by Allan Carlson, Ph.D.

I begin with what some still call the paradox of an age of abundance that is also an age of moral degradation.

Twentieth century industrialism has produced a cornucopia of material goods, rising average incomes, and longer life spans. In this process, capitalist industrial economies based on competition, profit, and rewards for efficiency have proved far superior to socialist industrial economies based on central planning.

The twentieth Christian century has also witnessed an unprecedented level of family dissolution. I understand the natural family to be a man and a woman bound in a socially-approved covenant called marriage, for purposes of the propagation of children, sexual communion, mutual protection, the construction of a small home economy, and the preservation of bonds between the generations. As we close the Second Christian Millenium, this natural family has all but disappeared as a culturally significant presence in most of the Western world. Declining rates of first marriage, soaring divorce, low levels of births within marriages, mounting illegitimacy, rampant abortion and the sexualization of popular culture: these developments have been especially pronounced in the very nations where industrialization has been most complete.

The critical question becomes: Are these two developments related? Put another way: Does the rise of industry cause family disruption? And if so, is it possible to find a way to have both material abundance and family virtue? Can we craft a virtuous economy?

The obvious, yet now mostly forgotten or ignored answer to the first question is "yes": industrialization tends, by its very nature, to undermine the material and psychological bases of the family. To understand why, we need turn to the very essence of modern industry, and what it replaced.

The pre-industrial economy is a household-centered economy, where each family is largely self-sufficient, in food production and preservation, in shelter, and in clothing: that is, in the essentials of material life. This self-sufficiency delivers to the family economic independence, or autonomy. Husbands, wives, children, and other household members specialize to some degree in tasks, a natural division of labor that generates material gain. The natural family household serves as a unit of both production and consumption, one built on altruism and love, where the principle of selfless sharing actually works. Using the corrupted language of the late twentieth century, the family household is in fact a kind of "socialist or communist entity," one that holds egoism or individualism in balance with the needs and claims of the family and the near community, and this household thrives best in the non-industrial environment.

This is why the natural family finds its favored setting on the subsistence farm: using a European term, among the free peasantry; or, in American parlance, among the Jeffersonian yeomanry. In his great autobiographical novel, THE FARM, Louis Bromfield described this life on his great-grandfather's Ohio homestead:

The vegetable garden was of the greatest importance. Out of it came not only all the vegetables for the summer, but for the winter as well, for [Great Grand-mother] Maria would have considered it a disgrace to have bought food of any sort. It had been part of the Colonel's dream that his farm should be a world of its own, independent and complete, and his daughter carried on this tradition. The Farm supported a great household that was always varying in size, and in winter the vegetables came from the fruit-house or from the glass jars neatly ticketed and placed in rows on shelves in the big cellar.

The small shop of the craftsman, also organized around the family household, served and serves as the village or urban counterpart to this rural yeomanry.

In its essense, industrialization means breaking apart these human-scale productive households, and distributing the human parts to factories: both to material factories such as textile mills, industrial canneries, automobile plants, or offices; and to social and educational factories such as mass state schools. In the industrial production of physical goods, wealth grows further by the extra gains that come through this exaggerated division-of-labor. But these material gains do come at the price of family solidarity and independence.

This is why it is fair to say that both modern corporations and states have a vested interest in family disintegration. Viewed in terms of efficiency, the autonomous family unit represents a drag on the gross national product. Family bonds interfere with the efficient allocation of human labor, and household production limits the sway of a money-based economy. What we call "economic growth" rests, in significant part, on the steady transfer of ever-more productive functions from the household, where such work is not monetized and so is uncounted, to industrially-organized entities, whether corporate or state. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, these transferred functions included spinning, weaving, shoemaking, and education. By the early Twentieth Century, they included food production and preservation, transportation, and child protection. In our time, these transfers from family to industry have included food preparation, the rearing of infants and toddlers, and the care of the elderly.

