Deconstructing the Hearth & Heart

A marvel-filled delight of an essay at New Oxford Review by Mitchell Kalpakgian, "The Ideology of Diverse Families" --

How does ideology differ from poetry? Like education, poetry educes or leads out, bringing forth what is there and lending shape, form, and adornment to that which is praiseworthy or admirable. The poet sees the wonder and glory that dwell in natural and human things, as Gerard Manley Hopkins does in his famous "Pied Beauty":

Glory be to God for dappled things --
For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow;
For rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

Poetry captures the splendor of the form (splendor formae) that dwells in matter and lets it speak for itself as Hopkins does in marveling at the many examples of pied beauty that appear throughout creation in the variegated tones of the sky, in the mixed colors of brindled cows, in the rainbow streaks of trout, in the motley patchwork of the landscape, and in the multiplicity of human talents and gifts that constitute "all trades, their gear and tackle and trim." Poetry sees the truth shouting from the housetops everywhere: the glory of God shines in the sky above, in the water below, and on the landscape surrounding the Earth, and it manifests itself in the vast heavens and in the small bird, in the animal kingdom and in human nature.

Ideology, in contrast, twists, tortures, and truncates. Like Procrustes, who either stretched or chopped off the legs of his victims to fit his notorious bed, ideology does violence to reality and distorts truth to accommodate its arbitrary theories. Ideology does not see the splendor of the form in matter or acknowledge a natural purpose or God-given design in creation. It resists recognizing the inherent structure of reality -- the givenness of things -- presuming always to improve nature, to redefine established universal meanings, and to substitute human theory for divine wisdom. Hence, all the attacks on the poetry of the home involve a denial of the universal truths which the poets sing: "All is well" or "Glory be to God for dappled things" or "Home is the definition of God" (Emily Dickinson). Instead, ideology resorts to sophistic legal reasoning, verbal gymnastics, and social engineering to demythologize the romance of the family. United Nations propaganda questions the universal meaning of "family" and "gender" by claiming that families come in a "plurality of forms" rather than by way of marriage, and by assuming that there are five genders, not two. Liberal rhetoric has revised the traditional, normative meaning of marriage to include the "marriage" or civil union of two men or two women. Feminist ideology persistently denies the existential reality of maleness and femaleness and regards these universal norms as mere social "constructs." Thus, how can one write of The Privilege of Being a Woman as Alice von Hildebrand does, or of The Greatness of Marriage as Dietrich von Hildebrand does, or of the beauty of families that Louisa May Alcott praises in Little Women ("I think families are the most beautiful things in all the world!")? Without the poetry of the home, life degenerates to the survival of the fittest and the most barbaric. Read all …