Julian Kwasniewski recently spoke with independent scholar and author Dr. Joseph Shaw about the family and its place in the modern world. A member of Oxford University’s philosophy faculty for 18 years, during which time he taught moral philosophy, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the philosophy of religion, Dr. Shaw is a contributing editor of OnePeterFive, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, and President of the International Una Voce Federation. His publications include The Case for Liturgical Restoration: Una Voce Position Papers on the Extraordinary Form (Angelico Press), and two recently released The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity and Sacred and Great: A Brief Introduction to the Traditional Latin Mass (Os Justi Press). Dr. Shaw lives near Oxford with his wife and nine children.
Dr. Shaw, at the beginning of this year, Os Justi Press published your latest book The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity, which I read with considerable enjoyment. I wanted to speak with you today on some further questions arising from your discussion in that book of the family and its place in the modern world. Based on your experience, can you say something about how large, traditional Catholic families, which have become something of a stereotype, differ from the current socially dominant type?
Having a large family tends to push one into a more old-fashioned approach to raising children, and away from either of the two extremes modern families fall into. One of those extremes is what we might call the ‘hippy’ model, in which you let your children do whatever they like. This is manifested in the attitude that parents should allow their children to choose for themselves what religion to have, or even how to spell. The other extreme is the ‘tiger mum’ or ‘helicopter’ model: it’s as if the parents are hovering over their children checking everything they do, and intervening if things don’t go as they want them to, and intervening in minor conflicts the child might have even when they are young adults—at university or in employment.
With a large family you can’t allow every child complete freedom, because there would quickly be conflict between the children. You also can’t try to control everything they do, since that is simply impossible. You find yourself governing a community, setting a framework for young people who have a lot of freedom but need to exercise that freedom in ways that do not impinge negatively on each other. But this is not like the liberal ideal of neutrality, since no family can be value-neutral. From the pictures on the walls to the shared activities, parents have to feed their children’s emotional and spiritual lives.
I believe America takes the lead when it comes to homeschooling. Can you comment on the state of homeschooling in the UK?
There is a significant homeschooling community in the UK, and Catholics are playing their part in this. The legal framework for home education is very favourable, though every now and then attempts are made to change this; so far these have all failed. We have now got to the stage in the UK when home education cooperatives, part-time homeschooling support, and the like, are springing up in places where there are enough traditional Catholic families to create critical mass. Catholics are a much smaller percentage of the general population in the UK than in America, Canada, or Australia, so getting enough of the minority of the minority together to make group efforts viable is more of a challenge.
Traditional Catholics tend to be suspicious of mainstream Catholic schools, whether independent or state-supported. (We have a big network of schools in both categories.) It is tragic that the efforts of our predecessors to establish these schools have resulted in institutions that are very unwilling to oppose the anti-Catholic ideology of the day, or for that matter which failed to avoid the sex-abuse scandals of the recent past, whether the abuse was perpetrated by priests, religious, or lay teachers. Catholic schools seem most concerned to fit in with the wider educational establishment.
One aspect of this educational heritage is boarding schools. Having been to boarding school myself from the age of 7, I can’t say I’d want to inflict that on children of my own. However, I recognise that it represents a business model to serve a widely-scattered set of families, and that some families find home education a real challenge. All I’d say is that if you are going to hand over the upbringing of a child to an institution for more than half of every year, you need to trust that institution implicitly and be on the same page culturally. The children will pick up their culture from the school, so it needs to be your culture too.
Do you think that the rapid rise of gender ideology in the past five years has fundamentally changed the climate of secular society to the point that families ought to proactively avoid situations that could create confusion in their children?
Gender ideology is the current thing. When I started home education, the big issue was sex education, which has not gone away. In ten years it will be something else, though gender ideology may still be lingering. Without the foundation of religious belief or morality, the secular world bounces from one stupidity to the next. You can get people to admit that the fashionable ideas of a 100, 50, or even 20 years ago were without moral or scientific basis, and sometimes wicked, but this reality seems to feed their self-righteousness rather than give them any perspective or humility.