In fact, much of what we measure as economic growth since 1960 has simply been the transfer of remaining household tasks uncounted in monetary terms--such as home cooking, maternal nursing, and family care of the old--to industrialized entities such as Burger King, corporate day care centers, and Medicare-funded nursing homes. Indeed, it is fair to say that by 1996, the productive home economy has been mostly denuded, the victim of industrialization on a massive scale, dedicated to "growth" and "efficiency."

The treatment of women under the regime of industry offers a case study. In the unregulated labor market of industrial capitalism, as in the formal program of industrial socialism, women--particularly young women--are desired as industrial workers: for their nimble fingers and relative obedience; and for their valuable role in expanding the labor pool, and holding wages down. In 19th Century Europe and America, the new factories hired wives, mothers, and daughters to undercut the skilled craftsmen: namely, the husbands and fathers of these same women. It was only the long and difficult organization of labor, focused in those years to a surprising degree on family restoration, that rebuilt boundaries of decency around the household, and limited industrial intrusion into the home. Under the "living wage" or "family wage" systems built by organized labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the factory could claim only one family member per household--normally the father--who would in turn be paid a wage sufficient to support his family in decency. Women could then return home, to bear, rear, protect, and educate offspring. Children, too, would be protected from premature immersion into the industrial environment.

Some industrialists came to see the moral wisdom of this "family wage," and the virtue of preserving some level of family autonomy within the factory system. In the United States, Henry Ford startled observers in 1914 by doubling the wages paid to married workers, arguing that the worker "is not just an individual....He is a householder....The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. The shop must pay them both." The alternative, Ford emphasized, was "the hideous prospect of little children and their mothers being forced out to work." In France, meanwhile, Catholic priests organized the industrialists in their parishes into study circles devoted to Church social teachings. These factory owners went on to craft a vast, voluntary family allowance system, which supplemented the wages paid to heads-of-households with bonuses determined by the number of their children. By the mid-1920's, this voluntary system also provided midwives, visiting nurses, and birth and breastfeeding bonuses to the families involved.

Yet the more common, and more economically logical response by industrialists was a steady campaign to tear the family into its constituent parts. From its founding in the late 19th century, the National Association of Manufacturers consistently battled to destroy the "family wage" regime and to gain access again to the labor pools of married women and children. Secretly, rumor had it, the employers' organization funded in the 1920's the National Women's Party, the radical feminist group that authored the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The National Association of Manufacturers, arm in arm with the feminists, openly battled to end the special legal protections given to women and children. In the 1960's, the same forces cheered together as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was twisted from an effort to achieve racial economic justice into a battering ram that destroyed the "family wage" system in America. The industrialists immediately and gleefully tapped into the vast pool of "married women's labor," driving down the average industrial wage. By 1990, young women had in fact become the most "proletarianized" or wage-earning group in America; more family members worked longer hours, yet overall household income was stagnant; and the marriage and marital birth rates tumbled to new lows.

The rise of state mass education offers another specific case of industrialism's effects on the family. Current research on fertility decline shows that parents reduce their family size from a natural average of seven children per household, only when there is a disruption in economic relations within the family. Demographer John Caldwell argues that it is, in fact, mass state education of the young that drives the shift in preference from a large to a small family, and so encourages the deterioration of the family as an institution.

Indeed, Caldwell's thesis--that the industrialization of education by the state causes family decline--solves a mystery that has long puzzled American historians: how to explain the steady fall in American fertility between 1850 and 1900. Throughout this time, the U.S. was predominantly rural and absorbed masses of young immigrants, situations usually tied to many babies. But data from 1871 to 1900 show a remarkably strong negative relationship between the fertility of women and an index of public school expansion. The fall in the birth rate was tied with particular strength to the average time that existing children attended a state school in a given year: each additional month in a public school term decreased family size in that district by .23 children. We see here how pulling the education of children out of the home setting, and organizing it on an industrial model, quite literally "consumed" children, and weakened families. As Princeton University demographer Norman Ryder has correctly summarized: "[state] education of the junior generation is a subversive influence."

