Do Families Matter?

[Phoebe]

By way of background reading, the linked article is classic Caitlin Flanagan, who plies her trade by being salty about other women, pissing off feminists not of her sub-section. I find her amusing but sometimes disagree with her ripe presumptions.

Anyway, the point is that in the linked article she offers a lengthy narrative about Donald Trump and two women with whom he had affairs, suggesting that Trump has fully achieved the pornographication of public life. His relations are transactional, brash, heartless, and have no room for "family values" of the traditional sort. He cleans rigidly to a kind of sham of these values, that amounts to promoting his children.

I find this interesting because after a lifetime of hearing about crazy, even cruel policies justified on the grounds of family values, Republicans as a party have abandoned the family values they long claimed to champion. The criticism of Clinton's affairs were a kind of last gasp of their ability to tag others for this behavior. They will not have credibility on this issue for decades hence, because Trump's example will be rather hard to forget. More than this, as Flanagan points out, is that he didn't merely have affairs with Playboy bunnies like McDougal, or Maples (who really is missing from the article), but he did so in the same transactional fashion with which he engaged with pornstars like Daniel. This is what it is to him, and his version of masculinity is not isolated in our culture.

So that leads me to wonder, who will be the champion of the family going forward, and why? How?

[akiva]

[Phoebe]

Sorry for the difficulty getting the link to work - should be fixed now!

The point you raise is part of my curiosity. What is it about families that we value, and how is that relevant to what we want out of our government, or what it should do? Are families still the basic unit of society around which we should plan?

Marriage is increasingly a sport for the rich. Divorce rates dropped but went along with many more people living together without marrying. (Living together before marriage actually slightly increases the chance of divorce, though I'd like to see ongoing study as social situations change.)

I've taken marriage to be the fundamental goal and stable foundation of life. A lot of people I know would never choose that path, or did and then stopped either by choice or unwillingly. I know so many terrific kids raised by terrific parents outside traditional marriage relationships, yet I've still taken that as a model and have taken for granted that it should be an ideal encouraged by government as the best means of creating successful communities and a thriving citizenry. Is that just a crazy unsupported assumption?

We can point to general evidence about how children fare in different circumstances, but is that because we are really just tracking other factors, or the system is rigged in favor of a certain family structure? Should we favor or encourage a certain set of values around family, or certain family structures? Or is it more like "whatever is good for my kids, plus transactional baby mama / daddy relations a la Trump"? The Trump model if you will.

[Tahlvin]

Slightly side-topic in nature, but I'm reminded of it by your post. I came across a that was interesting to think about, although I don't know how much I agree with it. The upshot being that the media's response to Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs, and how evangelicals felt they were portrayed as out-of-touch prudes, is what has led to the current anomaly, if you will, where they are willing to overlook Trump's extramarital and other moral failings out of pragmatism, if they feel he will help them achieve some of their other goals.

[Mike]

I have spoken in-depth about this topic with only one deeply religious Trump supporter. The issues that are most important to him center around abortion and gay rights and separation of church and state and protection of traditional marriage. He feels that the battleground for these issues is the court system. He feels like the way to get what is important to him is by appointing as many ultraconservative judges as possible. He knows Trump is a terrible and ungodly narcissist. But Trump promised evangelicals he would pack the courts with ultra-conservative judges. Trump is fulfilling that promise.

From his perspective, if he stood on some sort of principle and refused to vote for this very un-Christian man, all he would have accomplished is ensuring that the courts (and thus the nation) continue to become more and more sinful. To him, the greater personal sin was to allow the nation to continue sliding into moral degradation instead of voting for this very flawed man who promised to make it better. And again... it's one promise he is actually fulfilling.

