Ethics

by John Dewey; James Hayden Tufts

§ 6. UNSETTLED PROBLEMS: (2) POLITICAL

The family may be regarded as a political unit, first in its implication of some control of the members by the common end, and in the second place in its relation to the authority of the State.

1. Authority within the Family.—If the political character of the family were kept clearly in mind, the internal relations of the members of the family would be on a far more moral basis and there would be less reason for friction or personal clashes. If there is a group of persons which is to act as a unity, there must be some leadership and control. In many cases there will be a common conviction as to the fittest person to lead or direct, but where the group is a permanent one with frequent occasions for divergent interests, unity has been maintained either by force or by some agency regarded by the people as embodying their common will. In the earliest forms of society this, as we have seen, was not clearly distinguished from personal and individual command. But as the conception of the political worked free from that of the personal agent, it could be recognized more and more that the ruler was not the man—not Henry or William,—but the King or the Parliament, as representing the nation. Then government became a more consciously moral act. Obedience was not humiliating, because the members were sovereign as well as subject. It was not heteronomy but autonomy. In the family the personal relation is so close that this easily overshadows the fact that there is also a family relation of a political sort. The man in the patriarchal family, and since, has exercised, or has had the legal right to exercise authority. And with the legal theory of inequality to support him it is not strange that he should often have conceived that obedience was due to him as a person, and not to him as, in certain cases, best representing the joint purpose of the family, just as in other cases the woman best represents this same purpose.

Equality or Inequality.—But even when there had been recognition of a more than personal attitude the question would at once arise, are the members of a family to be considered as of equal or unequal importance? The answer until recently has been unequivocal. In spite of such apparent exceptions as chivalry, and the court paid to beauty or wit, or the honor accorded to individual wives and mothers, woman has seldom been taken seriously in the laws and institutions of society. Opportunities for education and full participation in the thought and life of civilization are very recent. Public school education for girls is scarcely a century old. College education for women, in a general sense, is of the present generation. But the conviction has steadily gained that democracy cannot treat half the race as inferior in dignity, or exclude it from the comradeship of life. Under primitive society a man was primarily a member of a group or caste, and only secondarily a person. A woman has been in this situation as regards her sex. She is now asserting a claim to be considered primarily as a person, rather than as a woman. This general movement, like the economic movement, has seemed to affect the attitude of unmarried women, and to a less degree, of men, toward marriage, and to involve an instability of the family tie. The question is then this: does the family necessarily involve inequality, or can it be maintained on a basis of equality? Or to put the same thing from another angle: if the family and the modern movement toward equality are at variance, which ought to give way?

The "pseudo-domestic" theory on this point is suggested by its general position on the economic relations of the family as already stated. It believes that the family must be maintained as a distinct sphere of life, coördinate in importance for social welfare with the intellectual, artistic, and economic spheres. It holds, further, that the family can be maintained in this position only if it be kept as a unique controlling influence in woman's life, isolated from other spheres. This of course involves an exclusion of woman from a portion of the intellectual and political life, and therefore an inferiority of development, even if there is not an inferiority of capacity. Some of this school have maintained that in America the rapid advance in education and intelligence among women has rendered them so superior to the average man who has to leave school for business at an early age that they are unwilling to marry. A German alliterative definition of woman's "sphere" has been found in "the four K's"—Kirche, Kinder, Küche, und Kleider.

If the permanence of the family rests on the maintenance of a relation of inferiority, it is indeed in a perilous state. All the social and political forces are making toward equality, and from the moral standpoint it is impossible successfully to deny Mill's classic statement, "The only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals." But some of the advocates of equality have accepted the same fallacious separation between the family and modern culture. They have assumed that the family life must continue to be unscientific in its methods, and meager in its interests. Some women—like some men—undoubtedly place a higher value on book learning, musical and dramatic entertainment, and other by-products of modern civilization than on the elemental human sympathies and powers which these should serve to enrich. It is too easily granted that the opportunity and duty of woman as wife and mother are limited to a purely unscientific provision for physical wants to the exclusion of scientific methods, intellectual comradeship, and effective grappling with moral problems.

