through. But these are old topics here.
Nope, not me. douglas, I think.
Oh, you're right, my bad. It seemed like something you'd like, so I didn't pay close attention.
So Hillary was right, but in the wrong way. It takes a village to raise children but as the support structure for the traditional family, not a substitute for one.
Grim
Grim, I know you don't like Vox day from past experience, but he links to an article that would demonstrate what I would call another symptom....
The "Usurping" our natural organic grassroots artwork literature and culture imposing it from top down is a symptom, ( Its not "America" and its rape as well.) Again Its not the root of the problem.
( I never liked the Alcoholic literature of Hemmingway anyway.)
https://voxday.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-destruction-of-literature.html
The Stolen Century by Miles
http://mileswmathis.com/papa.pdf
I don't know; I like Hemmingway. He may have been pushed by agents with money -- apparently the CIA funded a lot of the modern art movement in Europe -- but his stuff is occasionally quite good. I like mostly his shorter works, which bracket his career: his short stories after the war, and The Old Man and the Sea.
There's a valid criticism of the kind of literature he wrote that it is despairing, or nearly so. Yet World War One was almost sufficient reason for despair; and if anyone passed out of that despair into new hope, it was perhaps a miracle (as witnessed by Tolkien, who did so having experienced the war much more directly than Hemmingway). That people should feel called to explore the awfulness of the event, though, is not wrong; it would be akin to Tolkien having left out Mordor, and made a light jaunt of the quest. It would be as if Frodo didn't fall, in the end; or if miracles weren't required there, too, to save him and his quest.
Hemmingway was involved in the affairs in Cuba, so perhaps that's another intelligence connection. He figures there less as an agent of the CIA or British Intelligence than of the Communists, though.
Here's the link to the First Things article.
Also, I'd like to note the author claims that "Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness." That is my current understanding, and so I'm very curious about AVI's claims to the contrary.
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