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Part II
CONCLUSION
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We have seen some aspects of the bad influence that the social transformations of the last two centuries, characterised especially by industrialisation and urbanisation, have had over the internal structure of the family. This shaking of the traditional institution of the family had, and continues to have, profound repercussions in the social order. Before concluding, we would like to note that neither industrialisation nor urbanisation could provoke, of themselves, such a profound dismantling of the family. For the past six hundred years, Western Christian civilisation has been undermined deliberately. It is a process so profound, vast, and prolonged that it encompasses every domain of human activity, such as culture, art, laws, customs, and institutions. The late Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, in his masterly work Revolution and Counter Revolution, gives this terrible enemy a name: the Revolution. Its profound cause is an explosion of pride and sensuality. Pride leads to hatred of all superiority and, thus, to the affirmation that inequality is an evil in itself at all levels, principally at the metaphysical and religious ones. This is the egalitarian aspect of the Revolution. Sensuality, per se, tends to sweep aside all barriers. It does not accept restraints and leads to revolt against all authority and law, divine or human, ecclesiastical or civil. This is the liberal aspect of the Revolution.26 This Revolution is what moves the psychological and sociological factors to transform customs and institutions. Without its influence, industrialisation and urbanisation would not have taken place in an unbalanced, anarchic, and intemperate manner. The family that was traditional, patriarchal, extended, protective, educating, formative for both social and professional life, without psychological problems, without the generation gap, and without the crisis of adolescence, could have continued to exist and to give the tone to a wholesome society. Let us then reject this new form of the family, which has proven to be so harmful, and return to the traditional family with all of its proven benefits. The process will be hard and slow, but indispensable. 26) Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property, Spring Grove, Pa., 3rd printing (2003), p.3.
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