appendix 2 The Family as the Moral Foundation of Freedom:
The Forgotten Dimension of Liberalism
Paper presented at World Congress of Families II,
Geneva, Switzerland; November 14–17, 1999
Introduction
We gather today at a unique moment in human history. We are standing on an ever-shortening bridge from the second to the third millennium. Surely this is a time to take stock of what has gone before and what lies ahead.
In Europe and North America, we can look back at the century that we are leaving and take just satisfaction in having triumphed over the enemies of justice and freedom, first fascism and then communism. When we look beyond the Western world, we see a growing acceptance of Western institutions—not just our technology and market economy, but also our political institutions and principles of human freedom and equality. Turning our gaze to the future, the twenty-first century seems to hold forth a unique opportunity—the chance to harness the productivity of free markets with the freedom of representative democracy and the rule of law. Could it be that the utopias that seemed within man’s reach at the end of the last century will in fact be realized in the next?
For those who consider themselves the friends of liberal democracy—and I am one—this moment should be one of unprecedented optimism. And yet it is not. What happened?
Ironically, as the threats of fascism and communism recede into past, they have been replaced by an uneasy sense of an enemy within. A domestic decay seems to be undermining those very things that we cherish most—our relationships with one another: be it husband and wife; parent and child; grandparents and grandchildren; friends, neighbors and what we used to call “our fellow citizens.” In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”
This has been called the American paradox—not because it is unique to the US, but because it is there that the contrasts of the paradox are most vivid: the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind cannot stem the growth of poverty and crime in its own cities. The most advanced medical care system in history is not available to one-quarter of Americans. The nation that can send a man to the moon must live in gated communities at home. Old people strive to stay younger longer, and young people to get older faster.
The “American paradox” appears most clearly—and most terrifyingly—in the growing list of schoolyard shootings. The horror of these tragedies is that it is children—our own children—who shoot and are shot. Their crumpled little bodies are like mirrors—reflecting back on us the culture from which they came; and we see ourselves, dimly but disturbingly, as somehow complicit in this slaughter of the innocents. How could this have happened? What is going wrong?
In the wake of the most recent of these tragedies—the shootings this past April at Columbine High School in Colorado—Peggy Noonan captured this sense of social unraveling: “The kids who did this are responsible,” she said. “They did it. They killed. But,” she added, “they came from a place and a time, and were yielded forth by a culture.”1 What kind of culture was that? According to Noonan,
What walked into Columbine High School Tuesday was the culture of death… The boys who did the killing … inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam … Think of it this way. Your child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio; the headlines [and pictures] on the newsstands, on the magazines, on the ad on the bus as it whizzes by—all are waves. The fish—your child—is bombarded and barely knows it. … This is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture.
Of course, much of the finger-pointing that went on was pointed at Hollywood, and rightfully so. Sex and violence are nothing new. But their commercialization in the mass media is. And here, Noonan noted something new after Columbine. This time, Hollywood didn’t defend themselves with its usual excuse: “‘If you don’t like it, change the channel.’ They now realize something they didn’t realize ten years ago: there is no channel to change to. You could sooner remove an ocean than find such a channel.”2
Public Morality: Liberalism’s Forgotten Dimension
How has our liberal culture of freedom degenerated into a culture of death? There are, of course, multiple causes: secularization, commercialization, urbanization, technology, the rise of rights and the decline of duties, and of course the weakening of the family. But behind these more immediate causes is a proximate cause: we—not just the Americans but all of us—have forgotten the moral foundations of freedom.
Liberalism’s emphasis on individual liberty and equality have obscured the role and importance of the family in sustaining free societies. Liberal democracy is usually understood as only a political or an economic project; a collection of equal, rights-bearing individual citizens; or a collection of individuals rationally pursuing their economic self-interest in free markets. As Joseph Schumpeter said “Capitalism saps the private virtues that transcend self-interest, and motivate citizens to defend free institutions.”3
This view of liberal democracy as simply a political or an economic project is incomplete. Liberal democracy is also a social project. Just as democracy presupposes a certain political and economic infrastructure, so it requires a certain moral infrastructure. Most of the intellectual founders of modern liberalism recognized the need for “citizens with republican character” and the role of the natural family in producing public morality.