We need to live in this world, and so do our children. We need to be able to cope with public officials, the medical establishment, potential employers, and potential clients. We need to know what to do and what to say to the person who wants us to bake a gay wedding cake or the doctor who insists on our consenting to an abortion, sterilisation, or assisted suicide. Going to live in the countryside unfortunately does not solve these problems, nor does total immersion in good Catholic books written before 1950.
This does not mean that we should meekly hand over our toddlers to be brainwashed. We need to think carefully about how to understand the modern world, how to deal with it, and how to introduce our children to it: as we have to introduce our children to the realities of crime or to the crisis in the Church. The family can be a safe space to learn about these things; it can’t, unfortunately, exist in denial of them. This is why home education is so important: it allows us to curate that environment, not to keep our children ignorant, but to train them.
Do you think it is a good ascetic and spiritually beneficial practice for Catholics to reduce the use of social media or abandon it altogether?
I believe that future generations, if indeed there are any, will think that giving children free access to an unregulated internet through smart phones is akin to giving them free access to a cupboard full of spirits and hard drugs. There is massive denial—a deliberate closing of the mind to negative possibilities—by people of my generation and older about how harmful it can be.
One problem we face is that the internet has become a basic tool of any kind of ‘knowledge’ work, as well as entertainment, and is often the only source of much information. If you want to find out when your local swimming pool is open, you basically have no alternative but to do an internet search, and then you may have to book it online. It has also proved essential to maintaining an international community of traditional Catholics.
Somehow, we have to use this monstrous technology and also keep it muzzled and away from the children. We also have to control our own use of it, since, as we can see all around us, it encourages obsessive behaviour, depression, extremism, and so on. I think this is a problem without any clear-cut solution. As with alcohol, we need to keep constantly in mind the possibilities of excess, the effects even of moderate usage, its effect on our mood, and so on. We must develop not only personal habits but also social conventions to deal with this new reality.
In our day, some people have decided to ignore Church news almost entirely. Do you think that Catholics have a duty to follow current events of the Church or not? Or is it a good thing to ignore the news created by the world Synod and similar events?
I’m afraid that if you don’t follow things, to some extent you are easily fooled. There is no benign class of gatekeepers whom we can trust to tell us what is going on when we really need to know. What we must do is resist the very powerful tendency—present in all forms of media, going back to the pamphlet wars of the 16th century and beyond—to devote disproportionate attention to the inflammatory. The most extreme reaction to an event may be the most entertaining, but it is probably not the correct one, and the outlets that specialise in extreme reactions are not going to give you a balanced view of what is going on. It is useful to see one’s consumption of news about the Church as a duty, not a form of entertainment.
In your book, you speak of the family as not just a natural institution but a “sacrament” as well, which consequently has a unique and ultimate power in the contemporary conflict. You write: “The effect of the sacrament is to make the natural bonds of marriage unbreakable, to sanctify the natural love of spouses, and to reinforce with divine assistance their natural efforts in raising their children.” These sacramental gifts, you go on to say, are not given “to lay associations, to magazines, or even to parishes.” Would you say that this sacrament can give strength to contend with evils today that spouses never had to deal with before?
The challenges to family life today are certainly greater than at any time in past history, outside times of war, plague, and famine. We can break the challenges down and find historical parallels for many of them, but taken together this is something unique. It is the combination of a subtle persecution of the Church with an accelerating breakdown of family and morality in the wider world.
Graces are given in proportion to the challenges we face. “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able: but will make also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear it” (1 Cor 10:13). So perhaps we should rejoice, because God’s grace will be active in us in a special way in this godless generation, if we are open to it. At any rate, this is the age in which God has willed us to live out our vocation and state of life.
These challenges mean that we cannot afford to live as many of our Catholic predecessors did, hoping to make good our accounts with God shortly before death. I hope every sinner has the chance to do this, but as parents we don’t just want to avoid our own damnation at the last moment. We need God’s grace to establish and to defend our families against all kinds of spiritual assault, so our families form environments in which our children grow and develop in a healthy way. We need the liturgy and the sacraments, and we need to live them very seriously.
