In societies of abundance, the old argument — that capitalism consumes the basis of its own legitimacy — takes on a new twist in the claim that the rights demanded in an era of abundance erode the family structures on which social stability depends.7 The rights sought in eras of abundance are in fact demands to throw off the order of restraint and repression that prevailed in eras of scarcity. Can family life survive this revolutionary demand for freedom? Is it possible that rights are destroying the very institution that teaches us moral virtue?
A good place to begin the story of the impact of modern rights on intimate life is with divorce. All modern societies liberalized their marriage laws in the 1960s as part of a wave of social legislation, which also included welfare reform and the decriminalization of consensual same-sex activity between adults. In Canada, the Divorce Act of 1968, the first national divorce law in our history, permitted termination of marriage on grounds of adultery and cruelty or if couples had already lived apart three years. When the act was amended in 1985, this waiting period was reduced to one year.8 This provision effectively introduced no-fault divorce into Canadian life and the impact was felt immediately. By the 1990s, one marriage in three in Canada was ending in divorce. The results, for children, have been dramatic. It is estimated that half of the children currently growing up in developed nations will see their parents divorce by the time they are eighteen.9 Most troubling is the possibility that rising divorce rates are correlated with rising levels of child abuse. This would be the case if children turned out to be more at risk of abuse from step-parents than from their natural kin. It is not clear whether child abuse is actually increasing, but if there were a correlation between such an increase and rising divorce rates, then the rights revolution would be having disturbing effects indeed.
As divorce rates have risen, so have rates of cohabitation, couples living together outside of marriage.10 The rise of cohabitation reveals the new rights that have been asserted in intimate life since the 1960s: the right to found and dissolve intimate partnerships at will and to do so without the intervention of church, state, or family. Cohabitation was a declaration of sovereignty by the couple, an assertion that they, rather than the state, would define the terms of their relationship. In fact, of course, as these relationships foundered, cohabiting couples, like married ones, found themselves returning to the state (i.e., to the courts) to seek the rights to maintenance, child support, and family property provided by formal marriage. Indeed, as the incidence of cohabitation has increased, the pressure has grown to accord cohabiting couples the same rights as married ones. So the course of the rights revolution has had an ironic outcome. Couples might have wanted to keep the state out of their relationships at the point of getting together, but they discovered that they needed to get the state back in as an adjudicator when these relationships fell apart.
Forty years into the rights revolution, we are no longer sure what role courts and legislatures should play in family life. Should the law be promoting a certain standard of family life, or should it just be serving in loco parentis for children at risk from family violence and breakdown? This issue has turned many people’s politics upside down. Feminists who once insisted that the state had no business in their bedrooms now clamour for state intervention to protect women against family violence. Conservatives who once denounced the nanny state now plead for government to enforce frayed moral standards. As for liberals, many secretly wonder whether their revolution has gone too far.
The controversy over whether there should be laws against corporal punishment in families brings out all our perplexities about the relationship between state and family life. Some people believe that a state ban on corporal punishment would align the force of the law on the side of a crucial moral principle. Others maintain that punishing parents who use physical correction against children would be an invasion of family life. An Ontario court judge recently ruled against outlawing physical correction of children on the grounds that it infringed on the family’s essential margin of autonomy.11 It seems clear that the right of the child that needs defending is the same one accorded adults: the right to live a life free of fear. Children should respect their parents but never fear them, for fear always casts a shadow of mistrust over love and care. Children will never trust the love of someone who has made them frightened. So we do not want to strike children unless there is simply no other way to stop them from doing harm to themselves or others. But as soon as we concede that some forms of mild and non-harmful physical punishment may occasionally be necessary, it becomes difficult to enforce a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate correction. Do we need to? There are already sufficient laws to protect children against physical abuse, and these allow the state to take children into care. So their rights already have protection. Additional legislation may only multiply the number of wrongful prosecutions of parents, which would weaken rather than strengthen family life.
What this story illustrates best, I think, is that the state has only a limited capacity to protect children. We already have a vast apparatus for child protection — social workers, welfare officers, family physicians, court-appointed guardians, and so on — but despite the (mostly) conscientious efforts of those who work in this area, our society continues to be disgraced and shamed by the unheard screams of children. Sometimes these cries are very close by: through the party wall, across the garden fence, in the next aisle of the supermarket. What this says to me is that rights are not enough. The welfare state is not enough. Indeed, sometimes we enact rights in the statute books and the result only weakens our responsibilities. This might be the case with children in danger of abuse. The child-protection bureaucracy, necessary as it is, sometimes confiscates responsibilities that properly lie in society itself, with neighbours, friends, and good-hearted strangers. Ultimately, child protection is not up to the state; it is up to us. If we see a child being beaten, we must raise the alarm. A rights revolution is meaningless unless it calls forth our civic courage to intervene when we know we should.
