The Ties That Bind

“The state has no tool delicate enough to deracinate
the rooted habits and tangled affections of the family.”
—G.K. Chesterton

Allan Carlson is a humane man, an effective polemicist, a dedicated familialist, and a scholar trained in macroeconomic theory with its panoply of techniques and its characteristic lingo—opportunity costs, utility curves, and the like. This makes for an interesting, at times convincing, at other points unconvincing approach to the many terrible problems that bedevil contemporary America as a society as well as individual men and women arid children. In the past several decades we have witnessed a rise, sometimes dramatic, sometimes less so, in abortion, divorce, child abuse, crime, youth suicide, and female employment outside the home; a decline in the birthrate; and a rise in what used to be called “illegitimacy” but is now to be characterized in ways that involve no normative judgment (e.g., “out of wedlock births” or, if that is too heavy, “independent motherhood”). Is there any connection between these diverse phenomena? If so, what might it be? Are each of these developments equally to be deplored? If so, why?

Carlson is angry about the way these problems, often seen as crises, have emerged; about how experts have moved in to “manage” them after having, on his reading of the situation, helped to create the trouble in the first place; and about the hegemony of a certain sort of cool, public-policy, neostatist liberalism that sees ordinary Americans, so he claims, as so much grist for the managerial mill. His populist ire gives passion and movement to his text. I found especially interesting, and lots of fun, his attack on those who attack shopping malls as consumerist sites that speak only to American greed or to a collective taste for banality. Unfortunately, here as elsewhere, Carlson’s understandable desire to defend the “choices” and “moral preferences” of ordinary folks against the lofty and snide ministrations of various social critics blinds him to some real problems that do not lend themselves to such a clear-cut case of good Ordinary Joe and Jane vs. their elitist tormentors.

I will stay with the case of the shopping mall, love it or leave it, for a moment just to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of Carlson’s overall approach. First, he attacks the literati who “despise the shopping mall,” and some of the citations from some of the diatribes are pretty amazing, especially the wild correlations proffered by one William Kowinski who, in a book arguing that America has been mugged by malls, notes knowingly that William Calley of My Lai infamy “left prison to work in a mall,” or that “The history of atomic terror parallels the growth of malldom.” As Bob Dylan once said, “Wowee, pretty scary.” Going after this sort of silliness is like shooting fish in a barrel, although, as a good polemicist, Carlson is well within his discursive rights to clobber these folks. But in countering the most extreme version of his opponents’ case, he mounts such a strong pro-mall argument that I began to feel derelict in my civic duty that I don’t spend at least several hours a day haunting my local malls.

To make the pro-mall case as an instance of free-market populist democracy in action, Carlson paints an appalling picture of the big city—as a “prison campus” run by “an antidemocratic cabal of judges and bureaucrats” who force various amoral visions upon the populace. There is enough truth in his sketch of “human predators” running amok in the parks and streets of American cities that one begins to squirm. But just as the attacks of his opponents on malls are overly simplistic and harsh, Carlson’s portrait of the big bad city as antinomy is too severe. In addition, he refuses to come to grips with the ways in which many of the woes of big cities lie not only in the bewildering array of federal policies and programs dumped in their laps with insufficient resources to carry out their efficient ministration, but in their status (since 1873 and the Dartmouth case) as playthings of giant corporations which can move in, use a city, even abuse it, and then escape if things aren’t going their way.

Much of the opposition to malls, then, comes not only from the predictable snobbery of those who disdain American popular culture in any of its guises, but from folks seeking to preserve the very values and virtues Carlson himself cherishes. It seems odd that Carlson chides those who saw the building of a huge mall by Pyramid Companies as a “threat to the Vermont way of life.” Surely what they had in mind was the environmental disruption—not just the uprooting of local ecosystems huge construction often requires, but putting small mom-and-pop shops that have somehow survived on Main Street out of business. My hunch is that Carlson’s anti-elitism may, at times, push him into too strong an endorsement of market forces as expressing, somehow, “popular democracy” at work. It is not at all clear to me that this is the case. At times such forces, with the enormous economic compulsions that can be brought to bear in and against a community, run roughshod over the popular will rather than enact it. Here one would have to go on a case-by-case basis. No grand overarching theory, whether political or economic, could cover everything.

