The War Over the Family / In Defense of the Family
Kramer, Rita & Brigitte & Berger, Peter L.
BOOK REVIEWS THE WAR OVER THE FAMILY: CAPTURING THE MIDDLE GROUND Brigitte and Peter L. Berger/Anchor Press-Doubleday /$14.95 IN DEFENSE OF THE FAMILY: RAISING CHILDREN IN AMERICA TODAY Rita...
...Too olten, the Bergers add, the professionals merely view the family "as a handy hook on which to hang their left-liberal agenda of radical structural changes in favor of more equality...
...They are battling the disorders of "decadence" by embracing an often religiously motivated, sometimes eccentric, yet still recognizably middle-class commitment to family life...
...But such inner resilience also bred open cultural prejudice (such as popularly affirmed discrimination against homosexuals, unmarried and cohabiting couples, or unwed mothers) and strong legal prohibitions against actions such as abortion and abnormal sex...
...Secularism and pluralism, they note, "have contributed greatly" to the modern crisis, undermining the legitimacy of and the loyalty once given to the social order...
...When reaching a critical point in their argument, the Bergers show a similar, distinctly modern half-heart-edness...
...Since then, the Nixon Administration's ill-fated push for the Family Assistance Plan, Jimmy Carter's 1976 campaign declaration that "the American family is in trouble," the polarized and raucous 1980 White House Conference on Families, the appearance of a vocal "pro-family" coalition, on the political right, and creation of "family" committees in both houses of Congress have stoked "the family issue" up as a recurrent and tempestuous, if seldom understood, political question...
...Two books appearing this spring finally bring the family problem into proper ideological focus...
...But this balance between individualism and social responsibility, between liberation and community, was a precarious one...
...She dismisses theories of early maternal-infant bonding as simply another "trend," possibly resting on bogus research...
...Yet the author cannot shake wholly free from the dominant mood of the age...
...The first camp, they suggest, is exemplified by the feminist movement which, while never embracing more than 120,000 formal members, successfully challenged the standards of the 1950s and created "a widespread sense of the relativity of conventional family life...
...A decadent system," he explains, "is one in which everyone plays safe...
...Without a missionary-like, even "imperialistic" confidence, it seems unlikely that the new champions of the bourgeois order will prevail...
...The second group, the neo-traditionalists, stirred to action by the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion decisions, represented a backlash against the newly relativized view of the family...
...Western history shows that the nuclear family actually served as "a precondition" or "a conduit" for modernization, fostering the mind-sets and values that made a revolution in the human condition possible...
...As society's moral consensus declines, fewer individuals are prepared to take risks or make sacrifices on its behalf...
...Such offspring were" sheltered from the traumas of the outside world and educated, primarily by women (correctly labeled "the prime builders of bourgeois civilization"), to restrain their passions, control their sexuality, and confront the world as rational, "self piloting" individuals: an aristocracy of democratic virtue...
...Rita Kramer's In Defense of the Family effectively focuses on the practical and political problems of rearing children in an often hostile cultural environment...
...But they are not, I fear, the emotional material out of which counterrevolutions are built...
...In the bourgeois order, it was science, reason, and individualism which ultimately turned on their progenitor...
...Weary of their "civilization building" tasks, many women turned to feminism as a form of hyper-individualism, leaving even the most basic of human ties-the maternal-infant dyad-threatened...
...Parents should maintain "an ordered world" at home, where "distinctions between the sexes and between the generations are clearly expressed, values are clearly stated and limits clearly set...
...The more comprehensive effort is Brigitte and Peter L. Berger's The War Over the Family...
...Fortunately, such groups exist...
...the "empowerment" of people through devices such as educational vouchers...
...Challenging the medieval, hierarchical view of the world, this "deviant" family form first appeared in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe...
...Jllqually "bourgeois" in content and tone is Rita Kramer's In Defense of the Family...
...Mothers should take care of their children "as much as possible" during their first three years...
...A] substantial majority" of the West's population must be attached to the bourgeois family "both in practice and as an ideal...
...The authors reject this approach, finding a morality of selfishness and a latent hostility toward children within the movement's ideology...
...In one of her few references to religion, for example, she urges nonbelievers to keep their children in Sunday schools which stress "the idea of a benign cosmogony and the role of holidays in celebrating community with others...
...These are admirable sentiments, and they make good political sense...
...the recovery of parental rights...
...Breastfeeding is cast as oversold...
...They also state that toleration of deviance and "nonconformity" must, at some point, cease: "A society can absorb only a certain amount of dissolution of its moral substance...
