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condemns the values and institutions responsible for producing these riches.
Members of this new class, according to Jeanne Kirkpatrick, shape debate,
determine agendas, define standards, and propose and evaluate policies.. It is they
who allegedly advocate unlimited abortion, attack religion and the family, criticize
capitalism, destroy general education in the name of unlimited freedom of choice,
replace basic subjects in the lower schools with sex education and values
clarification, and promote a new ethic of hedonism and self-exploration. From a
conservative point of view, a return to basics demands a democratic movement
against entrenched interests, in the course of which traditionalists will have to
master techniques of sustained activism formerly monopolized by the left.
Even if it could be shown that conservatives misunderstand American society,
exaggerate the power of the so-called new class, underestimate the power of the
business class, and ignore the undemocratic implications of their own positions, it
would still be important to understand how they can see themselves as underdogs
in the struggle for the American future. The left, which until recently has regarded
itself as the voice of the .forgotten man, has lost the common touch. Failing to
create a popular consensus in favor of its policies, the left has relied on the courts,
the federal bureaucracy, and the media to achieve its goals of racial integration,
affirmative action, and economic equality. Ever since World War II, it has used
essentially undemocratic means to achieve democratic ends, and it has paid the
price for this evasive strategy in the loss of public confidence and support.
Increasingly isolated from popular opinion, liberals and social democrats attempt
to explain away opposition to economic equality as working class
authoritarianism, status anxiety, resentment, white racism, male chauvinism,
and proto-fascism. The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular
defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and
the school curriculum. The left no longer stands for common sense, as it did in the
days of Tom Paine. It has come to regard common sensethe traditional wisdom
and folkways of the communityas an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Because it equates tradition with prejudice, it finds itself increasingly unable to
converse with ordinary people in their common language. Increasingly it speaks its
own jargon, the therapeutic jargon of social science and the service professions
that seems to serve mostly to deny what everybody knows.
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown
by presenting them dialectically as the birth pangs of a new order. The left
dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the
emergence of alternative life-styles and the growing new diversity of family
types. Betty Friedan expresses the enlightened consensus when she says that
Americans have to reject the obsolete image of the family; to acknowledge the
diversity of the families people live in now; and to understand that a family, after
all, in the words of the American Home Economics Association, consists simply of
two or more persons Who share values and goals, and have commitments to one
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another over time. This anemic, euphemistic definition of the family reminds us
of the validity of George Orwells contention that it is a sure sign of trouble when
things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain,
forthright speech. The plain fact of the matterand this is borne out by the very
statistics cited to prove the expanding array of lifestyles from which people can
now chooseis that most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of
the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Blended or reconstituted families result from divorce, as do single-parent
families: As for the other alternative forms of the family, so highly touted by
liberalssingle families, gay marriages, and soon-it makes no sense to
consider them as families and would still make no sense if they were important
statistically, as they are not. They may be perfectly legitimate living arrangements,
but they are arrangements chosen by people who prefer not to live in families at
all, with all the unavoidable constraints that families place on individual freedom.
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement (one among
many alter-native living arrangements) grows out of the modern delusion that
people can keep all their options open all the time, avoiding any constraints or
demands as long as they dont make any demands of their own or impose their
own values on others. The lefts redefinition of the family encourages the illusion
that it is possible to avoid the trap of involuntary association and to enjoy its
advantages at the same time.
The question of the family, which now divides our society So deeply that the
opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing
about, illustrates and supports the contention that the left has lost touch with
popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the
party of common sense. The presumption behind the older definition of the family
is that ties of kinship and even of marriage and adoption are likely to be more
demanding than ties of friendship and proximity. This is precisely 1Ihy many
people continue to value them. For most Americans, even for those who are
disenchanted 1Iith their own marriages, family life continues to represent a
stabilizing influence and a source of personal discipline in a world where personal
disintegration remains always an imminent danger. A growing awareness of the
depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals, rather belatedly, to
concede that family is not just a buzz word for reaction, as Betty Friedan puts
it. But since these same liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition
of the family, their defense of families carries no conviction. They ask people to
believe, moreover, that there is no conflict between feminism and the family.