In traditionalist circles, ‘courtship’ is often championed in a way that seems simplistic to me, as if it is possible to follow a checklist and timeline which will result in a happy marriage. When so many social norms have changed, do you think the practice of ‘courtship’ as historically understood is even possible? Today, some authors recommend the total absence of displays of physical affection in almost all stages of ‘courtship,’ yet older theological manual’s like Prümmer’s Handbook of Moral Theology seem to see situations in which familiarity “such as kissing, embracing, words of affection, and so on” is permissible “between persons contemplating marriage.” What is your view?
I think ‘courtship’ is mainly an American thing. In the UK, children almost always go to university in a different city from their family home and there is little possibility of parents trying to control how their relationships work. This is a problem deserving of a great deal of attention, but, like the debate about modest clothing, we must keep in mind the amount of variation that Catholic societies have tolerated over the centuries.
Everyone seems to agree that a happy marriage is facilitated by a unity of outlook: culture, expectations, so on. This was the basis for arranged marriages in past centuries, where the couple didn’t know each other very well, and sometimes at all. If it had been arranged well, it could work out very happily because the couple would understand each other, because they shared a very dense culture, and also because someone with genuine insight had thought about their characters. A less extreme version of this would be a very formalised courtship where contact is rather limited. This approach is much harder today because even traditional Catholics do not share that kind of dense culture. Our home lives, for example, aren’t all the same.
This means that couples contemplating marriage are well-advised to get to know each other, as well as possible. Not in a sinful way, which is actually negatively correlated with lasting marriages, but with a real meeting of minds and emotions. This brings its own challenges, of course, and this is an area of life in which there is no guaranteed safe path. Romantic love and sexuality are the among the most dangerous and at the same time valuable aspects of human culture, so this is hardly surprising.
Your book devotes several chapters to patriarchy. You want to give patriarchy a deeper grounding in theology and philosophy, given the tendency for “male-headship” sometimes to be explained or practiced simplistically in traditionalist circles. Where do you think this simplistic understanding comes from? How can a restoration of a conception of patriarchy as something which ennobles, protects, and serves women be accomplished?
I think Protestantism has brought into Western culture a very unbalanced view of the masculine and feminine: as I note in the book, this first took the form of misogyny (women are witches), and then in an extraordinary about-face in the early 19th century, misandry (women are angels). Feminism can be seen as a reaction against the second conception, which idealises women while at the same time depriving them of agency: they are too precious to be allowed to think for themselves. Feminists often connect the idea of female oppression with the ideal of female ‘preciousness’ and paternalism. It’s an odd way of being oppressed—not being allowed to do heavy work, being protected from danger all the time, and so on—but the feminists have a point: it was unbalanced and placed unreasonable limits on what women could do.
The danger for Christians, whether traditional Catholics or evangelical Protestants, who want to recover the traditional teaching of the Church, is that they themselves overreact against the standard modern view or try to revive a way of life which only made sense in the specific economic circumstances of a century ago. So, for example, some people think it is an essential part of the ‘traditional Christian family’ that the wife does not engage in paid work. This idea, however, is a product of the Industrial Revolution: up until then, married women would typically make a contribution to the economics of the household. (This is even true of the ideal wife in Proverbs 31.) The ‘traditional family’ is a lot more flexible than might at first appear.
Another problem is understanding the nature of the husband’s authority. Aristotle contrasted the ‘tyrannical’ authority of a slave master with the ‘political’ authority of a husband: an authority that involves consultation and persuasion, and is not for the benefit of the tyrant but for the benefit of the community.
This is another way in which large families serve as a useful case study. Earlier I noted how a large family affects one’s parenting style; it also forces one to think not in terms of one-to-one conflicts and power dynamics, but of the good of the family as a whole. If parents have to decide whether to arrange an expensive and inconvenient specialist musical education for a talented child, for example, with one child it looks very much as if there is a zero-sum conflict between what is good for the child and what is good for the parents. With five children all having different needs, the question stops being about how much the parents should personally sacrifice and whether they should feel guilty if they don’t forgo their little luxuries to make it possible. The question instead becomes one of balancing interests and promoting the common good. The task of the parents is not a series of conflicts with one child, but the government of a small community.
