Power

"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic” (Del Noce). Yet freedom has not become more luminous in the absence of authority. On the contrary, it has been eclipsed together with authority by ever-more absolute forms of arbitrary power: totalitarianisms which aim precisely at authority. Authority is in the service of freedom; for it is the power to make things grow in accord with the given order to which the authority is first subject. It is best represented by a father who bears witness to that order, received from above, as he hands himself over to the mother and together with her brings a child into being.

The principle recognizing the prerogative of parents to educate their children is no longer just a haven from the tyranny of the State. The “right” itself has become an arbitrary claim, with “gender-affirming” parents appealing to it as proxies of their children’s “right to choose.” And the “parents” bearing the right are, increasingly, those who choose children—producing and buying them—not the ones who have them. Unless parents’ rights are grounded in the authority mothers and fathers possess as participants in a prevenient natural order, to which they themselves are beholden and for which they are responsible, it will become the arena of a lesser known, yet no less terrible, tyranny: the Huxleyan tyranny of our own desires.