[Phoebe]

This may be what people tell themselves to sleep at night, but we know it's nonsense. I'll take Ron as an example since he was a huge fan of Bill Clinton and I loathe Bill Clinton. Ron wanted one thing and that was to win, after 12 straight years of Republican leadership. Early on he identified Bill Clinton as his winning horse, and he campaign for him and voted for him and was delighted with his winningness throughout the entire time. He does not give one crap that Clinton was having affairs or harassing women. This is not to say that he personally would behave that way, but he is 100% honest about not giving a s*** whether other men act that way. He thinks that the other things men do are the grounds on which their behaviors and quality should be judged, and if they like to chase ladies-not-their-wives around the table, as long as no employment laws are being broken he doesn't give a damn.

So somebody wants to support Trump because he wants the things that Trump is doing, that's fine. The fact that you like somebody who by his own words assaults women, and is constantly having affairs, does not mean that you accept that standard of personal morality as your own. But it does mean that you do not get to expect higher personal moral standards of other people, including your fellow citizens in this nation that supposedly has a crumbling moral fiber and family structure. You are now committed to the view that personal morals and family commitments do not matter, when it comes to people outside your own family unit. That's just how it is. Because you're saying that the other things people do are far more important than how they conduct themselves in their personal morality, and you don't get to take that view just for Trump and then abandon it for everybody else.

The reason this interests me is not because I want to point out hypocrisy of Republicans on this issue, even though there is really no way they can escape that charge of hypocrisy no matter how much they try to tell us it's about the fetuses. Rather, I always felt that the traditional family was worth defending, and not in a hypocritical b******* way. A traditional family structure isn't necessary to achieving good outcomes for people, but in the larger scheme of things I thought government should support that structure. Culturally speaking, I thought it was valuable to treat it as an expectation one would aim for.

But now I wonder if it is even worth maintaining a notion of traditional family unit as an ideal, or a helpful thing in any way. I know what the sexist version that Republicans usually embrace looks like, and I have no interest in that. But is there any reason to cling to family as a cornerstone of society building in that way, or is it time to jettison the whole notion? What is gained by having any particular model that we try to encourage publicly? Maybe nothing.

And on the flip side, there's a certain value that comes from burning away the b******* that we've had to live with, as long as I've been alive, concerning personal moral standards. It's so often used to hurt people. I can't remember the last time I heard a public celebration of this standard of morality that wasn't being used as a weapon against an innocent party. So maybe just Burn It Down.
But you can see why this is strange for me because my entire adult life is organized around it being the most important thing, not just for my own personal choice but because I feel like it's the right way for a society to be organized in general. Maybe that was entirely f***** up.

[Mike]

You can certainly believe all that, and my sample size of one will in no way carry any weight. I don't know what's true for most Republicans, but this person was definitely morally conflicted and framed it as literally choosing the lesser of two evils. I disagreed with this man on most matters of public policy but I would never call him a hypocrite about his faith. He's incredibly sincere and doing what he believes is best.

Side note: the fact that your husband was all about winning in that election and waswilling to discount some things in service to that end is not evidence that all people are.

[Phoebe]

Yes. He's an example of how a non-hypocrite proceeds. If your moral principle is that you need to bet on a immoral horse, then either the immorality doesn't bother you (Ron's view) or you're willing to embrace utilitarianism at least as far as your own preferences extend.

This is why these pious Republicans who bet and are still betting on Trump are total hypocrites and moreover, in some cases, betraying their own religious faith whether they think they are or not. I don't care about sincere feelings. We all can have nice feelings. I care about results. They are willing to betray some of their principles in order to satisfy others as a matter of both convenience and utilitarian calculation. In both cases their calculations were wrong, and they should admit it. Or just go on being morally perverse hypocrites, but not one gets a free pass on it. Not from me, from GOD.

It's useless to make this point in public as a political argument because people just resent it, but nice sincere faithful people who have decided this means was justified are betraying their own morality in a bad way.

[Mike]

Your logic doesn't hold if every viable horse is immoral. Even choosing NOT to vote has an effect on who wins. If your action/inaction must help one of these immoral candidates, then it doesn't require hypocrisy to choose the least of the available evils.

