The Secret Knowledge

“Good ideas” go bad, and the intellect, rather than be affronted by its failure, will ascribe the reason elsewhere (e.g., the inevitable French “Nous sommes trahis” and the Liberal “The program itself was good—it had insufficient funding”).

But the interactions of the family were not based upon reason, and so, not liable to casuistry. They were based upon the generationally bequeathed experience of previous families; experience so deep and ingrained that it could neither be absorbed nor parsed by reason. (“This is how one treats one’s wife, one’s husband; this is the correct way to express disapproval, the correct way to ask for help, for indulgence, forgiveness, solitude,” et cetera “in our community.” For the family exists to inculcate those laws which will aid the child in the wider world—the world as experienced by its parents and their parents. Do we truly want to give this function to the State?)

Written rules and laws are only and can only be codifications of the unwritten rules which precede them. These unwritten codes of behavior have been worked out over millennia. The child learns them through constant observation, not through indoctrination. The child who has not been exposed or subject to these rules (treat your elders with respect, take care of your possessions, always defend your family members, do not bring bad companions into the house, never speak ill of or to your family, etc.) may come to think them arbitrary (cf. my generation of the sixties), and endeavor to create rules of his own, based upon his reason, which is and can only be (to a child) a conveniently self-excusatory name for his desires: copulate freely, do not marry, do not respect, but mistrust all authority, demand governmental support, base political choices upon feelings rather than experience, do not bother to learn a trade, et cetera.

Curiously, the brightest (or, perhaps, the highest achievers) of our educational system go to the elite universities where intelligent young people are misled into the essential fallacy of Liberalism: that all society and human interaction is susceptible to human reason, and that tradition, patriotism, marriage, and similar institutions are arbitrary, and stand between the individual’s spontaneity and his ability to create a perfect world: that the individual’s reason is supreme, that he is, thus, God.⁸⁰

The child imbibes the lessons of civic virtue, religious devotion, marital behavior, restraint, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency in the home. If the home is destroyed, or its influence negated or derided (as it was both by Welfare, and as it is in today’s Liberal Arts “education”), he is hard-pressed to come, through the force of his own reason, to a practicable ethical view of the world. His need for order, then, can easily be warped into the view that there is something wrong with “the world,” and that this dysfunctional world requires his participation in a grand new scheme to put things right. This scheme may be called Marxism, Socialism, Fascism, Cultural Revolution, or “change.” It is attractive not to the supposed “victims” of the old order, the poor, the “colonialized,” the “oppressed,” but to the deracinated affluent.

“Family Values” is, unfortunately, a vacuous term, implying an affinity of understanding. This affinity actually exists (on the Right), but renders the term dismissible (or, indeed, risible) to the Left. A more universal term might, simply, be: “family.” To learn the rules of a family is the first essential step toward learning the rules of a community.⁸¹

30

NATURALLY EVOLVED INSTITUTIONS

We are hovering over spheres of thought barely accessible either to psychology or to philosophy. Such questions as these plumb the depth of our consciousness. Ritual is seriousness at its highest and holiest. Can it nevertheless be play?

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1950

Children on a playground are perfectly adept at designing a fair game. They collaborate on its design not only though, but so that, they may compete when the design is finished.

It is the sine qua non of the design that the game’s rules be simple, and apply universally, for, without this, there may be triumph, but there will be no sport.

The game is a special case (as per Homo Ludens), it is, in effect, a sacred observance, where peace means not stasis, but fairness.

The rules of all sport evolve toward fairness, and the current hoopla about performance-enhancing drugs is due not to their immorality, but to the disruption of the spectators’ ability to root intelligently if drugs are involved.

The job of the referee, like that of the courts, is to ensure that the rules have been obeyed. If he rules, in a close case, sentimentally, he defrauds not only one of the two teams, but, more importantly, the spectators. The spectators are funding the match. As much as they enthuse over their favorite team, their enthusiasm is limited to that team’s victory as per the mutually understood rules. (Who in Chicago exulted over the triumph of the 1919 Black Sox?)

The product for which the spectators are paying is a fair contest, played out according to mutually understood and agreed-to rules. For though it seems they are paying to see success, they are actually paying for the ability to exercise permitted desire, and so are cheated, even should their team win, if the game is fixed. To fix the game for money is called corruption, to fix the game from sentiment is called Liberalism.

Let us note that the referee, in a close call, may be wrong—but this is also a part of the game. No referee is other than human, and our catcalls are part of the pleasure of the thing. He may also be corrupted, which is a profound betrayal of both the laws and the unwritten precepts of sport; or he may (having, to his mind, miscalled a previous close decision), warp his judgment in a current case, in an attempt to rectify his previous error (Liberalism; see: Affirmative Action). In such a case, however, to whom is he being fair? He is merely abrogating to himself a supralegal ability to act in the name of an abstract concept: justice, and in contravention of the only possible device for its implementation, law.

The good ref, then, would be aware not only of all the rules of the game, but of his own capacity for sentiment. He would consider his pay, in part, a reward not only for his scrupulousness over the rules, but over his own good intentions.⁸²

Both children agree: one gets to cut the cake, the other gets first choice. They have worked out the knotty problem, for they have foreseen that though the statue pictures Justice as blindfolded, her hands are filled, one with a scale and one with a sword, to prevent her from pulling the blindfold down.

And what of the boy–or girlfriend?

This institution, like baseball, is evolved from the unwritten law. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon and relationship, bearing, to the common understanding, more justice, rectitude, and force than the marriage contract.

Marriage contains a built-in mechanism for dissolution. But how do a boyfriend and girlfriend become divorced? They have no recourse to lawyers, or legalisms. They must, simply, tell each other the truth, or suffer the remorse of betrayal and betrayer. Many, I have observed, get married, because they don’t know how, otherwise, to break up.

In the boyfriend–girlfriend, or the institution of the best friend, we see most forcefully the operation of the