The Family
It can be argued that the family stands at the center of
all the current controversies in politics and morality or what some are calling
the Culture Wars. The institution of the family has come under a ferocious
attack from a number of quarters and is being stoutly defended by equally
vigorous individuals and groups. But the interesting thing about all this is
Chesterton’s defense of the family.
Chesterton's entirely original approach to the question of
the family was based on the seemingly paradoxical notion that the great thing
about family life is that it requires us to give up control over our lives,
which is to say give up our freedom. Yes, Chesterton says that too much freedom
(too much control) is boring.
A great part of life should be settled for us without our
permission. This may be a nuisance if we want life to be a system. But it is
essential if we want life to be a drama.
Here Chesterton is attacking the modernist notion that
connects happiness with something called "liberty" and
unhappiness with something called "limitation". But the idea
of perfect freedom and escape from all limitations is a delusion. Liberty,
Chesterton argued, is merely the right to choose between one set of limitations
and another. It is limitations, he wrote, that create "all the poetry
and variety of life".
The family ideal Chesterton was defending cannot be equated
with the industrialized consumer family, where the family members leave the
home each morning by the clock and on a strict schedule to pursue careers,
education, recreation, and so on. Chesterton's ideal was the productive home
with its creative kitchen, its busy workshop, its fruitful garden, and its
central role in entertainment, education, and livelihood. Unlike the industrial
home, life in a productive household is not amenable to scheduling and anything
but predictable.
Gilbert! is emphasizing Chesterton's Distributist ideas because of the urgent
need for us to get our basic idea of the family straightened out. For those who
complain of the family's uncongenial surroundings, Chesterton pointed out that "to
be born on this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings".
[And for further reading in
Chesterton's works, see "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of
the Family" in Heretics, "The Drift from Domesticity" in The
Thing and "The Story of the Family" in The Superstition of
Divorce]. A present
adaptation from Martin Ward's Chesterton page.