Peter Hitchens, the Christian brother of famously atheistic writer/activist Christopher Hitchens, identifies the increasing power of the state with the decline of dad.

I’ve had the same thought. Here’s a Counterpunch piece, “Witches and Bastards” on the subject:

“But there is a difference between bastardy inside the imperial state and outside that is crucial. In the imperial state, the missing father is replaced by the state. Outside imperium, that is not yet the case.

In the imperium even those who do have a father end up overshadowed by the hyper-masculinized image created, manipulated, and projected by the imperial state. Under its domination, the hyper-masculine father cripples the growth of his child, either turning him into a replica of himself or a pale, emasculated shadow.

The hyper-masculine male is both beneficiary and sacrificial victim of the imperial machine which employs him as soldier, sailor, beggar-man, and thief as it suits its purposes. We talk of the nanny-state but really it’s the Daddy-State, the substitution of organic, biological fatherhood with the robotic state. The Daddy State teaches its progeny well – through the mythologizing of sports, war, and crime – the three horsemen of the imperial apocalypse. In video games and films, the cult of violence of the Daddy-State reigns – children of all classes slouch around in the baggy, beltless trousers of prisoners to the phallic throb of rap, the soul music of the ghetto war-zones where the unofficial violence of the underclass plays out; their older siblings wear army camouflage and olive drab and their parents cruise the highways in sports utility vehicles and the military’s own Hummer, celebrating the official violence of the over-class. Roughly a third or more of the American economy depends on the prison-military complex. Whole sections of the populace are imprisoned at rates second only to China in the world while other sections profit from the jobs that accompany the growth of the complex. In America, there can be no true bastards or true witches under the all-seeing eye of the Daddy-State.”

Peter Hitchens writes:

“The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

>If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man, woman and children.’

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.”

Comment:

Although I’ve read quite a bit of Lawrence, I don’t recall this particular line. I’ll have to go hunt for it.

It only reinforces my admiration for Lawrence. What didn’t he get right?