Philocrites points to an essay by Unitarian writer Doug Muder that is the best piece I’ve yet read in the liberal “why do we keep losing elections and what are we going to do about it?” genre. Muder examines some current analyses of the culture war, especially George Lakoff’s, James Ault’s and Thomas Frank’s, and finds them incomplete.
In particular, he thinks Lakoff is on to something with his strict father/nurturant parent dichotomy of what people expect from government, but thinks Lakoff’s model of family is too limited. In addition to the parenting style, Muder says, there are profound differences in the structure of family itself. Muder develops an additional duality, contrasting the “inherited obligation” family with the “negotiated commitment” family — basically, the modern vs. the premodern model. In inherited-obligation families you are born into a set of relationships, and a specific role in them. In negotiated commitments, as the name implies, you freely contract relationships with others. This affects people’s politics in ways that Muder spells out well, that I won’t repeat here.
All this is familiar to me, but Muder makes some interesting additional points. One, he explains how fundamentalism is literally reactionary. He quotes Ault:
In an early and influential article, Richard Niebuhr, dean of American religious studies, interpreted American fundamentalism as a movement “closely related to the conflict between rural and urban cultures,†a movement he found most prevalent in “isolated communities … least subject to the influence of modern science and industrial civilization.†Revisionist scholars criticized Niebuhr’s view, pointing out, rightly, that fundamentalism first arose in cities. But if we consider fundamentalism as a defense of a rural way of life, a life organized in family-based networks of mutual dependence, whether in city, town, or countryside, would not such a defense arise only where it was eroded and threatened – first, among rural and small-town migrants to the new urban centers of industrial society on the threshold of the twentieth century, and then, two generations later, in the burgeoning cities of the New South and, in the case of Shawmut River, in rural and small-town communities overrun by the suburban expansion of Worcester in the 1960s and 1970s?
Second, Muder does an excellent job of explaining to liberals exactly why conservatives find them threatening:
Liberals tend to view themselves as live-and-let-live people. It’s the other side, we believe, that wants to start wars, keep the poor in their place, and make second-class citizens out of gays, non-Christians, non-English-speakers, and anyone else who didn’t come out of their cookie-cutter. We’re the nice guys. We believe in tolerance, diversity, and letting people be what they have to be. It’s hard for us to credit the idea that someone could be afraid of us.
Someone is. And for good reasons. Understanding that uncomfortable fact is the first step towards grasping what has been going on in this country’s politics for the last quarter century.
Our belief in negotiated commitment – that people are not obligated to relationships they did not choose – is like one of those devastating European germs that white settlers spread throughout the world three centuries ago. We are immune; our families are based on negotiated commitments and (though they are far from perfect) work quite well in that environment – as long as we can maintain the social safety net.
But Inherited Obligation families are not doing nearly so well. Blue states consistently lead red states in statistical measures of familial success – low divorce rate, low drop-out rate, low violent crime, low teen pregnancy. Divorce rates in particular seem to vary inversely to liberalism: conservative Baptist marriages fail far more often than those from more liberal Christian denominations.
I think this is dead on. When I’ve seen other liberal bloggers raise the Bible belt’s dismal social stats, it’s generally in the spirit of crowing: those fundamentalists are such hypocrites! But I’ve heard Muder’s hypothesis raised by a Catholic sociologist who studied evangelicals. He found that their churches tend to include more non-traditional families than mainline churches, even though they preached “family values” while the mainlines preach “inclusion.” Those non-traditional families know exactly what they haven’t got, and they want it.
He’s also right that liberals tend to believe rather naively in their own innocence and harmlessness. The dream of pluralism is that everybody can believe what they want to and nobody loses, but Muder says that’s chimerical. He remarks rather chillingly:
Liberals have a vision of how the world should be. I believe in that vision. It is a fairer, more just world than has ever existed before. It is better adjusted to the realities of modern life. And it is, in my opinion, the only vision of the future that does not eventually lead to competing fundamentalisms fighting a world war.
But no matter how peaceful and good our vision is, eggs will be broken to make our omelet. Eggs have already been broken. We need to take responsibility for that. And we can’t expect people with cartons of half-broken eggs to simply shrug and let us do our thing.
