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I’m currently reading Fustel De Coulanges’ The Ancient City, which goes into extreme, meticulously-researched detail about just how profoundly family-centric were all of the ancient legal and religious institutions of Rome, Greece, India, and all of the other major Aryan-derived civilizations. It is simply not remotely tenable to claim otherwise, given a cursory survey of the available information. The extended family — the gens in ancient Rome — exercised totalizing control over the lives, property, inheritance, and legal standing of individuals. Said individuals’ level of kinship was meticulously catalogued and determined their legal standing toward each other, their religious obligations, etc.
You can claim that those civilizations only began to count as “Western Civilization™️” once they began to introduce reforms to mitigate/complicate this paradigm; my observation is that boosters of the “Western Civilization” framing are fairly shameless in the way they selectively pick the parts of ancient history that they want current society to recapitulate now, and fully ignore/misrepresent every counter-example or inconvenient element which would cast their narrative into doubt.
But it was the male heads of the gentes who determined the allocation of privileges and roles per gens, and who put together the rituals, customs, and rules which grew Rome from a collection of backwater kin networks into a civilization. They made their determinations not within the family or family network but between the male heads, in the Senate or through another male-determined process. It was males with families deciding things with other males that have families. The gens existed as a consequence of male political life, as a way to neatly ascribe responsibilities and privileges and promote order.
And? They also thought staring at goat entrails would reveal mystical truths about the universe or earn favor from their gods. Old-timey people did all sorts of dumb shit. Patriarchy was just another log on the dumbass fire.
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This is exactly the thing I predicted you would do, though! You acknowledge, apparently, that during the period in which the various Aryan peoples speciated into their various proto-nations (a period which lasted at least a thousand years) they were highly clannish, with each family having pervasive control over the legal and religious life of its members; you just don’t think they counted as “a civilization” (let alone as “Western civilization”) until they began moving away from that paradigm by introducing a political superstructure on top of it. This means that even though the Hellenic peoples spent a much larger period of time without such a superstructure than they did with it, all the before stuff doesn’t factor into your analysis.
You get to pick and choose the precise moment when you think a multi-thousand-year-old societal evolution began to count as a civilization, which means you conveniently discard the preconditions that led to it as long as they don’t satisfy the parameters you want a civilization to look like. In my opinion this reveals the fundamentally constructed and aspirational nature of “Western Civilization” discourse. Do you acknowledge it as such?
If there are human societies which emphasize the family unit, but which have no civilization, then something else is required to cultivate civilization. The Ju/'hoansi have marriage ceremonies and families, but would never develop civilization. The barbarian German tribes practiced more faithfulness in their marriages than the Greeks or Romans, but they didn’t really have civilization. I am using the 19th century of civilization that is appropriate to remarking on Chesterton. A modern anthropologist would probably say all of these are equal civilizations.
Well yeah, this makes sense, because we want to look at where their civilization began. If they had 50,000 years of families and extended families, which is possible, then that stuff doesn’t really matter as a bedrock for civilization. If some men get together and steal women as property and then start forming a city that will one day make art and enjoy philosophy, which is Rome, then that’s civilization. If Cistercian monasteries pop up in the middle of nowhere, all unmarried men, and after years a micro-civilization begins to spring up nearby as an outgrowth of their industry, then that’s civilization founded on the opposite of the family. Or if some of Alexander’s troops get bored and settle down with some women they took, then that’s civilization with a very ad hoc family. I can imagine Spanish troops taking indigenous wives in Mexico and forming a little city with art and music — in what sense can we plausibly say that the foundation of this is the family?
I suppose we first have to determine what we mean by civilization; I’m pretty sure Chesterton has a certain thing in mind.
Western tradition is to only call certain things “civilized”. I guess we can disagree with this, but is that a fruitful inquiry? This may be a matter of taste, but I highly doubt Chesterton would believe that the pygmies of Africa have civilization because they are mostly monogamous.
But your original claim was that “family was never the bedrock of Western Civilization.”. You then brought up Greece and Rome as central examples of “Western civilization.” But both Greece and Rome did have family as the bedrock of their civilization for a very very long time! It still occupied a massively important part of their society long after the point when they had collectively achieved elements of social and technological development that you identify in this post as preconditions for civilization: art, philosophy, and industry.
