You should immediately be suspicious of a blog called “The Philosopher’s Zone” when it begins a post with a statement like this one:
Most college sophomores can spot the misreading of The Republic, even if Australian writer Joe Gelonesi and his editors cannot. But that is the less troubling part of this blog post — a three-oven-mitt hot take titled, “Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?”
Obviously, the title is provocative on purpose. But the post unintentionally illustrates how warped the world becomes when one views every activity in life through the lens of inequality.
Gelonesi cites philosopher Adam Swift as someone who “has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.” Swift’s implication is that parents are making inequality worse by, for example, reading to and hugging their children.
Fortunately, Swift is willing to accept some of this family-induced inequality in society. He rejects the idea of breaking up families (again, falsely framed as Plato’s prescription for society) or even less intrusive measures such as abolishing storytime. He views such measures as impractically hard-hearted solutions, but he frowns upon other advantages parents would like to confer upon their children, such as private schooling and inheritance.
Swift argues that these purely economic benefits, unlike the others, can be abolished without simultaneously destroying the benefits that family life confers upon society. As he generously puts it, “We should accept that lots of stuff that goes on in healthy families — and that our theory defends — will confer unfair advantage.”
But Swift never questions his underlying premise that this is really “unfair,” or that his kind of “fairness” is a relevant or even helpful concept. What if family prosperity is the entire purpose of the larger social order? What if “fairness” is impossible unless families can enjoy the fruits of their own and their forebears’ labor?
This is the view that most people accept tacitly without a second thought. And that’s why Swift’s entire conversation is so provocative — because it hints at using radical means to solving a problem that most people don’t view as a problem. This is the out-of-touch mindset that gives rise to infamous hot-take columns like this one.
The more standard view is that government, and society itself, exist in order to help families thrive, not the other way around. The family is human ecology. People are born into families, and each individual does his or her part to make the family strong. In turn, communities and societies are the products of families cooperating with one another to promote mutual benefit and protection.
Even today, where it thrives, the family structure probably does more than 90 percent of the heavy lifting for government and society. The institution of the family carries a burden government cannot bear — and this becomes most obvious in places where the family is weakest as an institution. The government would collapse as a simple matter of math if it had to care for everyone’s children as their parents currently do. (It would also fail in this mission even if the resources miraculously appeared.)
Families that are economically prosperous and self-sustaining should not be viewed as the enemy of equality. Rather, they are an essential part of a fair society. As long as they create honest wealth, they pay for society’s governmental and private civic institutions, and they don’t burden the system themselves. Government can only afford to focus on helping the one-sixth or one-fifth of families that are not self-sustaining at any given moment because it doesn’t have to worry about the vast majority.
As for private education, at the very least it reduces the financial burden on the government school system — and that goes not just for tony prep-schools but also every Catholic school and every home-schooling hippie. But there’s also something to be said for the diversity of education that private schooling permits. Even good public schools are pretty weak when it comes to some things — Classical education, for example (so that people don’t misquote Plato), or the Montessori method. A lot of parents are willing to pay so that their children can inherit the cultural riches that the current system fails to value appropriately. Private education can be worth more than dollars and cents.
The real answer to Swift’s problem is that it just isn’t a problem. Family poverty is a problem, family breakdown is a problem. The success that some families enjoy is not the problem.
