Hooray: the family is no more

When Britain’s most senior family judge welcomes the collapse of the ‘nuclear’ family (which is to say the family), you know it’s the end of the world.

It’s beyond belief that a man as manifestly unfit, morally and intellectually, to head the High Court’s Family Division as Sir James Munby got the job.

In his recent speech Sir James made the most subversive attack on the very notion of the family ever launched by a public official, this side of Lenin at any rate.

He began in a way that raised expectations. Finally someone in charge of family law realised the social, demographic, economic and moral catastrophe that had befallen the family. Sir James Munby-Punby certainly got his facts right:

“People live together as couples, married or not, and with partners who may not always be of the other sex. Children live in households where their parents may be married or unmarried.

“They may be brought up by a single parent, by two parents or even by three parents. Their parents may or may not be their natural parents.

“They may be children of parents with very different religious, ethnic or national backgrounds. They may be the children of polygamous marriages.”

He left out babies conceived and gestated in a test tube, but otherwise the dystopically nightmarish picture is complete. We’re witnessing the collapse of society’s cornerstone and therefore of society itself.

After all, it would be tedious to cite the masses of statistical data directly linking the offspring of such families to high levels of crime, joblessness, alcoholism, drug use and just about every type of sociopathy known to man.

Surely Sir James has all such data at his fingertips, and thank God here’s a man in a position to do something about it.

The reality, summed up Sir James, is that many Britons “live in families more or less removed from what, until comparatively recently, would have been recognised as the typical nuclear family.”

And then came a thunderous fist banging on the table, with the listeners made to jump up and hold their breath. This was followed by a rise of 20 decibels in Sir James’s voice and a mighty roar: “THIS HAS GOT TO STOP!!!” Right? Alas, no.

No fist banged down; no roar came. What came was a Munby-Punby squeak: “This, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.”

Since one can’t think of anything more diabolical than the situation Sir James described in such loving detail, the inference has to be that any reality, especially a new one, must be welcomed and applauded.

This is in line with the current thinking on just about every issue of import. One hears such progressivist twaddle everywhere, from Parliament to the Cabinet to a run-of-the-mill dinner party. “Things change,” mouth nincompoops who think they are actually saying something.

The implication is that every change and every new reality resulting therefrom is for the better, and hence none should be decried or resisted. This sort of thing confirms the Darwinist fallacy of man descending from lower organisms.

For such inane thinking wouldn’t be out of place in a conversation between two amoebas. Their presumed descendants couldn’t have evolved all that much, since they can neither acknowledge the facts nor draw proper conclusions.

If all change were for the better, today’s philosophy dons would be an improvement on Aristotle or at least Collingwood, the Beatles on Bach or at least Handel, Damien Hirst on Vermeer or at least Chardin.

More to the point, Tony-Dave-Theresa would be an improvement on Burke, Wellington or Churchill. Even more to the point, a pygmy like Sir James would tower over giants like Lord Chief Justice Holt (d. 1710), King’s Serjeant Davy (d. 1780) or Lord Chief Justice Mansfield (d. 1793).

Those great lawyers made a vital contribution to the abolition of slavery, and all three cited a ruling from a 1569 case, that “England is too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.” Lord Holt also stated unequivocally that “as soon as a negro comes to England he is free; one may be a villein in England, but not a slave”.

I can just hear what Munby-Punby would have said in similar circumstances: “The reality is that many English families own slaves, which, I stress, is not merely the reality; it is, I believe, a reality which we should welcome and applaud.”

Slavery was reprehensible because it struck at the foundations of our society: treating men as livestock makes mockery of the very essence of humanity as established in the founding documents and events of our civilisation.

The disintegration of the family is just as, if not even more, reprehensible. For the family isn’t just a building block of society – it’s also the model on which many traditional institutions were built. Welcoming and applauding its demise is either cosmically stupid or deliberately subversive.

I don’t know which of those possibilities apply to Sir James, some combination of the two most likely. What I do know is that the very fact that he occupies such a position says a lot not just about him but also about every one of us.

