Mammon

Abstract

The further we move into the realm of modern ideas, the more we discover that patriarchal attitudes can survive intellectual change; the attitudes are transmuted, adapted, but remain fundamentally what they had been for generations. It goes to show, not just that even highly able and original minds will continue to justify a state of affairs which is advantageous, but that we are all shaped by our early memories. The family structure of childhood, with its image of father and mother, is accepted as fundamental and repeated by the child become father. And although bourgeois marriage may look like a trap rather than an ideal to us, this ideal of family life was reinforced in the past not only by moral constraint but, ironically, by the fact that it was so difficult to attain.