The Kentucky poet and philosopher Wendell Berry draws the same picture for us on a broader canvas. As he writes in his book, WHAT ARE PEOPLE FOR?:

We must be careful to see that the old cultural centers of home and community were made vulnerable to this [modernist] invasion by their failure as economies. If there is no household or community economy, then family members and neighbors are no longer useful to one another. When people are no longer useful to one another, then the centripetal force of family and community fails, and people fall into dependence on exterior economies and organizations....The local schools no longer serve the local economy; they serve the government's economy and the economy's government.

And when the family weakens as a small economy, children become less welcome, the logic for entering a marriage dissolves, and sexual disorder grows.

There have been varied responses to this situation. The great economic heresy of Communism can be viewed as an attempt to apply the altruism or family principle--"from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"--across all society. Our century has shown this to be a huge and tragic error, something that cannot be done. For once we move beyond the household, the clan, the religious community, or the village--where everyone knows the character strengths and weaknesses of each other and where inherited rules impose a tolerable discipline--once we move beyond these small communities, this form of altruism fails.

A second response to the plight of the family in the industrial milieu was the quest for the "Middle Way," the path of Social Democracy that supposedly led between industrial capitalism and industrial communism. The phrase came from the title of a book written by Marquis Childs in 1938, which celebrated the developing model of Sweden. He and other enthusiasts argued that the disruptive effects of industrialism could be balanced by intense state regulation of the factory system and construction of a family-centered welfare state, where the costs of rearing children would be borne by government.

For about three decades, 1940 to 1970, Sweden did seem an attractive model. But the system succumbed thereafter to its own internal contradictions, all linked in a way to the family problem:

1. Government old age pensions transferred from families the ancient tasks of caring for their own in adversity, disrupting the natural security bonds between generations, and discouraging the birth of children in numbers sufficient to maintain the system.

2. State welfare policies by protecting people from the inevitable consequences of immoral choices, created incentives that made easy--or actually encouraged--divorce, cohabitation, and illegitimacy as substitutes for marriage.

3. Government child allowances actually weakened parent-child bonds, as mothers gained an entitlement that undercut the role of the father as earner and distributor of income.

4. And the altruistic vision of a rational welfare state, inspired by the family, necessarily gave way to penalties on altruism and a reliance on irrationality. Specifically, the system survived financially only as citizens restricted their claims, as when families cared for their ailing members at home, rather than sending them to a state-supported nursing center. But the very logic of an entitlement system financially penalized that altruistic choice.

Today, the classic "Middle Way" states of Sweden and Denmark are in fiscal and moral crisis, facing both financial and spiritual bankruptcy. In short, there proved to be no real "Middle Way."

Another response to the family's fate in modern industrial society might be called the "Modernist" path. Using a kind of veiled Marxist logic, this argument held that industrial capitalism created a new family form: usually labelled the bourgeois, or nuclear family. This family form, it is said, has shed loyalties to extended family, clan, or village, and reorganized around its nuclear core. While most productive family functions have been lost, this new bourgeois family has supposedly strengthened the functions of adult personality adjustment, psychological support, and the rearing of small children. We most often associate the mid-Twentieth Century Harvard sociologist, Talcott Parsons, with this view, particularly in his celebration of the reconstituted "companionate family" of the 1950's.

At one time, I too took refuge in this argument, notably in an widely-circulated 1980 article for the American journal, THE PUBLIC INTEREST, where I defended the suburban families found in the U.S. during the 1950's as a sustainable model. I now realize that I was wrong: there has never been nor can there ever be a stable "bourgeois" or "companionate" family form, adaptable to industrial conditions. The American family system found in the 1950's was the temporary result of three converging forces: Federal tax and housing policies that reinforced for a time marriage and large families; the strengthening of an American "family wage" system resting on job segregation by gender; and a surprising, religiously motivated increase in the completed family size of Roman Catholic families in America. But these positive forces all disintegrated in the 1960's, and we can now see that the celebrated "bourgeois family" is merely a brief way station on the slope of family decline.