Well, it might better serve liberal politics not to be quoting metaphors coined by Communists. But as he goes along he offers a somewhat more conciliatory idea:
The most important fact that conservatives don’t know about liberals is this: We believe that a life without commitments is superficial and empty. Unlike the demonic liberals you hear about on Fox News, real liberals are morally serious people who are not looking to take the easy way out when there are greater issues at stake.
Consider, for example, liberal parents. The Negotiated Commitment model offers them very little in exchange for the effort and expense that they put into parenting. They don’t have to do it, and they can’t demand that children reciprocate after they grow up. Most liberal parents understand the situation. But they volunteer to raise children anyway. Liberals join the Peace Corps, work in soup kitchens, and stand together with unpopular oppressed peoples rather than walking away from. Why? Because liberals are serious, committed people.
This is a good start, but ultimately his recommendations are a bit thin after the perceptiveness of his analysis. I’m still not sure that he exactly “gets it.” Although he mentions abortion, I don’t think he takes it seriously enough. For many people, unborn babies are the most numerous and innocent “broken eggs.” There’s a little more to it than just the press to propagate the family.
A more complicated subject that he raises, but doesn’t really go anywhere with, is the fact that social conservatives feel ambivalent about freedom of choice. They do not share what Joe Guada calls the left’s “optimist humanism”, believing that most people will choose paths that lead to their own flourishing, and their own social problems bear this out. They can sympathize with St. Augustine’s question: “What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?”
What’s interesting about this, historically speaking, is that so many on the Christian right are Baptists. And Baptists, back when they started in England in the 1600s, were one of the groups that insisted that Christian faith should be a free choice. Hence the opposition to infant baptism, hence the name.
But nowadays, although they continue to baptize adolescents, most Baptists seem to think like pedobaptists. They believe that only if society’s institutions are thoroughly Christian, therefore removing or heavily slanting individual choice, will God’s will be done. That’s the only explanation I can see for the popularity of this “Christian nation” horsepucky. Once upon a time we controlled the social institutions, the story goes, but the heathens and heretics have usurped our rule. So much of the agenda aims at restoring this supposedly lost reign.
I wonder if it’s possible to recover some of the lost anti-pedobaptist language of choice from its current ownership by liberal humanists. Because, as I understand it, the original anti-pedobaptists didn’t believe in choice out of a naive humanism, but out of an understanding of the New Creation and being “born again.” Just as Jesus’ disciples left their families and formed a new community around him, so church is a new covenant that supercedes the inherited obligations of your first birth. When you’re baptized as an infant, under the charge of your parents, your second birth is too close to your first to have meaning.
Essentially, I think that what separates this New Testament attitude from modern Christian conservatives is a faith in the future. Once upon a time, Christians believed that the future was on their side: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again in glory. Nowadays Christians are often the ones standing athwart history crying “Stop!” (Michael Spencer wrote astutely about this here.) Without this faith, conservative Baptists are clinging to the structures of the Old Creation that their sect once repudiated. Unless Democrats can show them a future they actually want to have, so it will remain.
Sounds to me that what Muder is describing/advocating is libertarianism, not liberalism. It’s libertarianism that says the only obligations you have are those you voluntarily contract for. I always thought liberalism was all about solidarity and looking out for the most vulnerable members of society as an obligation.
The idea that only freely chosen commitments are “authentic” is modernist bosh. It requires the notion of an autonomous subject choosing according to the dictates of an unembodied reason. The negotiated commitment model seems to completely capitulate to the logic of capitalism. And this is supposed to be an alternative to the right? I admit I take this sort of thing a bit personally because I’m sure my own family would not live up to the exalted standards of “negotiated commitment.”
However, I do think that there is an important distinction between how we should view the family and the community and how we should view the state. That’s where I think Lakoff goes off the rails – why should we expect the government to act like a family? I prefer Alister McIntyre and William Cavanaugh’s idea that the state is nothing more exalted than a utility company.
Comment by Lee — March 3, 2005 @ 6:45 am
Camassia,
This is a very good post.
By the way, I’m Baptist. I was a fellow seminarian (and roommate) with “Bending Faith” and “Taking Off and Landing” not too long ago. I also spent about half my life outside the Bible Belt inside generic conservative evangelicalism.
