Monthly Memos

Family Values: Cause Or Effect?

Charles I. Mundale
Executive Director of MCCR

October 1993

In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Prof. Michael Novak builds a strong case for the middle-class family. As our "primary institution of realism," the middle-class family has taught us discipline, self-control, humility, and how to use and accept authority. "Above all else," the professor asserts, "the bourgeois family is built on critical judgment," on "the capacity to reflect clearly upon the world of experience, to make practical judgments about it, and to act."

It is hard to argue with the professor's emphasis on the family as important to the "moral order," or to contest his characterization of it as a teacher of realism. But like so many discussions of family values, his analysis confuses the cause-effect relationship between the family and the larger society.

He credits the family, through its child-rearing practices, with the power to "strengthen or undermine...the habits of mind and soul, the moral skills...of the republic itself." This is true enough as far as it goes, but it creates the impression that family is cause and society is effect: Fix the family and society will come around. Reality, alas, is more complex.

Mr. Novak censures the relativism and permissiveness of what he calls the "utopian elite," but he also points out that the middle-class family has been badly shaken by the lures and snares of affluence. He thus makes affluence the point of origin for our difficulty and not the family. Yet, behind affluence in the chain of causes stands, democratic capitalism itself. It is democratic capitalism's own enormous success that has -- to use Mr. Novak's allusion -- left the children of the Depression unprepared "to bring up children under heretofore never experienced conditions of affluence."

If today's parents find it hard to make judgments, if they prefer, as Mr. Novak argues, "'to find' rather than 'to better'" themselves, it is because they are lost in the blizzard of exhortations to self indulgence that has come to characterize the culture in which they live.

Elites, utopian and otherwise, have contributed to the confusion, even as they have tried to sort it out, but the issue we don't want to face is the complicity of our larger institutions -- government, business, and religion -- in the values plight of our families.

We have not come up with a compelling alternative to material consumption as the engine of our economy or the goal of human life. Viewed in this way, what is happening in our families is effect, not cause. Causes and effects in society work both ways, often at the same time. "Families are to blame" is a misleading diagnosis.

The good news is that growing numbers of business leaders now recognize that their operations have a telling impact on family life. MCCR's Board of Directors has reflected that concern in its approval of "Work-and-Family" as the focus of this year's programming.

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