...The author boldly affirms the "virtues . . . associated with capitalism and with the bourgeoisie" as essential to the creation of "men and women who can befriend each other, plan for the future, extend our knowledge and control of natural forces, . . . make life on earth fuller and richer for themselves and each other, . . . [and] have the discipline necessary to tolerate and contribute to life in a free society...
...Day-care centers are inferior and potentially damaging to children...
...restoration of the private sphere of life...
...Psychoanalysis, for example, tended to cast the self as the sole reality, treating "family" as the source of pathology...
...His famed report on "The Negro Family," which stressed the "pathologies" of divorce, illegitimacy, and fatherless children occurring with growing frequency among urban blacks, represented the first politically relevant, post-1945 call for the creation of a national family policy...
...and the maintenance of community through "mediating structures" such as neighborhood and church...
...Yet when casting their ''middle ground" agenda, the authors themselves tend to hedge their bets...
...Simply put, this volume is a major achievement...
...Old enemies of the bourgeoisie, moreover, took on new guises and pressed home the attack...
...Most sociologists, they insist, are wrong in arguing that current family disarray arises from the pressures of modernism and industrialization...
...who were also ready for innovation and risk-taking," then launched the liberal-capitalist revolution...
...Grasping at a reed of hope, the Bergers at one point suggest that defenders of the bourgeois order "will look for possibilities of revitali-zation in the less decadent groups within the population...
...Curiously, Rita Kramer takes shots at several of the groups of child-bearing Americans actually showing sparks of an inner, family-centeted "faith...
...Department of Labor, sensed something going wrong with patterns of family life in America...
...Yet, just when the authors' blood temperatures are rising, involuntary thermostats seem to cut in and they quickly cool down...
...So Mrs...
...Yet from a broader view, I think, her animus is misplaced: while the women and men swept up by such ideas do sometimes become fanatics, they are (at Least today) seldom archfeminists or devotees of yellowing* copies of the Berkeley Barb...
...Such "counter-modern" movements began with aristocratic and peasant opposition to industrial capitalism and ran through nineteenth-century expressions such as romanticism and Marxism (the latter mixing modern and counter-modern themes) to the bohemianism and Fascism found early in this century...
...Campaigns were launched and persecutions sustained on behalf of a specific vision of moral community...
...Critical to the bourgeoisie's suc' cess was a religiously based (and commonly Protestant) confidence in its goals, values, and measures of right and wrong, a surety that bordered on fanaticism...
...Most of them derive from the petite bourgeoisie-clerks, programmers, factory foremen, secretaries, and accountants-and are deeply committed to family and children...
...The author views "home births" as expressions of the dying counter-culture and radical feminism...
...The Bergers instead attempt to create a "middle ground" with a spirited analysis and defense of the "bourgeois family...
...Children need to be taught what is normal, she says...
...While "pluralism" is a good and fine word, it is seldom a fighting word...
...A his basically "liberal" dilemma, faced by all three authors, runs deep...
...respect for pluralism...
...Family beds" are roughly equated with "lesbian couple parenthood...
...BOOK REVIEWS THE WAR OVER THE FAMILY: CAPTURING THE MIDDLE GROUND Brigitte and Peter L. Berger/Anchor Press-Doubleday /$14.95 IN DEFENSE OF THE FAMILY: RAISING CHILDREN IN AMERICA TODAY Rita Kramer / Basic Books / $15.50 Allan C. Carlson . It was 1965 when Daniel P. Moyni-han, then an assistant secretary in the U.S...
...She criticizes the "natural childbirth" movement for being "doctrinal" and issuing "propaganda...
...As much as the "positive" virtues cited earlier, these attitudes and actions were an expression of the triumphant middle class, a legacy lasting in the United States well into the 1950s...
...As a guide to parenting in modern America, it fits comfortably into the historic literary genre catering to the "child centered" middle class...
...Her purpose here is to reassure young mothers that there is no single, "pure" way to deliver babies or rear children, a useful point...
...In our time, political and cultural spearchuckers fighting on behalf of the bourgeois virtues will need a similar kind of fire in their bellies, a burning surety that their values are right, universal, and worthy of the ultimate devotion...
...The Bergers label the three warring camps as the critical (' 'the radical-to-reformist coalition rooted in the movement of the 1960's"), the neo-traditionalist ("the new 'pro-family' camp, more brash and uncompromising by its very youth"), and the professional ("the combines of proAllan C. Carlson is Executive Vice President of the Rockford Institute, and has written on family topics for the Public Interest, Policy Review, This World, and The American Spectator...