Most women, according to Friedan, want both feminism and the family and reject
categorization as pro-family or anti-family, pro-feminist or anti-feminist. Most
women are pragmatists, in other words, who have allowed extremists on the left
and right to manipulate the family issue for their own purposes and to create a
political polarization between feminism and the family. Her suspicion of
ideology and her belief that it is possible to have things both wayseven in a
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reduce everything to the same dimensions. The effect of the mass media is not to
elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. Drugs are merely the most
obvious form of addiction in our society. It is true that drug addiction is one of the
things that undermines traditional values, but the need for drugsthat is, for
commodities that alleviate boredom and satisfy the socially stimulated desire for
novelty and excitementgrows out of the very nature of a consumerist economy.
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence
on all these important matters. Neoclassical economics takes no account of the
importance of advertising. It extols the sovereign consumer and insists that
advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they dont already want to
buy. This argument misses the point. The point isnt that advertising manipulates
the consumer or directly influences consumer choices. The point is that it makes
the consumer an addict, unable to live without increasingly sizeable loses of
externally provided stimulation and excitement. Conservatives argue that
television erodes the capacity for sustained attention in children. They complain
that young people now expect education, for example, to be easy and exciting.
This argument is correct as far as it goes. Here again, however, conservatives
incorrectly attribute these artificially excited expectations to liberal propaganda
in this case, to theories of permissive childrearing and creative pedagogy. They
ignore the deeper source of the expectations that undermine education, destroy the
childs curiosity, and encourage passivity. Ideologies, however appealing and
powerful, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they
are embedded in daily experiences that appear to confirm them. In our society,
daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of
new toys and drugs. A defense of free enterprise hardly supplies a corrective to
these expectations.
Conservatives conceive the capitalist economy as it was in the time of Adam
Smith, when property was still distributed fairly widely, businesses were
individually owned, and commodities still retained something of the character of
useful objects. Their notion of free enterprise takes no account of the forces that
have transformed capitalism from within: the rise of the corporation, the
bureaucratization of business, the increasing insignificance of private property, and
the shift from a work ethic to a consumption ethic. Insofar as conservatives take
any note of these developments at all, they attribute them solely to government
interference and regulation. They deplore bureaucracy but see only its public face,
missing the prevalence of bureaucracy in the private sector. They betray no
acquaintance with the rich historical scholarship which shows that the expansion
of the public sector came about, in part, in response to pressure from the
corporations themselves.
Conservatives assume that deregulation and a return to the free market will solve
be separated so easily from the cultural dimension. Nor can bigger welfare budgets
make the family economically viable. The economic basis of the familythe
family wagehas been eroded by the same developments that have promoted
consumerism as a way of life. The family is threatened not only by economic
pressures but by an ideology that devalues motherhood, equates personal
development with participation in the labor market, and defines freedom as
individual freedom of choice, freedom from binding commitments.
The problem isnt how to keep religion out of politics but how to subject political
life to spiritual criticism without losing sight of the tension between the political
and the spiritual realm. Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of
coercion it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice. But
neither can it be dismissed as the work of the devil (as Jacques Ellul maintains in
his recent writings). A complete separation of religion and politics, whether it
arises out of religious indifference or out of its opposite, the religious passion of
Ellul, condemns the political realm to perpetual warfare, as Niebuhr argued in
Moral Man and Immoral Society) If social cohesion is impossible without
coercion, and coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice, and
the destruction of injustice is impossible without the use of further coercion are we
not ill all endless cycle of social conflict? . . . If power is needed to destroy
power, ...an uneasy balance of power would seem to become the highest goal to
which society could aspire. The only way to break the cycle is to subject oneself
and ones political friends to the same rigorous moral standards to which one
subjects ones opponents and to invoke spiritual standards, moreover, not merely
to condemn ones opponents but also to understand and forgive them. An uneasy
balance of power now enshrined as the highest form of politics in the theory of
interestgroup liberalismcan be ended only by a politics of angerless
wisdom, a politics of nonviolent coercion that seeks to resolve the endless
argument about means and ends by making nonviolent means, openness, and truthtelling political ends in their own right.
