Fox
News’s Tucker Carlson caused quite a stir earlier this year with his comments
on the breakdown of the family in the united States, a problem for which he
believes the Elite are showing too little care:
This
brought forth a stream of reaction from various conservative commentators - National Review, American Family
Association, etc. A few examples:
For
ourselves, we would like to focus on one thing he said near the end: ‘Any economic system that weakens and
destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a
healthy society’.
It
is here that the lower classes Mr Carlson dotes on have been their own worst
enemy. They have cheered on the
technological revolution in the hopes of attaining the much-ballyhooed American
Dream of a higher standard of living. In
so doing, they have created the very economic system ‘that weakens and destroys
families’, ‘that is the enemy of a healthy society’. That economy is the industrial economy.
At
this point, we will let another Carlson, Allan Carlson, have his say on the
industrial economy and the capitalism that undergirds it:
I
turn now to my remarks on the Industrial Revolution. To be sure, this event had
sweeping effects on human life. Whether industrialization was pursued under the
creed of Manchester liberalism, as in 19th Century Britain, or under
the creed of Stalinist Marxism in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, or under the
new hybrid creed of Communistic-Capitalism now found in China, some of
industrialism’s effects have proved to be universal.
The
most important of these, and the one most often forgotten, has been the
wrenching apart of the workplace from the place of residence. Prior to
industrialization, the vast majority of people — well over 90 percent — lived
and worked in the same location, be it a peasant or family farm, a fisherman’s
cottage, a nomad’s tent, or an artisan’s shop. This unity of workplace and home
formed the normal, even natural, human experience. Men and women, joined in
marriage, worked together to make their small enterprises a success, sorting
out tasks according to their strengths and skills; and so finding a natural
complementarity. Children, too, commonly found useful places within these small
home economies.
The
Industrial Revolution — resting on centralized factories and offices — tore
these productive homes apart. The men moved into certain factories; the women
moved into others; and, in the early decades, so did the children as well, most
working 10 to 12 hour days, six days a week. Economic historian Karl Polanyi
calls this change “The Great Transformation.” Francis Fukuyama prefers “the
Great Disruption.” Both phrases capture the huge effects on human relationships
of this event.
Industrialization,
by definition, also has meant the progressive displacement of the home
economy. In pre-industrial societies, most homesteads sought and achieved
some degrees of self-sufficiency. They raised, and preserved their own food –
grains, vegetables, and meat animals. They spun their own cloth and sewed their
basic garments. They built their own shelters and raised their own draft
animals for field work and transportation. At their best, as on the freehold
peasant or family farm, these self-sufficient home economies delivered
an autonomy, or freedom, that analysts of liberty such as Thomas Jefferson
would admire.
Industrial
Production means replacing these products and tasks of a home economy by
industrially made goods and services. As it turned out, there would be no
end to the process. It usually began with factory-spun cloth and world
proceed relentlessly until family households would be stripped of virtually all
productive functions, including in the end infant care and meal preparation (in
our terms think “daycare” and “fast food”).
Again,
these effects are common to all industrial orders, be they of the
classical liberal variety or of one of the socialist models. The
conservative remembers that the gift of industrialization — a great array
of commodities — has been accompanied by these large social costs.
. . .
Fifth, capitalism undermines natural human
bonds and wages a relentless war against tradition. Economist Joseph
Schumpeter viewed capitalism as an evolutionary system, one full of nervous
energy, one that could leave nothing untouched and changed. This was and is the
process of “Creative Destruction,” — his phrase — which “incessantly
revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the
old one, incessantly creating a new one.” [Capitalism,
Socialism & Democracy]
Capitalism
also excels in leveling natural institutions — most notably, the family itself.
Writing in the 1930s, Schumpeter could point to data showing that marriage,
family life, and parenthood meant ever less to men and women. Tumbling martial
birthrates and “the proportion of marriage that produce no children or only one
child” were the clearest signs of this revolution in values. This revolution
derived, he said, from capitalism’s “rationalization of everything in life,”
the embrace by persons in the capitalist era of an “inarticulate system of cost
accounting” that exposed “the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and
especially parenthood entail under modern conditions.” This sharp decline in a
desire for children left already functionless homes with even less value.
But
what is the alternative? Mr A. Carlson
answers with some words from the conservative economist Wilhelm Roepke:
. . .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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