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One of the best books on
fatherhood is Fatherless America,
by American writer David Blankenhorn. In one of the chapters of this book,
"The Old Father", Blankenhorn notes that the traditional, masculine father
arouses a strong, negative reaction in modern cultures.
The question is why? I'd
like to set out my own answer to this, drawing on the useful source
material (and many of the arguments) provided by Blankenhorn.
Gender
splitting
Why has
there been such a strong rejection of the Old Father? One reason is that
the traditional father was strongly masculine. As Blankenhorn writes,
"In
essence, the Old Father is the paternal embodiment of ... what several
analysts term "the masculine mystique".
Why is
this a problem? The answer runs as follows. We live in a society shaped by
liberal political principles. The first principle of liberalism is that to
be fully human we must be self-created by our own individual will and
reason. However, our sex - our manhood and womanhood - is not something
that we can choose for ourselves. It is, in the terms of liberalism, a
"biological destiny".
It's
difficult for liberals to accept the idea that our lives might be
influenced in an important way by something unchosen like the sex we are
born into. They prefer to believe that traditional sex roles are
oppressive social constructs which can be overcome. They think that we are
liberated when we throw off the "confines" of such sex roles, by achieving
genderlessness (androgyny) or better yet by reversing traditional sex
roles.
Blankenhorn provides a large number of good quotes illustrating this kind
of liberal thought process. For instance, Carolyn Heilbrun claims in her
book Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1993) that,
"our
future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the
prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of
personal behavior can be freely chosen."
This is
simply a very orthodox liberalism in which gender is thought of as a
"prison" because gender roles are not "freely chosen" by the individual.
Another
interesting quote is Judith Lorber's call for "the eradication of gender
as an organizing principle of post-industrial society" and the
"restructuring of social institutions without a division of human beings
into the social groups called 'men' and 'women'." Lorber is
so concerned here to show that gender difference is merely an outmoded social
construct, that she puts the words men and women in inverted commas and
refers to them as "social groups".
Susan
Moller Okin spells out the liberal view in these terms:
"A just
future would be one without gender. In its social structures and
practices, one's sex would have no more relevance than one's eye color or
the length of one's toes. No assumptions would be made about "male" and
"female" roles; childbearing would be so conceptually separated from child
rearing and other family responsibilities that it would be a cause for
surprise, and no little concern, if men and women were not equally
responsible for domestic life or if children were to spend much more time
with one parent than another." (Justice, Gender and the Family, 1989)
In this
quote Susan Moller Okin is calling for gender to be made so entirely irrelevant
that it would be both surprising and concerning if mothers spent more time
with their babies than fathers did (and note again the placing of the terms
male and female in inverted commas).
Finally,
there is family therapist Frank Pittman's warning that "Heavy doses of
masculinity are unquestionably toxic, and no longer socially acceptable."
So
liberals reject the Old Father because they are led by their first
principles to reject traditional sex roles. Blankenhorn adds a further
twist to this idea by noting that many theorists are especially opposed to
the male sex role because they believe that it is the origin of "gender
splitting" - in other words, that it's masculine fathers (rather than
feminine mothers) who trigger the masculine identity of their sons and
feminine identity of their daughters.
That's
why family therapist Olga Silverstein specifically targets the male sex
role when urging us to seek "the end of the gender split", as "until we
are willing to question the very idea of a male sex role ... we will be
denying both men and women their full humanity." (Our very humanity is at
stake! ... as liberals see it, anyway.)
What is the conservative response to all this? I won't launch into a
full-scale criticism of the liberal attitude to gender at this
point. I'll simply point out that science has already proven that
differences in male and female behaviour can be at least partly
attributed to differences in the biological natures of men and
women. So liberals are going against both nature and reason in
claiming that gender differences are a social construct which can be
overcome.
Paternal authority
There's a second major reason why the Old Father arouses a hostile
response in modern Western societies. David Blankenhorn perceptively
recognises that,
"At
bottom, much of this assault [on the Old Father] centers on the
problem of paternal authority: the use of power by fathers in family
life and in the larger society."
Why
should paternal authority be such a problem? Again, we have to go
back to liberal first principles for an answer. Liberals believe
that we should be subject only to our own individual will and
reason, but this means that liberals can only accept forms of
authority that they themselves have consented to or contracted with.
Unchosen forms of authority are made illegitimate by liberal first
principles.
That's why early forms of liberalism were often so hostile to the
power of kings and priests, as the authority of both was unchosen.
The eighteenth century writer Denis Diderot captured this hostility
perfectly in his famous saying that,
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the
entrails of the last priest."
But
it's not only kings and priests who wield unchosen authority. So too
do fathers. We don't vote to accept our father's authority, nor do
we formally assent to it. Instead, we are simply born into our
father's dominion. Our own reasoned preferences don't come into it
at all.
So
it's little wonder that the Old Father should provoke such
opposition within a liberal culture. As Blankenhorn describes it,
"The Old Father wields power. He controls. He decides. He tells
other people what to do. He has fangs. This aspect of his character
generates suspicion and resentment ... This is the heart of the
matter. Many contemporary critics view authority ... as synonymous
with male identity itself."
Blankenhorn provides quite a number of examples from within popular
culture in which the authority of fathers is feared or reviled. For
instance, in 1993 Oliver Stone produced a television miniseries,
"Wild Palms", in which there is a struggle in Los Angeles in the
year 2007 between liberal humanists and malignant totalitarians. The
humanists call themselves "Friends" in contrast to the totalitarians
who call themselves "Fathers".
