On the right today, there is no greater source of concern than the decline of the family, followed closely by its civic cousin, the decline of community. Listen to the traditionalists, and you’d be led to believe that all of Britain’s woes can be traced back to falling marriage rates, social atomisation, and rampant, irresponsible individualism.

The story goes as follows. At some point in the not-too-distant past, Britain was a country of large, happy families. Though not everything was perfect, this state of affairs promoted harmonious relations between generations, made it easier and cheaper to raise children, and instilled in everybody a profound sense of community and responsibility. Men were men, women were women, and the whole world made sense.

Then, in the 20th century, along came the liberals, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Britain’s happy status quo was destroyed by liberalism, both social and economic, which undermined traditional communities, upended incentives to marry, and encouraged women to burn their bras and enter the workplace. You are here — neoliberalism, atomisation, decline.

The traditionalist solution, of course, is simple — we must rediscover a love of big family structures, by destigmatising intergenerational living and encouraging greater obligation to our extended families. Where possible, the state should intervene to allow people to rediscover our instinctive love of large families. Grandparents can care for grandchildren, grandchildren can then care for grandparents, and the whole natural order will be restored.

But of course, those familiar with our history will know that the communitarian fantasy is just that — a fantasy. In fact, the realities of English life since at least the 13th century have involved population circulation, a decidedly nuclear family structure, and high levels of individuated responsibility. Family has always mattered, of course, but our obligations have been owed to our immediate kinsmen, not to an entire clan or tribe. A mediaeval Englishman may well have been close friends with his cousin, but he would not have been obliged to be so.

Lord Willetts, writing in his famous book The Pinch puts it best:

Think of England as being like this for at least 750 years. We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. Our parents expect us to leave home for paid work. You try to save up some money from your wages so that you can afford to get married. You can choose your spouse.

According to the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, the English are nearly unique in this, sharing an “absolute nuclear” family structure only with the Danes, the Dutch, the Bretons, and the Norwegians. Elsewhere, obligation is the order of the day. In Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, it has long been the norm for children to continue living with their parents even when married — ditto in Sweden, Germany, and much of France. In most of the rest of the world, an explicitly communitarian family structure is, indeed, traditional.

Where bigger families did emerge in England, they tended to coincide with either abject poverty — particularly during the squalid period of Victorian urbanisation – or high levels of Catholic migration from Ireland. Otherwise, we’ve practically always been a nation of small, strong family units — relatively mobile, relatively low-obligation, and relatively individualistic. To return to tradition, in the English context, would be to return to liberalism.

But perhaps we ought to move towards a different family model anyway. Perhaps the nuclear family is so harmful and so atomising that we should upend centuries of social habit in order to chart a bold, new, pro-family future. After all, disintegrating social cohesion and plummeting birth rates represent a challenge of civilisational scale — radical action can surely be justified in the face of such existential threats?

Yet like most action proposed in the name of communitarianism, the reality of high-obligation family structures is far less rosy than the traditionalists would have you believe.

Just look at southern Europe and the Balkans. Here, it’s common for adults to live with their parents, and often their grandparents, well into their 30s and 40s. In practice, that means near-constant parental browbeating, a lack of privacy, and a duty to care for older relatives at every given opportunity. Contrary to the idea that this arrangement eases the burden of child-rearing, countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece have a lower birth rate than Britain. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Can you imagine dating while sharing a house with your kids and your grandmother?

It is the English nuclear family system which affords individuals … dignity, mobility, and liberty

And these European examples are relatively moderate in comparison to the wider global picture. In Nigeria’s Yoruba culture, you will often see young people prostrate or bow before their older family members. In India, it is relatively common for adult children to send money to their parents, on a monthly basis, even if their parents earn more. In Somalia, deep-seated clan rivalries present an almost insurmountable hurdle to the functioning of a normal society. Wherever one chooses to look, high-obligation family structures are associated with excessive duty, high levels of individual repression, and social dysfunction.

Instead, it is the English nuclear family system which affords individuals the dignity, mobility, and liberty to form healthy interpersonal relationships on a voluntary basis. The distant, polite disinterest of many English families is certainly preferable to the jealous, cloying clannishness that prevails elsewhere in the world.

If anything, most of our current social maladies are the product of well-meaning but misguided communitarianism. To at least an extent, the decline in family formation is the product of high housing costs, which make it difficult for couples to put down roots in that traditionally English way. These high costs, in turn, are driven by a lack of housing supply, the result of a planning system which prioritises ‘community concern’ over individual property rights.

Our civilisation was built on freedom of association, individual liberty, and small, strong social structures, all of which are smothered by the misguided communitarianism of the self-consciously traditionalist right. Instead of wishing to be more like the rest of the world, advocates of “family values” should celebrate the unique strengths of the Anglo-Saxon social model. Rather than trying to uproot our ancient norms, we should be working to make the system work on its own terms — particularly by increasing the supply of housing, a precondition for a successful nuclear family structure.

And most of all, we should stop allowing “tradition” to be co-opted in the name of heavy-handed, interventionist social engineering. If they really do want to return to tradition, finger-wagging trads should start by getting out of the way.