Inevitably, the rights revolution — and the sexual revolution that went with it — produced backlash. Since the mid-1970s, conservative politicians and social analysts have been arraigning the liberal reforms of the 1960s and condemning their consequences. The backlash has reversed the usual conservative position on rights. Conservatives used to be strong exponents of individual rights, since rights define the limits of state intervention and conservatives were anxious to set limits on the power of the post-war state. Liberals, on the other hand, used to be more hostile to individual rights talk, because some rights, especially property and privacy rights, were invoked by conservatives to resist crucial liberal objectives, such as the establishment of graduated income tax and the creation of a welfare state. The revolution in family life has turned this alignment upside down. Now conservatives say that rights have gone too far, while liberals are trying to stay the course of a rights agenda.
The problem with liberal rights talk, conservatives argue, is that it individualizes people. Once people begin speaking about their rights, they start counting the costs of all relationships with other human beings that involve sacrifice. And family life is based on sacrifice: parents devoting years to the care of children when they might prefer to be furthering their own interests, and husbands and wives devoting themselves to each other when other persons and possibilities beckon.
This argument has something to say for it, but not much. Conservatives are wrong to suppose that rights talk invalidates sacrifice itself. Even we heartless liberals need intimacy and we know that we cannot have intimacy without sacrifice. These sacrifices, both moral and material, are worth bearing when they are borne mutually, when both partners share the load, and when the result of equal sacrifice is renewed affection. Much of the complaint about family life focuses not on sacrifice per se, but on inequality of sacrifice. This inequality is not imagined: it is painfully real. In Canada, statistics show that even now, after a generation of femin
ist progress, 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled, and the sick falls on women, most of whom receive no pay for these essential tasks.12 These enduring facts help us to see that the revolt against family life in the 1960s was a revolt not against sacrifice but against inequality of sacrifice. And to judge from the statistics, the revolution remains unfinished.
But feminism was much more than a revolt against inequalities of sacrifice. It was also a revolt against certain kinds of sacrifice, notably the sacrifice of female identity. Young women coming of age in the 1960s looked back on the lives of their own mothers, women who had come of age in the Depression and the Second World War, and felt that they had thrown away their lives for the sake of their husbands and children. The sacrifice that had been made was of their very selves. This was the cardinal wrong that had to be righted. When daughters raised this issue, the results were often painful. What daughters accusingly called sacrifice, some mothers poignantly felt as fulfilment, at least of a kind. But sometimes the confrontation between generations ended with both feeling the same sense of injustice.
As a man who came of age in the late 1960s, I was deeply affected by feminist rights talk, and by this reckoning between mothers and daughters. Like many men, I was soon to go through my own version of Fathers and Sons. The central idea I absorbed then — chiefly, if not exclusively, from feminism — was that each of us has a right to choose the life we lead and that we must fight to exercise this right against all comers. This could be called the ideal of authenticity.13 In the name of this ideal, we all went off to find ourselves. This meant getting away from family, career, and society, and going in search of the self’s authentic impulses. Sometimes the results were laughable: the 1960s cult of authenticity produced dull conformity in no time. We all went in search of ourselves and ended up in graduate school. Even those who dropped out tended to end up conforming to a nonconformist lifestyle.
For many of us, even those for whom the 1960s were either an episode or just a memory, the ideal of authenticity exerted a powerful influence on our very idea of what it was to have a life and a career. Authenticity taught us that we had a duty to ourselves and not just to others, and that in the face of a conflict between these two duties, we would sometimes have to choose for ourselves — against children, families, lovers, and friends.
So to summarize the argument so far, two moral ideas were the heart of the rights revolution in private life: first, that family sacrifice is unjust unless it is equal; and second, that each of us owes a duty to ourselves, and this is equal to the duty we owe to others. Let’s admit immediately that these were highly contentious values. Conservative social critics would argue that these ideals are just fancy ways to justify selfishness. What I have been calling the rights revolution, conservatives would dismiss as the permissive revolution. The cardinal vice of permissiveness is wanting rights without responsibilities: wanting sex without love, wanting intimacy without commitment, and worst of all, wanting children without being willing to care for them. Liberalism, so the argument goes, has made a devil’s bargain with permissiveness. In the name of an ethics of authenticity, rights talk is actually undermining the very possibility of moral behaviour, since it appears to authenticate every selfish impulse: to quit marriages when they don’t work, to abandon children when work calls, to flee responsibility when pleasure beckons. To make matters worse, conservative critics say, the state colludes in this selfishness by providing welfare benefits for unmarried mothers, so that the costs of irresponsibility are paid not by the guilty, but by the hard-pressed taxpayer.