So “post-evangelical” is actually a pretty good term, but I’m officially a Baptist (albeit an often perpelexed one these days, variously pulled toward Catholics and Menonites). I’m just grateful that my struggling little blog merits inclusion on your list.
“I wonder if it’s possible to recover some of the lost anti-pedobaptist language of choice from its current ownership by liberal humanists. Because, as I understand it, the original anti-pedobaptists didn’t believe in choice out of a naive humanism, but out of an understanding of the New Creation and being “born again.—
You’re exactly right, about this point and about so many contemporary Baptists’ reversal of their historic positions.Conservative/fundamentalist Baptists (the ones that get the most national attention) are probably more likely to identify with the label “conservative evangelical” than to emphasize being denominationally particular Baptists. It’s the moderate-liberal Baptists who highlight those particular hallmarks of their heritage that you mentioned.
Unfortunately, because of so much recent infighting and fear of all things resembling fundamentalism, non-conservative Baptists are (in my opinion) struggling to assert a coherent position when all many seem to agree on as an organizing principle is individual autonomy.
A good resource for these issues is the late Baptist theologian James McClendon, someone I hope to study thoroughly in the future. Perhaps you’ve read or talked with Telford about him.
As for “inherited obligation” vs. “negotiated commitments” — the New Testament and early Christian emphasis was to relativize the inherited obligations of family in light of the new family one enters at baptism. To say that these new relationships are a matter of choice or “negotiated” (because undetermined by biology) is simplistic and destructive.
Some good thoughts to consider for all of us who agree that “a life without commitments is superficial and empty” but worry that “negotiated commitments” are insufficient: http://www.newpantagruel.com/issues/1.4/practicing_the_discipline_of_p.php?page=4
Comment by Andy — March 3, 2005 @ 7:14 am
Judging from how I vote, I’m definitely in the liberal camp, but I don’t feel comfortable with Muder’s “negotiated commitment†family model. Some members enter a family voluntarily, but others do not (we do not choose our parents and siblings), and yet we have an obligation of loyalty to *all* familly members. Let me use Marilynne Robinson’s words to flesh this out. After reading her excellent “Gilead”, I read her essay “The Way We Work, the Way We Live” (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=258). Here are excerpts from the beginning of this essay.
/////
We are all aware that the word “family” eludes definition, as do
other important things like nation, race, culture, gender,
species; like art, science, virtue, vice, beauty, truth,
justice, happiness, religion; like success; like intelligence.
The attempt to impose definition on indeterminacy and degree and
exception is about the straightest road to mischief I know of–
very deeply worn, very well traveled. But just for the purposes
of this discussion, let us say: one’s family are those toward
whom one feels loyalty and obligation, and/or from whom one
derives identity, and/or to whom one gives identity, and/or with
whom one shares habits, tastes, stories, customs, memories. This
definition allows for families of circumstance and affinity as
well as kinship, and it allows also for the existence of people
who are incapable of family, though they may have parents and
siblings and spouses and children.
I think the biological family is especially compelling to us
because it is, in fact, very arbitrary in its composition. I
would never suggest so rude an experiment as calculating the
percentage of one’s relatives one would actually choose as
friends, the percentage of one’s relatives who would choose one
as their friend. And that is the charm and the genius of the
institution. It implies that help and kindness and loyalty are
owed where they are perhaps by no means merited. Owed, that is,
even to ourselves. It implies that we are in some few
circumstances excused from the degrading need to judge others’
claims on us, excused from the struggle to keep our thumb off
the scales of reciprocity.
Of course, families do not act this way always or even typically,
certainly not here, certainly not now. But we recognize such duty
and loyalty as quintessentially familial where we see it. …
Imagine this: some morning we awake to the cultural consensus that
a family, however else defined, is a sort of compact of mutual
loyalty, organized around the hope of giving rich, human meaning to
the lives of its members. Toward this end family members do what
people do–play with their babies, comfort their sick, keep their
holidays, commemorate their occasions, sing songs, tell jokes, fight
and reconcile, teach and learn what they know about what is right
and wrong, about what is beautiful and what is to be valued. They
enjoy each other and make themselves enjoyable. They are kind and
receive kindness, they are generous and are sustained and enriched
by others’ generosity. The antidote to fear, distrust, self-interest
is always loyalty. The balm for failure or weakness, or even for
disloyalty, is always loyalty.