Needless to say, this is not a task either for the new right, for interest group
liberals, or for those on the left who still cling to the messianic hope of social
revolution. Faced with the unexpected growth of the new right, the left has asked
itself how it can recover its former strength and momentum. Some call for a
vigorous counterattack, a reassertion of the left-wing gospel in all its purity and
messianic fervor. Others wait passively for another turn of the political cycle,
another age of reform. More thoughtful people on the left have begun, however
reluctantly, to acknowledge the legitimacy of some of the concerns that underlie
the growth of contemporary conservatism. But even this last response is
inadequate if it issues simply in a call For the left to appropriate conservative
issues and then to give them a liberal twist. The hope of a new politics does not lie
in formulating a left-wing reply to the right, It lies in rejecting conventional
political categories and redefining the terms of political debate. The idea of a
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left has outlived its historical time and needs to be decently buried, along with
the false conservatism that merely clothes an older liberal tradition in conservative
rhetoric. The old labels have no meaning anymore. They can only confuse debate
instead of clarifying it. They are products of an earlier era, the age of steam and
steel, and are wholly inadequate to the age of electronics, totalitarianism, and mass
culture. Let us say good-bye to these old friends, fondly but firmly, and look
elsewhere for guidance and moral support.
constrained after divorce, when she almost always becomes the sole emotional and
economic support of those children?
And by what reasoning do we deride that two people who live .and love in a longterm, stable relationship, perhaps even raise a child together, are any less subject to
the constraints of family life simply because they sleep with someone of the same
sex instead of the opposite one? Certainly for many Americans the commitment to
a marriage is itself the constraining force. But surely no one living through an era
when half of all marriages end in divorce can still believe that legal constraints
alone provide the binding force on those who wed, And if it is the deeper
emotional ties and attachments that make for stable relationships, then who is to
say that heterosexuality supplies a monopoly on these?
There is no logic here, There is only an emotional and nostalgic wish for a past that
never existed for most people anywhere in the world. The old family for which
Christopher Lasch grieves was, historically speaking, a reality for a very brief
period following the Industrial Revolution and even then only among a select
group of peoplethe bourgeoisie. Moreover, it is this very bourgeois family,
whose return he calls for, that broke down under the weight of the contradictions
chat surround it.
In the public arena, the family has been our hallowed and sacred institution,
politicians paying it obeisance as they remind us and each other of its importance
in American life. Yet both economy and polity have failed to support it. We are,
after all, the only advanced industrial nation that has no public policy of support
for the family, whether with family allowances or decent publicly-sponsored
childcare facilities.
The old family for which Christopher Lasch grieves was, historically
speaking, a reality for a very brief period following the Industrial Revolution
and even then only among a select group of peoplethe bourgeoisie.
Inside the family, too, theres conflict between our ideal statements and the
reality of life as it is lived there. We are a nation that speaks of liberty and
equality for all, yet the family has been a hierchica11y ordered institution in which
liberty and equality largely have been labeled for men only. As long as the
traditional bargain in the bourgeois family workedthat is, a woman would trade
equality and freedom for economic securitythat family had a chance. But long
before the emergence of the modem feminist movement this bargain had already
been breached, and men in large numbers were leaving wives who were ill
prepared to do so to fend for themselves and their children.
We need only look at the work of family historians to see the difficulties of family
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life throughout the agesthe struggle for survival that, for most families, has been
arduous and exhausting, if not downright torturous. And if these arent convincing
enough, a Dickens novel should do the trick.
The cruelties and oppression family members pave visited upon one another, as
they acted out their rage against their own instead of the enemy outside, have been
well documented. And the issue of family instability that plagues us today has, in
one way or another, been with us at least since the Industrial Revolution so
effectively split work from family life and family members from each other. It was
different then. It wasnt divorce that divided families; it was death and desertion. It
wasnt drugs that crippled the children; it was being tied to a machine for twelve to
fourteen hours a day.
Feminists have offered the first new vision in many decades of what, at its
best, family life could and should be.