According to Rousseau, it is the experience of family that attaches children first to their relatives and then to their fellow citizens. Conventional bonds, he states, can only be built on natural bonds. He describes the family as “la petite patrie,” and challenges his readers if it is not “the good son, the good husband and the good father who makes the good citizen.”4
American Founding Father James Madison, while a realist about the low side of human nature, also recognized that man is capable of living a life based on rationally conceived principles of justice: “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”5
Alexis de Tocqueville, perhaps the pre-eminent analyst of the dangers as well as the opportunities of modern democracy, was adamant in his defence of the democratic family.6 “No free communities existed without morals,” Tocqueville wrote, and families are the wellsprings of moral sentiment.7
In sum, two hundred years ago, at the beginning of this radical experiment called liberal democracy, there was a consensus that a free society presupposes free citizens, and that the family played an important role in producing “republican character.” The founders’ understanding of liberal democracy as a three-dimensional project—combining a moral as well as a political and economic infrastructure—has been neglected for most of the twentieth century. The moral dimension of their thought was eclipsed by their more stirring appeals to individual liberty and equality. This forgetting of the moral foundations of freedom is the deeper source of our present problems.
Civil Society and Social Capital
Recently, however, the moral dimension of liberal democracy—and the family’s crucial role in it—has been rediscovered by social scientists. This new body of social science recognizes the importance of the natural family to a properly functioning democracy. The key concepts in this new field of research are “civil society” and “social capital.”
Civil society is the network of voluntary associations that fill the gap between individual citizens and the state. These associations are voluntary, and have a wide variety of purposes—social, economic, religious, recreational, political, and educational. Civil society produces the social connectedness and trust that allows individuals to co-operate for mutual benefit and happiness.
Civil society is important because it produces “social capital.” Social capital is a new expression for an old concept—civic virtue or public morality. At a minimum, it means not doing harm: obeying the laws and respecting the rights of others. More expansively, it denotes doing good by helping others; an altruism born of the knowledge that one’s own happiness is connected to the well-being of those around us. Social capital focuses attention on the institutions that generate “the habits of the heart”; that transform the “me” into the “we.” The most important source of social capital is the family.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is the leading exponent of this new school. Putnam’s research claims that societies in which civil society is strong enjoy better schools, faster economic development, lower crime, and more effective government.8 Putnam goes on to argue that American democracy is threatened by the weakening of civil society and declining social capital.
Putnam’s work is complemented by the work of sociologists such as Sara McLanahan of Princeton University, David Popenoe of Rutgers University, and Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation. Their research measures the effects of family breakdown on children. McLanahan’s research shows that children who grow up with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who are raised in a household with both of their biological parents.9 Popenoe’s studies reach similar conclusions.10
McLanahan’s studies found that children from single-parent families are twice as likely to drop out of school; twice as likely to have a child before the age of twenty; and twice as likely to be unemployed in their late teens and early twenties. This trend holds regardless of family income, educational background, race, or whether the resident parent remarries. There are also higher correlations with drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and criminal behaviour.
What children from single-parent families lose, according to McLanahan, are parental guidance and attention, as well as equal access to community resources. She describes this as a deficit of social capital—”an asset that is created and maintained by relationships of commitment and trust.” Social capital, McLanahan concludes, can be just as important as financial capital in promoting children’s future success. While Putnam and McLanahan are Americans, the importance of preserving social capital—and the natural two-parent family—is beginning to find its way into public policy debates elsewhere.11
These new truths—and really, they are old truths—are good news. After years of producing research that contributed to the weakening of civil society, social scientists are finally recognizing the social and economic value of the traditional family and the moral infrastructure that it helps to sustain.
The New Egalitarians
If the rediscovery of the social value of the family is good news, there is bad news on another front. There is another stream of modernity—represented primarily by the gender feminists and gay rights movement—that targets the natural family as public enemy number one. According to the feminist-gay gospel, the great evils of this world are sexism and homophobia, and their breeding ground is the traditional family. Hence, the gay-feminist project has become a social engineering project—to use the coercive power of the state to undermine the existing family and to reconstruct in its place their gender-equal utopias.
These New Egalitarians, as I call them, travel under the banner of human rights. But what exactly do they mean by human rights? Those standards of moral right and wrong that transcend dominant opinion in any one nation? Those minimum conditions of civilized conduct that are recognized by all religions and all codes of ethics? Natural rights—those first principles of individual freedom that limit both what governments can do and how?
No. This new version of human rights has been reduced to a single, monotheistic principle: equality. Moreover, this new equality means not so much economic levelling as moral levelling; not the old Left’s socialist program of state-coerced redistribution of wealth, but the new Left’s embrace of moral relativism. The embrace of moral relativism is evident in most of the new “human rights” issues: abortion, homosexuality, pornography, euthanasia, legalizing recreational use of drugs.