But I have jumped ahead of my story. Let’s begin at Carlson’s beginning. He notes that the family “is actually in the throes of basic upheaval.” The statistical evidence is clear—soaring rise in the rates of all the items noted above, including divorce. Carlson then states his theses with admirable clarity: (1) A central purpose of the human species is reproduction, (2) The family is a universal institution, (3) Governments or states have “an infinite capacity to harm or disrupt the family and very limited ability to help it,” (4) “The American system of liberal capitalism holds an unusual relationship with the family institution.” (Carlson further explains his fourth thesis by insisting that “Capitalism needs the family as regulator, or control, over the economic system’s baser instincts.” But the family, by contrast, “does not need industrial capitalism to the same degree.”) Points (5) and (6), respectively, are that a free society can easily accommodate the family “so long as the family is seen as the repository of unique rights and obligations,” and, finally, that the negative turn of statistics may overstate the case for social breakdown.

He then moves to treat each thesis by examining six “questions”: Gender, Population, Economic, Sexual, Age, and the State. The many questions imbedded in each of these areas is daunting. Because Carlson is determined to cover so much, at times his analyses are frustratingly truncated, too abbreviated to do much more than hit and run. But the many items he hits before running are essential ones that put strong demands on analysts of other stripes.

Let me note several areas of general agreement between Carlson and myself before I raise additional questions. He seems to me right on target to remind us that 50 percent of mothers of preschool age children do not work, contrary to the constructions that now dominate our discourse which make stay-at-home mothers not only nigh invisible but tend to silence them as a residual category not worthy of a strong public voice. His yearning for a restoration of some modem version of the old family wage idea is one I share, although I do not share the normative implications he packs into it for female domesticity. I agree with him that much that comes parading through town under the banner of “choice” is actually a new set of constraints and compulsions. More and more women, for example, testify that the “choice” to abort post-amniocentesis if they are carrying a “defective” child is nearly irresistible: they become “bad mothers” by carrying a child to term rather than aborting it! “Choice” and “constraint” always go hand-in-hand.

Carlson is also right that an enormous amount of outright silliness has been and is carried within the frame of professionalized academic discourses, especially those of “mental health.” He is correct to be dubious, and angered, by those pathetic few who promote destruction of the incest taboo as just another mode of cultural transformation. He is right to be outraged at the horrors perpetrated by eugenicists and their allies within the forces of progressivism who bought the eugenicist line and that led to the forced sterilization of the so-called feebleminded by the thousands in the interwar period. He is appropriately off-put by some feminist language that characterizes motherhood (just one example) as a “breeder-feeder role.” (We’re not talking fanatical fringe here, either, but respected mainstream folks who somehow fell into this kind of judgmental usage. Who needs misogynists when your ostensible friends describe you like that?)

Finally, he does well to point out that Planned Parenthood, as just one example, has always promulgated a normative vision, whether pro- or antinatalist, and that its claims to the neutral dispensing of information are bogus. It is an interested outfit. Whether one concurs or not with its interests, it is dishonest to deny that they constitute a particular set of terms of inclusion and exclusion for what is or is not to count as “normal” or “appropriate” sexuality and how it is to be achieved. They are pushing particular values; the Catholic Church is pushing alternative values, and so on. Of course their research studies are not disinterested. But this is the easy part. More difficult by far is how we analyze the construction of problems and the promulgation of solutions. Carlson loses his surefootedness in this part of his task, in large part (it seems to me) because there is an inevitable clash between “macroeconomic” and “motivational” approaches. The former looks at aggregate outcomes, and assesses some as preferable to others. The latter requires plumbing how and why individuals act. To too readily collapse the motivational dimension into the macroeconomical grinder is deeply problematic.

