The Rights Revolution (13 page)

Yet this crisis is too complex to be blithely blamed on “deadbeat dads” alone. In hearings before a parliamentary committee in Canada in 1998, groups of fathers bitterly complained that they were bearing the brunt of public blame for what has happened to the family. In fact, they claimed that they were discriminated against. Courts
were favouring mothers over fathers in custody disputes, and the divorce process was being abused by lawyers despoiling working men of their assets. These groups demanded that the “custody and access” regime created by the Divorce Act of 1985 be replaced with a “shared parenting” regime in which both parents are given equal rights to bring up their children.
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These are sensible and overdue suggestions, and the fact that they’re being made shows that men and women are struggling to correct the rights revolution, so that equality works for everyone.

In facing up to these issues, liberals also need to face up to their responsibilities. Let us acknowledge that the rights revolution must shoulder some share of the blame for family breakup and its consequences in our society. Even if a lot of other factors also come into play — the pressure of work in capitalist society, the mobility that market success requires of many families — it has to be true that we divorce more frequently than our grandparents because of the kinds of freedom we take for granted, and hence the kind of persons we have become. We do believe we have a right to happiness; we do believe we want to live our lives instead of silently enduring them; we are much more explicit than our grandparents about wanting sexual happiness and a wide variety of sexual experience.

But the conservative critique, which denigrates these desires as selfishness, gets us nowhere. People can and do repent of selfishness and they can turn their back on appetite. But the rights revolution has been propelled by something stronger than appetites: it’s propelled by the
values of authenticity that shape our ideas of what a good life should be. The divorce rates tell us that men and women are no longer willing to suffer and be still. Our rights culture endorses complaint and it dignifies discontent. It offers moral legitimacy to departure.

There is a deeper conflict than our parents’ generation imagined between being faithful to others and being faithful to ourselves. It is entirely possible to be true to others — your spouse and your children, for example — and betray yourself. By betrayal, I mean giving yourself to others in ways that sacrifice your talents, your special gifts, your unique ability to contribute. If you betray yourself in this way, you then render yourself useless to others, incapable of carrying out your duties and responsibilities with conviction and self-respect. It is this moral insight — more than just sexual temptation or appetite — that drives so many modern marriages onto the rocks. Marriages can survive sexual temptation. They can even survive betrayal. What they cannot survive is either partner believing they have betrayed something essential about themselves. We ought to be candid enough to admit that when a marriage forces a couple to betray themselves, it deserves to fail.

Even if we should accord respect to divorce, let no one suppose that there can ever be such a thing as a painless one. Even those who make a happy escape can be burdened for the rest of their lives by a real sense of sadness and failure. And the harm done to children is real, though this harm must be evaluated against what might be called the contra-factual harm: what would have happened
had the parents stayed together. Indeed, all one can ever say about divorce is that it can teach children something sad but true about life: that love is not eternal, that trust can be lost as well as won, that betrayal is a fact of life. Some believe that children should always be sheltered from these facts. But I don’t see why innocence should enjoy these moral prerogatives, because I don’t see why concealing the truth helps children. And besides, children know more than we think. Anybody who breaks up a marriage certainly learns one thing: if you cannot justify divorce to your children, you cannot justify it to yourself. And justify it you must. But this truth is underpinned by another: that a modern family is a realm of moral equals, each with claims and each with rights, one of which is a right to justification.

We owe children truth; we owe them reasons for our conduct. Sustained moral concern implies helping them to understand us as the imperfect but struggling agents we are. Divorce takes everyone off the pedestal. But why did we put ourselves on the pedestal in the first place? Parents needn’t be heroes — moral or otherwise. Nor should they be friends. They should be parents.
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Children do have rights. They have the right not just to be sheltered and cared for and protected from abuse, but also to be treated as moral agents in their own right, with intentions, purposes, and visions of the world that we should not presume are identical to our own. A liberal ideal of parenting puts empathy at the heart of modern family life — that is, no longer taking children for granted, no longer assuming that they should be the
silent and obedient witnesses to the godlike dramas played out above their heads, but acknowledging that they are incipient adults whose minds must be read, whose hearts must be understood, and whose love must be earned.

Will a society of children raised in divorced families be a society in which individuals no longer know how to trust one another? This will happen only if we lie to them, only if we pretend to be happy when we’re not, only if we fail to treat their emotions with the respect they deserve. Only if we fail to give them what we know we need ourselves: the continuous light and warmth of sustained moral concern.

Only a complacent person could possibly be happy with the state of modern married life and the family. The conservative blames the rights agenda for creating discontentments with family life that didn’t exist before. But this is false. The unhappiness was there; the rights revolution simply enabled men and women to act on the unhappiness they once felt powerless to change. What rights have done is to enlarge people’s sense of themselves as agents: empowering them to think of their urgent needs as entitlements and giving dignity to their complaints about the unfairness and injustice of family life. But this injustice exists. It cannot be conjured away by greater acts of will and self-repression and it cannot be dispersed by the law.

Nor can we go back on what we have already done. The changes in family life are not a transient effect of 1960s fashion; they are not the consequence of some blind
descent into moral selfishness. They are here to stay and we need to make the promise of moral equality in intimate life real for all of our citizens. Families that divorce need help so that parenting responsibilities can be genuinely shared, not reluctantly conceded in rigid custody-and-access schemes that end up dividing children from their parents. We need to create new cheap and efficient institutions that mediate family conflict instead of impoverishing families with exorbitant legal costs. Instead of abandoning the equality agenda that began in the 1960s, we need to complete it. Same-sex couples should be entitled to the same rights of marriage, adoption, and parenthood as other-sex couples and they should be held to exactly the same standards of responsibility and accountability.