This is the same discussion we've had for the last year and a half. You've created definitions of other people's morality that necessitates them being evil inconsistent hypocrites in order to make the choices they do. I see a possibility where a person of good conscience can examine the available information and alternatives and truly feel that picking the lesser of two perceived evils is the best thing they can do out of a handful of bad options. I don't agree with these people, but I see how they get to where they are.

[For the record, I feel that your assessment holds true for many of them. They choose political expedience while trying to frame it as morality and their judgement varies based on political party of the accused. Yes--there are a lot of hypocrites. But it is far from the logical necessity you make it out to be.]

[Phoebe]

I don't think this is the same discussion. Yes, I have a problem with Trump voters. But the problem I'm talking about here is different: it's that people who support Trump because they think he is a useful tool are saying that their moral principle allows them to make choices of expediency even when they know that doing so is going to cause harms. Not even the doctrine of double effect allows this kind of b*******, and we all know the DDE is wrong anyway. These people are hypocrites because they harshly judge the moral principles of other people, even as they are so willing to violate their own. If you are a Trump supporter right now you absolutely do not get to judge the morality of other people who don't agree with you politically. The moral ship has long since sailed for them; it sailed so Goddamn far that they're now in bed with the very fine people of the white nationalist movement.

The DDE, by contrast, is what comes into play when we start talking about Trump voters who thought there was no good choice, so they held their nose and voted for the fetuses, and they aren't happy about what Trump is doing. These people are simply chumps, getting played by a Republican party that isn't doing a thing to stop abortion even now that it has a majority. But we're all chumps in some way. What did the Democrats really do to stop global warming when they had the chance? Why did we get a hybrid private insurance health plan instead of nationalized healthcare? Yeah, we're all being played as chumps. But if you're out there supporting Trump telling me how great he is and willing to overlook all that has happened over the past year-and-a-half (it seems so much longer)? At that point you're not merely a chump. I hesitate to tag people as "evil" per see, but you're definitely on the side of the bad if you're still over there in Trump's corner. Do you know someone who's happy with Trump that you're confident about calling a truly good person? I don't know a single one. I'm not saying I'm better than these people are, but they're definitely not good people if they think what he's doing is okay.

[Mike]

If your premise is "people who do things that will cause harm and then are disingenuous about it are bad", then obviously I have no way to argue with that. But it really feels like you're saying that bad people are bad.

[Phoebe]

I wanted to get back to the question of how families matter for democracy, going forward, but had veered far off the topic up there. I take it as an assumption that our government is organized around families as a basic unit. It's built into the law in all these different ways. I used to think this was okay because families were the natural cornerstone structure around what you build your society. You need to generate more kids if your society is going to persist, and people have those kids, and the government provides a safety net to ensure that the kids are taken care of decently and then educated. At some point we hope that adult useful citizens result from the process, and this explains and justifies why the family is a cornerstone unit in the way that it is. This is why, apart from historical convention and enshrined prejudices, it made sense for government to support families as opposed to single individuals, or a particular kind of family structure as opposed to, say, polygamous marriages, clans, or other arbitrary groupings of people into living or sharing arrangements.

Now I'm on the fence about all that. Not because of Trump, but he's an interesting symptom of how the real values for some people were always just capitalist patriarchy and not family. I've read an awful lot of arguments against the capitalist patriarchy in my day, and I always rejected the points of view that said we should throw out traditional families as the basic unit of society along with throwing out the patriarchy. I felt like that was throwing out the baby with the bathwater, har har. But now I'm not so sure, and it's a little bit weird to have lived my whole life trying to embody a particular set of values that I'm not sure are even the right ones for people in general! They can still be right for me, but I don't know if I feel comfortable suggesting that they are generally preferable for other people at all. I used to be quite confident suggesting that they were an optimal state: i.e. if you're going to have kids, you should aim for the stable nuclear family structure. If it doesn't work out, that's fine, but I always took it to be the target, and as such I thought it made sense for the government to support that basic family structure as the target, as the best means of producing the next generation for a society. I felt like most people agreed with this regardless of their political persuasion or personal situation. My main complaint was that we were no longer treating elderly persons as part of that family unit the way that we used to in generations past.

