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Individual Character and the 'Utility' of the Family
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18182 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
7,029 Words |
| Author
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Bruce P. Frohnen
Bruce Frohnen, who has taught politics at Reed College and
Cornell College, is now studying law at Emory University. |
In her song "The Emperor's New Clothes," shaven-headed pop singer Sinead O'Connor proudly asserts "I will live by my own policies/I will sleep with a clear conscience." Pop singers rarely set forth new or deep thoughts, but morality (both "policy" and "conscience") independent of outside forces does reflect the personal character that Western society, and America in particular, increasingly has come to idealize.
The goal of public policy and of "moral" thinkers over at least the last hundred years has been to "free" the self from the constraints of social and economic forces. The assumption has been that the "unconstrained" self would choose a rewarding and functional life, which would be somehow good for all. But this ideal, being totally bereft of positive content, has left only a vacuum where social norms, community standards, and civilized arts and manners once resided. And, nature hating a vacuum, people have come to place the instruments of "autonomy" in the place of true human goods. Thus the material ends of life - money, leisure, and security - once posited as instrumentally necessary for self-creation, have tended to become the sole criteria by which lives, and justice itself, are judged.
In freeing the individual from all constraints, in giving him the supposed power to create his own morality, Americans have succeeded only in breaking the ties that bind individuals together into a society. In mistaking the destruction of standards for liberty, Americans have delegitimized institutions - most prominently the family - necessary for the maintenance of civilized life. For it is the family, now made subservient to and indeed the victim of the pursuit of individual pleasures, which is the only possible training ground of human conduct; the only arena within which individuals may come to learn the habits of affection on which any free society is based and the modes of conduct making up good character.
The well-ordered liberty which the French philosopher and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville saw in the nineteenth-century American community was based on the affections fostered in family, church, and local voluntary association. The community was held together by mores or "habits of the heart" inculcated first by the mother, then by participation in the family, then in the relationships of civic and religious life. America was a good nation, for Tocqueville, because its institutions and practices fostered good character. Americans taught their citizens to value the interests of their neighbors as their own (even to love one's neighbor as oneself) and so tempered the democratic drives toward material equality
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