Families that work need help to survive — help that includes decent public education, publicly funded daycare, universal health care free at point of need, and accident and unemployment insurance. Families also need respite from the devouring impact of work and stress on intimate life. We need to change the employment laws so that family life is not squeezed between the millstones of two precarious incomes. The key goal of our social policy should be to give families the time they need to be together.

In the new century, most families that survive do so not by jettisoning the values of their parents, but by reinventing them and rebalancing the division of labour. They balance rights against responsibilities, seek to equalize sacrifice, and manage to impose rational limits on
children’s behaviour. But no vision of family values has a chance of commanding genuine assent — and that is the test of an ethic’s legitimacy — unless it accords respect for the individual’s needs
against
the devouring claims of family life.

Much as deficit-reducing conservatives may lament the fact, the test of serious moral commitment to the family is a willingness to spend public money. Effective child protection, universal access to health care, affordable child care, first-rate primary and secondary education — these are the building blocks of the protective arch that society must raise over its families. This institutional arch doesn’t come cheap, but those exponents of family values who won’t stump up for it are just engaging in cheap talk.

The rights revolution has not launched us on a slippery slope towards nihilism and social collapse. We are simply trying, with as much success as failure, to live by the twin ideals of equality and authenticity, to fashion lives that reflect our choices and do not depend on thwarting the lives of others. There is wreckage at our feet, but the new forms of family and intimate life that are emerging do what these institutions have always done: sustain us with a shared experience of moral concern. There is much that we could do better, and we had better acknowledge, sooner rather than later, that we cannot have it all. If we want happy children and happy spouses, we had better fight back the claims of work; if we want to be treated equally, we will have to treat others equally; if we want our children to respect us, we will have to respect their need for rules and order. What I think cannot
be changed is our sense of ourselves as free agents: the idea that all family members have rights; that we have duties to ourselves, as well as to others; that no one is there to serve, honour, obey, and suffer in silence; that we are committed to perceiving each other not as equals — since parents and children cannot be equals — but as moral entities entitled to reasons, the best ones we can devise. The liberal proposition is that children deserve reasons as much as love, and that reasons are a form of love.

It is often said that we should beware of what we want, because we are likely to get it. We need to see our anguish and disarray about the family as a struggle to face up to the consequences of having got what we wanted. We wanted freedom and we should stop apologizing for it. We must simply pay its price. As Isaiah Berlin once said, freedom is a chilly virtue: it is not justice, equality, or a quiet life; it is merely freedom.
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Almost everybody is frightened of it. And almost everybody would restrict somebody else’s freedom if he could get away with it. Freedom is not the only moral virtue, not the only moral priority, but it happens to be the precondition of all the others. An agent who is not free cannot be a responsible one at all. If we value responsibility, then we need to have the courage to embrace our freedom. It is the very condition of responsibility, not to mention self-respect, and hence the very basis of an authentic life. The rights revolution has been in the service of freedom and we need to have the courage to continue with it until we can genuinely say that everyone shares its benefits and not just its costs.

I
N THE COURSE OF THESE LECTURES
, I’ve retold the history of our country since the 1960s as a story of the struggle by different groups of citizens for rights and recognition. In this final lecture, it’s time to draw together the argument and ask a basic question: Has the rights revolution brought us closer together as a nation or driven us further apart?

The answer to the question depends on whose point of view you take. In these lectures, I’ve taken the point of view of the rights-claimants in these struggles: women seeking sexual and economic equality, aboriginal peoples seeking recognition of their title to land, ethnic minorities seeking protection of their culture, and same-sex couples seeking rights equivalent to those afforded heterosexuals. From their perspective, the history of the past forty years is a story of freedom painfully fought for and far from achieved. Unity, by and large, has not been their concern.

From the viewpoint of the bystander majority, however, the rights revolution has often seemed less about emancipation than about fragmentation, with the Canada they once knew taken apart and reassembled into a fractious collection of rival rights communities: gays versus straights, aboriginal peoples versus non-aboriginals, French-speakers versus English-speakers, immigrants versus native-born, abled versus disabled, rich versus poor. The rights revolution empowered these groups at the price of disempowering the majority. When a majority feels it is weakened, it is natural for it to believe that the country has been weakened as well.

Minorities have won recognition, and now it is the turn of the majority to look around and ask, in astonishment, whether it recognizes itself. Where is the majority any more? Who are we? Once we thought we knew: white, heterosexual, family-oriented, native-born people who were Canadians first and anything else second. Now the population is cross-cut with identities — sexual, racial, religious, and ethnic — making it difficult to speak of a Canadian majority at all. This may be one reason for the belief, widely held among our elites, that our country has become ever more difficult to govern. The essential work of national politics is creating majorities (i.e., national coalitions of interest). As the rights revolution fragments the majority, it fragments the coalitions that keep the country together.

The rights revolution also turns politics into an exchange of recrimination between victims and their supposed oppressors. It’s not that there aren’t real victims out
there; the problem is that the majority has genuine difficulty accepting the idea that present generations remain responsible for the harms committed by past ones. How long must the Canadian majority continue to pay for the abuses done to aboriginal peoples in times past? How long must it do penance for racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice? It is clear that for many Canadians, the debate over past injustice produces not mutual recognition but resentment. Victim and oppressor become co-dependent, locked into their roles and unable to shed them. The victim minorities resent depending on the majority for redress. The majority resents depending on the minority for forgiveness. Since forgiveness would foreclose future claims, victims tend to withhold it; since redress implies culpability, it too is withheld. So the politics of argument is replaced by a politics of blackmail and stonewalling. Many in the majority Canadian community who have felt themselves put in the dock by the incessant accusations of various victim communities do not see the rights revolution as a story of a successful fight for inclusion by the excluded. Instead they see it as a story of how a once strong country was fragmented.