3. Diseño de la solución
3.3. Etapa analógica
(Deuteronomy 5:18)
Neither shalt thou commit adultery. (Deuteronomy 5:18) Adultery in the Bible means not only sexual infidelity by a married person but includes also the sexual faithfulness of a betrothed person (Deut. 22:23-24). The death penalty applies in the biblical law (Deut.
22:20-25), because, the basic institution being the family, adultery is treason in a familistic society. Our world is statist, and treason is now unfaithfulness to the state.
Adultery, like all sin, is a double offense, against a man or a wom-an, the marital partner and the families involved, and against God, whose law is transgressed.
Even in societies like our humanistic one, where adultery is some-times seen more as pleasure in variety rather than as sin, adultery has serious consequences. A high percentage of married men today are not certain who fathered the family’s children. This uncertainty has vast social consequences. Adulterous women know that such an un-certainty has commonly an unsettling and even devastating effect on their husbands. It limits their future orientation. Why work to build up an estate, a business, or a farm for a son perhaps fathered by some-one else? What happens then to a father’s headship and authority?
The sexual revolution was an aspect of a present-oriented culture, and it furthered that culture. Renaissance literature shows that the mockery of other men as cuckolds was an evil and commonplace fact, and a devastating one. Suspicion introduced in so basic a rela-tionship as marriage has long-term consequences.
Among other things, true marriage is a religious fact as well as an intensely personal alliance. We now see it as a bond between two people, a man and a woman. The Bible underscores the fact that a new unit is created by marriage.
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. (Gen. 2:24) This new unit is, however, in continuity with the old, for marriage is the basic community, after that the larger family, and, with some, the clan. In Ruth’s statement we see this greater dimension:
16. And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:
17. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16-17)
Ruth, a widow, makes this statement to her mother-in-law. By her marriage, Ruth has changed her faith and her loyalties, and for her there was no retreat.
A community always has a center of power and life. In a familistic society, that center is the man, the husband, and, in association with him as a vice-regent, the wife. It is not an accident that men tend to be authoritarian: they were created to be the human centers of culture.
In the modern world, humanism has shifted the power center from the family and the male to the state. The modern state is the power center, and it is intensely hostile to any other claimant to cen-trality, such as the church, but, most of all, hostile to the family.
Controls on the family have as their purpose the chaining of the main rival to statist power.
One of the consequences of the triumph of statism is, first, limita-tions on women. The Enlightenment and the so-called Age of Rea-son severely limited a woman’s powers over herself and her property. Second, because this restricted women unduly, a conse-quence of this was the rise of feminism. Women gravitate to power, whether as “groupies” ready to become the sexual playthings of me-dia-created male celebrities, or as persons to whom “the real world”
is no longer the family but the political order. Politics becomes fem-inized; a major political emotion becomes pity for every group sin-gled out by politics for attention. The power center of humanistic women becomes the state. For some it is sponsored and state-promoted cultural activities. For such women, the power center is emphatically not their husbands nor families, no matter how great their affections for them.
This is why W. B. Yeats’s words are so telling: in the modern world, “the center does not hold” because it is a false center. The re-sult is an eccentric or center society. Children then too are off-center and accordingly become problems or are derelict.
Where men are power centers as heads of families, wives are also of great importance. John Adams was a man still close to the Puritan
Guarding the Family (Deuteronomy 5:18) 97 world. Howe, the British viscount and general, proved to be alter-nately good and bad. Adams remarked, “a smart wife would have put Howe in possession of Philadelphia a long time ago.”1 To many, Adams’s comment makes no sense, but to Adams, who knew men as power centers whose wives are powerful aides, the meaning was clear. Modern women are turning to the state and its “culture vul-tures” to be near to the new centers of power.
To detach power in society from the family is very dangerous.
Man being a sinner, the abuses of power in families are real. In non-Christian cultures, they are endemic. It must be recognized that, de-spite abuses, the family is not simply a power center. It is a family, an intensely personal group, and the ties are those of blood and love, among other things. Very often, too, the power is a shared power.
The family members of an important man gain in personal impor-tance and privilege. The power exercised is personal and familial, not impersonal and statist.
Every social order is a system of power relations, and the more im-personal the power center, the less im-personal the consideration given to individuals. Statist power is the cold ability to dominate, control, and coerce people and to compel their conduct. In the family, faith and loyalty are strong compelling forces, whereas in the state it is the monopoly of legal power. The family’s authority and power is a moral force when faithfully exercised. The state which is the power center has military and police power in its hands; it seeks, not a mor-al compliance, but a brute force organization of society.
Even sociologist Ray E. Baber summarized the defining fact of the family thus: it is “the basic social institution.”2 Since Baber wrote that in 1944, a statist revolution has triumphed, and the family is a major target of attack.
A Roman work, by Athenacus, written between AD 230 and 250, is revealing as to what happens when the state replaces the family as the power center. Athenacus held, as C. C. Zimmerman summarizes it,
1. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, NY: Avon Books [1977] 1978), 62.
2. Ray E. Baber, “family,” in Henry Pratt Fairchild, ed., Dictionary of Sociology (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1944), 114.
...that people had complete confidence in the power of sex to in-tegrate the family and social system of that time and to insure the continuity of each.
The people were then ready to believe that this had always been true and every public character of the past is made out to be, whenever possible, a homosexual, to have had a mistress, and to have occasionally fathered illegitimate children. It reinforces the idea that women should sustain and feed the love of the hus-bands by out-Venusing Venus. It shows a sex-life panorama as adequate — if not more so — as the most sophisticated writings on sex today.3
This primary emphasis on sexuality serves to erode the family. It gives a priority to anarchistic conduct which undermines the family, and it thereby furthers the state’s claim to be the power center. So-called sexual freedom becomes an asset to the power state by helping to break down the family.
A final note: The inability of many scholars to understand the family as it once was appears in the work of an archeologist, Eber-hard Zangger, in The Flood from Heaven (1992). Dr. Zangger sees the adultery which led to the Trojan War as a “trifling incident”!4 But, from the perspective of the time, Paris’s adultery with Helen was an assault against the king and the realm, a grim fact that called for jus-tice. Twentieth-century man may regard adultery with a queen, or anyone, as a trifling matter, but it was then an open contempt for and an assault on Greek power. This was why so many great Greeks joined in the war. It was far from being a trifling matter: it treated them all as slave people whose women could be taken at will, begin-ning with the queen. It was war.
3. Carle C. Zimmerman, The Family of Tomorrow (New York, NY: Harper &
Brothers, 1949), 150-51.
4. Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven (New York, NY: William Morrow and Co., 1992), 191-92.
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