This is utopian. And yet it describes something of which many of us
feel deprived. We have reasoned our way to uniformly conditional
relationships. This is at the very center of the crisis of the
family since the word means, if it means anything, that certain
people exist on special terms with each other, which terms are more
or less unconditional. We have instead decided to respect our parents,
maybe, if they meet our stringent standards of deserving. Just so do
our children respect us, maybe.
Siblings founder, spouses age. We founder. We age. That is when
loyalty should matter. But invoking it now is about as potent a
gesture as flashing a fat roll of rubles. I think this may contribute
enormously to the sadness so many of us feel at the heart of
contemporary society. “Love is not love / Which alters when it
alteration finds,” in the words of the sonnet, which I can only
interpret to mean, love is loyalty. I would suggest that in its
absence, all attempts to prop the family economically or morally or
through education or otherwise will fail. The real issue is, will
people shelter and nourish and humanize one another? This is creative
work, requiring discipline and imagination. No one can be scolded or
fined into doing it, nor does it occur spontaneously in the
demographically traditional family. …
/////
Comment by Kolya — March 3, 2005 @ 7:49 am
Lee, I agree that his model could as well apply to libertarians, and in fact I thought of that while reading it. But I don’t think he’s presenting a Unified Field Theory of all liberals and all conservatives — rather, he’s describing two particular camps in the culture war who seem to do the most fighting. And he does explain how the negotiated-commitment model can lead to things like supporting a social safety net, although I agree it doesn’t compel that attitude.
Also, I don’t know about Lakoff, but I don’t see Muder actually saying government should be like a family. Rather, he’s saying that your family model will affect your view of certain social issues, and you will vote on that basis. However, I would say in defense of Lakoff that although it may not seem like a good idea to look at government as parental, this probably is indeed a deep subconscious template that people tend to fall into. The first rulers were glorified tribal patriarchs, and most kings have explicitly made themselves father figures. It’s not the democratic ideal, but it’s very human.
Andy, I gathered that you grew up Baptist but wasn’t sure if you still were. Of course, “evangelical” is one of those categories that doesn’t necessarily exclude being Baptist (or Pentecostal, or Presbyterian…). Thanks for your comments, all.
Comment by Camassia — March 3, 2005 @ 8:54 am
Camassia, fair enough. Admittedly the notion that most American “conservatives” and “liberals” are really just flavors of Millian (as in John Stuart) liberalism is one of my hobbyhorses. I think that’s why I tend to have more sympathy for radicals of the left and traditionalists on the right who question the liberal consensus of the “contract society.”
Comment by Lee — March 3, 2005 @ 9:35 am
See this on blue-state/red-state marriage statistics.
Comment by TSO — March 3, 2005 @ 11:57 am
Since the divorce-rate statistics have been debunked, I won’t offer the comments I was going to offer. Instead I would like to point out that it hardly speaks well of “negotiated” marriages simply because they don’t divorce as much as “traditional” marriages (which hasn’t been established anyway). If a society functions to favor one sort of marriage over another (and I would argue that our society is arranged in favor of “negotiated” marriages; e. g., “no fault” divorce), then one can certainly argue that “traditional” marriages are more likely to fail since societal structures oppose them. I’m not so sure that this is an indictment against “traditional” marriages, nor that it is an endorsement of “negotiated” marriages.
Comment by Clifton D. Healy — March 3, 2005 @ 4:13 pm
Hey, Camassia,
Another thought provoking post.
FYI: the phrase “optimist humanism” was coined by Martin Kelley over at Quaker Ranter. I “borrowed” it from him because it conceptualized some of the prominent thinking amongst us liberal Friends here in the States.
