The Rights Revolution (11 page)

In the era of the rights revolution, demands for equal rights have also become demands for approval. Indeed, it might even be claimed that anything less than full approval denies the excluded individual (or group) recognition of his or her status as an equal. But there is a problem here — and it is colloquially called political
correctness. One fundamental critique of the rights revolution is that it engenders a coercive culture of ritualized, insincere approval. When every excluded group is demanding both equal rights and recognition, the majority can feel that it is being compelled to accord moral approval to practices that, at best, it only tolerates. So political correctness becomes a code word for a new form of moral tyranny: the tyranny of the minority over the majority. You can’t speak of sexual promiscuity among gay people, lest you appear to be demeaning gays in general. You can’t speak against affirmative-action programs that favour women, lest you seem to be denying women full recognition and respect. And so on.

Whether these constraints on public speech are actually a form of tyranny is another matter. Anyone with a memory knows that coarse, offensive, and demeaning remarks about women and gays were commonplace in the male culture of recent times. Creating a culture where groups are freed from the dismal drizzle of these remarks cannot be regarded as a serious constraint on the free speech of those attached to these stereotypes. So on balance, the idea that the rights revolution ends in coercive political correctness seems obviously misconceived. Yet closing down a culture of casual and ill-considered abuse is quite different from moving a culture towards full-hearted approval of same-sex activity and positive discrimination in favour of women. Rights equality changes moral culture because groups demand recognition. As they do so, they force sexual majorities beyond toleration towards acceptance and approval. So long as
this process is negotiated, so long as it is not presented as a unilateral demand for surrender, rights equality can be followed successfully by full recognition. But if the majority feels coerced into according approval, rather than just toleration, the result is likely to be a backlash. Once the relationship between rights and moral change is understood as a protracted process of intercultural negotiation between majority and minority, it becomes clear that rights are a necessary precondition for recognition, but not a sufficient one. Even if they secure equal rights, same-sex couples may still have to await their fellow citizens’ recognition of them as moral equals. The process will take some time and properly should do. But again, it seems hard to imagine that this respect will not follow eventually.

In this lecture, I am examining the intertwined process by which a rights revolution became a sexual revolution, which in turn became a moral revolution driven by a demand for equal recognition. But even this doesn’t begin to describe the magnitude of the change that has overtaken private life since I came to manhood in the 1960s. The rights revolution surfed on top of a much bigger wave, which brought with it improved access to higher education for women, the entry of married women into the workforce, the arrival of the birth control pill, and the development of social security systems that cushioned the impact of family breakup.

The American social theorist Francis Fukuyama has called this converging set of moral, technological, demographic, and legal changes “the great disruption.”
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All
advanced societies were affected by it, but as Fukuyama argues, Western societies were more disrupted than any other. In a society like Japan, the great disruption did not sweep away traditional marriages or increase the rate of divorce. This fact helps us to see that rights talk in the West did more than ratify social changes that were already under way. It actually helped trigger the social changes themselves. What raised divorce rates in Western society, but not in Japan, was the Western endorsement of values of individual autonomy, which in turn eroded the fabric of female self-sacrifice upon which the family depended as an institution.

Forty years after these changes, we are still trying to take account of their effects. The ledger has many double entries. There is more sexual freedom and more divorce. There are more varieties of sexual identity and more confusion about what kind of sexual beings we actually are. Abortion rights have increased the freedom of women, while at the same time raising bitter and contentious debate about our right to terminate the life of the unborn.
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There are more types of families — same-sex, single-mother, single-father — and yet more anxiety about whether family intimacy and stability can endure.

In this lecture, I want to tell the story of this double revolution in rights and sexual conduct and ask whether rights talk is weakening or strengthening our capacity to sustain intimate life. We all need intimacy, children especially, but intimacy requires permanence. Is the rights revolution threatening permanence? Is there too much talk of rights in intimate life and not enough talk of responsibility?

Questions like these are not new. Indeed, they are the hardy- perennials of modern self-doubt. By modern, I mean any society based on markets and individual rights. In North America and Western Europe, we have been living in such societies at least since 1700 and ever since then social critics have contended that market life endangers stabilizing institutions such as the family. As the great Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter argued, capitalism depends upon values such as trust and mutual confidence; without these, no one would feel safe enough to enter into contracts and exchanges.
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Now, the source of such values is the family. But the “creative destruction” of the capitalist investment process recurrently overturns stable ways of life and work based on existing technologies. These convulsions make it difficult for families to maintain continuities of care. If wage pressure and time pressure deplete the emotional reserves of family life, children are less likely to learn the values on which the larger society depends. Children who do not learn how to trust and how to love turn into selfish and aggressive adults. The result, if family breakdown becomes general, is a brutal and uncaring social order. This chain of reasoning is very familiar. There is no more enduring fear in capitalist life than that the system erodes the very values it needs to maintain order.

Capitalism’s chronic instability used to be chiefly blamed for harming family life. But newer critiques emphasize the destabilizing effects of abundance. Abundance changes the moral economy of a society by favouring values of consumption over saving,
self-assertion over self-restraint, present-mindedness over future-orientation. Abundance has other moral effects as well. Societies of scarcity are obsessed with distribution and therefore with equality; societies of abundance care less about distribution once poverty ceases to manifest itself as absolute deprivation. Paradoxically, abundant societies that could actually solve the problem of poverty seem to care less about doing so than societies of scarcity that can’t. This paradox may help to explain why the rights revolution of the past forty years has made inequalities of gender, race, and sexual orientation visible, while the older inequalities of class and income have dropped out of the registers of indignation. Abundance has awakened us to denials of self while blinding us to poverty. We idly suppose that the poor have disappeared. They haven’t. They’ve merely become invisible.

