There is a growing trend among those on the political left to attack the intact traditional two-adult nuclear family structure. It’s under attack from the feminists who claim that supporting the traditional family is sexist and goes against “women empowerment.” It’s under attack from leaders in the black community, who tell us that what we refer to as a traditional family structure is really a “white household dynamic,” which means supporting it is, in their minds, racist. Progressives tell us that there are many other types of household structures and dynamics, and in today’s 21st-century modern age, we need to look as all types of household structures as “equally valid as each other,” and that we can’t look at the traditional family structure as superior to other forms of households, because that is just wrong thinking. But the strongest attacks on the traditional family dynamic come from those on the political left who claim that it is fascist to support the traditional family, and that we are “evolving past” the need for this type of household structure.
But I strongly disagree with these assessments on the role of the traditional family structure, and its role, and benefit, to society. In this article, I’m going to discuss the argument in support of the traditional family from nature. So, let’s begin.
The Argument
Where did the idea behind marriage and the traditional family structure come from? Our modern concept of a traditional marriage, being a legal contract between a man and woman, and the foundational cornerstone behind the traditional family structure, can trace itself back to common law. In other words, it was a common social structure that everyone just “understood to be so,” and was part of human society long before it became a legal thing. In fact, it was part of the human social structure long before we started writing down history many millennia ago, long, long before fascism ever showed up on the scene as a political ideology and type of government. How far back can we trace it?
To answer this question, let’s make an observation and discuss it. If you look around the natural world, you will see the family structure all over the animal kingdom, and in birds like ducks and geese.
Consider geese. The female lays the eggs and sits on them to keep them warm, nurturing the young, who haven’t hatched yet. The male stands guard to protect the female and the young from possible harm. The male and female have seemingly different roles in that family unit, and those different roles maximize the probability that the young are hatched and make it to maturity, where they can find a mate and then have offspring of their own.
Consider this fact that the male and female goose have different roles in their family unit. No one told them that they’re being “patriarchal” or “fascist,” or that they’re “practicing an archaic and backward way of doing things.” No one told them that “The fact that the male and female have different roles in your family unit is proof of how sexist you are, and how unequal you treat the female vs. the male!” The different roles in the “goose family” don’t give one of the members superiority over the other; both roles are needed to maximize the survival of the offspring so they can make it to maturity and have offspring themselves. The idea here is that the male and female have different “wiring” that are both needed to maximize the best possible environment for the offspring – the differences don’t make them unequal; the differences are meant to be complementary and synergistic. And the reason so many species have the family dynamic going on, without being told to, suggests that it’s written in their biology, and in their genes.
If, for example, one of the parents died, it would reduce the younglings’ chance of survival and making it to adulthood. If the father died, the young might be nurtured, but not protected. If the mother died, the young might be protected, but not nurtured. The young need both roles together to maximize their survival. In the case of the geese, it means that the younglings are left disadvantaged if one of their parents dies. The same goes for the young of any other species which utilize this family structure. And the same goes for the young of our species – they need the roles of father and mother, in a traditional family environment, to maximize their ability to thrive and flourish in their lives. I will talk more about this later.
If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you would understand that the family structure you see among geese, and other species for that matter, including our own, that is so recurrent across the realms of nature, evolved into that format, because that format maximizes the survival of that species, and maximizes the probability of the young of that species making it to maturity, where they can have offspring themselves.
Let’s say that some gene mutation changed the behavior of some geese so that this “traditional family structure” was no longer intact, but some other group dynamic occurred. What do you think would happen to those geese that exhibited that gene mutation? It would reduce, possibly even eliminate, those member’s abilities to survive in the long run. That gene mutation wouldn’t last long because it would make those geese “less fit to survive,” and less able to make it to maturity, where they reproduced, causing that gene mutation to end up being eradicated.
If “family” is biologically hardwired into their genes, the gene mutation that would lead to some members not having a family format would eventually be eradicated because it would have changed the protective environment that maximizes survival and longevity, thus reducing it. Perhaps other structural formats and group dynamics were exhibited through some mutations, and attempted to evolve throughout the ages, but those formats would not have survived – nature would have knocked them out.
Origins of the Family Structure in Humans
So, let’s go back to the earlier question: where did the traditional family structure come from in our own species, the human race? It could be easily argued that humans, like other species, evolved into that dynamic because it maximizes the probability of humans thriving and surviving. Our ancient ancestors, according to this line of reasoning, evolved into utilizing that family dynamic, with a male and female coming together to form the core foundation of that dynamic, and that dynamic was passed down, generation after generation.
As human society evolved, the core of that dynamic, the coupling of a man and woman to form a new family unit, was called marriage, and that marriage coupling became part of common law. And that common law was passed down, generation after generation until the time we further evolved into a species that developed a modern legal system and turned that common law of marriage into a legal contract. Now, we’re at a point in our history that we’re so full of ourselves that we’re messing around with this legal contract, and the family structure it represents, and thus changing its dynamics, and deceiving ourselves into thinking that we’ve “evolved past the need” for a traditional family structure.
If nature has proved through countless ages that this traditional family structure is the best way for many species to thrive and flourish, including our own species, homo sapiens, what does it mean that we’re now standing against what nature has taught us for ages is the best way, and trying to do things differently? Are we so naive to think that we’ve “evolved” past the need for us humans to have traditional nuclear families? Are we too blind and too arrogant to see the benefits this type of structure has on our communities and society-at-large?
Have you ever met someone who’s so arrogant, so full of themselves, so cocky, that they do something stupid because they “think they know better?” Once they get through the pain and suffering that their own stupidity and arrogance causes themselves, and they’re humbled, and their eyes are finally opened, they realize they should have done whatever it is that they did the way it’s always been done, rather than doing things differently. Is this the route that the Western world is going to go through? If we do, we’re going to cause our society to break down in ways that seem unfathomable to us now. We’re going to cause a level of self-destruction and collapse to our society, our civilization, our species, and on a scale unprecedented in the annals of human history – all because we’re being “too smart for our own britches.” If we are to assume that the evolutionary process is what brought us to where we are, do we really think we’ve “evolved” past the need for a family structure? Who are we really kidding?
Going against the traditional family structure is going against nature, and the best possible environment for our offspring to thrive and flourish – in many species in the animal kingdom and within humanity. Calling this structure “fascist” and “patriarchal” will in the end just hurt us as a human race.