Were they “civilized” but not “Western civilization” at that point? When, chronologically or otherwise, did they officially become Western?™️ (Surely “Western” in this peculiar usage must not have any consistent relationship with geography, as you believe that the Greeks (and somehow the Hebrews, presumably) are more “Western” than the Celtic and Germanic tribes who were physically situated farther to the geographic west.
I’m open to conceding that there is some combination of societal and technological development at which a polity can be said to be (lowercase c) “civilized”: some identifiable factors might be the ability to coordinate large-scale public works, pooling of resources, economies of scale, the ability of the centralized power structure to reliably feed its constituents, the facilitation of leisure activities, etc.
However, under that understanding, the Third Reich was extremely “civilized”. It was wealthy, highly politically centralized, had a thriving artistic and philosophical life, and was in every way a peer competitor to the other rich European powers. Whatever Chesterton seems to mean by “civilized”, it has only a tenuous connection to those elements.
The tribes of pre-civilized Greece and Rome may very well have practiced family-oriented extended kin networks for hundreds of thousands of years before they ever developed into a civilization. Lots of primitive tribes did that. The road from the dark ages to the archaic period to the classical civilization of Greece is marked by a different activity: male political formation involving the polis. The men leaving the family to go join (or obey) other men in political matters. Is my understanding correct that you want me to call the Greek dark ages “civilization”?
No doubt, but that doesn’t make it the bedrock of the civilization — the necessary precondition, the cornerstone, the thing which once achieved places them on the road to civilization.
But I am disagreeing with Chesterton, though retaining the appropriate turn-of-the-20th century understanding of “civilization”. Here, as an example, is the definition of civilization in Webster’s 1913 dictionary:
This is what I mean by civilization. I don’t see much of a reason to determine the exact moment something constitutes civilization. To paraphrase the highest court in our civilization: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["civilization"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the [hodgepodge kin networks] involved in this case is not that.”
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I was a history major in college, and one of the biggest problems I have with non-professional pop historians (Howard Zinn, Jared Diamond, etc.) as opposed to academic historians who actually have formal training is that the former tend to invent just-so stories and compile evidence to support them, as though the truth of a thesis is determined by the number of footnotes. Meanwhile, there is so much counter-evidence available to anyone who does even a cursory investigation that the entire thesis can be dismissed entirely. One of the problems I always had with history writing is that every time I thought I had to develop a thesis I'd inevitably have to retool it after finding something that didn't fit, which happened about sixteen times per project. Hell, to give you a sneak preview to the next Pittsburgh series installment, I was researching the City Beautiful movement from the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The classic story is that the movement was inspired by the White City at the 1983 World's Fair in Chicago, but supposedly those in the know know that the real inspiration for the movement was the 1901 McMillan Plan to redesign Washington, D.C. Except a good number of buildings supposedly built as part of the movement predate the plan, and eliminating them seems wrong. Then again, there were antecedents and it only makes sense that they would get merged with the new movement, and now I've spent two hours researching a point from an introductory section that will nonetheless inform how I treat the rest of the piece. This is especially difficult because my normal instinct would be to "teach the controversy", which means writing six paragraphs to go in-depth on the history of a city planning movement because I want to use the movement's precepts as a framing device to describe a neighborhood. It's frustrating as hell, and it happens all the time. It would be a lot easier if I just put blinders on, limited myself to one sentence "The City Beautiful movement started with the White City at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago" and forgot about it. But then I might just be repeating a myth, and that's the last thing I want to do, put myself in the same league as Jared Diamond even though the stakes are a lot lower.
That seems like a general problem though that applies to plenty of academics as well, especially once politics gets involved. For an example, I've read more than enough articles by such claiming that hunter-gatherers were often gender egalitarian, citing tribe after tribe where, say, women are involved in hunting, or men are involved in cooking, or men are involved in child-rearing, drowning you in citations that superficially seem like their case is ironclad.
Then you read the opposite position - sometimes another academic historian, sometimes not - and they point out how even in the cited tribes, women actually only "hunt" in the sense of laying traps for small game, men still do just the most physically demanding parts of preparing food and leave the majority to the women, and the men also only teach older children useful skills, while again leaving the younger children to the women. And more importantly, they actually go quantitative and show how cherry-picked these few tribes even are, and that the great majority of those we know is even less gender-egalitarian.
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Following up Guns, Germs, and Steel with a just-so story of the precipitous decline of Easter Island in Collapse which conveniently ignored, y'know, the obvious and terribly destructive germs part, was peak Jared Diamond.
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