There is little doubt that the rights revolution of the 1960s is the product of the most sustained period of affluence in the history of the developed world. The old virtues, the old limits, lost their legitimacy. The new virtues — self-cultivation, self-indulgence, self-development — acquired the force of moral imperatives. This is the context that explains why the old moral economy of self-denial began to lose not only its economic rationale but its moral dignity as well.

In societies of abundance, the old argument — that capitalism consumes the basis of its own legitimacy — takes on a new twist in the claim that the rights demanded in an era of abundance erode the family structures on which social stability depends.
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The rights sought in
eras of abundance are in fact demands to throw off the order of restraint and repression that prevailed in eras of scarcity. Can family life survive this revolutionary demand for freedom? Is it possible that rights are destroying the very institution that teaches us moral virtue?

A good place to begin the story of the impact of modern rights on intimate life is with divorce. All modern societies liberalized their marriage laws in the 1960s as part of a wave of social legislation, which also included welfare reform and the decriminalization of consensual same-sex activity between adults. In Canada, the Divorce Act of 1968, the first national divorce law in our history, permitted termination of marriage on grounds of adultery and cruelty or if couples had already lived apart three years. When the act was amended in 1985, this waiting period was reduced to one year.
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This provision effectively introduced no-fault divorce into Canadian life and the impact was felt immediately. By the 1990s, one marriage in three in Canada was ending in divorce. The results, for children, have been dramatic. It is estimated that half of the children currently growing up in developed nations will see their parents divorce by the time they are eighteen.
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Most troubling is the possibility that rising divorce rates are correlated with rising levels of child abuse. This would be the case if children turned out to be more at risk of abuse from step-parents than from their natural kin. It is not clear whether child abuse is actually increasing, but if there were a correlation between such an increase and rising divorce rates, then the rights revolution would be having disturbing effects indeed.

As divorce rates have risen, so have rates of cohabitation, couples living together outside of marriage.
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The rise of cohabitation reveals the new rights that have been asserted in intimate life since the 1960s: the right to found and dissolve intimate partnerships at will and to do so without the intervention of church, state, or family. Cohabitation was a declaration of sovereignty by the couple, an assertion that they, rather than the state, would define the terms of their relationship. In fact, of course, as these relationships foundered, cohabiting couples, like married ones, found themselves returning to the state (i.e., to the courts) to seek the rights to maintenance, child support, and family property provided by formal marriage. Indeed, as the incidence of cohabitation has increased, the pressure has grown to accord cohabiting couples the same rights as married ones. So the course of the rights revolution has had an ironic outcome. Couples might have wanted to keep the state out of their relationships at the point of getting together, but they discovered that they needed to get the state back in as an adjudicator when these relationships fell apart.

Forty years into the rights revolution, we are no longer sure what role courts and legislatures should play in family life. Should the law be promoting a certain standard of family life, or should it just be serving
in loco parentis
for children at risk from family violence and breakdown? This issue has turned many people’s politics upside down. Feminists who once insisted that the state had no business in their bedrooms now clamour for state intervention to protect women against family violence.
Conservatives who once denounced the nanny state now plead for government to enforce frayed moral standards. As for liberals, many secretly wonder whether their revolution has gone too far.

The controversy over whether there should be laws against corporal punishment in families brings out all our perplexities about the relationship between state and family life. Some people believe that a state ban on corporal punishment would align the force of the law on the side of a crucial moral principle. Others maintain that punishing parents who use physical correction against children would be an invasion of family life. An Ontario court judge recently ruled against outlawing physical correction of children on the grounds that it infringed on the family’s essential margin of autonomy.
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It seems clear that the right of the child that needs defending is the same one accorded adults: the right to live a life free of fear. Children should respect their parents but never fear them, for fear always casts a shadow of mistrust over love and care. Children will never trust the love of someone who has made them frightened. So we do not want to strike children unless there is simply no other way to stop them from doing harm to themselves or others. But as soon as we concede that some forms of mild and non-harmful physical punishment may occasionally be necessary, it becomes difficult to enforce a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate correction. Do we need to? There are already sufficient laws to protect children against physical abuse, and these allow the state to take children into care. So their rights already have
protection. Additional legislation may only multiply the number of wrongful prosecutions of parents, which would weaken rather than strengthen family life.

What this story illustrates best, I think, is that the state has only a limited capacity to protect children. We already have a vast apparatus for child protection — social workers, welfare officers, family physicians, court-appointed guardians, and so on — but despite the (mostly) conscientious efforts of those who work in this area, our society continues to be disgraced and shamed by the unheard screams of children. Sometimes these cries are very close by: through the party wall, across the garden fence, in the next aisle of the supermarket. What this says to me is that rights are not enough. The welfare state is not enough. Indeed, sometimes we enact rights in the statute books and the result only weakens our responsibilities. This might be the case with children in danger of abuse. The child-protection bureaucracy, necessary as it is, sometimes confiscates responsibilities that properly lie in society itself, with neighbours, friends, and good-hearted strangers. Ultimately, child protection is not up to the state; it is up to us. If we see a child being beaten, we must raise the alarm. A rights revolution is meaningless unless it calls forth our civic courage to intervene when we know we should.