The Rights Revolution (12 page)

Inevitably, the rights revolution — and the sexual revolution that went with it — produced backlash. Since the mid-1970s, conservative politicians and social analysts have been arraigning the liberal reforms of the 1960s and condemning their consequences. The backlash has
reversed the usual conservative position on rights. Conservatives used to be strong exponents of individual rights, since rights define the limits of state intervention and conservatives were anxious to set limits on the power of the post-war state. Liberals, on the other hand, used to be more hostile to individual rights talk, because some rights, especially property and privacy rights, were invoked by conservatives to resist crucial liberal objectives, such as the establishment of graduated income tax and the creation of a welfare state. The revolution in family life has turned this alignment upside down. Now conservatives say that rights have gone too far, while liberals are trying to stay the course of a rights agenda.

The problem with liberal rights talk, conservatives argue, is that it individualizes people. Once people begin speaking about their rights, they start counting the costs of all relationships with other human beings that involve sacrifice. And family life is based on sacrifice: parents devoting years to the care of children when they might prefer to be furthering their own interests, and husbands and wives devoting themselves to each other when other persons and possibilities beckon.

This argument has something to say for it, but not much. Conservatives are wrong to suppose that rights talk invalidates sacrifice itself. Even we heartless liberals need intimacy and we know that we cannot have intimacy without sacrifice. These sacrifices, both moral and material, are worth bearing when they are borne mutually, when both partners share the load, and when the result of equal sacrifice is renewed affection. Much of
the complaint about family life focuses not on sacrifice per se, but on inequality of sacrifice. This inequality is not imagined: it is painfully real. In Canada, statistics show that even now, after a generation of feminist progress, 70 percent of the burden of caring for children, the aged, the disabled, and the sick falls on women, most of whom receive no pay for these essential tasks.
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These enduring facts help us to see that the revolt against family life in the 1960s was a revolt not against sacrifice but against inequality of sacrifice. And to judge from the statistics, the revolution remains unfinished.

But feminism was much more than a revolt against inequalities of sacrifice. It was also a revolt against certain kinds of sacrifice, notably the sacrifice of female identity. Young women coming of age in the 1960s looked back on the lives of their own mothers, women who had come of age in the Depression and the Second World War, and felt that they had thrown away their lives for the sake of their husbands and children. The sacrifice that had been made was of their very selves. This was the cardinal wrong that had to be righted. When daughters raised this issue, the results were often painful. What daughters accusingly called sacrifice, some mothers poignantly felt as fulfilment, at least of a kind. But sometimes the confrontation between generations ended with both feeling the same sense of injustice.

As a man who came of age in the late 1960s, I was deeply affected by feminist rights talk, and by this reckoning between mothers and daughters. Like many men, I was soon to go through my own version of
Fathers and
Sons. The central idea I absorbed then — chiefly, if not exclusively, from feminism — was that each of us has a right to choose the life we lead and that we must fight to exercise this right against all comers. This could be called the ideal of authenticity.
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In the name of this ideal, we all went off to find ourselves. This meant getting away from family, career, and society, and going in search of the self’s authentic impulses. Sometimes the results were laughable: the 1960s cult of authenticity produced dull conformity in no time. We all went in search of ourselves and ended up in graduate school. Even those who dropped out tended to end up conforming to a nonconformist lifestyle.

For many of us, even those for whom the 1960s were either an episode or just a memory, the ideal of authenticity exerted a powerful influence on our very idea of what it was to have a life and a career. Authenticity taught us that we had a duty to ourselves and not just to others, and that in the face of a conflict between these two duties, we would sometimes have to choose for ourselves — against children, families, lovers, and friends.

So to summarize the argument so far, two moral ideas were the heart of the rights revolution in private life: first, that family sacrifice is unjust unless it is equal; and second, that each of us owes a duty to ourselves, and this is equal to the duty we owe to others. Let’s admit immediately that these were highly contentious values. Conservative social critics would argue that these ideals are just fancy ways to justify selfishness. What I have been calling the rights revolution, conservatives would
dismiss as the permissive revolution. The cardinal vice of permissiveness is wanting rights without responsibilities: wanting sex without love, wanting intimacy without commitment, and worst of all, wanting children without being willing to care for them. Liberalism, so the argument goes, has made a devil’s bargain with permissiveness. In the name of an ethics of authenticity, rights talk is actually undermining the very possibility of moral behaviour, since it appears to authenticate every selfish impulse: to quit marriages when they don’t work, to abandon children when work calls, to flee responsibility when pleasure beckons. To make matters worse, conservative critics say, the state colludes in this selfishness by providing welfare benefits for unmarried mothers, so that the costs of irresponsibility are paid not by the guilty, but by the hard-pressed taxpayer.

When divorce is the norm, conservatives argue, children grow up in a moral world in which all trust is conditional, because betrayal is always possible.
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According to the conservative critique, we risk producing a future generation of children who trust so few people that they no longer start families themselves.

And even when families survived the permissive revolution, conservatives argue, they were damaged by it. The mistake was believing that the family could be run as a community of rights-bearing equals. Children are not the equals of their parents; they need limits and rules. Permissive parenting, on a rights-equality model, so it is argued, has produced a generation of young adults who came of age in the 1990s, never having
learned the meaning of self-discipline.

