Chapter IV. The crisis of the family in the West
Post-liberalism as an attempt to overcome
the crisis of family
In order to understand the post-liberal approach to family, one needs to recall the essence of the liberal approach. Common knowledge is that the ideology of liberalism rests on three main theses. Firstly, the idea of the free and rational individual is proclaimed. The individual’s rights are asserted to stand above the rights of the state, the society, the collective. Secondly, this truth is held to belong to the category of the universal. Thirdly, the state is not supposed to interfere in the individual’s affairs; it must at all times stay at least neutral. When applied to the family, this all means that the individual himself decides how to build his family relations, the value of the personality being higher than the value of the family. Liberals don’t reject the institution of marriage itself (since it formed historically), but they oppose intervention by the state in the process of family life, including the process of bringing up and providing for children. In other words, they demand that the state stay detached from the family, while the family in turn has no obligations to the state. In other words, family is free enterprise dependent only on the entrepreneurs themselves (husband and wife). This approach, naturally, implies support for common-law marriage, free love, homosexual “marriage.” This position is usually held in the USA by the Democratic party; its presidential candidates are supported by all stripes of homosexuals.
This liberal approach to family matters dominated throughout the second half of the 20th century, until some part of ruling elite in the West recognized that unless some bounds are imposed on liberalism, the state itself may go the way of the family. This “discovery” was made much later than it should have, since mass immigration into the Western countries, especially from Asia and Africa, helped smooth over the general picture in the family sphere. By the start of the 21st century, however, not even these torrents of immigration could conceal the obvious crisis of the family and the subsequent decrease of the indigenous population in the Western countries.
A reaction to the liberals’ ideological postulates can be seen in the strengthening of the ideology of religious conservatism (or “civil Republicanism” – same thing), which is represented in the USA by the Republican party. George Bush Jr.’s two terms of Presidency were ensured largely by the conservative part of the American electorate who hold a traditional approach to family life issues and to the institution of marriage in general. Their ideology is based on the “divine” postulates in the Bible: family is instituted by God, it is sacred, etc. They all oppose homosexuality as contrary to God’s plan; the late Pope John Paul II, in particular, reminded in his speech to the pilgrims in Vatican that marriage is a “human” and a “divine” gift that the society has a duty to protect. "In our times, a misunderstood sense of rights has sometimes disturbed the nature of the family institution and conjugal bond itself," he said.
In July of 2003, the Vatican issued a 12-page denunciation of same-sex marriage. The document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that Catholic politicians had a "moral duty" to oppose laws granting legal rights to gay couples. "Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior ... but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity," the document said.[1]
Even though the Christian milieu, particularly its Anglican denomination, by now has some obvious renegades, such as the openly gay bishop Gene Robinson (New Hampshire), the general policy of the Church is directed against perversions in family life. This line was confirmed by the new Pope, Benedict XVI. It is that rare instance when the Church’s position coincides with the laws of nature.
The theorists of the communitarian movement make pronouncements in much the same vein, albeit from a different perspective; their ideas are adopted for implementation by some political leaders in major Western states, for example Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Although almost all of these theorists touched on the problems of family in one way or another, the most frequently referenced author is Amitai Etzioni – possibly because his works are publicistic for the most part.
The communitarians’ attitude toward family consists of two components: one political, the other moral-ethical. Everyone who is familiar with the works of communitarian theorists, starting with John Rawls’ famous book A Theory of Justice, will recall that they reject the modern capitalist state, contrasting to it the community, in which all contradictions of modern capitalism are resolved on a fair basis. It follows from this that the communitarian family, too, is a building block, or cell, of that great community – it is something like a mini-community in which the true citizen is formed. The family’s community character is determined by the cooperation between the two partners who are involved in the upbringing of children based on equality and mutual responsibility. While in the liberals’ worldview the concept of responsibility is altogether absent, the communitarians accord it an important place, since the quality of the entire community depends on the quality of the family. Easily found in this approach is both an anti-individualistic and an anti-state thrust. The latter is stressed in the assertion that only a communitarian family can bring up a true citizen rather than just a consumer of the kind constantly reproduced by the bourgeois family within the framework of the capitalist state.
However, the family as such is not the goal but rather a means – towards what? Toward development of the personality. In the communitarians’ opinion, the purpose of the human life is the revealing of one’s “I”, the cognizance of one’s essence, the realization of “selfness.” The family facilitates this realization – primarily from the physical, or, to use the word fashionable today, the therapeutic perspective. Theorists have discovered that “people have begun to see marriage as part of the domain of mental health.”[2] It also turns out, notes Entzioni, that unmarried people are for the most part unhappy, physically and mentally ill, and have a higher mortality rate (107).
As for the moral aspect of the family’s value, it consists in the fact that the “I” itself, the “Ego” is only nurtured and formed in “relationships”, within which framework ripen the concepts of responsibility, justice and equality.
This is all correct, of course. However, all these “correctnesses” turn shaky as soon as the communitarians get around to analyzing the problems of divorce. What is the cause of divorce?