With this in mind, the dynamic between the parents also looks different. It is not about how nice it might be for a husband to have a wife doing his cooking and cleaning. It is about how they can between them govern this complex community for the good of all. The husband may have the ultimate authority, but the wife too exercises authority over the household, and may well do so much more than the husband, making practical decisions, budgeting, dealing with the children and so on, because he is away or simply engaged in other things. The family is a joint project between the married couple, which could not exist without both of them. Loving cooperation between the sexes is something that a lot of modern discourse finds difficult to analyse, and we have to remind ourselves that marriage is about two people consenting to enter a relationship ordered towards children. No one is forced to marry, but people do marry because they want this kind of relationship and its good results: the ‘domestic tranquillity’ suited to the raising of children. In order for the goods of marriage to be possible, one must accept all kinds of limitations, above all a loss of independence, and accepting some kind of chain of command.
I have noticed an anti-intellectual streak in many Latin Mass communities, where there is suspicion of—or disregard for—the intellectual life. Where do you think this comes from and how dangerous is it?
There are two sources of this attitude. One is the way that the Catholic community has been betrayed by its own intellectual leadership. The other is the model offered by anti-intellectual Protestants.
In the latter, we in the English-speaking world must be on our guard all the time against assuming that what that world thinks of as typically Christian really is so, since the world’s conception of Christianity is dominated by the historical experience of Protestantism. ‘Strong’ Christianity, for many people, is represented by evangelical or even fundamentalist Protestantism; ‘weak’ Christianity by liberal Protestantism. You can see this in popular presentations of Christian family life, education, art, and so on. If we want to be strong in our Catholic faith, and how we live it, we need to recover our own tradition and not imitate something alien to it.
The Catholic tradition gives us a beautiful illustration of how a profound faith can be combined with a respect for human reason, and artistic and intellectual excellence. Human reason and human endeavour are not rendered useless and wicked by the Fall; these have their dangers, but they can be used to explore God’s creation and to give Him glory.
This has been obscured by the use of ‘reason’ as a slogan to attack the faith. The conflict between reason and faith makes sense in a Protestant context, since Luther, classically, said they were indeed opposed, but this makes no sense in a Catholic context. If reason appears to conflict with faith, there is an error somewhere, and we must work out where it is. It may be in our understanding of the faith, or it may be in the arguments advanced on behalf of reason.
This implies a lot of hard work, and it is understandable that not everyone is equipped, by nature or by education, to undertake this. What we can’t do, however, is to turn our backs on the whole subject. This would just allow the apostate Catholic intellectual elite to claim victory.
It is good to see, particularly in America, serious efforts being made to re-establish Catholic higher education, after more or less all of the existing institutions lost any sense of Catholic identity. This is a work in progress, inevitably. My own university education was almost completely secular, and while it would have been good to spend more time on the Catholic tradition, this education has equipped me better to deal with secular ideas. You need to be able to understand what your opponents are saying: really understand it, to the extent that you grasp their intellectual motivations, what they say to objections, and where their arguments are going next. The vocation of a Catholic intellectual is a double one: to understand our own tradition in one’s chosen field, and to understand what is going on outside the Church in that field.
I stress this point because I think that the crisis in the Church today is the long-term consequence of the failure of the Church to meet the challenge of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. There was a tendency to treat it as a matter of heresy, something to be identified and condemned, rather than as a new way of doing science and philosophy that needed to be analysed and critiqued. The Enlightenment, like the key ideas of modern liberalism, had great weaknesses, but it also traded on weaknesses in the way the faith was being presented at the time. Both of these things needed to be drawn out, but this didn’t happen adequately.
The 18th century response was possible because the Church then was still enormous: she had her own universities, was a great patron of the arts, had her own career structures, and so on. We are today a tiny and beleaguered minority. We don’t have the luxury of turning inwards. We must deal with the world as we find it, and—to return to a point I made near the beginning—equip our children to do the same.