There is also the case of Sara Maitland who in describing "every
dark thing that father means" confesses her desire to "cast out the
Father in my head who rules and controls me ...This frightens me; I
want to protect my father and my love for him. I do not want to kill
him, to see him dead. I want to set the man free from having to be a
father."
From the sphere of "high" culture there is also the viewpoint of
poet Adrienne Rich, who believes that our unjust society is a
Kingdom of the Fathers, which stands for "rapism and the warrior
mentality".
Of
course, the tension created by paternal authority is not only a
product of liberalism. It exists also because it's an authority
which is so close to home, so personal: if it's wielded unwisely it
touches an especially raw nerve.
This is a point focused on by Blankenhorn who notes that "antagonism
toward paternal power seems to go with the territory of fatherhood."
Although maternal authority also exists, the father's power is "more
rule-oriented, more emotionally distant, more aggressive, more
physically coercive, more instrumental, and therefore more overtly
severe."
This means, in Blankenhorn's words, that there is a "necessary but
potentially explosive tension between father and child. Much of this
tension is rooted in the fact that the child both craves and resents
authority. So does culture."
Blankenhorn continues by eloquently rebutting those who
think the solution to the question of paternal authority is to
destroy it. He writes,
"Here is a core irony of fatherhood. If having a father fosters
anger in children, having no father fosters greater anger. If
fathers generate tension and ambivalence in children that is hard to
resolve, fatherlessness generates cynicism and confusion that is
much harder to resolve.
"If
paternal authority it problematic, abdication of paternal authority
is tragic. Yes, a fathered society must struggle with the inherent
tensions of domesticated masculinity. But a fatherless society must
accept the consequences of undomesticated masculinity: mistrust,
violence, nihilism.
"Adrienne Rich is wrong. Ultimately, rapism and the warrior culture
mentality represent the kingdom of the fatherless, not the fathers.
Male predation is not the synonym, but rather the necessary antonym,
of encultured paternity."
Bringing it together
Liberals, therefore, reject the Old Father on two grounds. First,
for liberals it is illegitimate to base parenting on traditional
gender roles. Second, liberals don't easily accept unchosen forms of
authority, including paternal authority.
So
liberals need to find a way to avoid gender splitting on the one
hand, and to overcome paternal authority on the other. One logical
way of doing this is to have a single parental role shared by both
sexes, but based on the mother, rather than the father.
Back in 1982 this is exactly what Sara Ruddick urged in her book
Rethinking the Family. In this work Ruddick tells us that she
looks forward,
"to
the day when men are willing and able to share equally and actively
in transformed maternal practices ... On that day there will be no
more 'fathers,' no more people of either sex who have power over
their children's lives and moral authority in their children's world
... There will [instead] be mothers of both sexes."
This must have seemed a radical proposal back in 1982. Yet we can't
laugh at it, or dismiss it as "going too far", because it has
already become the accepted attitude to fatherhood.
In
the mainstream media it is now assumed that a good father, an
involved father, is one who takes on a traditional mothercare role,
especially hands-on babycare tasks. It is also assumed that because
the Old Father did not engage much in these tasks that he was
uninvolved in family life.
It's not even considered that the Old Father contributed to his
family in an important way by going to work to provide an income, by
teaching discipline and morals, by actively guiding and socialising
his children and by providing emotional stability and physical
protection for his family.
To
put this another way, there is no longer a recognised masculine role
for men within the family. Effectively a distinctive fatherhood has
been abolished as a social ideal. Men can now either be one part of
a motherhood team, or else simply not be recognised for their
efforts by the culture they live in.
Liberty & fatherhood
The
liberal principle is that to be fully human we have to be
self-created by our own individual will and reason. If true, this
means that that the liberty to be unimpeded in our individual will
is what makes us human. Liberty of will therefore becomes the trump
card of politics.
Liberty of will, expressed simply as "liberty", is an attractive
slogan. There are even conservatives who wish to make it a one word
definition of conservative politics.
I
hope, though, that what I've written above serves as a warning to
conservatives not to accept the current understanding of "liberty of
will" too lightly. The logic of this concept, as currently
understood, requires a radical transformation of society, including
the effective abolition of fatherhood.
Nor
does "liberty of will" really deliver a true sense of freedom to the
individual. Is abolishing our gender identity - our sense of manhood
and womanhood - really felt as a personal freedom? Is it really a
freedom to restrict men's participation in the family to a feminine
role?
Liberty of will just doesn't work as a sole reigning principle of
politics. It doesn't correctly define what is worthy and what is
necessary within a social order. It cannot even deliver the one
thing it promises, namely individual freedom.
Conservatives, then, will be exactly those people who reject the
idea that "liberty of will" is the sole determining principle of
politics. If masculine fatherhood is an impediment to individual
will, conservatives will not automatically sacrifice fatherhood to
remove the impediment.
This is because the worth and the necessity of fatherhood is not
reasonably measured just in terms of its effect on liberty of will.
Fatherhood has its own importance, residing elsewhere: in the
security provided to mothers and children by a strong, protective
father, in the transmission of moral values through paternal
authority, and in the successful socialisation of boys to a
productive and well-directed manhood through fatherly role models.
Related articles:
Working out role reversal
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