Now I wonder if it's worth clinging on to it. If many of the people who give it lip service are hypocrites, and if that superficial preference for a certain kind of family structure is usually just used as a weapon to hurt people who fail to achieve it, is there any substitute reason left to push for this? Is it really that important anymore? I think it's important but maybe I'm wrong.

[bralbovsky]

There are at least two facets to this, which are really different threads.

Families are important the way molecules are important. They're the first building block to bigger, more complex things. In families we have our first defined roles and responsibilities, which we will need when we form bigger, more complex things.
There is tension about how bonds exist, about whether uniformity is better, in cultures, and there are molecules that are more or less useful to bigger more complex things, but I think the metaphor holds.
My personal take is that it barely matters what atoms the molecule is made of, as long as it holds together and contributes (who evaluates that is tricky) - Quick story: There is an iron mine in the Adirondacks which proved to be a financial bust in the 19th century because there was a persistent impurity they couldn't smelt away. Turned out it was titanium. Metallurgy and cultures need evolution to improve.--

The second facet isn't about families at all. It's about politics. Is the king a lesser king/man because he has children on the wrong side of the bed? Is infidelity a sign of something deeper, like lack of integrity in general. After all, what is marriage other than a contract, a set of public promises? And if you can't keep those, wtf.
This question in isolation isn't really a moving target. Can these men be trusted? In my view, no. Just no. The fundamental selfishness it reveals is anathema to the trust inherent in the office. Does this disqualify Kennedy and Johnson and Bush and Clinton and Trump. Yes.

The moving part of the target is whether it disqualifies Roosevelt. The nature of marriage as an arrangement, either before adulthood where you don't get a vote, or as part of the social contract for Henry VIII, has shifted in terms of the amount of agency someone has as well as the stigma connected to leaving such a contract. (Not, in general, a fan of contracts that last forever. They violate the laws of physics and inhibit evolution).

This breaks our thread into at least two further pieces: The nature of that contract, and the cost of leaving it. To stay to the point, Trump could have easily divorced Melania, as evidenced by his marital history, but he was a liar and slave and chose to cheat instead.
Clinton had no history of breaking contracts, probably should have.
So far, I have omitted a rather important variable: Her choice.

The structural error is that in a country founded on separation of church and state, we let the church be our primary broker of marriage. It brings in all sorts of unpleasant baggage in order to do that. It was an oversight of men for whom fidelity was a variable, personal choice, but for whom, generally public contracts were important. Disengagement from church involvement would instantly make clear many of our marriage conflicts. Racial, gender, etc issues would evaporate, at least in the law.
I don't have a good metaphor for the kind of solution/media we atoms and molecules are surrounded by, but it absolutely encourages some reactions while discouraging others. Mostly without regard for how productive they will be.

[Bonefish]

I do n't know if they matter, but I can tell you that I can't stand mine any longer.

[Phoebe]

That sucks. Hopefully it will ebb and flow over time and something will change.

Trying to process bralbovsky's comments but need to be less foggy and miserable to figure it out.

[Ronster]

Families matter most of all. Nothing can be worse than a bad family and little could be better than a good family. Ultimately we need to sift through the broken pottery pieces of our lives and our families and decide what we are going to make out of all this.

In regards to family, I can tell you that the family my wife and I have made is very different that the one I was born into. While I love both in different ways, one is more duty driven (to my mother ) and the other is affection driven as well as duty which I consider to be "My Family/Our Family"

There are very different relational dynamics. With one you do not get to choose who the members are and the other is all your choice who your spouse is and you will both most likely be the primary influences in your childrens' lives.