The war on the family waged by Flores d’Arcais and MicroMega
By Roberto de Mattei | 16 October 2024
Is there really a carefully planned war against the family, as we have written on Corrispondenza Romana? For those who have doubts in this regard, clear and definite confirmation has come in recent days from MicroMega, a magazine edited by Paolo Flores d’Arcais, which since 1988 has constituted an ideological point of reference for the Italian left. The name “MicroMega” comes from a philosophical novella of the same name by Voltaire (1752), and this in itself sets an agenda.
MicroMega dedicates its latest monographic issue (4/2024) to this very theme: “Against the family: critique of an (anti)social institution”. Right from its title, the dossier directly opposes the understanding of the family held by classical thought and the magisterium of the Catholic Church: the family is an institution of natural law that constitutes the first cell of society, which is born from the family and expands from the family.
The editorial in MicroMega explains that the special edition of the magazine “sets itself the ambitious aim of dismantling the mythology surrounding the family, revealing its most pernicious aspects and bringing into dispute its supposed centrality in the life of a free, open and democratic society which makes the emancipation of individuals its goal. … The first and most immediate ‘dark side’ of the family is the fact that it, far from always being a place of refuge and unconditional love, often establishes itself as the first theatre of violence, oppression and control … the family is the first place where children learn about the hierarchies and rigid roles of gender, internalise conformism and suffer the repression of their individuality” (p 3).
MicroMega, presumably from the pen of Flores d’Arcais, continues in its editorial:
“The family is not only oppressive within itself, it also has a potentially disintegrating effect on the public sphere. In a society in which the private is sacralised, the collective and public dimension is constantly eroded” (p 4). The family is “a mechanism that does nothing but consolidate a system of structural injustices, preventing social mobility and the achievement of real equality” (p 4).
We are in 2024, but the ideas that MicroMega presents are holdovers of the old Italian and European left. One need only recall that one of the foundational texts of the revolution in the 1960s was entitled The death of the family. Its author, the anti-psychiatry theorist David Cooper (1931–1986), maintains in this text that the family must be destroyed because it is a pathological institution, the mother of all social repression.
But MicroMega goes further. Among those who contributed to the issue is Telmo Pievani, one of Italy’s homegrown champions of evolutionism, who denies the existence of a “natural family” (pp 6–15) because, he writes, “our four closest relatives, namely chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, do not display a single model of natural family” (p 7) and teach us that “there is no basis for branding as ‘against nature’ sexual behaviours that are not our own” (p 8).
Homosexuality, for example, “is a very widespread and diversified behaviour among animals”, not only primates, but also dolphins, sheep, penguins and even cockroaches and toads. “Amplexus between male toads is widely noted and may be due to the difficulty of distinguishing one sex from the other” (p 13). The confusion of ideas is extreme. When perennial philosophy speaks of natural law, it refers not to what exists in nature, but to what is in accordance with human nature. While animals tend towards their end and reach it through instinct, man, although having instinct in common with the animals, unlike them is endowed with reason, which guides him to his ultimate end; an end that is not inherent in nature, but transcends it. The natural law of man is nothing else, therefore, than a rational law. To act according to nature does not mean following one’s instincts as the animals do, but acting according to reason, and to act according to reason means to align one’s behaviour with a rational law that is also imprinted in our nature, such that we do not undergo this law as an external imposition, but find it within ourselves, and in finding it, realise our deepest identity.
Otherwise why not admit, for example, the possibility of incest or of many other perversions that are widely practised by animals?
But MicroMega presses on, giving the floor to another ultra-progressive intellectual, Stefano Petrucciani, who justifies the attack on the family by referring to Marx’s colleague, Friedrich Engels, attempting to demonstrate that “the bourgeois patriarchal family is a completely historical and contingent institution, destined to be surpassed together with the society of which it constitutes an organic element” (p 39).
These are the ideas of the infamous work The origin of the family, private property and the state (1884) by Engels, who claims to demonstrate that the family is a purely historical and therefore ephemeral entity, destined to disappear. In the perspective of Marx and Engels, everything that exists is matter animated by a continuous movement; nothing is stable, but everything changes, everything is transformed, in a perpetual becoming. The family, according to the two theorists of communism, is a superstructure destined to be left behind in the passage from bourgeois society to an anarchic society without a state or social institutions of any kind.
At this point, it is clear that there is an open war between two conceptions of the world: on one side, those who draw upon the social doctrine of the Church and the philosophia perennis; on the other side, the sophists, the intellectual subversives, the utopians who want to turn reality into a nightmare.
Cardinal Carlo Caffarra recalled receiving from Sister Lucia of Fatima a long handwritten letter that ended with these words: “Father, there will come a time when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and the family. And those who work for the good of the family will experience persecution and tribulation. But there is no need to be afraid, because Our Lady has already crushed his head.” What more is there to say?