Yet Lasch, the historian, manages to write as if he knows nothing of all
this. The family may be under threat from economic pressures, he concedes, but
the real threat comes from a feminist ideology; which, in his words, devalues
motherhood, equates personal development with participation in the labor market,
and defines freedom as individual freedom of choice, freedom from binding
commitments. When over 50 percent of all married women with young children
are in the labor force, its time to stop blaming feminists for destroying the family.
Whatever personal satisfactions these women may find at work, the cold hard fact
of American family life today is that it takes two incomes to live decently and still
pay the bills.
Here again, its hard to tell Lasch from Schlafly. Both offer a hostile and
oversimple view of modern feminism; both misstate feminist theory and ideology
and misread our recent history. A social movement like feminism does not arise in
a vacuum. Rather feminism in this modern era came to life precisely because the
family itself had already failed in its function to provide for its members that
haven in a heartless world for which so many of us yearn. Not for women, not
for children, and not for men either.
Lasch rails at women who have demanded change in the structure of roles in the
family, all the while refusing to acknowledge the inequities of traditional family
life, from female infanticide to battered women. He laments the demise of the
family wage systemthat is, the system whereby the wages of one worker could
support a familyand argues that it is the breakdown of this wage system that has
driven women into the labor force in such large numbers. But what family is he
talking about? Except for a few of the economically privileged, this family wage
that he mourns so deeply has never been enough to support the family adequately.
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ethic that calls for more sexual responsibility has been emerging in recent years.
We may still have a way to go to make our interpersonal relationships all that we
want and need, but the enormous success among men as well as women of my own
Intimate Strangersa book that offers no easy answers, whether in the bedroom,
the living room or the kitchenis itself testimony to our willingness to engage the
struggle.
In the public sphere, the gains are more visible. There is no longer exclusively
womens work and mens work, whether in the elite building trades or in the
professions. Sex discrimination has not ended, to be sure. But todays children
will feel no surprise at the sight of a woman pilot or plumber. And already the
sound of a male voice on an AT&T line no longer gives any of us a jolt.
Some of these changes are relatively broad and deep; others are still symbolic
only. All of them stand, also, alongside a set of problems that have yet to be
tackledthe increasing feminization of poverty, the double shift to which most
women who work outside the home are consigned, the lack of childcare facilities.
Still, the fact that there are problems yet to be met and mastered should not disable
us from seeing and appreciating the gains.
Certainly theres work ahead if family life is to fulfill our ideal vision. But it is not
a return to a past we need, a past where the constraints were so great that neither
men nor women were expected to enjoy what we so delicately called connubial
relations, where divorce was either illegal or so socially unacceptable that the
only alternative for men was desertion and for women, stoic endurance. Instead,
we must reorder our social priorities in ways that support rather than hinder family
life.
For at least the last one hundred and fifty years, the major threat to family life has
been the organization of work. If the family is to survive, we need to think
creatively about reorganizing the world of work to honor family life and give it the
priority it deserves. This means, among other things, a shorter work week or both
men and women, benefit packages that permit I substantial amount of time off
when a child is born, adequate and affordable child care facilities.
The Left has much to criticize itself for, not least for laving lost touch with the
American consciousness, with the hopes, the dreams and the fears of most of our
people. But that doesnt mean joining the Right in their unrealistic attempts to turn
back the clock to a world that never was. Nor should we be supporting their
insistence that there are simple and easy answers to the hard issues our society
faces, whether about the family or about any of the other arenas of both public and
private life in which problems abound. It is indeed, as Lasch argues, time for those
of us who call ourselves progressives or, dare I even say the word, radicals to take
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stock of where we have been and to begin to define an agenda for the future that
takes account of the legitimate concerns of most Americans. But he is wrong when
he seeks to do so by pandering to the worst elements of the existing popular
consciousness.
For at least the last one hundred and fifty years, the major threat to family
life has been the organization of work.