But there have also been hints, in our century, of a "Third Way" of economic organization that does represent a better path. The common denominator has been recognition and defense of a family-centered economy. These approaches to the problem cut directly to the unchanging nature of the true family, and seek to build barriers that would protect the altruistic home economy from corrosive individualism and consumerism. Put another way, they encourage the "refunctionalization" of families by driving industry back from some of the household ground it has seized.

The best known advocates for a Third Way were the English Catholic essayists G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton argued openly and boldly for the building, where it no longer existed is, of a "peasant society," based on small acreages and small shops. Belloc wrote that "[t]he family is ideally free when it fully controls all the means necessary for the production of such wealth as it should consume for normal living." Toward this rebuilding of a society of family freeholders, he urged the creative use of taxation and state regulation to handicap large joint-stock corporations, and encourage small, family-owned ones.

A more systematic economic theory of the family-centered economy came from the pen of Alexander Vaselevich Chayanov. Before his arrest and execution by the Soviet Communists, this Russian economist had refuted the view, held by liberal and Marxist theorists alike, that peasant or family farms are irrational and inefficient, and should be eliminated. In his 1925 masterpiece, PEASANT FARM ORGANIZATION, Chayanov persuasively showed that small family farms--combining subsistence vegetable and animal production with cottage industries, household production, and variable outside employment--these were in fact a logical, even superior, form of economic organization. Neglect of Chayanov's work has meant, in one economic historian's words, "that [global] agriculture and development [policies] have been running down the wrong track" for seventy years, purposefully subverting a more natural, versatile, and sustainable family-centered agriculture in favor of industrial farming.

Another economist active at the time, Ralph Borsodi, emphasized "family production" as the program "for folk who aim at virtue and happiness, and for whom the good life is represented by home and hearth, by friends and children, by lawns and flowers." He gave special attention to the economic contribution of the mother in the home. Where both Marxist and liberal economic theories dismissed the homemaker as economically useless, or even a parasite, Borsodi emphasized the true economic value of gardening, butter-making, and the keeping of chickens; of cooking, baking, and serving foods; of canning and preserving; of cleaning and washing; of sewing; of bearing and nursing babies; and of protecting and teaching children. Moreover, the fact that the gain from these activities could not be taken from the family through taxes made--in his words--"the maintenance of an adequate balance of family production absolutely essential to the preservation of individual economic independence and freedom."

These models of an economic Third Way, I repeat, shared a focus on family well-being. Family renewal would come only as certain tasks or functions were protected from immersion into industry, or deindustrialized and returned to the household. Under these models, the measure of economic success would not be "growth" of the official, industrial economy, for as we have seen, much of what we call "growth" is actually the obverse side of family institutional decline. Rather, success would be measured through the formation of marriages, the birth of children, and the solidarity of the household group. This would turn economic analysis back toward its authentic roots, in the Greek/Latin word, oeconomia, meaning the "management of the household." So, rather than dwelling on a "Third Way," it might be better to talk of a "Family Way" as the path to the virtous economy.

How does the Magisterium fit into this question? Does the Catholic church endorse a particular economic path?

On the one hand, the clear answer to this latter question is "no." SOLICITUDO REI SOCIALIS (1987) declares that "the church does not propose economic and political systems or programmes, nor does she show preference for one or the other, provided that human dignity is properly respected and promoted, and provided she herself is allowed the room she needs to exercise her ministry in the world." The same document denies that the Church's social doctrine is "a `third way' between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism." And indeed, the Church has no mathematically derived theories regarding trade, price, or indifference curves.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church has created standards by which to judge economic systems. As noted above, these include human dignity and freedom for the Church to do its work. Of equal importance is the measure of family health. In an important 1951 commentary, Pius XII identified "one of the fundamental errors of materialism, whether liberal or Marxist," as its denial of "the life of the family" as the source of "the life, health, energy, and activity of the whole society." In placing the family at the center of analysis, the Church does show us principles by which we might judge economic systems. As explained in QUADRAGESIMO ANNO, the Church "never can reliquish her God-given task of interposing her authority, not indeed in technical matters, for which she has neither the equipment nor the mission, but in all those that have a bearing on moral conduct." Or as restated in SOLICITUDO, God calls the Church "to interpret these realities, determining their conformity with or divergence from the lines of the Gospel teaching on man and his vocation....[I]ts aim is thus to guide Christian behavior."