8 thoughts on “Hooray: the family is no more”

  1. ‘It’s beyond belief that a man as manifestly unfit, morally and intellectually, to head the High Court’s Family Division as Sir James Munby got the job.’

    Sadly, it’s not so unbelievable. It’s probably why he got the job in the first place. As you are aware, he’s not alone. The entire public and charitable sectors are swarming with commies, cultural Marxists and all sorts of ‘progressives.’ Progressing in a downward spiral to oblivion I’d say! If we want to halt this destruction, there will need to be a very large mucking out of the stables…

    1. Marxists and commies are averse to the idea of letting people do as they like (try any of that free-choice malarkey in St Petersburg or Beijing and see where it gets you). Although they may encourage this in non-communist societies in the hope of sabotaging them from within.

      As for progress meaning things get better and better, well we have contrary evidence before our very eyes. We recovered from our descent into Hogarthian squalor to the point where we defeated France (again) and established the now maligned British empire and Pax Britannica. Another slide in standards among ‘problem families’ was recorded in the mid- 20th century by RD Laing who was usually dismissed as a biased crackpot by the ‘social studies’ brigade and attendant ‘social workers’ who found a rich and seemingly everlasting vein of career opportunities in attempting to treat the problems without addressing the causes. Family courts seem to have expanded to meet the expanding need for the papering over of the cracks.

      Darwinian theory is just a theory that can be amended if necessary if predictions arising from it are shown to be wrong. But it is worth noting that it never referred to constant improvement or changes for good or bad but rather to causes of change. Usurpers such as Teilhard de Chardin warped the theory to explain how we achieved God’s aim by evolving towards the ‘Omega Point’ and that the universe was evolving to perfection. A greater worry is the second law of thermodynamics, which is directly opposed to Chardin’s scheme for a perfect Universe because it embraces the theory of entropy (the tendency towards a disordered state). However, its adherents admit that entropy can be reversed by doing work, a notion I reluctantly submit to when my desk gets untidy.
      As for family law and associated policies, there needs to be a very large mucking out of the stables indeed because appeasement, collusion, or denial will not make problem families go away.

  2. Winny Churchill is reported to have quipped that a case against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. He was wrong.
    The case against democracy is a FIVE SECOND conversation with the average office holder.

  3. I blew my top about this yesterday in a comment on the ‘Cranmer’ blog; so I’m delighted to see a rather bigger gun being fired here!

    But assuming Munby is not insane – a rather questionable assumption – one can only presume he knows enough about the current establishment to be certain he will not instantly be sacked for his outrageous comments. So when I railed about the moral bankruptcy of this one man yesterday, I missed the point. Far more serious is the extent to which that kind of subversion has taken hold right across our nation.

    Unless…he could just be the unknowing sufferer of a brain tumour which is affecting his thinking process. Such things can genuinely happen. Now I wouldn’t wish such a thing on anyone, but it’s our last hope that things are not actually as bad as I’ve just suggested. I think for all our sakes, and especially his, he should speak to a brain consultant immediately. I would be the first to rejoice if a tumour were found, he received the very best treatment, recovered totally, and in due course repudiated every last wicked word of what his unfortunate condition caused him to utter.

    1. I think we can safely discount any serious brain disorder. You’ll find a link under my piece to one I wrote about the same chap five years ago, when he was just as subversively inane. I’m afraid it’s Zeitgeist that speaks through this man. Actually it would be more accurate to say that he expresses the new orthodoxy, while we are trying to subvert it.

      1. Thank you, Alexander. My conjecture about a possible brain disorder was entirely to do with explanation for why anyone might say what he said and not a wish that such a thing were actually the case; so I’m pleased to read your reassurance about that. I think your observation that it is now we who are trying to subvert the new orthodoxy sums up the whole bleak business perfectly.

  4. Maybe he wants to keep him and his fellow legal chums in work by encouraging family breakup and the resulting crime that flows from broken homes.

    Perhaps Mis-Justice Mumbo-Jumbo should take up the psalmists cursing..

    Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
    11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
    12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

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