Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 439For millennia, kin emotions have shaped even the largest societies. Thereach of parental love can extend over generations via gifts and inheritance.Parental love causes the fundamental paradox of politics: no societycan be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people whowork harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give theirwealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some peoplewill inherit wealth they did not earn. Ever since Plato called attention tothese tradeoffs in The Republic, most political ideologies can be definedby the stance they take on which of these ideals should yield.Another surprising consequence of kin solidarity is that the family is asubversive organization. That conclusion flies in the face of the rightwingview that the church and state have always been steadfast upholdersof the family and of the left-wing view that the family is a bourgeois,patriarchal institution designed to suppress women, weaken class solidarity,and manufacture docile consumers. The journalist FerdinandMount has documented how every political and religious movement inhistory has sought to undermine the family. The reasons are obvious. Notonly is the family a rival coalition competing for a person's loyalties, but itis a rival with an unfair advantage: relatives innately care for one anothermore than comrades do. They bestow nepotistic benefits, forgive thedaily frictions that strain other organizations, and stop at nothing toavenge wrongs against a member. Leninism, Nazism, and other totalitarianideologies always demand a new loyalty "higher" than, and contraryto, family ties. So have religions from early Christianity to the Moonies("We're your family now!"). In Matthew 10:34-37, Jesus says:Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to sendpeace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against hisfather, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in lawagainst her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me:and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.When Jesus said "Suffer the little children to come unto me," he wassaying that they should not go unto their parents.Successful religions and states eventually realize they have to coexistwith families, but they do what they can to contain them, particularly the