And, I humbly suggest, to guide economic life toward the Family Way.

Regarding family farms, for example, Pius XII declared: "Today it can be said that the destiny of all mankind is at stake. Will men be successful or not in balancing this influence [of industrialism] in such a way as to preserve for the spiritual, social, and economic life of the rural world its specific character?"

Regarding property and the family, Pius XII emphasized how "private property" secured "for the father of the family that healthy freedom, of which he has need, of being able to fulfill the duties assigned to him by the Creator, with respect to the physical, spiritual, and religious well-being of the family." In a sermon the same year, he added: "Only that stability which is rooted in one's holding makes of the family the vital and most perfect and fecund cell of society, joining up in a brilliant manner in progressive cohesion the present and future generations."

Regarding employers, labor, and the family, Pius XI argued in QUADRAGESIMO ANNO that "Every effort must...be made [to insure] that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately." The encyclical LABOREM EXERCEM reinforced this linkage of work and family formation. Terming the creation of a family "a natural right," John Paul II defined the just wage for an adult as that "which will suffice for establishing and maintaining a family and for providing security for its future." However created, he concluded, the existence of a family wage serves as "a concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socio-economic system."

Regarding the importance of the domestic economy, the current Pontiff declared : "Domestic work is an essential part of the good ordering of society and has an enormous influence on the collectivity; it demands a constant and total dedication, and therefore is a daily exercise in ascetics, which requires patience, self-control, perspicacity, creativity, a spirit of adaptation, [and] courage in the face of the unexpected; [domestic work] also contributes to producing income and riches, well-being and economic value....It has a direct influence on the good development of the family."

And regarding family, state, and economy, John Paul II has stated: "We are all called to promote an environment favorable to the family, and, therefore, to motherhood and fatherhood, an environment where, increasingly, the optimal conditions can be found to bring it about that the family can develop its own riches: fidelity, fecundity, and intimacy enriched by an openness to others." And in CENTESIMUS ANNUS, he has rejected as unjust both unbridled Capitalism and Socialism (indeed, properly labelling the latter as a form of State Capitalism), calling instead for "a society of free work, of enterprise and of participation," inspirited by "a concrete commitment to solidarity and charity, beginning in the family."

These references, of course, do not constitute an economic theory. But they do, I believe, encourage us to reconsider the work of theorists for "The Family Way," and to help build environments friendly to household life where, in the Holy Father's words, "the family can develop its own riches: fidelity, fecundity, and intimacy."

And the Family Way is more than mere theory. There are modern examples of nations that have, by accident, stumbled onto secular policies that have reinvigorated the family, by deindustrializing aspects of production, and restoring these functions to the household. In consequence, we have also found in these places visible signs of family renewal: stronger marriages and more children.

Mexico, for example, broke up vast, industrialized estates in the early 1940's and distributed 25 million acres to the rural people. These changes transformed plantation serfs into free peasants, and restored the family's place as a unit of both production and consumption. Spectacular gains in rural wealth and food production were matched by a growth in handcrafts and other forms of cottage production. With productive property back in family hands, marriages came earlier and children arrived in growing numbers: the family riches of which John Paul II would talk. Regrettably, this experiment in family restoration came to an end about 1970, as U.S. and United Nations "population control" authorities intentionally set out to disrupt the family-based economy of Mexico, in order to slash average family size and turn the nation back to the industrial model.

Yet a second, unintentional, massive experiment in family restoration began later in that decade, and continues yet, in the most unlikely of places: The People's Republic of China. The Chinese peasantry--collectivized on industrial farms by Mao Tse Tung after the 1949 revolution--suffered terribly for a quarter century, as the Marxist Communists sought to eliminate families as "fundamental habitation and production units." But Mao's death in 1976 brought a shift in policy, leading two years later to the introduction of the oddly, but appropriately named "family responsibility system." While the state still technically owned the land, the industrial collectives were broken up, and families gained the use of land according to their size. After meeting a quota, farm produce was theirs to consume or sell. The new system also allowed peasant families to engage in side occupations, such as handcrafts.

