The traditional family, the traditional male-female union, and definitely such a union as a spiritual or religious sacrament (and thus historically a fundamental Occidental institution) has been undermined over a rather long period of time, by different forces (or ideologies) and for a range of purposes. It is tempting, but reductionist, to try to assert a 'conspiracy' and so to answer the question of "who" is problematic. But the purpose is a bit easier to discover.Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:46 pmWhy do you say "the family" is "under attack"? And if it is under attack what is the "purpose" of the attack? Who is "attacking" it?Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 6:02 pm So instead of knee-jerk I think we'd have to coin a term related to mind-jerk. Certain images invoke or stimulate reactions. Certain ideas invoke or stimulate reactions. This implies psychological content that has been stimulated. But let's examine some facts: it is literally true that *the family* as it had been understood for generations and centuries is certainly under attack. How this has come about can be examined and described. It did not pop out of nowhere. Are you aware of how this came about? Are you aware that it has a purpose?
My own studies led me to Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality:
Following this logic, if there is an authoritarian personality, and authoritarianism is defined as pathological, that authority is located in the father-figure. The authority that must be challenged therefore is the father and this opened up to a wide critical posture of the family-structure and paternalism. The foundations of European culture (and certainly of most cultures) is maintained through cultural institutions and the family structure is certainly the central one.The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after World War II.
The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)." The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.
Though criticized at the time for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."
So the argument goes that to produce changes in society (revolutionary, socialistic, etc.) the foundational structures have to be modified. And the way toward modification involves critique. Critique is thus a term with a special meaning related to dialectical processes. To understand this outlined process better one need examine Antonio Gramsci:
Gramsci’s prescription for dismantling the alleged cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie was through dismantling and subordinating the so-called dominant culture. This would come through promotion of alternate cultures to a new hegemony. This would allow the proletariat class revolt to move forward unhindered and bring a communist society. To be successful, this would require attacks on the cultural icons of society and a sustained demeaning of that culture. It would require a change in language and accepted “common sense.” For example, the term “picking yourself up by your bootstraps” would be alleged to be part of the cultural hegemony to keep the proletariat complacent within the hegemonic system. Following the Marxist admonition “the present must control the past,” historical icons must be removed and replaced. This happened in Russia, with the renaming of the iconic city St. Petersburg (temporarily Petrograd during WWI) as “Leningrad” and, in a sense, the elimination of the Tsarist system — and the extended royal family — among many examples.
Like Marx, Gramsci wrote that Christianity was a primary enemy of the communist revolution and the major pillar of the alleged cultural hegemony. The claims of absolute truth and submission to societal authority were a part. In particular, Christian admonitions of the importance of the nuclear family and the role of the father in the family were primary obstacles to the proletariat uprising. Like Marx, Gramsci advocated attacking and demeaning Christianity, the nuclear family and fatherhood (“patriarchy”). Gramsci advocated infiltration of cultural Marxists in the media, entertainment, courts and politics. He referred to this as going through “the robes” of society to dismantle the hegemonic culture.