"To Be True Christians and Political"

Sunday, cigarette #1

The Indians shall be brought together in towns to live politically... And because in order to be true Christians and political, like the rational men they are, it is necessary to be congregated and subjected in towns, and in convenient and accessible places, and that they not live dispersed through the sierras and jungles, and that they be congregated where they can live politically, like Christians. First Provincial Council of Mexico (1555), cited in Claudio Lomnitz’s Death and the Idea of Mexico

George Kateb's Molotov cocktail of a column on patriotism insists (among other things) that comparisons between country and family (including but not limited to expressions like “fatherland” and “mother country”) are dangerously misleading. Insofar as the family is understood as a refuge from the political, he’s right. But what if we took politics off the list of things the family is supposed to be a refuge from and replaced family-as-co-op with something more like family-as-baby’s-first-polis? Bringing things like power, rhetoric, and legitimacy into family life doesn't have to be incompatible with love and loyalty. (For example, The Godfather, where an unconditionally loyal family is also a place for politicking.)

This isn't a case for patriotism (for that, go here), and I hardly want to argue that patriotism and familial love should look exactly alike, but I think one reason the comparison between the two sounds so odd to our ears is that we’ve gone too far in the direction of making family relationships apolitical. Smaller family size, fewer inherited family businesses, and Social Security seem related to this trend, but whether they’re causes or indications is unclear to me.