A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
WHAT an explosive word "family " seems to be! Perhaps naturally, since families are apt to be fairly explosive things. But to denigrate the family relationship in public, as some members of the " Brains Trust " did a few Sundays ago, is to touch off gunpowder mines all over the country. Most of the party then assembled thought that children could be brought up quite as well away from their parents, and often a good deal better. They seemed to me to be under-estimating the not un- wholesome ingredient—a kind of mental vitamin—that parental affection and spoiling may be in a child's life ; but many listeners seem to have taken a far graver view than this of the performance. Some have seen in it evidence of the " pagan bias " of the " Brains Trust." An odd view, for pagans in all lands and all ages have usually held the family bond in super- stitious veneration, extending even to remote ancestors. The African pagan today, celebrating his religious rites in his fields, would be astonished and shocked at the references to the family relationship in the Christian Gospels, where it is consistently
played down, presumably to correct the views of the very family- minded Jews. The " Brains Trust," their visiting assistants, and their Question Master may or may not be pagans (though I should doubt if they get time for many pagan rites, or would know how to set about them), but what is quite certain is that the family, that essential, tough, like-it-or-leave-it natural relation- ship, is not " a Christian institution " ; it is something far more primitive and less civilised. We all. accept the family (we had better, as Carlyle remarked about the universe) ; but there seems to be rather an exaggerated fuss about it in some quarters, and to hear it exalted by Christian Fascists such as Petain and Franco as a kind of sacred substitute for the liberty they reject is to feel there must be something wrong with it.
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