RED FAMILY, BLUE FAMILY: Doug Muder

...As you would expect from Lakoff's theory, Ault noticed a profound difference between the families of Shawmut River and the ones he was used to finding among his friends. But the nature of the difference is somewhat surprising: The families Ault found at Shawmut River -- extended families in which multiple generations remain deeply involved in each other's lives -- aren't supposed to exist any more, especially not in a Massachusetts edge city like Worcester.

Though a life of mutual dependence within a family circle was commonplace among members of Shawmut River and other new-right activists I met, it was foreign to people I knew in academia and the New Left, as well as to other educated professionals I knew. Most of us were prepared, from the moment we left home for college, to leave family dependencies behind and learn to live as self-governing individuals. This left us free to move from one city to another for graduate education or for those specialized jobs for which our training qualified us. In the process, we learned to piece together a meaningful life with new friends and colleagues alongside old ones. Our material security did not rest on a stream of daily reciprocities within a family-based circle of people known in common, but rather on the progression of professional careers, with steadily increasing salaries and ample benefits to cover whatever exigencies life would bring. ...

The key distinction in Ault's account is not strictness vs. nurturance, but the Given vs. the Chosen. What, in other words, is the source of your responsibilities to other people? Are you born with obligations? Or do you choose to make commitments? As with strictness and nurturance, every actual person experiences some combination of obligation and commitment. But emphasizing one or the other makes a striking difference.

I, for example, feel some sense of obligation to my 82-year-old parents, but its practical value is limited by the fact that they live a thousand miles away. I maintain a relationship with my similarly distant sister and nephews, but this feels more like a choice than an obligation. My marriage is almost entirely a negotiated commitment, even if it looks fairly traditional from the outside. ...

Several liberal/conservative issues become much clearer in this analysis than they are in Lakoff.

Abortion. In the Inherited Obligation model, having children is an obligation, not a choice. Of course a pregnant woman may find it inconvenient to have a child at this point in her life, but that's no reason to let her opt out -- obligations are almost always inconvenient. In the long run, however, children are a good deal; their obligation to you pays off when you are old. In demanding that a young woman carry a fetus to term, then, society is looking out for long-term interests she may not yet have the perspective to see.

Conversely, in the Negotiated Commitment model nurturance is a gift, not an investment. A child is more like a work of art and less like a retirement plan. Having a child out of obligation, without a sense of commitment, is seen as a recipe for disaster. Pregnancies that result from rape, ignorance, or a birth-control failure are set up for such a disaster. If society is going to hold a prospective mother responsible for the welfare of her child -- and it should -- she must be given a chance to decide whether this child is her project or not.

Same-sex marriage. The husband/father and wife/mother roles in the Inherited Obligation model are timeless, unchangeable, and necessary. Someone has to be the husband/father and someone has to be the wife/mother. Same-sex couples just can't cover both roles, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

But no comparable difficulty exists in the Negotiated Commitment model. A child has needs, and the parents have to negotiate a plan to meet those needs. Whether the parents are a mixed-sex couple or a same-sex couple -- or even a single parent with a lot of committed friends -- the problem is the same.

If the government recognizes same-sex marriages and same-sex couples as parents, then it is tacitly siding with the Negotiated Commitment model of marriage and parenthood, and undermining the Inherited Obligation model. This is why conservatives believe that marriage needs to be "defended" from same-sex relationships. But from the Negotiated Commitment point of view, "defense of marriage" is nonsense. How a same-sex couple negotiates its relationship has no effect on the negotiated relationships of mixed-sex couples.

Social programs. The social safety net is an absolute necessity for the Negotiated Commitment model. Negotiated relationships, by their nature, are based on some notion of fair exchange. But what happens to people who have little to offer? In the absence of a prior obligation, who would volunteer to take responsibility for an indigent person in an irreversible coma? Unless the government steps in, people will fall through the cracks.

The Inherited Obligation model, on the other hand, is ambivalent about the social safety net. On the one hand, it is good that people don't just die when they have no one to take care of them. But on the other hand, the safety net weakens the network of familial obligations. A young adult who moves to the big city to seek his fortune doesn't come home when he fails, he draws unemployment. Social Security and Medicare may provide an excuse not to take care of aging parents. ...

The virtue of this explanation is that it makes sense of the Inherited Obligation family's swing to the Right, rather than making nonsense of it. The family consistently chooses its politics in order to face what it perceives to be the greatest threat to its continuance as a social system. In FDR's day, that threat was economic and came from big business. Today, many Inherited Obligation families believe that the threat is cultural: the pressures of modern capitalism and the rise of a competing vision of family threaten to break the bonds of obligation that hold the family together. ...

There is a lot to promote about liberalism and the Negotiated Commitment model behind it. We take people as they are, rather than demanding that they fit themselves into an increasingly outdated set of roles. We face problems directly, rather than making people jump through hoops that may or may not be relevant. And so, for example, we ask: "Who is going to feed the child, teach the child, protect the child, and love the child?" rather than "Who is going to be the father and who is going to be the mother?"

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posted by Eve at 3:59 AM VOTE

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