On all of these issues, we are now told that “freedom of choice” is a basic human right. Competing concerns about the effect of that choice on family members and neighbours—not to mention the character and happiness of the chooser—are dismissed as secondary. The important thing, we are told, is not what I choose, but that I be completely free to choose it. It is the act of choosing, not the contents of that choice, that matters. The freedom of choice principle is tarted-up as an issue of “individual human dignity,” regardless of how undignified or socially destructive the actual choice may be.
The new role of moral relativism in the redefinition of human rights is obvious in such issues as abortion and gay rights. But it is also curiously evident in the death penalty debate. Many of the opponents of capital punishment denounce it as a violation of human rights. Yet these same people, with few exceptions, have no problem with other contemporary forms of taking of human life—such as abortion or doctor-assisted suicide.
Their opposition to capital punishment is not based on the sanctity of human life, a traditional human rights position. Rather, as David Frum recently pointed out, “what offends them is not that the death penalty kills, but that it judges. They object not to a specific punishment, but to the very ideal of justice.”12
Here is the great paradox in this “new improved” version of human rights. Whereas human rights once stood for something objective and eternal, now it stands for the subjective and the temporal. Whereas once human rights pointed toward what is right always and everywhere, regardless of government policy or public opinion, now it means “what I want, here and now.”
I can assure you that no other civilization in the history of mankind—East or West, North or South—has ever had such a low and vulgar definition of the good.
The New Egalitarians further debase the value of the human rights standard by stretching it to cover their most recent cause-du-jour. Despite “great progress,” we are routinely told, human rights are still under attack around the globe: Kosovo, Tiananmen Square, Rwanda, East Timor—and yes, in Ohio and Alberta! Suddenly genocide and ethnic cleansing are on a par with supporting private religious schools; torture and political prisoners are equated with opposing pay equity; the Holocaust is lumped together with opposition to state-endorsement of homosexual rights. Indeed, there is hardly an issue on the feminist or gay-rights agenda that is NOT presented as a “human rights issue.”
Such rhetorical overkill has become the stock in trade of the so-called Human Rights movement. Its bombastic and self-serving moral imperatives are destroying the very meaning of human rights. Moralistic inflation has the same effect as monetary inflation—it devalues the currency.
A final distinguishing characteristic of the New Egalitarians is their love affair with non-representative, non-accountable institutions: courts, rights bureaucracies, and recently the United Nations. Their recourse to the coercive authority of non-accountable institutions is not by accident. The principal obstacles to the achievement of this brave new world are the present middle-class occupants of the old world—people like us. Since we refuse to be reconstructed voluntarily, they must rely on institutions whose authority is not based on consent and whose exercise of power is not accountable. Just as Lenin had to create the Communist Party as the “Vanguard of the Proletariat” to construct Marx’s workers’ paradise, so the courts (and other non-accountable institutions) have become the “Vanguard of the Intelligentsia” in the construction of the new egalitarian utopias.13
The Fabric of Freedom: Responsibility
The New Egalitarians like to present themselves as the party of freedom and accuse the defenders of family and traditional moral principles as authoritarian. This of course is absurd. The constant recourse to non-democratic institutions—courts and other non-accountable bureaucracies—discloses their true authoritarian bend.
But there is a subtler and more dangerous dimension to the moral levelling of the Egalitarians. Their mantra—”Freedom is the right to choose”—regardless of the content of that choice—certainly appears to make them the defenders of the private sphere of human freedom. This private-public distinction easily gives rise to confusion, and we can turn to Alexis de Tocqueville to sort out the truth of the matter.
Modern liberalism clearly expanded the scope of “the private”—individual liberty—by reducing the scope of “the public”—those aspects of individual activity subject to state regulation. Tocqueville, a self-confessed political liberal, approved this change as enhancing the exercise of human freedom. On the other hand, he also saw an implicit threat to liberty in the nascent social atomism that accompanies this change. Tocqueville captured the threat posed by the “privatization” of the regime in the novel phenomenon of “individualism.”
An unchecked individualism creates social atomism, a condition that actually favours the expansion of the powers of the state by increasing demands on it. The democratic despotism feared by Tocqueville would occur as civil society withered, leaving behind a mass of increasingly disassociated and self-seeking individuals on one side, and an increasingly powerful state on the other. Because such individuals no longer are inclined to take care of one another, the state’s “welfare function” expands accordingly. As individuals exercise less and less self-restraint in their actions toward their “neighbors,” the state’s police function continues to expand in order to protect personal and property rights.
Tocqueville feared that over time this trend threatened to destroy political liberty. To arrest this trend, Tocqueville recommended that matrix of institutions and traditions that fostered the self-dependence of families and local communities, and the ethical self-restraint of individuals. The family is one of these institutions. It is private in that it arises out of a voluntary association, is not part of the state, and is not (generally) subject to state regulation. However, its social consequences give it a political and thus a public significance.
