Criticism
The family being such a deep-rooted and much-venerated institution, few intellectuals have ventured to speak against it. Familialism has been atypically defined as a “social structure where … a family's values are held in higher esteem than the values of the individual members of the family.” Favoritism granted to relatives regardless of merit is called nepotism.
The Russian-American rationalist and individualist philosopher, novelist and playwright Ayn Rand compared partiality towards consanguinity with racism, as a small-scale manifestation of the latter. “The worship of the family is merely racism, like a crudely primitive first installment on the worship of the tribe. It places the accident of birth above a man's values and duty to the tribe above a man's right to his own life.” Additionally, she spoke in favor of childfree lifestyle, while following it herself.
The British social critic, poet, mountaineer and occultist Aleister Crowley censured the institution of family in his works: “Horrid word, family! Its very etymology accuses it of servility and stagnation. / Latin, famulus, a servant; Oscan, Faamat, he dwells. … hink what horrid images it evokes from the mind. Not only Victorian; wherever the family has been strong, it has always been an engine of tyranny. Weak members or weak neighbours: it is the mob spirit crushing genius, or overwhelming opposition by brute arithmetic. … In every Magical, or similar system, it is invariably the first condition which the Aspirant must fulfill: he must once and for all and for ever put his family outside his magical circle.”
The American journalist Marty Nemko considers family to be overrated. “Politicians, clerics, and just plain folks extol family as our most important institution. / I believe family is overrated. So many people suffer inordinately from family. … / Millions of people don't even speak with a family member. Millions more spend years and fortunes on therapists, trying to undo the ills that family perpetrated on them. / All this shouldn’t be surprising. After all, unlike with friends, we are placed in our family of origin at random, with no say in the matter.”
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)