Tag Archives: Alexis de Tocqueville

Why Radicals Always Target the Family

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Political Philosophy, Speeches

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Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving

“As our families fragment, so do the deepest structures of our consciousness. When a certain kind of family breaks down, so do the values which once linked parents and children, and gave continuity and character to our inherited world.

Which is precisely why ideological radicals have focused on the family. Change it, and you change humanity. But let’s turn the argument around: if changing the family would change the world, protecting the family might be the best way of protecting our world.

Which is, I believe, what our religious tradition has been doing until now — because the Bible is above all a book about the family. It begins with one: Adam and Eve, and the command to bring the next generation into being. And from then on the book of Genesis never relaxed its grip on the subject. It endlessly turns to some new variation in the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob, Rachel and Leah: these aren’t miracle workers or agents of salvation. The heroes and heroines of Genesis are simply people living out their lives in the presence of God and the context of their families.

And we can perhaps now see that this forms the foundation of the Bible’s larger moral and social themes. The family is the matrix of individuality. It’s that enclosed space in which we work out, in relation to stable sources of affection, a highly differentiated sense of who we are. It’s hard to imagine a culture which didn’t possess a close family structure arriving at the breathtaking idea that the human individual is cast in the image of God.

De Tocqueville once wrote that ‘as long as family feeling is kept alive, the opponent of oppression is never alone.’ By which he meant that the family is the great protection of the individual against the state. It’s no coincidence that totalitarian regimes have often attacked the family. Against this, it was the Bible that gave rise to the great prophets who dared to criticize kings. The family is the birthplace of liberty.

Not only that, it’s where we care for dependents — the very young and the very old, those to whom we gave birth and who gave birth to us. And it’s a short step from this to the biblical vision of society as an extended family, in which the poor and powerless make a claim on us, by virtue not of abstract principle but of feelings of kinship. It’s this that lies behind the prophetic identification with the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. They’re not merely people with theoretical rights. They’re part of the family.”

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Pulled from part three of Jonathan Sacks’s 1990 Reith Lecture for the BBC.

You can find this and the rest of Sack’s excellent, six-part lecture in his book The Persistence of Faith: Morality and Society in a Secular Age. As with anything from Sacks, however, try to enjoy it in audio form. His voice makes Morgan Freeman sound like Gilbert Gottfriend.

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Tocqueville’s Take on the Nature of Man

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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Alexis de Tocqueville

“There is no need to traverse earth and sky to find a wondrous object full of contrasts of infinite greatness and littleness, of deep gloom and amazing brightness, capable at the same time of arousing piety, wonder, scorn, and terror. I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.

If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much in impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.”

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From Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal Democracy in America.

Some other writers who grazed these same ideas and used some of these same images (life on the verge of two eternal abysses, etc.):

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).”

Vladimir Nabokov, writing the introduction to his memoir Speak, Memory (1951)

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, at the seashore… But this is a characteristic of the most common sort of men, for it is in your power whenever you will to choose to retreat into yourself… and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing other than the proper ordering of the mind.”

Marcus Aurelius, reflecting in book four of his Meditations (167)

“Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry…”

Robert Ingersoll, speaking in the eulogy for his brother (1879)

“When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it… I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?”

Blaise Pascal, writing in a section of his Pensées (1662)

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Tocqueville on Church and State

Alexis de Tocqueville on Church and State

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Alexis de Tocqueville“The short space of threescore years can never content the imagination of man; nor can the imperfect joys of this world satisfy his heart. Man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt of existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation. These different feelings incessantly urge his soul to the contemplation of a future state, and religion directs his musings thither. Religion, then, is simply another form of hope, and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself. Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. If we consider religious institutions merely in a human point of view, they may be said to derive an inexhaustible element of strength from man himself, since they belong to one of the constituent principles of human nature.

I am aware that at certain times religion may strengthen this influence, which originates in itself, by the artificial power of the laws and by the support of those temporal institutions that direct society. Religions intimately united with the governments of the earth have been known to exercise sovereign power founded on terror and faith; but when a religion contracts an alliance of this nature, I do not hesitate to affirm that it commits the same error as a man who should sacrifice his future to his present welfare; and in obtaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks that authority which is rightfully its own. When a religion founds its empire only upon the desire of immortality that lives in every human heart, it may aspire to universal dominion; but when it connects itself with a government, it must adopt maxims which are applicable only to certain nations. Thus, in forming an alliance with a political power, religion augments its authority over a few and forfeits the hope of reigning over all.

As long as a religion rests only upon those sentiments which are the consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of all mankind. But if it be mixed up with the bitter passions of the world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its interests, and not the principle of love, have given to it; or to repel as antagonists men who are still attached to it, however opposed they may be to the powers with which it is allied. The church cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites.”

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Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Chapter 17 of Democracy in America.