There’s a lot of talk about ‘family values’. Conservatives swear to defend them perpetuating narrative of defense. The left side wants to abolish it, also reacting to the defense narrative. They try to deconstruct it by pointing out hypocrisy. The most common examples are treatment of immigrant families and people like Donald Trump getting divorced. Here I'll focus on their view on the cishet divorce and LGBT epistemic domination.
What ‘family values’ means, changes not in time and between different people. Let’s stick to the people who use the term the most. Speaking of it in positive terms means you're most likely a conservative of sorts. Left wingers do not use it unless when arguing against rightwing narrative.
What is family? Under generous debate it's the broadest, most abstract definition, a superset of each of the stances’ definitions. That means a focus on families as in with real, often daily contact.
Family is a filiation - alliance unit, not unconected with production. Therefore any discussion of it must necessarily touch socio economic issues.
Either the family values change or they are immutable.
Those who support them usually contrast with the status quo of a few decades at most. On the other hand, there are perennialists. They don’t argue that it’s a family value, but a perennial, traditionalist value. For them that 'family values' are good not because of connection to family unit, but beloning to the perennial ones.
Context expansion: a variation of historical ‘family values’ is wide:
- in ancient Rome patria potestas would be held as family value
- Aristotle included slaves in the definition of family
- Massachusetts settlers forbade bachelors from living alone
- nuclear family - as contrasted to extended family. TL;DR nuclear families have been in England since the 13th century, in the US popularized in the 60s and 70s. At peak about 40% of households were parents and children, decreasing to less than 25% in 2000. That was accompanied by increase in singles and single parents households. Non-anglophonic cultures tend to exhibit extended family patterns. This nuclear family pattern is interculturally correlated with fertility. Family values are sets of practices, beliefs. There might be only family (pun not intended) resemblance between its members, but let’s try to get behind words. We might invent / discover a variable they all optimize as self-replicating memes.
Family values as a meme
From there follows that they favour fertility, natalism. Then on the face of it family values should be against all that decreases the number of births: - contraceptive - abortion - women empowerment - increasing possible % of lifetime devoted to non-parenting activities - cohabitation - does not maximize childbearing conditions. Marriage as state sanctioned exclusive resource exchange union - divorce - except when a spouse is infertile - community/ friendship / consumerism if would disrupt early marriage - anything crossing the limit of cis-heteronormativity The system is imperfect, has false alarms where family values shun something that doesn't affect fertility. Especially in changing conditions of production. That’s the most crude model, used by people shouting at clergy ‘we won’t breed like rabbits’. Then these false alarms operate as factors that optimize on their own. Let’s go deeper.
Social fabric argument
Another angle is that family values are those that promote intergenerational link. Holding a country together in time, as important as keeping regions together. This rests on quasi-Derridean deconstruction of space - time duality, treating them equally. It's an incentive for low time preference behaviours. On this account family values would perpetuate: - multigenerational families - bonds between grandparents and grandchildren. Help with parenting reciprocated by help in decrepitude. - trust in the family - against divorce, but on the grounds that it’s a signifier of a breach of trust. Here it can be argued that settling into a new high trust LTR would be beneficial - sanctity of familial bonds - like Confucian filial piety - retirees support ratio - economical argument that lack of family values gentrifies population. The state makes Ponzi retirement schemes schemes, less youths, disrupting innovation long term. Demographic dividend turns into demographic debt. Demographic transition is not a certain science. Stabilizing population long term is an art no one has mastered.
Interruption: Eyes don’t see failure mode. Disliking X which causes Y makes you avoid seeing Y instead of dealing with X directly, wrong optimization.
Let’s describe another position. Conservatives treat family as the primary unit of society. Abstracted out, this is a choice of some small unit to compose the whole. Ideologies see different units composing society: syndicalism factory, fascism each industry, Marxism-Leninism the Soviets. Assuming benefits from decentralization, a family size unit is one of the smallest possible options. Would ‘family values’ units of that size outrank other units of similar size? In families you have a biologically driven range of emotions. This would mean it's easier to form bonds inside it than outside. Such strong feelings become political and religious, giving rise to intentional communities. It is worth noting on this occasion that most intentional communities created from scratch were enterprises in the 19th Century. Low cost of looking for similar people and the total available pool of them were really favourable to such endeavours. Arguably more than ever before. Or maybe it's just a Hajnal line thing.