If allowed to succeed, the New Egalitarians will lead us down the path to the soft despotism that Tocqueville both predicted and sought to deter. We will become like sheep rather than citizens. As the true friends of human liberty, we must oppose these crude forms of egalitarianism and libertarianism that emphasize rights while ignoring responsibilities. The weaker the bonds of civil society, the stronger those of the state. These trends must be reversed. Free societies require citizens who meet their responsibilities as well as exercise their rights.
Pro-Family Policies
To avoid the soft despotism of New Egalitarians, we must make enlightened family policy a cornerstone of the democratic state. We must incorporate the new truths of civil society and social capital into public policy.
We can do this in two ways. The first is to persuade our governments to require a “family impact” statement for every new policy or law that is being considered. Before legislation is voted on, there should be an investigation and written report that assesses its impact—positive, negative, or neutral—on the following aspects of family life:14
- Family income
- Family stability
- Family safety
- Parental rights and responsibilities—especially the right to educate their children in the moral and spiritual traditions of their choice.
Our governments already do this for the natural environment by requiring Environmental Impact Statements (EIS). Why not for the human environment?
At the Second World Congress in Geneva, Mr. Kevin Andrews, the Member of Parliament from Australia, went further still, recommending that governments adopt an explicit family policy.15 I would second this proposal. It would facilitate opening up the family dimension of economic policies, such as the threat posed to income security programs by our aging population. A more comprehensive approach would create opportunities to educate politicians and the public on the research that shows the positive economic impact of intact families16 and the negative family impact of big government and over-taxation.17
Secondly, we can identify a number of specific areas where pro-family, life-affirming, freedom-enhancing policies should be adopted and/or defended. These policies are based on the proven social advantages of two-parent families and need for a social environment that encourages and strengthens such families.
Personal income tax policies must be revised to support the traditional family rather than put it at a competitive disadvantage. Combined family income—not individuals’ income—should be the basis for calculating tax rates. This could be easily achieved by allowing income splitting between parents.
Parental child care must be put on an equal tax footing with commercial or public daycare. So-called “public daycare” should be discouraged. Instead, tax-credits for child care should be equally available to all parents—both those who look after their own children and those who choose child care service of their choice.
The family-choice principle should be extended to primary and secondary education. This can be achieved easily and efficiently by expanding the school voucher programs. The state maintains responsibility for the universal availability of primary and secondary education, but parents are given the power to choose the kind of school they want. We know that state monopolies provide inferior service in every other field of human endeavour. Why do we continue to support it in education? This is especially true when we know that the New Egalitarians have targeted the public education system as a primary instrument for their social engineering.
On the subject of education, we must bring back education in moral character that includes more than just toleration. Toleration is an important virtue, but hardly the only one. Under the cult of “non-judgmentalism,” we have allowed toleration to crowd out all the other virtues that we value in fellow human beings: honesty, courage, generosity, industriousness, fidelity, modesty, compassion, chastity, moderation. We must help our children to recognize what we all know as adults: that there are otherwise noble individuals who are intolerant; and also very tolerant individuals who are otherwise moral scoundrels and a source of sorrow for all who depend on them.
We must support politicians and political parties that will restrict the explosion of hardcore pornography that has flooded into our societies—especially child pornography. The pornography industry is central to the culture of death. It degrades and harms the people who are used to make these films, and corrupts those who consume it. It teaches us to use others as a means to our own end—pleasure. Since much of this material falls into the hands of impressionable minors, it leads them to confuse sex with love and coarsens relations between the sexes. All of these effects undermine marriage and the family.
On the abortion issue, we must try to win back the ground we have lost in recent decades in the battle for public opinion. In North America, at least, it seems to me that this will best be done by accepting “the right to choose” status quo and refocusing on increasing the probability that young women make the right choice—life. This can be done directly by supporting “informed choice” legislation and mounting the kind of paid media advertising that addresses the issue of choice in a direct and personal manner. Here I have in mind the powerful, thirty-second television spots developed by pro-life groups in Michigan that have helped reduce the rate of abortions among teenagers in that state.
There are also indirect policy options. We should take advantage of the new emphasis in public health on fetal alcohol syndrome. Similarly, the growing acceptance of “open adoption”—which emphasizes the mother’s ongoing responsibility for her child—should be well publicized among teenage women. These non-coercive steps would help raise public awareness about life-before-birth and help to nudge public opinion in a pro-life direction.