Until now, I have been one of Christopher Laschs defenders, arguing that,
despite serious flaws in his analysis, he has had the courage and imagination to
raise questions that others on the Left have failed to confront. But it seems to me
now that his rage and fear about the state of society has led him to the kind of
analysis this article displays, whether about the family or about the role of religion
in politics. In both, he treads on dangerous ground. For despite a sometimes
trenchant critique of the positions of the Right, the Ultimate effect of what he has
written is to show that they are not on the wrong side, only that they misunderstand
the source of the problem. In doing so, Lasch has given over to the meanest and
most reactionary forces in our land the power to set the terms for our own debate
a mistake the Left has made before and always has paid for dearly.
American Left has had to choose, in effect, between two equally futile and selfdefeating strategies: either to wait hopelessly for the revolution, while fulminating
against capitalism, or to try to gain its objectives by outflanking public opinion,
giving up the hope of creating a popular constituency for social reform, and relying
instead on the courts, the mass media, and the administrative bureaucracy. As
militant outsiders or bureaucratic insiders, radicals have succeeded only in laying
the basis of a conservative movement that has managed to present itself,
infuriatingly, as a form of cultural populism, even though its own program,
especially its economic program, seeks only to perpetuate the existing distribution
of wealth and powerindeed, to reverse most of the democratic gains actually
achieved over the last five decades.
An analysis of the capitalist economy, even a fresh and trenchant analysis (as
opposed to Lichtmans lifeless theorizing), in itself would contribute very little to
an understanding of the political situation in this country. Why should economic
contraction deprive liberalism of its rationale, as Lichtman maintains? One
might expect that it would have the opposite affect, as it did in the 1930s. During
the Depression, liberal democrats argued that questions about the distribution of
wealth, obscured in the past by a long history of economic expansion, could no
longer be postponed. Liberals reluctance to press such a point today, when it
would be equally pertinent in a climate of diminishing expectations, cannot be
explained without reference to the collapse of the political coalition had sustained
liberalism in the past; and this development, in turn, cannot be explained without
reference o the cultural issues that have separated liberals from their popular
constituency. The divisive political effects if this cultural civil war are
documented in many historical studiesfor example, in Frederick Siegels useful
survey of American history since World War II, Troubled Journey. I recommend
this book to anyone who wants to understand why the Left has fallen on hard
times, as a substitute for the kind of theorizing which assumes that invocation of
the magic words, capitalism and socialism, will explain everything that needs to be
explained.
To readers who are tired of formulas, I can also recommend a long list of works on
consumerism, mass culture, and the mass mediaamong others, those of Jackson
Lears, Richard Fox, Stewart Ewen, William Leach, and Todd Gitlin. Read Gitlin
on the media overage of the student movement in the sixties and then try to
convince yourself that a reactionary political bias accounts for everything. But
dont be afraid to rely on your own observations, which ought to be enough, all by
themselves, to raise doubts about the dogma that the mass media purvey a rightwing ideology of loyalty, ...patriotism, and anti-intellectualism, elitism, anticommunism, and uncritical acquiescence. Ask yourself how it is possible for so
many people to believe that the media, controlled by the eastern liberal
establishment, purvey a diametrically opposed ideology, one of undiluted liberal
orthodoxy. This belief is no less misguided than the left-wing dogma that the
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media are holly dominated by the interests. But neither belief can be dismissed
out of hand. Instead of replying to one dogma with another, we have to take them
seriously enough to understand how they came to be held and what makes them
seem like plausible descriptions of reality. The refusal to pay attention to popular
perceptions or to listen to any views that dont agree with those one already holds
is a recipe, it goes without saying, for ignorance.
As for the question of whether Americans believe everything they see on
television, fifteen minutes in a bar ought to settle the matter. Only political
frustration, a relentlessly abstract quality of mind, or lack of any exposure to
everyday lifeor a combination of these disabilitiescould have led Lichtman to
say that the great majority of Americans absorb, as though by osmosis, the vast
majority of Administration deceits, lies, and distortions... It would be hard to find
a single statement that better exemplifies the plight of the Leftits diminished
capacity not only for rigorous analysis of social conditions but for ordinary
observation, its suffocating self-righteousness, its inability to summon up the
elementary political realism that would begin by trying to understand the basis of
its adversaries political appeal, above all its lack of any political prospects of its
own. If the vast majority of Americans are as easily fooled as Lichtman thinks,
they will never accept socialism, except at the point of a gun, It is hard to escape
the conclusion that socialismcareful now!appeals to Lichtman, as it appeals
to so many of those radicals who covet reputation of radicalism without its
attendant risks, just because it is mildly unpopular (though destined, of course, for
ultimate success) and therefore retains a faint afterglow of the dangerous and
forbidden, at the same time providing all the intellectual comfort of a safe,
predictable, fixed, unchanging body of dogmas.
