John Wilder has the next installment in his "How To Break A Society" series: "Part II - Destroy The Family." He points out:
The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.
A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.
But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.
Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.
He goes on to describe the suffragettes and early family planning/birth control protagonists (i.e., eugenicists) and advocates of "free love" who were anti-Church but fascinated with the occult. You see these characters show up again and again in popular literature in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Pick up almost any Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers novel from the 1920s and '30s and you will constantly be stumbling over such women as characters.
Oswald Spengler referred to women of this type as "Ibsen women" after the famous 19th Century playwright Henrik Ibsen. And what are these Ibsen women?
“Instead of children, she has psychic conflicts, and marriage turns into a task in which what matters most is that the partners understand each other.” Men no longer see women as the prospective mother of their children, but as business associates with whom they can resolve their spiritual quandaries. Sexual reproduction transitions from a matter of instinct to a subject of cost-benefit analysis.
Spengler also noted:
The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now [in the aging civilization] emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “lives for herself”—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.
It is no surprise that these anti-female "feminist" movements arose when they did, closely following on the Romanticism movement of the late 18th Century which advocated for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture, but instead just gave us socialism and communism and spiritual death. As Wikipedia notes:
Romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favour of a moral outlook known as individualism. They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form, but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response. With this philosophical foundation, the Romanticists elevated several key themes to which they were deeply committed: a reverence for nature and the supernatural, an idealization of the past as a nobler era, a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious, and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime.
And there you have the end of Western Civilization, when we became ruled by women and children as the prophet Isaiah would have put it. The rejection of reason for "feelings"; replacement of true art with blobs of paint and detritus; rejection of family for individualism; rejection of Christianity for paganism, spiritualism, and environmentalism; the rejection of one's posterity and nation with a lust for the foreign and foreigners which underlays the modern invasion of the West from the third world.
James Blish (under the pseudonym, William Atheling, Jr.) summarized many of Spengler's ideas in his own piece "Probapossible Prelegomena to Ideareal History" including this bit:
Spengler's view of history is organic rather than casual, and so is
his imagery; as previously implied, he compares the four major periods
of each culture with the four seasons. The onset of civilization is the
beginning of autumn. At this point, the culture has lost is
growth-drive, and its lifestyle is codified--most particularly in
architecture, with the building of great cities or cosmoploi which both
express the culture's highest spirit and drain it away from the
countryside. Here, too, law is codified and history is written (all history
is urban history); and the arts enter upon a period of attempted
conformity to older, "standard" models, like the eighteenth century in
Europe, when it became increasingly difficult to tell one composer or
playwright from another. In the West, civilization began to set in about
the time of Napoleon.
Civilization may last for centuries and be extremely eventful;
Imperial Rome is a prime example. At first, too, great creative works
remain possible; I have mentioned Vergil, and in the West we have had
Milton, Goethe, Joyce, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Einstein. (Spengler
would unabashedly add himself to such a list, I think justifiably.) But
autumn ends, and a civilizations becomes a culture gone frozen in its
brains and heart, and its finale is anything but grand. We are now far
into what the Chinese called the period of contending states, and the
collapse of Caesarism.
In such a period, politics becomes an arena of competing generals and
plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low intelligence and
complete moral plasticity, who amuses himself and keeps the masses
distracted from their troubles with bread, circuses and brushfire-wars.
(This is the time of all times when a culture should unite--and the time
when such a thing has become impossible.). Technology flourishes (the
late Romans were first-class engineers) but science disintegrates into a
welter of competing, grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede
each other almost weekly and veer more and more markedly toward the
occult. Among the masses there arises a "second religiousness" in which
nobody actually believes; an attempt is made to buttress this by
syncretism, the wrenching out of context of religious forms from
other cultures, such as the Indian, without the faintest hope of knowing
what they mean. This process, too, leads inevitably toward a revival of
the occult, and here science and religion overlap, to the benefit of
neither. Economic inequity, instability and wretchedness become endemic
on a hitherto unprecedented scale; the highest buildings ever erected by
the Classical culture were the tenements of the Imperial Roman slums,
crammed to bursting point with freed and runaway slaves, bankrupts, and
deposed petty kings and other political refugees. The group name we give
all this, being linearists by nature, is Progress.
Given all this, it is easy to deduce the state of the arts; a period
of confused individual experimentation, in which traditions and even
schools have ceased to exist, having been replaced by ephemeral fads.
Hence the sole aim of all this experimentation is originality--a
complete chimera, since the climate for the Great Idea is (in the West)
fifty years dead; nor will nostalgia, simply an accompanying symptom,
bring it back. This is not just winter now; it is the Fimbulwinter, the
deep freeze which is the death of a culture.
My own Church leaders released a proclamation on The Family in 1995 (probably about 100 years too late) that states, in part:
The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.
... Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.
The opposite of the family is individualism, best summed up by Alistair Crowley as: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Which, of course, is just chaos, violence, and tyranny of the strong and powerful.