For example: suppose one concurs with Carlson’s analysis of the problematic effects over time of Social Security on income transfer from the young to the old, thus loosening family bonds. (Do not suppose that I suppose that: I am really unsure and I haven’t done the reading and research that would give me the right to proffer even a provisionary opinion.) That the system on the macro level “relies” on a sufficiently large number of children to “pay for promised future pensions and other welfare benefits” yet, simultaneously, makes “childbearing economically foolish,” does put the system, in an aggregate sense, in an anomalous situation. But does it follow from this that those ordinary Americans in whom Carlson places such trust will knowingly cut the number of children they might have had in light of their assumption that, macroeconomically, other folks will have a sufficient number of children to keep the system intact from which they will derive benefits once they reach age 65? I have a hunch that “baby or no baby” decisions don’t come about like that.

But it is to Carlson’s fourth thesis, namely that “the American system of liberal capitalism holds an unusual relationship with the family institution,” that I want to turn in order to offer a few insights from the vantage point of political and social theory. Carlson describes the nuclear family “fit” with liberal capitalism, when it is at its happiest point of symbiosis, as one in which the family provides both ballast and the possibility for sufficient mobility such that it (“as a highly mobile unity”) can “follow the market signals that would raise their incomes while also increasing market efficiency.” This is, at best, a highly unstable, asymmetrical relationship, and the family as the intergenerational matrix of human identity is bound to wither as mobility wins. And when mobility wins, people are more and more severed from the ties that bind. This bodes ill for the survival of anything that resembles the supporting surroundings (kin, neighborhoods) that help to sustain familial relations. Carlson’s double commitment to robust families and a robust market is, at best, riddled with ambiguities.

Democratic politics and families have always existed in tension with one another. Capitalism and families have always existed in tension with one another. Indeed, I daresay, socialism and families are not a happy mix. Maybe this tells us something about families. Michael Walzer, in Spheres of Justice, suggests that attempts, whether from defenders or opponents of the market, to restructure the family in order to make it “fit” neatly with some abstract scheme of total justice or some overarching systemic macroeconomic theory, are always problematic, even disastrous. Carlson, I believe, recognizes this—indeed, even endorses it. But his commitment to capitalism and democracy—but only if the family (as “ballast”) survives—does not, finally, work, at least not in the way he wants it to and the way his arguments require that it must. The “Family Policy for a Free People” he promulgates at the conclusion of Family Questions relies, as he recognizes, on continued productivity and prosperity, and that may not be in the cards. Plus, many of the welfare state measures—he blasts for their baneful unintended consequences (and sometimes their baneful intended ones, on his reading) are a complex concatenation of expert schemas and popular initiatives and demands based upon real needs and genuine troubles.

I have no solution. I am not even sure how best to formulate many of the problems. But I agree with Allan Carlson that what might be called the “unbearable lightness” of many by now threadbare liberal-statist approaches, approaches that consistently enable their proponents to refuse to look at the dark underside of their welladvertised nostrums, has lost credibility. Carlson has plenty of company on the independent left in that assessment. But where these thinkers, myself included, must stand apart is in our respective assessments of what capitalism is and what it does. When Carlson talks about capitalism the images are those of forces unloosed—rather like Marx in The Communist Manifesto—with outcomes that are far more beneficial than baneful. Macroeconomically speaking, he may be right. But a heavy price in human misery has been paid and continues to be paid along the way. When prices in the gas pumps in Nashville, Tennessee, jump three or four cents per gallon just two days after the Exxon Valdez has forever marred a precious environment and destroyed tens of thousands of innocent creatures with whom we share this planet, I know something is amiss. I would like Allan Carlson’s analysis of what that is—precisely because he is a man who loves his family and his country, and who worries about our particular and collective fates.

[Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis, by Allan C. Carlson (New Brunswick: Transaction Books) 335 pp., $34.95]