Attacks on the Family East and West: Evidence for the Erosion of a Common Good

Abstract

In this essay I am concerned to allow families and “thick” communities to be better appreciated as foundational to our human lives and not be perceived as merely derivative. To set about accomplishing this, what I offer is less an argument to this effect than a highlighting of historical and philosophical impediments to seeing matters in this way. I construe these impediments to be deep, influential and not often well-comprehended biases. They grow primarily out of a commitment to individualism that is poorly thought through. I enumerate and comment on a number of these individualist undercurrents, from Newton’s atomism to recent secular existentialism. Later, I suggest that Enlightenment notions of universality and autonomy not only contribute to these “anti-family” biases, but also paradoxically engender a vacuous sort of “commonality” that plays into equally empty notions of the common good. In the interim, however, I draw from both Sellars and Hegel to forward a richer notion of the “individual” that enables us better to appreciate the spiritual life and the central role that families and thick communities play in its constitution and in the constitution of all human life. I conclude with some brief reflections on the importance of empathy and of spiritual families in our contemporary world.