If marriage impedes the forming of the personality and the achievement of the more bonded and realized feeling of true self, then there is every ground for divorce. Such disharmony can be caused by the difference in the spouses’ development vectors, i.e. changes in their perspectives in approach to values of life, uneven intellectual development, and even changes in the ideological and political persuasions of the husband and the wife. All this can destroy the family’s unity and lead to a split. As Helen Reece writes, “Where the spouses do not grow and change in tandem, they may be different selves from the ones who married in a very fundamental sense.” (116)
On first sight, such reasoning is identical to mine presented in the previous chapter. In actual fact they are substantially different, and the essence of this difference lies in the fact that my justification of the right to divorce applies to the personality whose development benefits the society as a whole through the person’s participation in science, art and politics. As for the communitarian personality, its goal is self-knowledge, self-deepening, the revealing of its true self or authenticity (those authors’ favorite word). That is, the emphasis is made on the personality as an individuality without its directedness toward the society’s interests. (To me, that is no longer a personality). Who needs such a “self-penetrating” personality? The usual answer is: the personality itself. Such “self-revelation” for some reason brings to my mind right away a picture of a man contemplating his own navel in the process of mystical exercise – stuff practiced by the followers of Buddhism who manage to penetrate through their navels into cosmos, apparently for the purpose of communicating with black and other holes. There is practically no difference between such “immersers-into-themselves” and the liberal-individualists; both are useless. This approach has in fact led the communitarians into the liberals’ camp. Individualism has conquered the community man.
On the issue of divorce, the communitarians have also diverged from the civil republicans, who are extremely negative about divorces, believing that family values trump the individuals’ interests. By the way, the divorce rate is the lowest in religious communities (founded by religious communitarians).
Curiously, the family reform legislation introduced in the British Parliament several years ago under the name Part II of the Family Law Act (inspired by post-liberal ideas), is still not adopted mainly because it does not specify clearly the responsibility (the document even uses the word “fault”) of the initiator of divorce. The grounds for divorce examined above appeared utterly unconvincing to the legislators.[3]
Still, it has to be admitted that at least the Anglo-Saxon countries (the USA, the UK) are indeed drifting away from liberal ideas and are increasingly inclined toward the ideas of post-liberalism which, albeit not always consistently so, are nonetheless a step forward toward strengthening family and marriage. Naturally, the main regulator of this process in capitalist societies can only be money. In the United Kingdom, for example, in recent years the costs of divorce cases have increased dramatically, to an average figure of about ₤13,000. In conflict situations, this figure jumps to ₤24,000 and more. Working in the same direction is the principle of equal division of marital property, approved by the House of Lords in the year 2000. The matter is, any divorce usually results in substantially lower income for the woman. Since this principle has been signed into law, “the wealthier husbands are thinking a lot more seriously about the consequences of having affairs,”[4] which is one of the most common official grounds for divorce. Be that as it may, after the adoption of the indicated principle the number of divorces among the rich has dropped.
Many options are suggested for strengthening the family; some of them appear to be perfectly naïve. For example, the already mentioned Danah Zohar believes that should the spouses communicate with each other correctly and on a regular basis, in the process they will reveal new qualities that will make them interesting to each other. Others believe that, on the contrary, it is not worth going into the reasons for disagreements – better to just forget the episode and go on living as if nothing happened. Either advice may prove useful to some family or other, but they certainly don’t resolve the problems faced by the institution of marriage in the West on the whole.
Among the multitude of proposals for strengthening the family, the greatest attention is accorded to the rights of children (children come first) and women. Currently, for example, the possibility is being considered of extending maternity leave from six to nine months. Various options of reforms in support of single mothers are discussed in rather much detail. As for men – various ways are examined for involving them in family affairs, especially in the upbringing of children based on equal rights with the women[5]. I already came across reports saying that in Sweden men skip work to sit home tending to their sick children more often than women, and are very much willing to do so. Actively debated in the press is the necessity of organizing courses for couples that intend to get married. Law firms and divorce specialists have started instructing spouses in the organization of their financial affairs, including their retirement accounts, in the event of divorce. That is, already at the moment of wedding the spouses must be thinking about preserving their incomes after divorce. Briefly, the family is no longer regarded as the natural union of a loving couple, but rather as a matrimonial-financial measure that is beneficial to all parties (spouses, children and the state).
In the capitalist society, where private property is the meaning of everything, the problems of morals, to say nothing of love, are relegated to the second or third level of importance, as stated with perfect justification by Engels in his famous book. It was only under socialism that the husband leaving his wife walked away from “all property” without giving it a second thought. That was socialism; capitalism has different rules. With their help, to some degree, in some countries at least (the USA, France) in recent years the most glaring manifestations of the decay of family were somewhat reduced. Still, this did not put a stop to the general dynamics of the crisis; that process continues, and nowhere does it have a more acute form than in Russia.
[1] http://lenta.ru/world/2003/12/29/pope/
[2] Quoted from: Reese. Divorcing Responsibly, 90.
[3] For more detail, see the already mentioned book by Reese, who examines family problems precisely from the perspective of this reform.
[4] Quoted from: The Economist, March 5, 2005, 37.
[5] See: Social Policy and Social Justice: the IPPR Reader.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)