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BEGINNING WITH THE FAMILIAR

Aristotle famously identified the family as the primary unit of political society. One might be tempted to object and insist on the primacy of the individual, but the Greek philosopher’s reasoning was that there is no society without the family. Hillary Clinton wrote a book on the theme of an African proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Aristotle insisted, more basically, that it takes a family to form the basis of the broader society.1

Whether one centers political analysis on the individual, the family, the village, the nation-state, or the world community, the family is the first place in which we must interact with each other. It is our first society. The novelist Pat Conroy once said that each divorce results in the death of a small civilization.2 And he is right.

In part because of these reasons, I would like to begin our thinking about political thought with some personal reflections on family. My other motivation is that this is an introductory text. Many people are intimidated by phrases such as political thought or political philosophy. If we begin by talking about something virtually all of us can understand, such as the family, we can take a subject that may seem overly complicated or cerebral and make it more accessible. Families have features such as leadership, order, fairness, debate, restrictions, coercion, and freedoms. There are priorities, decisions, boundaries, budgets, and many other aspects that mirror political life. Rather than speak of families generally, I propose to talk about mine and the one in which my wife was raised. Through our experiences, you will be able to spot some fundamental ideas about politics.

I was raised in a family that had and has its own way of doing things. In this family, I had a great deal of freedom to decide what I was going to do. I don’t mean that I determined my own bedtime or made my own rules, but rather that I had the discretion to figure out what to do with my time outside of musts such as attending school.

While our family often ate together, sometimes we didn’t. On occasion, my folks would eat and talk in the kitchen while my sister and I ate sandwiches of our own heterodox design in front of the television (white bread, sliced ham, and A-1 steak sauce!). There were large unstructured patches of time available in any given day. I spent many happy hours alone in my room reading comic books, building with Legos, creating tents out of sheets and folding chairs, and even writing stories at my little desk. Other times, I wandered outside just looking around or playing games of imagination. Through sheer repetition over long hours, I taught myself how to play basketball by heaving up endless shots toward the hoop that seemed so far away when I began. I learned tennis in a similar fashion, beating fuzzy green spheres into the masonry on the side of our house and learning how to predict their rebound.

There were also more structured periods. I often had baseball practices and games to attend. My father and I regularly played catch for about thirty minutes or an hour after he came home from work. Friends and I frequently organized pickup games of football (we played it full contact with no pads or helmets) in each other’s yard.

The overriding theme of my childhood was bounded freedom. There were limits all around me. I had to finish homework. I had to be in bed by a certain time (reading if not sleeping). I had to go to school. A number of family activities were not optional. But what I remember so clearly was the great liberty I had to pursue my interests and desires. My family was a happy one, though it bucked the typical image by being one in which each member had a lot of time to him- or herself. I loved that.

The life I had as a child is a good example of a political idea that has had special resonance in America. The idea is ordered liberty. Ordered liberty means that to the degree a person is willing to govern himself, he can be free of a lot of external control over the details of his life. In other words, part of the reason I may have had a lot of liberty in my childhood is that I had little tendency to misuse it. (Committing acts of mischief never held any attraction for me. My internal moral compass was fairly strong.) In this way of thinking, we move toward the true meaning of liberty. We tend to think of liberty as a synonym for freedom or an absolute release from constraints of any kind, but to do so is to fail to think deeply enough. It is true that words such as liberty and confinement are effectively opposites, but it is also true that “liberty” is often opposed to another word, which is license. Used in this way, license refers to a wrong use of freedom or a wrong direction of human agency. Liberty implies a correct use of freedom.

Before I go further, I must admit that there are some drawbacks to the type of upbringing I describe. My folks did not exercise a great deal of control over the books I read, shows I watched, music I listened to, or videos my friends and I rented. (The one real constraint I recall is my father personally asking me not to see the film The Exorcist because of the disturbing images he recalled from the movie. Without question, I honored the request and still do.) In the course of the high school years, I probably consumed a lot of books and other media that were less than appropriate for a young person. And that kind of thing, of course, is one of the costs of freedom.

My wife, on the other hand, grew up in a different sort of family. Her comings and goings were more limited. Her parents made firm rules about things such as the kind of music she could listen to. Popular music in the style of Top 40 rock and roll was off-limits. They had a much stronger bent toward group activity. Freedom was less of a value than living out a certain type of excellence that was centered on being a good Christian. For her family, this meant avoiding a variety of influences that were viewed as corrupting or worldly. It also meant choosing to spend a great deal of time doing things such as memorizing Scripture. The family also put a lot of work into traveling together and developing a record of memorable experiences as a group. Unsurprisingly, they achieved what they set out to do. They are a tightly bound unit with an incredible collection of slide shows from their journeys!

Based on the description I’ve offered so far, you can see that my wife’s family was not about something like ordered liberty in the way mine was. In the Baker family individuals had wide discretion in how to order their lives as long as they avoided crashing certain boundary lines. Instead, her family identified a specific type of excellence centered on group participation and Christianity. The parents provided substantial guidance (and good, old-fashioned parental coercion) in that direction with the goal of producing the desired result. If we were to associate a political ideal with her family, it would be something like civic excellence or civic idealism.

Today when we visit her family, I experience a bit of culture shock (something that is not unusual for those who cross family lines via marriage). Now, the dissonance I feel is not centered on the Christian confession that I have come to embrace. The trouble for me is that for a period of several days I have to reconcile my own desire for broad discretion and liberty with my wife’s family ideal of group participation. I want to wander, go off by myself for a couple of hours, and just make sure I get back for the important parts. To me, that sort of accountability to the group seems perfectly reasonable. To them, especially the women, my model represents preferring the self to the group and rejecting the collective effort to make memories together.

My wife experiences a parallel but opposite sort of disconnect when she is the Martin among the Bakers. We get together at some rented cabin or at my parents’ home, where people pretty much break off and do what they want. There are times when we all gather for some meal or activity, but there is a great deal of spinning away from the nucleus as individuals or subgroups and charting separate paths in the context of the overall family vacation. Having grown up in a very different type of family, she feels as though the activities are too fragmented and that there is not enough togetherness. For her, love expresses itself through careful planning and cohesiveness, but my family tends to feel happy and reunited sharing the same general area and periodically doing something as a group.

You may be reading this and thinking the description is very personal and not really related to politics, but what I am describing in terms of different types of families and the ways they interact is the same fundamental dynamic that is present in politics. Both types of people (and other types!) live together in political communities. The same values and instincts contend with one another. Should we all be highly plugged into a community collectivity with our lives tightly wound together (often in nonoptional ways)? Or should we place a very high value on individual discretion? What is more important?

As the next short chapter will demonstrate, families are not synonymous with political societies and should not be confused as such. However, the dynamics of freedom, discretion, group activity, individual and joint identification of ideals, supervision, and control all apply in both the family and the political community. For that reason, thinking about how things were in your...