- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
let's start from the oldest : the recognition of children as members of the tribe. It may be unfortunate that Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) was so much influenced by Lewis H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) and Bachofen’s Mother Right (1861), because his theory of primal matriarchy became part of the mythology of left feminism, and eventually of leftism as a whole. Freud went in the other direction, with his fantasy of the primal horde and the murder of the fathers by the sons. All this is merely representation of aspects of universal and common childhood fantasy, I suppose, but it led to a system of religions, one of whose primary functions was to police reproduction, and eventually to declare children of unknown paternity "illegitimate." The modern state inherited this function, quite naively, during the period of enlightenment secularisation, which has led to the modern state being judged by the rigor with which it polices reproduction and sexual behavior in general. The problem lies in the naive, i.e. unexamined, manner in which the modern state assumed these functions, which constantly traps it in anachronism and inferiority vis-a-vis an imagined ancient purity of race which I imagine never actually existed anyway. And all this underlies 'the Law.'
