We have finally to examine a fundamental superstition relating to the seat of domestic authority. In so far as the feudal principle, or the theocratic principle, or the autocratic principle, or the plutocratic principle, survives here and there, owing to the conservatism of the home, the father does manage to retain some semblance of authority. But patriarchy is on its last legs. There is little to it now but outward form and old court ritual. The father still gives his name to the family, sits at the head of the table, and—oh, yes, pays the bills! But there is more service than authority in the second and third of these prerogatives, since someone has to carve, and it is the making rather than the paying of bills that really counts. Of course, he can still tyrannize over the family by making himself so disagreeable that he has to be bought off; but in a family anybody can do that. It is not a power that attaches to the male parent as such. As father, he is still the titular monarch, and that is about all. If he were formally to abdicate, it would not alter the actual balance of domestic forces in the least.
Meanwhile, it is to be feared that he to some extent exploits the pathos of his fallen greatness, and wrings from the feelings of his wife, children, or sister-in-law various minor concessions affecting his comfort. Nothing can exceed the scrupulousness with which appearances are preserved in public. He still takes the curb when the family uses the sidewalk, and is the last to enter and the first to leave a public or private conveyance. But to one who knows life as it is, the irony and bathos of the modern age are summed up in two spectacles: Kaiser Wilhelm chopping wood at Amerongen, and the paterfamilias washing dishes in the pantry.
If the father has fallen from authority, who has superseded him? The mother? Not at all. The popular impression to that effect has no basis except the fact that the power of the mother has increased relatively to that of the father. But this is due to the fall of the father rather than to any notable rise of the mother. No, the new domestic polity is neither the patriarchy nor the matriarchy, but the pediarchy.
That the children should encroach upon, and eventually seize, the authority of the parents is not so strange as might at first appear. After all, it is only the domestic manifestation of the most characteristic social and political movement of modern times, the rise, namely, of the proletarian masses. Within the family the children constitute the majority, the unpropertied, the unskilled, and the unprivileged. They are intensely class-conscious, and have come to a clearer and clearer recognition of the conflict of interest that divides them from the owners and managers. Their methods have been similar to those employed in the industrial revolution—the strike, passive resistance, malingering, restriction of output, and, occasionally, direct action.
Within the family, as in the modern democracy, the control is by public opinion. It is government of the children, by the children, and for the children. But this juvenile sovereignty is exercised indirectly rather than directly. The officeholders are adults, whose power is proportional to their juvenile support. The real (though largely unseen and unacknowledged) principle of domestic politics is the struggle for prestige among the adults. Some employ the methods of decadent Rome, the panem et circenses; others, the arts of the military hero or of the popular orator. But all acknowledge the need of conciliating the juvenile masses.
The power of juvenile opinion is due, not merely to its mass, and to the boldness and unscrupulousness with which it is asserted, but to its reinforcement from outside. It is more than a domestic movement: it is an interdomestic movement. The opinion of the children is thus less provincial than that of domestic adults. It has, furthermore, a force which it derives from its more intimate contact with the main currents of history. The domestic adult is in a sort of backwash. He is looking toward the past, while the children are thinking the thoughts and speaking the language of tomorrow. They are in closer touch with reality, and cannot fail, however indulgent, to feel that their parents and resident aunt are antiquated. The children's end of the family is its budding, forward-looking end; the adults' end is, at best, its root. There is a profound law of life by which buds and roots grow in opposite directions.
The domestic conflict is in many of its notable features parallel to the industrial conflict; and they may be of common origin. It is natural that similar remedies should be proposed. The Taylor system and other efficiency systems have already broken down in both cases. Conservatives will propose to meet the domestic problem by higher allowances and shorter school hours, with perhaps time and a half for overtime and a bit of profit sharing. Liberals will propose boards of conciliation with child representation, attempts to link study and chores with the "creative" impulses, and experiments in divided management. Radicals and domestic revolutionists will regard all such halfway measures as utterly ineffectual, because they preserve the parental system in its essentials. They will aim to consummate the revolution as soon as possible by violence, and then to bring a new order into being through a dictatorship of a sectarian minority.
This new order would be an almost exact inversion of the parental order. Whereas, under the present system, the parents are supposed to control the home for the benefit of the children, providing them with the necessities of life, and giving them work and advice for their own good, under the new system, the children would control the home for the benefit of the parents and other adults, assuming full responsibility for their living, and employing their expert services only as might be required. However difficult it may be to put such a change into effect, there is, from the adults' point of view, much to be said for it.
(Ralph Barton Perry, "Domestic Superstitions," in Atlantic Essays, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Cary B. Graham [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958], 239-48, at 246-8 [italics in original; editorial footnotes omitted] [essay first published in 1921])
Note from KBJ: Perry is my philosophical great-grandfather. Let me explain. My teacher (dissertation director) was Joel Feinberg (1926-2004), whose teacher was Charles Leslie Stevenson (1908-1979), whose teacher was Ralph Barton Perry (1876-1957), whose teacher was Josiah Royce (1855-1916), whose teacher was George Sylvester Morris (1840-1889), whose teacher was Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802-1872), whose teacher was Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823), whose teacher was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose teacher was Martin Knutzen (1713-1751), whose teacher was Christian Wolff (1679-1754), whose teacher was Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). I'm not making this up!
Note 2 from KBJ: See page 13 of this document for my name. Trace upward until you find Leibniz.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 