Results between 1978 and 1990 were spectacular. Farm output climbed sharply, as did rural family wealth and well being. More importantly, traditional marriage patterns reappeared after decades of suppression, as did a preference for many children. In the more rural parts of China, three-quarters of women now wanted four-or-more children. Indeed, this "family responsibility system" subverted in the countryside the post-Mao leadership's other innovation: namely, the "one child per family" population policy. Simply put, an economy in The Family Way wants and welcomes children.

In both the Mexican and Chinese examples, avowedly secular or athiest governments turned to policies that allowed the natural family economy to recover and thrive. While these economies would not meet the Magisterium's test of freedom for the Church "to exercise its ministry," they would--I suggest--meet the test of encouraging The Family Way.

At a more modest level in the United States, we can also find an economic change--broadly defined--that has strengthened the family: namely, the home education movement. We need remember that home schooling at the elementary and secondary levels represents the deindustrialization of the children involved, their return from schooling crafted on industrial principles to schooling focused on the family. Over one million U.S. children are now schooled at home, including a rapidly rising number of Catholic children. There is also evidence linking home education to higher fertility: an authentic sign of family integrity and health. One study found the average number of children in home-schooling families to be about 3.5, double the average for all American married-couple families.

In short, a Family Way economics is more than abstract theory. There are examples on the ground that show us how we might proceed to build a better, more virtuous order, one closer to the tests of family justice and human dignity fixed by the Catholic Church.

What might this mean for parish priests, current and future? Allow me to close with several examples of what you could do to advance the Family Way.

First, look back to the early 20th century example of France, and organize the business leaders in your parishes to study the principles of Catholic social teaching, regarding the dignity of labor, the just wage, and the sanctity of the family.

Second, focus the "buying power" of your parish on local, family-based suppliers. Encourage parish families as well to use their consumer sovereignty to sustain local businesses.

Third, promote micro-enterprises among your flock. Using indirect structures, some parishes have even created a small pool of capital to start up family businesses.

Fourth, encourage home education. Guide traditional parish schools to serve Catholic home educators as a resource center, as a place for some common classes, and as a site for improving the teaching skills of parents.

Fifth, create parish food cooperatives. This may be easier in small towns and rural regions, but is possible in cities as well. In the "megacities" of the developing world, seventy-five percent of food is still raised in home gardens and small poultry operations found in the cities themselves. Family gardens can be maintained in our cities, as well. The parish can also link "farm families" with "city families" in the direct sale of fresh produce and meats from the countryside, to the benefit of both.

Sixth, some priests may dedicate themselves to specific rural ministries, and the restoration of the distinctive rural life. Under the inspired leadership of Father Luigi Ligutti, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference once did vital work in this area. I believe there is a new hunger among the Catholic laity, particularly young adults, for spiritual and practical guidance here, embodied in several new journals, notably CAELUM ET TERRA.

And seventh, help renew the rule of St. Benedict in our time and place. Borrowing words from M. Francis Mannion, in the journal COMMUNIO, create "particular communities of exemplary Christian existence" which "teach us how to live authentically." Renewal of the traditional monastic model--brotherhoods and sisterhoods--will be part of this. At a more controversial level, our time calls as well for modified application of the monastic rule to small communities of families: a life of shared residence, work, charity, and worship, resting on vows of obedience, poverty, and marriage. Again, I believe there is a great hunger for this now in America, and several Catholic communities of this sort have recently taken form. A largely Protestant, yet highly sacramental community of this kind also grows in Massachusetts.

Failing society-wide renewal, more will surely follow, as families confront the mounting crisis of our age, with lives conducted in faithfulness to the natural order and to the divine commands, holding to the promise of salvation.