Let us grant what we can to the conservative counterattack. Let us grant that freedom is not a licence to do whatever you please. Let us insist that fathers and mothers must know how to say the word no; that moral life for children begins with the understanding of limits; that any person who embarks upon the adventure of marriage must judge the result not by happiness alone, but by other, more arduous standards, such as staying the course. None of this is alien to the liberal temperament or inconsistent with a commitment to rights equality between men and women. Indeed, it is impossible to envisage marriage surviving at all unless both partners strive towards equality.

The conservative critique of permissiveness has its points, but it is reactionary in the strict meaning of the term. It wants to turn the clock back, and to do so by means of coercive legislation — such as making divorce more difficult and penalizing single parents — which would violate conservativism’s own commitments to the freedom of the individual. A liberal position is simply more consistent with that commitment. Moreover, a liberal rights culture does not obliterate responsibilities: it presumes them. To father a child is to shoulder responsibility for its upbringing. If a father abandons his family and fails to pay maintenance, he should be pursued and, if he still fails to pay up, punished. If pregnant mothers so abuse themselves with drugs and alcohol that they damage their children, they should feel the penalties of the law.
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A state whose child-protection agencies fail to
pin responsibility on defaulting parents, and whose welfare institutions then mutely step in to cope with the consequences, is undermining the link between rights and responsibilities that makes a rights culture consistent with public order. On this issue, a liberal and a conservative will see eye to eye.

But on others, the divide is unbridgeable. What conservatives see as the collapse of the family, liberals view as its mutation into new forms. Nowadays, there are many types of good parents and many types of good families: nuclear, extended, single-parent, same-sex. The fact that there are many types of families does not mean that there are no longer any fixed standards about what a good family is. The test of goodness is loose but evident: it’s a community where each member receives and displays lifelong moral concern for the well-being of everyone else. The key is not love necessarily, or hugs, or sentimental Disney eyewash, but an enduring moral commitment. A child needs to feel that her development matters intensely to another person, and that this person will stay the course with her to ensure that she develops as best she can. What a liberal insists upon is the idea that it is possible to reconcile a commitment to absolute standards of care and responsibility in family life with a faith that these standards can be met by a wide variety of persons and a wide variety of possible family forms.

So-called family values, as propagated in the rhetoric of North American popular entertainment, pulpit sermonizing, and political homily, are a downright tyranny. They make people feel inadequate, ashamed, or guilty
about their inability to conform to what is in fact a recent, post-war suburban norm of family domesticity.

We need family values all right, but the ones we actually need must be pluralistic. We need to understand that the essential moral needs of any child can be met by family arrangements that run the gamut from arranged marriages right through to same-sex parenting. Nature and natural instinct are poor guides in these matters. If good parenting were a matter of instinct, families wouldn’t be the destructive institutions they so often are. It is frequently the case that perfect strangers turn out to be better parents or step-parents than natural ones. This is not always the case, of course, as the incidence of abuse by step-parents attests.

The point is not to invalidate one type of parent. Instead, it is to insist that ideology will not help us here: if we insist that one category or type of parent will always do a better job than any other, we are certain to be wrong. Same-sex parents have taught us that there is no necessary relationship between heterosexuality and good parenting. The question to be asked in every case is not what kind of sexual creatures these parents are, or even what kind of biological or other relationship they have to these children, but what kind of parents they are. The test of goodness here is the capacity for sustained moral concern and to be willing to make reasonable sacrifices for the sake of children’s interests. A family is not a bus station: children will not develop well when there is no continuity of care and concern. Continuity implies sacrifice but reasonable sacrifice doesn’t necessarily mean
putting children’s interests first. No model of family life will work if it is based on unequal and unlimited sacrifice. As a moral training ground, families ought to teach the lesson that no one’s interests should automatically come first and certainly not the children’s.

Getting any of this to work is not easy. None of us is always capable of unconditional moral concern for another human being, but some surprising people routinely do it better than we do. Opening our eyes to the different ways other families work is more useful than despising those who do things differently. Pluralism does not mean relativism. It means humility.

But, conservatives say, even if one admits the viability of same-sex, single-parent, or divorced families, the problem is that these new family forms do not endure. They are eaten from within by the liberal ideology that family life should be satisfying, and that if it isn’t, each member should exercise their right of secession.

Let us acknowledge that fathers — and mothers — are deserting their families in the name of “finding themselves,” and that children are paying a high price for the inability of adults to reconcile duty and desire, freedom and responsibility. As a father, I find it hard not to be pained by the statistics about modern fatherhood and divorce in Canada: mothers get custody of children in 86 percent of cases, and more than 40 percent of children in Canada’s divorced families see their fathers only once a month. Even when both parents remain present in their children’s lives, research in England shows that, in families where both spouses work, mothers spend
ninety minutes a day with their children and fathers only fifteen minutes. The same pattern must be broadly true among Canadian working families. Here the ideal of authenticity — of both parents seeking lives that fully express their capacities — risks being purchased at our children’s expense. But let’s stop lamenting these trends as if we were powerless to do anything about them, as if they were some malign kind of fate. We’ve made the rights revolution, and we need to fix it. And that is precisely what working families are trying to do. There isn’t a responsible working couple I know who aren’t conscious of this conflict between what they owe themselves and what they owe their children. Many of them have tried to have it all and discovered that they need one item more than any other: time with each other.

Many families do break up under the strain of these competing claims. Some parents simply abscond altogether. The disappearing dad — who neither pays child support nor visits his children — is a fact that cannot be denied, and his absence from his children’s lives can have painful effects.
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These effects do not just harm children, of course. They also harm women. Divorce has become a multiplier of inequality in Canada: deprivation is heavily concentrated among single mothers with children.
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