Against oppression
By deriving from memetic competition, family values perpetuate what is called oppression by the left . Set of values transmitted by ‘voluntary honest discussion’ is much smaller than those propaganda. A set of ideas has an edge in populating itself over minds if that populating one mind by others is good. That is evident in most Christian denominations, and almost all non-Protestant ones. Not to mention Confucian filial piety, and circumcison practiced in Judaism and Islam.
Left anarchists would contrast ascriptive family with voluntary associations, communes or polycules. The problem of finding compatible people was described above. Contrasting nuclear families with communes not do them justice scale wise. These are different things. Fair comparison is between a nuclear cishet family and postmodern family. Postmodern families: be it post-divorce one, non cishet, pair without children, single parent raising. Then it doesn't look so bad for family values anymore.
Wider social network around family is unviable in today Western individualized economic landscape. Deterritorialization of jobs, constant moving, no anchoring in one geographical place - all anti-familial.
Let’s argue close to leftist POV. Upward social mobility is good. The data indicates that single parent upbringing prevents upward mobility. How should the state respond to that, ideally? Either embrace the meme, ethics of single motherhood or work against it. There appears a dilemma: the state endorses whatever it supports by anything, even whatever it talks about. Either it talks negatively, or talks explicitly positively or neutrally. In the latter two cases sending messages of support.
Even if the state talks about something in a neutral language, it validates it by devoting broadcast time to it. By increasing LGBT visibility it creates enemies of LGBT non tolerant people. By extension, the state also affirms the conditions that gave rise to a given phenomenon, by the heuristic ‘no bad fruit from a good tree’. At least optics wise. This means that empowering single mothers would approve of men not refusing the challenge of fatherhood.
Microfascism and macrofascism - notions from Fromm and Deleuze and Guattari. It seems that there is a certain inverse relationship between the two. Microfascism (distributed familial hierarchies, more robust than single point of failure macrofascism) seem to be the better of two ‘evils’. That's a notion similar to subsidiarity. Empowering the family is against the state, theme present in the West since the Antigone.
Summary of stances
Popular self-coherent positions outlined (and judged) here are:
Generally pro-family stances / arguments:
- natalism - exoteric, against divorce on children grounds, against non-reproductive individuals. This includes all those ‘refusing the call to patrenthood’ not only LGBT.
- organicism - more complex view, flexible around divorce and not minding LGBT presence. Still often critical of too overt visibility, even if just for feeding internal discord.
- perennialism / reaction - ‘family values’ as purely by coincidental subset of pernnial values. Values that survived modernity, but some value requirements are still being too modest. Opinions on divorce and LGBT differ.
- subsidiarity - family as a decentralized power structure. Pragmatically efficient - sceptical towards divorce, as long term alliances would be made not in the filiative organ, but in religion, at work. LGBT accepted insofar as it doesn’t create overpowered structures. Characteristc of societies outside Hajnal line. Stances sceptical to what we call ‘family values’ in the argument: voluntarism - family as involuntary association —> oppressive. Either fully against, or as an opt out system.
- cultural relativism - any specific cultural model of family is culture bound, so flexibility is needed. This can be organicism under multiculturalism, choosing tradeoffs promoting social cohesion. Then cultural stress on family values of a subculture is sacrificed for whole-culture harmony. Still most often an alternative, common-to-all culture creation attempt occurs. Catch 22 here, if it succeeds historically the prior cultures are often forgotten, and failed cultural unions are more visible. Successful examples include Roman in the Apennine Peninsula and unification of Japan. Unifications of Germany and Italy in 19C are relatively recent and less successful in terms of cultural homogeneity .
- anti-natalism - no explanation needed
The utilitarian impulse to analyse this question is strong. There might be no solution that is good on all sides, giving adequate outcomes for all the things we hold dear now. Update of preferences under realism might be necessary. There are tradeoffs. We are in a situation where we cannot address some of the concerns without working against other concerns. Family values are traditional ideas, made explicit under modernity and subverted under postmodernity. I’d say experimentation is needed, but that already occurs. In science devising an experiment is as important as deciding to terminate it and collect results.