Why family life is the true key to equality
by Belinda Brown, The Conservative Woman:
[…] In the first part today I argue that the utopian quest for equality which involves abolishing all family privileges has perverse and contrary consequences:
Would a truly equal world abolish all family privileges?
There is a long tradition of seeing the family as the enemy of an ideal world. For Plato the family threatened his polis, for Jesus Christ it competed with devotion to God. For Marx the family threatened the collective. And for us the family is the enemy of equality whose parameters are set by the state.
But what I want to suggest is that the family is potentially the greatest leveller. We are all born to a mother and a father and, to the extent that we actually have these most basic resources, other advantages will follow in their wake.
I want to suggest a rhetorical question. Imagine two societies. One where wealth and education is entirely evenly distributed but the types of family people belong to are completely random. Some have a nuclear family with a loving, supportive mum and dad. Others grow up in a children’s home, others with foster parents and others have only a mum or only a dad. Wealth is equally distributed but there is a full range of family formation and family functioning.
In the second society everybody has the ideal family with supportive parents, but wealth and education are extremely unevenly distributed.
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