Comment by Joe G. — March 4, 2005 @ 9:14 am
The divorce stats are enlightening, but I still think that Muder’s basic thesis holds. For one, he’s talking about other social indicators besides divorce (violent crime, teen pregnancy etc.). But more importantly, he’s talking about a thinner demographic slice than statewide divorce statistics are going to reveal. Basically, what he and these other Democrats have been agonizing over is how they lost lower-income white voters. They used to be part of the New Deal coalition, and Democrats still think they’re rightfully theirs, but now they’re mostly Republican. And I think it’s indisputable that the dissolution of the premodern family, which started among more upscale folks, has hurt poorer people more than richer people. So I think Muder is correct that they have more reason to be afraid of it.
Also Clifton, I think you’re basically agreeing with Muder, whether you realize it or not. His point isn’t that negotiated-commitment marriages are inherently less likely to break up, but that subcultures where the model gradually developed are more maritally stable than ones where it was brought in abruptly (hence his comparison to pathogens). So his point is really the same as yours: inherited obligation is no longer the social norm, therefore societies that were structured around them are destablized.
Comment by Camassia — March 4, 2005 @ 9:35 am
Consider, though, the counter-example of the African-American community. They are generally quite liberal and overwhelmingly Democratic. African-American family structures among the nation’s most fluid, most negotiated, and least
subject to inherited obligations. Nonetheless, they still suffer those various social pathologies at rates far higher than in conservative white Christian communities.
Jews also don’t easily fit Muder’s model. They also tend to be liberal and heavily Democratic, but their family structure generally carries an enormously strong sense of inherited family obligation. And they seem to be doing fine.
Also, Muder’s analysis of the gay-marriage issue seems quite wrongheaded to me. I think there’s a strong consensus among liberals that homosexuality is properly viewed as a wholly innate, genetically determined (i.e., inherited) characteristic, whereas it’s more common among conservatives to see homosexuality as at least in part the product of a choice; i.e., a commitment subject to negotiation. It’s this perspective that informs the liberal view of gay marriage. A liberal man doesn’t support gay marriage because he wants the freedom to negotiate a marriage with either a man or a woman as the mood strikes him; he supports it so that every person can be free to marry according to the dictates of the sexual orientation that he or she inherited.
Comment by Tom T. — March 4, 2005 @ 5:35 pm
Fascinating. Although I must say, I come from one of those “Inherited Obligation” families, and we’re liberal! (think traditional Sicilian-American Depression-era values, and you’ll be on the right track).
Have you seen this? I agree with this guy; the “New Left” liberals seriously underestimate the level of disrespect and contempt that the average working-class American feels from them. What’s the matter with Kansas? Shit. Why aren’t we asking What’s the Matter with the Left? And my answer is: when the New Left stopped being the Old Left. The Old Left was all about the meat-and-potatoes: good-paying jobs with benefits and a future, safe workplaces, food on the table, decent education for one’s children so they would have a better life. What the hell does the New Left even stand for? What are they willing to fight for? So much of the rhetoric that comes from the Left assumes that everyone has a Master’s and lives in the suburbs. Working class people feel abandoned, because our needs are forgotten or ignored. I know a lot of folks who feel sold out by NAFTA; they stayed home from the polls.
Now, don’t get me wrong….I’m coming from stage Left, myself! I haven’t given up. But if you want to know why Republicans are getting votes from working class Americans who are getting thoroughly shat upon by those same Republicans, you have to start looking at the changes in the Democratic party.
Comment by La Lubu — March 4, 2005 @ 9:10 pm
weekend review: news around the UofBSC
Here at the University of Blogaria we keep pretty busy. It helps if I link every so often to the faculty doing interesting work. But first, let me share with you the weekend. I do this not because I had…
Trackback by conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form — March 7, 2005 @ 4:05 am
Tom, I think ethnic minorities are more afraid of Republicans than of Democrats for, er, other reasons. Like I said, this is not a unified theory explaining all Republicans and all Democrats. There are obviously other factors at play besides family structure.
Also, I see the point you’re making about gay marriage, but I don’t think a genetic sexual orientation counts as “inherited obligation”. Basically, the liberal view is that you should marry according to your personal feelings and preference (which is what a choice basically is, after all), whereas the conservative view of marriage is that it serves a social function in communal cohesion and raising children and so on.
Comment by Camassia — March 7, 2005 @ 3:33 pm