Unable to explain the persistence of religion, pro-family attitudes, and an
ethic of personal accountability except as an expression of false
consciousness the Left finds itself without a following.
Readers will find my position confusing only if they persist in thinking that
any position not immediately assimilable to left-wing orthodoxy belongs
automatically to the Right. The experience of adversity, under Reagan, has
intensified the demand for ideological conformity on the Left and thus encouraged
this kind of thinking, always appealing to those insecure people who yearn for the
excitement of taking sides in the eternal struggle between the forces of progress
and the forces of regression. Which side are you on, boys? When the sides
were more clearly drawn, the question made some sense. It still makes sense if it
means that people who profess a disinterested love of truth and justice ought to be
skeptical, on principle, of the claims of wealth and power and predisposed to side
with the underdog. But the Left long ago lost any vivid interest in underdogs. It is
allergic to anything that looks like a lost cause. Such moral authority as the Left
enjoyed in the past derived from its identification with the oppressed; but its
appeal to intellectuals, unfortunately, has usually rested on its claim to stand on the
side of history and progress. What added to the thrill of choosing sides was the
certainty that in socialism one chose he winning side, the cooperative
commonwealth lure to prevail in the long run. The only morally defensible
choice, however, is the choice of mercy, charity, and forgiveness over the worlds
principalities and powers, the choice of truth against ideology. To make that
choice today means to reject Left and Right alike.
For those who refuse the choice when it is presented in this way, my argument
remains a muddle. (Others lave been able to follow it without difficulty.) The
muddle, Im afraid, is in my critics beads. Lichtman pounces on what he sees as a
contradiction: on the one hand I reject the attempt to define the family out of
existence on the other hand I concede that most people no longer live in nuclear
families. But the improvisation of new living arrangements in the wake of marital
breakdown does not mean that these new living arrangements can best be
understood as alternatives to the conventional family or that most people view
them in that way. Lillian Rubin blunders into the same contradiction. In her
dreadfully confused discussion of choice and constraint, she reminds me,
unnecessarily, that single-parent families often arise out of necessity, not choice.
But this was precisely my point when I said that Orwellian sloganeering about
alternative lifestyles and the new diversity of family types serves to disguise
marital breakup as an exhilarating new form of freedom, just as some sloganeering
about womens liberation disguises the economic necessity that forces women
into the labor market. My intention is to promote plain speech and discourage
euphemism. To this end, my essay distinguished between two types of living
arrangements misleadingly referred to as alternative forms of the family: those
makeshift arrangements single-parent households, blended families) that usually
result from divorce or desertion and those arrangements (gay marriages,
informal cohabitation, single persons living alone) freely chosen by people who
reject family life altogether. By confusing these two quite different categories)
Rubin loses the logic of my argument and then complains that there is no logic
here.
Let me try to restate my argument about the family in a form my critics can
follow. In the interest of simplicity, I want to confine most of my attention to the
first category of families. The second can be easily disposed of. Single persons
living alone obviously cant be described very well as families (though people
have tried). As for informal cohabitation, even if we could agree to call it a
marriage of sorts, we would still have no reason to call it a family. In every
society known to anthropology, with a few much-debated exceptions, a family
consists of a man and woman united by marriage and living with their offspring. It
is impossible to discuss family without reference to marriage, but it is also
impossible to discuss it as if it were marriage and nothing more. Clearly it means
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a marriage plus children. Any other type of family is just word play.