When divorce is the norm, conservatives argue, children grow up in a moral world in which all trust is conditional, because betrayal is always possible.14 According to the conservative critique, we risk producing a future generation of children who trust so few people that they no longer start families themselves.
And even when families survived the permissive revolution, conservatives argue, they were damaged by it. The mistake was believing that the family could be run as a community of rights-bearing equals. Children are not the equals of their parents; they need limits and rules. Permissive parenting, on a rights-equality model, so it is argued, has produced a generation of young adults who came of age in the 1990s, never having learned the meaning of self-discipline.
Let us grant what we can to the conservative counterattack. Let us grant that freedom is not a licence to do whatever you please. Let us insist that fathers and mothers must know how to say the word no; that moral life for children begins with the understanding of limits; that any person who embarks upon the adventure of marriage must judge the result not by happiness alone, but by other, more arduous standards, such as staying the course. None of this is alien to the liberal temperament or inconsistent with a commitment to rights equality between men and women. Indeed, it is impossible to envisage marriage surviving at all unless both partners strive towards equality.
The conservative critique of permissiveness has its points, but it is reactionary in the strict meaning of the term. It wants to turn the clock back, and to do so by means of coercive legislation — such as making divorce more difficult and penalizing single parents — which would violate conservativism’s own commitments to the freedom of the individual. A liberal position is simply more consistent with that commitment. Moreover, a liberal rights culture does not obliterate responsibilities: it presumes them. To father a child is to shoulder responsibility for its upbringing. If a father abandons his family and fails to pay maintenance, he should be pursued and, if he still fails to pay up, punished. If pregnant mothers so abuse themselves with drugs and alcohol that they damage their children, they should feel the penalties of the law.15 A state whose child-protection agencies fail to pin responsibility on defaulting parents, and whose welfare institutions then mutely step in to cope with the consequences, is undermining the link between rights and responsibilities that makes a rights culture consistent with public order. On this issue, a liberal and a conservative will see eye to eye.
But on others, the divide is unbridgeable. What conservatives see as the collapse of the family, liberals view as its mutation into new forms. Nowadays, there are many types of good parents and many types of good families: nuclear, extended, single-parent, same-sex. The fact that there are many types of families does not mean that there are no longer any fixed standards about what a good family is. The test of goodness is loose but evident: it’s a community where each member receives and displays lifelong moral concern for the well-being of everyone else. The key is not love necessarily, or hugs, or sentimental Disney eyewash, but an enduring moral commitment. A child needs to feel that her development matters intensely to another person, and that this person will stay the course with her to ensure that she develops as best she can. What a liberal insists upon is the idea that it is possible to reconcile a commitment to absolute standards of care and responsibility in family life with a faith that these standards can be met by a wide variety of persons and a wide variety of possible family forms.
So-called family values, as propagated in the rhetoric of North American popular entertainment, pulpit sermonizing, and political homily, are a downright tyranny. They make people feel inadequate, ashamed, or guilty about their inability to conform to what is in fact a recent, post-war suburban norm of family domesticity.
We need family values all right, but the ones we actually need must be pluralistic. We need to understand that the essential moral needs of any child can be met by family arrangements that run the gamut from arranged marriages right through to same-sex parenting. Nature and natural instinct are poor guides in these matters. If good parenting were a matter of instinct, families wouldn’t be the destructive institutions they so often are. It is frequently the case that perfect strangers turn out to be better parents or step-parents than natural ones. This is not always the case, of course, as the incidence of abuse by step-parents attests.
The point is not to invalidate one type of parent. In
stead, it is to insist that ideology will not help us here: if we insist that one category or type of parent will always do a better job than any other, we are certain to be wrong. Same-sex parents have taught us that there is no necessary relationship between heterosexuality and good parenting. The question to be asked in every case is not what kind of sexual creatures these parents are, or even what kind of biological or other relationship they have to these children, but what kind of parents they are. The test of goodness here is the capacity for sustained moral concern and to be willing to make reasonable sacrifices for the sake of children’s interests. A family is not a bus station: children will not develop well when there is no continuity of care and concern. Continuity implies sacrifice but reasonable sacrifice doesn’t necessarily mean putting children’s interests first. No model of family life will work if it is based on unequal and unlimited sacrifice. As a moral training ground, families ought to teach the lesson that no one’s interests should automatically come first and certainly not the children’s.
Getting any of this to work is not easy. None of us is always capable of unconditional moral concern for another human being, but some surprising people routinely do it better than we do. Opening our eyes to the different ways other families work is more useful than despising those who do things differently. Pluralism does not mean relativism. It means humility.
But, conservatives say, even if one admits the viability of same-sex, single-parent, or divorced families, the problem is that these new family forms do not endure. They are eaten from within by the liberal ideology that family life should be satisfying, and that if it isn’t, each member should exercise their right of secession.
The Rights Revolution Page 9
