Hey, I love the Godfather, and one of the themes of the film is valuing family above everything else. Like in The Godfather 2 when Michael is ostracized for joining the military, going against his brother Sonny's comments (which sound like "pop talkin'" to Michael) that you're supposed to value family over fighting for people you don't know. This excessive value of family is, to me, a very overlooked ill in our society. Family here can refer to biological similarity, but more broadly refers to whatever group you call home, including your tribe, village, or even nation.
When we value our families too much we by definition exclude or devalue other people. One of the apparently bad Bible verses I really like is when Jesus says if you don't hate your mother, brothers, sisters, father -- basically your whole family -- then you aren't worthy of being a disciple. Hate in these earlier times could be interpreted as "to love less," but I think Slavoj Zizek nails it when he says it's not necessarily the concrete family members Jesus is referring to hate, but the abstract idea of family; in Christianity you're supposed to love all people equally, even if you love them in different ways. Because I have affection for my wife, I'll love her with this added layer of affection, but my goal is to love her (to will her good, benevolence) as much as I do a stranger. This doesn't subtract love from my wife; it subtracts my partiality in idealizing her over other people in the deepest sense.
After all, biologically the family, when valued too much, is really a covert form of self-love, seeing how the family is an expression of genetic similarity and interest. I love you because you're to some degree biologically like me. This isn't just human, all too human; this is primal nature at its purest. Insofar as we value family in this way, we're no different than chickens.
Family should be a stepping stone that helps a person transcend his ego toward other people related to him with the goal of moving beyond this to the world at large in a cosmopolitan spirit. But for so many people it stops at family and so becomes again a form of self-love, the rest of the world strangers left excluded from our benevolence.
When we value our families too much we by definition exclude or devalue other people. One of the apparently bad Bible verses I really like is when Jesus says if you don't hate your mother, brothers, sisters, father -- basically your whole family -- then you aren't worthy of being a disciple. Hate in these earlier times could be interpreted as "to love less," but I think Slavoj Zizek nails it when he says it's not necessarily the concrete family members Jesus is referring to hate, but the abstract idea of family; in Christianity you're supposed to love all people equally, even if you love them in different ways. Because I have affection for my wife, I'll love her with this added layer of affection, but my goal is to love her (to will her good, benevolence) as much as I do a stranger. This doesn't subtract love from my wife; it subtracts my partiality in idealizing her over other people in the deepest sense.
After all, biologically the family, when valued too much, is really a covert form of self-love, seeing how the family is an expression of genetic similarity and interest. I love you because you're to some degree biologically like me. This isn't just human, all too human; this is primal nature at its purest. Insofar as we value family in this way, we're no different than chickens.
Family should be a stepping stone that helps a person transcend his ego toward other people related to him with the goal of moving beyond this to the world at large in a cosmopolitan spirit. But for so many people it stops at family and so becomes again a form of self-love, the rest of the world strangers left excluded from our benevolence.