...When the Western bourgeoisie was a revolutionary force, the Bergers themselves note, it carried "an almost unshakable confidence in the righteousness of [its] values, culture, and political causes...
...It's bracing, and unusually entertaining, stuff...
...fessionals, academics, and bureaucrats who make the family their field of expertise, advocacy, and management...
...A string of social philosophers, from Aristotle to Emile Durkheim to Alasdair Maclntyre, has emphasized that a viable society rests on a moral consensus deemed worthy of risk and sacrifice...
...While bourgeois certitude still powers her words, the animating spirit seems strangely rootless...
...In his brilliant excursus on "decadence," Peter Berger argues that the central symbol%and rituals of bourgeois culture stand nearly empty...
...W]e disagree . . . with conservative efforts to impose, by law, an essentially provincial morality on the entire society," the Bergers write...
...Kramer delineates an updated version of the "protected liberation" long used to raise bourgeois offspring into the ethical elite...
...Cast up against the cultural challenge of slick-paper sleaze such as High Times, or the gay perversity of Victor, Victoria^ affirmations of neutrality appear feeble, however highminded...
...Kramer proceeds, an iconoclastic, quintessential^ bourgeois "bull" in the liberal psycho-sexual china shop...
...Combining persuasive historical interpretation and wise social commentary, it cuts to the heart of our present discontents...
...They add later: "no particular family type should be either elevated or denigrated by public policy...
...At the heart of bourgeois society lay a set of "virtues"-the priority of children, the sanctity of infant life, the celebration of domestic bonds, the linked ideals of romantic love, marital fidelity, and sexual equality, an affirmation of hard work, diligence, discipline, duty, frugality, and self-control-which middle-class parents labored to instill in their children...
...Homosexuality derives from the presence in the male's past "of overpowering, overprotective mothers and inadequate fathers...
...Work and "liberation" can wait...
...As the needed minimum "common values" for contemporary Americans, they offer a subdued, almost noncontroversial list: reliability, honesty, industrious-ness, respect for others, and a willingness to assume responsibility...
...Yet the Bergers shy away from these folks, too, suggesting that the latter stand "in tension with the realities of pluralism in America," holding "a somewhat idealized picture of the American past...
...the historical record, though, suggests that it was...
...The final aim of this book is to find a reasonable middle ground amid the current alignments in the war over the family," writes husband Peter m his opening '' excursus,'' one of the four extended commentaries on selected subjects (e.g., "femspeak" and "abortion") that mark his unique contribution to the volume...
...And if they are not [normal], they need help in finding out what the problem is and, if possible, solving it...
...It is possible to argue that the legally enforced imposition of bourgeois standards was not a necessary part of the cultural equation...
...Finally, the authors also reject the family professionals, a group guided by an anti-organic view of society and given to such Orwellian ideas as mandatory day care and the licensing of parents...
...Nonetheless, after arguing that "there is no alternative to the "bourgeois family in the contemporary world," they turn to the task of shoring up that battered institution...
...Fathers should be paternal, for "[n]o child needs two mothers" and "children need a structuring figure as much as they do a nurturing one...
...Their concluding "public policy" suggestions show similar moderation: recognition of the primacy of the family...
...Single-parent families" is an oxymoron...
...Bourgeois culture rested on a fine balance between "revolutionary activity in the larger society" and "a zone of domesticity" at home, thus linking the future of modernity to the future of the family...
...With almost quaint self-confidence, Mrs...
...In America, the prevailing brand of left-liberal politics, the zero-growth and zero-population theories, the anti-technological sentiments, the widespread pacifism and longing for an international posture of meekness, the popular suspicion of patriotism, and the negative views of discipline, competition, and achievement do add up, Professor Berger believes, to a "constellation of decadence...
...The bourgeois family, in producing individuals "with singularly stable personalities...
...as Vilfredo Pareto taught, every society holds internally the kernels of its self- destruction...
...More recently, the "counter culture" of the 1960s intensified the antimodern assault, correctly perceiving'that technologic cal progress, capitalism, and the bourgeois family were "closely related enemies...
...While it is the necessary function of the state to protect the family," they suggest, "it is not the function of the state, in a democracy, to protect the sexual or other private preferences of [heterosexual] adult citizens...
...Formal beliefs can be outgrown and discarded later," she adds...
...Unfortunately, family advocates have still to discover how to speak to and for many of them.to speak to and for many of them...
...This, the Bergers argue, is what has happened in recent decades...
...The Bergers concede that Western society may no longer have "the vitality and the cultural resources to regain its moral self-assurance...
...It could be upset by radicalizing either side of the equation...
Vol. 16 • August 1983 • No. 8
