Which comes first: the political
community or the family? This strike me
as a theoretically interesting question.
I am sure that it is a politically interesting one. I suppose that most conservatives would be
offended by the suggestion that the political community is in any way prior to
the family. To suggest as much might
seem to authorize the examples of heavy-handed government intervention into parental
decisions that we have recently seen in Britain. That, after all, is why we sent the British
government packing not quite so recently.
As often happens, first glance is
not the penetrating glance. To argue
that the family is fundamental (either because it is natural or because it is private)
and government merely artificial in fact liberates
government. Political institutions can
represent a leap into freedom from the individual and the biological foundations
of life.
That is a good deal of what
left-wing social science wants to say. I
recently looked at a sociology text on the family. It presented the family as an institution
akin to slavery, with the mother and daughter in bondage. In good Marxist fashion, the state can
liberate the bond servants because it represents a Hegelian antithesis to the primitive
familial institution.
Unfortunately for this position,
it works both ways. If the political
association is altogether new and unencumbered by the familial association,
then the latter is also independent of the political association. For that reason, as long as families continue
to exist, they serve as a core or resistance to progressive government. If familial bonding cannot be wiped out, and
all evidence is that it cannot be wiped out, neither the final state nor even a
genuine republic is possible. The
liberation of the political from the familial makes the problems of nepotism
and tribalism unsolvable.
Here, a theoretical approach may
be helpful. There are two senses in
which one thing can be prior to another.
One is temporal priority. The
baby is temporally prior to the child and the latter to the adolescent. The other is logical priority. The door is logically prior to the doorknob
because the former makes sense without the latter but not vice versa.
In recent biosocial research,
there has been a shift in thinking about the temporal priority of the family
and the polis. The older hypothesis held
for a long time. In Aristotle’s account
(see the Politics Book 1) the first human
association is the union of male and female, i.e., the family. A union of families leads to the clan, of
clans to the village, and the union of families leads to the polis.
Aristotle was not making natural
history here. He is only trying to
understand the polis by breaking it down into its constituent
associations. He does suggest that this
might be the basis for a natural history when he says that men suppose the gods
to be ruled by kings since that is how their more primitive societies were
ruled. At any rate, to make this into an
evolutionary account, one need only suppose that men and women once mated as
solitary animals as do bears. We can
then present this hypothesis as follows:
1. Solitary animals
2. Nuclear families
3. Extended families
4. Bands
5. Communities
This progression plays out over
time. I am using Robin Dunbar’s numbers
here. He has evidence that the steps
from 2 to 5 scale up by threes: 5, 15, 50, 150.
I note that Dunbar, like Aristotle, is analyzing existing social orders
and not presenting a history. It makes
sense, however, that more complex communities emerge out of simpler ones in a
step by step fashion. It just didn’t
happen that way.
The new hypothesis that is
emerging goes like this. Human beings
left the trees (or the trees left them) as solitary foragers. It was every man and women for his and herself. They coalesced into groups because the group
was the only protection they had against predators. Travelling together, they foraged together
and quickly became dependent on one another.
A group can forage much more effectively, especially if they are hunting
and willing to share.
The first step in the evolution
of human cooperation was obligate collaborative foraging, according to Michael
Tomasello. It was collaborative because
we did it all at the same time, even though we were only doing what we would do
if alone. It was obligate because we had
come to depend on the collaboration to get enough to eat.
Tomasello’s second step was the
emergence of group mindedness. We began
to think of our fellow hunter-gatherers as “us” as opposed to “them”. At that point, I would argue, we are already
talking about a political community.
There is a high degree of collaboration and a common interest.
To get further, one must include
the hypothesis of Christopher Boehm. He
brought to light the “egalitarian syndrome”.
All known hunter-gather communities display an egalitarian ethos. Meat is shared. Bullies, who want to push their weight around
and take more than their share of the spoils, are ruthlessly suppressed. Free riders, who want to share in the spoils
without investing effort, are dealt with in the same way.
The egalitarian ethos protects
each individual against any bully in the group.
What needs protecting? The bully
can’t boss you around or go up side of your head without group sanction. He can’t take your stuff. Neither
can he take your mate. This, I
submit, was the origin of the human familial association. The group recognized this mate as your mate and gave you some reason to
believe that these offspring were your
offspring. The investment of the father
in his offspring can now be selected for.
If the father knows his children, so also the brothers know one
another. Familial instincts can be selected
for.
If this is correct, then the human
family is a product of the primitive political community. It is group recognition that makes a
family. It didn’t stop there. If the group could recognize kinship by blood
it could also recognize kinship by marriage.
The group recognizes this woman as my wife and these children as my
children. It can also recognize my wife’s
brother as my brother-in-law.
Affinal kinship extends the
recognized relations beyond the bounds of blood ties. This allows the unions that extend Aristotle’s
clans into villages and then into the polis fully realized. So now we get this history:
1. Solitary animals
2. Simple political
animals
3. Nuclear families
4. The polis
With the simplest political community,
you would have no families. Without
families, you would have no more that the simplest political community. No political philosophy that ignores the dynamic
by prioritizing one over is sustainable.
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