Last but not least, marriage laws should be strengthened: both by making it more difficult to become married and more difficult to dissolve a marriage. The covenant marriage option adopted recently in some American states appears to be a promising option since it naturally appeals to the optimism of young, engaged couples. Many churches have strengthened their marriage preparation courses. This development should be encouraged and extended to non–church based courses.
On the subject of marriage, I would conclude by stressing the importance of resisting the growing pressure to accept so-called homosexual or gay marriage. Homosexuals have—or should have—the same rights to individual freedom and personal privacy that the rest of us enjoy. But they should not have more. Enlisting the coercive power of the state to force people to “approve” homosexual relations is the antithesis of toleration. Toleration loses any meaning if we are not allowed to continue to disapprove of what we tolerate!
As for gay marriage, it will simply further weaken the institution of marriage and fuel the growing number of fatherless children. As David Frum recently observed, most governments will try to minimize the political costs of legislating gay marriage by framing it in euphemistic terms and extending it to cover a variety of co-habitating adults, including heterosexuals.18 The French are calling it a “Civil Solidarity Pact.” In North America, “registered domestic partnership” is perhaps the most well-known of these euphemisms. These alternatives extend most of the benefits of marriage with many fewer of its responsibilities. These new legal arrangements must be equally available to heterosexual couples, and, because they are convenient, will be used by heterosexual couples.
From this perspective, the argument over gay marriage becomes less about gays and more about marriage. The functional equivalents of gay marriage, Frum argues, will not extend marriage but rather abolish it, and put “a new, flimsier institution in its place.” Since the average heterosexual co-habitational relationship lasts less than five years, the real losers will be the increasing number of fatherless children. As Frum puts it, “The gay marriage argument … pits the wishes of adults against the needs of children, the urgings of the self against the obligations of the family.”
I would take this analysis one step further. It is not just the “obligations of the family” that are at stake, but the future of our societies. We should recall the adage that civilization may be thousands of years old, but it is only a generation deep. Or, as Thomas Sowell more pointedly observed, “each new generation born [is] in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians who must be civilized before it is too late.”19
This process of “civilizing” can only be done efficiently through intact families. As the late Christopher Lasch observed,
If reproducing culture were simply a matter of formal instruction and discipline, it could be left to the schools. But it also requires that culture be imbedded in personality. Socialization makes the individual want to do what he has to do; and the family is the agency to which society entrusts this complex and delicate task.20
Where but in the family will one first learn to be his brother’s keeper?
Conclusion
In 1965, more than thirty years ago, American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the lack of any family perspective explained the failure of many of the anti-poverty programs targeted at Black poverty. Calling for a family policy for America, Moynihan wrote:
From the wild Irish slums of the Nineteenth century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest and disorder—most particularly the furious unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.21
Moynihan was largely ignored. Today, the level of illegitimacy for all of American society is 33 percent—higher than what existed in the Black community Moynihan was describing in the 1960s. But being ignored and being wrong are two different things. Indeed, Moynihan’s message has been proven true time and time again, most recently and most tragically at Columbine High School.
At the opening of the second World Congress of Families, Bishop Njue of Kenya declared, “Without families, you cannot have government.” I would qualify this only slightly: “Without families, you cannot have free government.”
If democracy is the last best hope for mankind, then surely a more informed family policy is the last best hope for democracy.
Postscript
I wrote this in 1999, twenty-five years ago. Recent scholarship confirms the many social, political, and economic benefits that I attributed to strong, intact two-parent families. Scholars warn about the “decline in social capital … the rich networks of relationships that exist not just in families but also in neighborhoods, religious institutions and other civic institutions, and the society-wide trust they generate.”22 University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox’s statistical analysis finds that married adults are happier, healthier, more satisfied in life, live longer, and are more financially secure.23 University of Maryland professor Melissa Kearney’s new book reports the economic and social advantages enjoyed by children who are raised by two parents.24 In a recent article, Wilcox and co-writer Chris Bullivant assert that “the success of these books suggests the pendulum is swinging back from extremist ideologies that have discounted the value of marriage and stable families in American life.”25
Recent Canadian scholarship confirms that these same trends are happening here.26 Tim Sargent’s statistical study confirms that not only do “children in two-parent families have a much higher standard of living than children in one-parent families,” but also that “children raised by their original parents have, on average, better life outcomes than children raised in one-parent families or in stepfamilies.”27 Policy-wise, Sargent draws the same conclusions as I do: “Given the clear individual and social benefits of marriage and children, there is a case for making sure that public policy does not impede—and preferably promotes—family formation and fertility.28