Another voice
To be a virgin
Auberon Waugh
At a time when the whole of intelligent Britain is discussing Mr Ferdinand Mount's brilliant new book: The Subver- sive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage (Cape £9.50) it would obviously be churlish to discuss anything else. But before turning to the implications of his important discovery that the monogamous 'nuclear' family, far from be- ing a recent and transitory development in- human relationships, is part of our in- alienable biological programming (which is as near as scientific language can approach to describing something which is naturally semble divinely instituted) perhaps I may be allowed some sour comments on the author's richly deserved success.
A few years ago, it seemed a reasonable thing to discuss the observation of Mr Clive Jenkins that 'the unions are a democratic alternative government for the British peo- ple'. None of us, of course, discussed it with any enthusiasm or approval, but in the context his words seemed to have a relevance, not to say a certain menace. To- day, the suggestion that Messrs Ray Buckton, or Sid Weighell, or Clive Jenkins or Moss Evans or Arthur Scargill or even (in my view the most sinister of the lot) Mr Len Murray could possibly have any say in the running of the government seems more absurd than anything else. It might raise a laugh, but scarcely a shudder. We find it hard to understand how we ever took such a preposterous notion seriously.
Similarly, although I discuss Mr Mount's book and its interesting conclusions this week, I shall almost certainly be discussing something quite different in seven days' time. A weekly magazine is obviously not the place to decide whether Mr Mount just happens to have said the right thing at the right time to create a nine-days frisson or whether he has assembled from various neglected (if secondary) sources a major ex- planation of human society to rank with Darwin, Frazer, Freud and Marx.
In support of the first theory — that a somewhat flimsy surfing board just hap- pens to have caught the crest of a wave — is the consideration that not many people were really much impressed by the sugges- tion that nuclear families were a transitory and baneful product of the industrial revolution. We did not have the benefit of Mr Mount's researches to remind us that Plato was railing against them 2,300 years ago, Diodorius Siculus in the second cen- tury be, the canon lawyer Gratian in the 12th century and the Adamites of Bohemia in the 1420s, Tolstoy, William Gerhardie and Cyril Connolly more recently. We all supposed that the anti-nuclear-family idea was a tiresome fad of the 1960s, borrowed from Max,r and proclaimed by people like R. D. Laing, Germaine Greer and also, ap- parently, a fiend in human shape called Professor Shorter. To knock such people on the head is not, as one might say, a very big deal. Moreover, in accurately describing how the nuclear family has always been a chief obstacle to utopian or statist fantasies, he uses words like 'subversive' and 'revolu- tionary' to describe a role which is neither subversive nor revolutionary but innately conservative. In fact he uses these words in their radical-chic 1960s colouring — when 'subversion' and 'revolution' were generally felt to be good ideas — to create a cheap and inappropriate paradox. The family has always been an obstacle to excessive govern- ment aggrandisement and also to social engineering or utopianism in any form, but that is not the same thing as being subver- sive of reasonable authority.
One could pick further holes in his argu- ment — especially on the subject of divorce — by pointing out that he seems to misunderstand the Christian theology of marriage. He says of the Dark Ages that 'Marriage was so far from being a sacra- ment that there was no obligation to be married in Church'. Christianity has never claimed that it invented marriage, or even that it bestows it as a sacrament. The Church merely offers itself as passive witness to a process which was naturally (or divinely) instituted, and sometimes specifies the conditions under which it is prepared to act as witness. In refusing to 'grant' people a divorce, the Church merely declares it has no such power. In fact, Mr Mount and the Christian Church have long ago reached the same conclusion. When Mr Mount pursues his uxorious ideas to the point of almost saying that since marriage is a man's life, 'to confine him within an unhappy mar- riage is in effect to kill him,' he is indulging in cheap and meaningless rhetoric. Divorce is not only an acknowledgement of failure; in the context of the nuclear family it is also
'You will not be going on a long journey.' an outrage against nature. That it may, in some circumstances, be the lesser of two evils is undisputed. But to argue from the fact that divorce has nearly always existed within the human institution of marriage to the point of accepting it — with 'subver- sive' and 'revolutionary' — as a hooray concept is scarcely different from at- tributing the same virtues to murder or revenge.
These, however, are quibbles. The cen- tral effect of Mr Mount's argument may be to replace some obviously silly ideas — like the crypto-lesbian description of marriage as 'licensed prostitution' — by some less obviously silly ones, but its importance lies elsewhere. In the course of arguing from the fact that the family is hostile to the ex- cessive spread of government, ideological or religious authority to the doubtful pro- position that it is invariably hostile to the exercise of all such authority, Mr Mount makes some discoveries about government, political ideologies and religion which deserve to be written in letters of gold above every hearth in the land.
The first is that they are all, initially, hostile to the family. The Christian religion and Jesus himself, let alone St Paul and the early Fathers, were hostile to the family, not only in the familiar sense (Luke 14:26, Matthew 10:34-37, 1 Cor 7: 7-9, 32-33) of expecting Christians to turn their backs on family and all wordly attachments — this might easily be glossed over as enjoining no more than the celibacy of the clergy — but also in the more important sense that the Sermon on the Mount, with its emphasis on carefree improvidence and trust in the Lord, is directly opposed to the whole basis of marriage as the focus for wordly at- tachments and human endeavour. The same is true of Marxism, Nazism, the com- mune idea and every other utopian or revolutionary movement ever started. The fact that those utopian or revolutionary movements which survive eventually redefine their purpose and re-write their histories to pose as the great champions of the family — as both Christianity and Marxism have done — illustrates better than anything else how the family will always win against such aberrant fantasies. Such airy-fairy concepts as the brotherhood of man, class solidarity, or the good of the community as a whole, wither and die beside the solid fact of family loyalty.
All of which is true enough and, like all truths, needs occasionally to be stated. Its most important implication seems to me that to the extent the Christian Church preaches the superior state of virginity it is preaching against nature — that is to say against a divine institution — and is therefore wrong. Where does that leave Jesus, let alone St Paul and the early Fathers? The Catholic theologian who came closest to tackling this paradox was Cardinal Jean Danielon, who died while visiting a prostitute in Paris a few years ago. Perhaps he should be recognised as the latest in a long line of martyrs to Mr Mount's greater truth.
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