That leaves us with the first category. No one can object to the designation of
blended families, extended families, or even, perhaps, to single-parent households
as families. The question is whether these arrangements represent alternatives to
the traditional family or its ruins. I think it would be hard to show that people
have I elected these arrangements in the spirit of social pioneering. All the
evidence suggests that people prefer more conventional domestic arrangements but
find it hard to hold them together. What is misleading is not so much the
description of new arrangements as families but the additional claim that people
now prefer alternative families to the traditional nuclear family. On the
contrary, most people still seem to cherish the stability associated with the
traditional family, even though this ideal no longer conforms very well to
everyday experience.
People still cherish the stability of long-term marital and intergenerational
commitments, in other words, but find little support for them in a capitalist
economy or in the prevailing ideology of individual rights. Liberal societies tend
to undermine family life, even though most of them profess a sentimental
attachment to family values. This tendency has been present from the very
beginning of the liberal capitalist order, in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the first place, the family wage was a poor substitute for the self-sustaining
domestic economy destroyed by industrialism. Not only did wages often fall short
of familys actual requirements, but the family wage-system had the effect,
precisely when it was most successful, of making women economically dependent
on men an unhealthy state of affairs.
In the second place, the ideology of individual rights was deeply opposed to
family values (although theright has never grasped this point). By defining
the individual as a rational calculator of his own advantage, liberal ideology made
it impossible to conceive of any form of association not based on the calculation of
mutual advantage; that is, on a contract. There is no place in liberalism, or at best
an insecure and precarious place, for those forms of association based on
spontaneous cooperation. When people start to argue bout their rights, about
receiving their fair share of goods, spontaneous cooperation breaks down. When
cooperation breaks down, conversely, people start to argue about their rights. It is
less important to try to establish which came first, historically, than to recognize
the antipathy between a contractual view of association, specifically of marriage
and the family, and a view, on the other hand, that regards a promise not as a
contractual obligation but as a test of character. According to the first way of
looking at things, you keep a promise as long as it works out to your advantage or
in a variant of this prudential morality only marginally superiorbecause it is
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desirable for you to establish the reputation of keeping promises. The second
view, by contrast, refuses to regard promise-keeping as a matter of social
convenience. It takes the position that promise-keeper, as K. R. Minogue puts it
in The Liberal Mind, has a different character from a promise-breaker, and [that]
this character can only be adequately described if we consider it in moral terms.
As products of a liberal culture, we find it difficult to understand the importance
other political traditions place on spontaneous cooperation and the value of
promises. For the Greeks, the capacity to make promises was almost the definition
of a political animal. Feudalism rested on a different but equally powerful
conception of the importance of binding oaths. The modern conception, on the
other handwhich is profoundly apoliticalis that the capacity for rational
choice, rational calculation of utility and personal advantage, is what defines the
citizen or the consenting adult, as we say. The modern conception gives little
support to the binding promises that underlie the family, especially when we add to
the ideology of individual rights the widely accepted belief in the universal
obligation to be happy. Liberal ideology not only gives little support to the family,
it cannot even make sense of the family, an institution that appears irrational in the
sense that its members ideally do not think of their own interests and of the rights
designed to protect them, and in the further sense that they promise to sustain each
other through a lifetime. What folly!
The whole tendency of modern society, of modern liberalism in particular,
consigns family life (by any reasonable definition of family life) to the realm of
nostalgia. Note that I dont blame the instability of family life on feminism.
Since feminism is an expression of well-founded grievances, and since the
economic and ideological assault on the foundations of family life antedated
emergence of a feminist movement, it would be foolish to blame feminism for the
collapse of the family. But it is equally foolish to pretend that feminism is
compatible with the family. Feminism is itself an outgrowth of liberalism, among
other things, and it shares liberalisms belief in individual rights, contractual
relations, and the primacy of justice, all of which make it impossible to understand
the nature or the value of spontaneous cooperation.
Spontaneous associations like the family institutionalize (in the form of promises,
oaths, covenants) a willingness to accept the consequences of your actions in the
case of the family, the act of procreation. The family implicates the older
generation in the life of the younger. It counters the tendency, highly developed in
humans and especially among human males, to run away from responsibility for
the young. The family is cultures answer to the peculiar structure of human
biology, to the absence of sexual periodicity which makes it possible for humans to
breed with abandon, and to the prolonged dependence of the human young. The
combination of these two biological traits would be fatal to the prospects for
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