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Us Against the Gangs What Liberals Know That Isn't So

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Middle Class Family Values

by Christopher Chantrill
March 21, 2004 at 3:00 am

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HE’D GROWN up fatherless, the caller told radio host Dennis Prager.  Now he was a born-again Christian with a wife and kids, and liked to think of Dennis as the father he never had. 

Everyone agrees that the conservative movement has spawned a renewed interest in the family and family values.  But what does family values mean?  Conservatives like to represent it as an ageless devotion to the permanent things, and liberals like Stephanie Coontz as a suffocating nostalgia for The Way We Never Were.

In fact, of course, both conservatives and liberals are wrong.  The middle-class family is a new and radical concept, so conservatives are mistaken when they imagine the family as a sacred tradition that goes back to the dawn of time.  But the liberals are wrong too.  Who cares whether families in the 1950s were really like the Cleavers in Leave it to Beaver?  The middle-class family has never been a reality; it is instead a revolutionary ideal.

American philosopher Lee Harris makes this clear in Civilization and Its Enemies when he shows how the modern family came to replace the traditional family in Europe.  This change did not just happen; it was forced upon the world when the dynamic modern form of social organization, the team, elbowed its way onto the world stage.  The modern team cannot coexist with the traditional family.  One or the other must give way.  This was starkly illustrated recently in City Journal by British writer Theodore Dalrymple in an article about his work as a young doctor in a hospital in Rhodesia, before it became Zimbabwe under the rule of Robert Mugabe.

Although black doctors were paid the same as white doctors in Rhodesia, they did not enjoy the same standard of living.  There was a simple reason for this: the black doctors “had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill.  They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members… and people from their village, tribe, and province.”  And the more they made, the more they were expected to spread their good fortune around the family.  The white doctors, on the other hand, had no obligations to family and tribe.  They worked long and hard, but lived like kings in spacious villas attended by servants, and enjoyed “friendship, sport, study, and hunting.”  To the African, this lack of family obligation in the westerner is “puzzling and unfeeling.”  To the westerner, it is called freedom.

In Africa, people still live in a web of consanguinity; in the west, people live as members of a team.  It is therefore a mistake to think of the bourgeois world as one of rugged individualism.  The modern economy is more like a sports league, where well-coached teams come to play against each other for the honor of giving the best service to the consumer.  Modern corporations expend enormous effort to promote team spirit in their employees.  The modern nation state is another remarkable creation, establishing a new social focus of belonging to replace the old social membership that could only comprehend blood relationship.  But the most notable modern team is probably not the corporation but the nuclear family with its husband and wife forming their own team, their partnership, to raise and fledge their children. 

Looking back on the transformation from a family-oriented world to a team-oriented world, one is struck by the audacity of it all.  How could anyone have dared to break out of the safety of blood relationship and (in the formulation of Lee Harris) recklessly experiment with a new way of socialization by adapting the teenage boys’ gang into the cooperative team?    But it worked, and to replace the old family, the middle class built up a new myth of the family, no longer the sprawling network of cousinhood but the focused, purposeful, nuclear family team.

The post-enlightenment left hates this world of middle-class teams: the families, the churches, the businesses, and the self-help associations.  It hates the hearty competition and the dogged pursuit of respectability.  It celebrates refusal, the multitude refusing the invitation to accept citizenship and the creative genius “challenging” the system.  It believes in a world of creative geniuses swimming in a world of universal community.

Again and again, the left has fought to destroy the team spirit of middle-class culture.  They pretty well destroyed the mutual-aid associations; they made fun of corporate teams; and now they are trying to destroy middle-class marriage.  The last time they tried this, in the 1960s, they ended up sending the respectable working class into the Republican party.  This time, they will likely unmoor blacks and Hispanics from the Democratic party base.

Middle-class tradition and family values may be nothing but a “myth.”  But they are a myth by which ordinary Americans climb up from single-parent indigence to proud competence and respectability.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”  —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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