Isolation Not the Solution.—The solution for the present unrest is therefore to be found not in forcing the separation between the family on the one hand and the intellectual, political, and other aspects of civilization on the other, but in a mutual permeation. They think very lightly of the elemental strength of sex and parental instincts who suppose that these are to be overslaughed in any great portion of the race by cultural interests. And it is to ignore the history of political progress to suppose that organic relations founded on equality and democracy are less stable than those resting on superiority and subordination. The fact is that there is no part of life so much in need of all that modern science can give, and no field for intellectual penetration and technological organization so great as the family. Correlative with its control over economic processes through its position as consumer, is its influence over social, educational, and political life, through its relation to the children who are constantly renewing the structure. To fulfill the possibilities and even the duties of family life under modern conditions requires both scientific training and civic activity. Provisions for health and instruction and proper social life in school, provisions for parks and good municipal housekeeping, for public health and public morals,—these demand the intelligent interest of the parent and have in most cases their natural motive in the family necessities. A theory of the family which would limit the parent, especially the mother, to "the home" needs first to define the limits of "the home." To measure its responsibilities by the limit of the street door is as absurd as to suppose that the sphere of justice is limited by the walls of the courtroom. A broader education for women is certainly justified by precisely this larger meaning of the care of children and of the family interests. The things of greatest importance to human life have scarcely been touched as yet by science. We know more about astrophysics than about health and disease; more about waste in steam power than about waste in foods, or in education; more about classical archæology than about the actual causes of poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, and childlessness, the chief enemies of home life. In the light of the actual possibilities and needs of family life two positions seem equally absurd: the one that family life can be preserved best by isolating it, and particularly its women, from culture; the other, that it does not afford an opportunity for a full life. Neither of these errors can be corrected apart from the other. It is in the mutual permeation and interaction of the respective spheres of family and cultural life, not in their isolation, that the family is to be strengthened. Here, as in the economic field, no one family can succeed entirely by itself. The problem is largely a social one. But every family which is free and yet united, which shows comradeship as well as mutual devotion, is forcing the issue and preparing the way for the more perfect family of the future.

2. Authority over the Family: Divorce.—The strains which have been noticed in the foregoing paragraphs have centered public attention on the outward symptoms of unrest and maladaptation. Current discussions of family problems are likely to turn largely upon the increase of divorce. For the reasons which have been given there has doubtless been increasing tendency to seek divorce, and this may continue until more stable conditions are reached. Now that the authority of the church is less implicitly accepted, individuals are thrown back upon their own voluntary controls, and whether marriages are arranged by parents as in France, or formed almost solely on the initiative and unguided will of the parties as in America, the result is much the same. Two classes of persons seek divorce. Those of individualistic temperament, who have formed the marriage for selfish ends or in frivolous moments, are likely to find its constraints irksome when the expected happiness fails to be realized and the charm of novelty is past. This is simply one type of immoral conduct which may be somewhat checked by public opinion or legal restraint, but can be overcome only by a more serious and social attitude toward all life. The other class finds in the bond itself, under certain conditions, a seemingly fatal obstacle to the very purpose which it was designed to promote: unfaithfulness, cruelty, habitual intoxication, and other less coarse, but equally effective modes of behavior may be destructive of the common life and morally injurious to the children. Or alienation of spirit may leave external companionship empty of moral unity and value, if not positively opposed to self-respect. This class is evidently actuated by sincere motives. How far society may be justified in permitting dissolution of the family under these conditions, and how far it may properly insist on some personal sacrifice for the sake of larger social ends is simply another form of the problem which we considered in the economic field—the antithesis between individual rights and public welfare. The solution in each case cannot be reached by any external rule. It will be found only in the gradual socializing of the individual on the one hand, and in the correlative development of society to the point where it respects all its members and makes greater freedom possible for them on the other. Meanwhile it must not be overlooked that the very conception of permanence in the union, upheld by the state, is itself effective toward thoughtful and well-considered action after as well as before marriage. Some causes of friction may be removed, some tendencies to alienation may be suppressed, if the situation is resolutely faced from the standpoint of a larger social interest rather than from that of momentary or private concern.

General Law of Social Health.—Divorce is a symptom rather than a disease. The main reliance in cases of family pathology, as for the diseases of the industrial and economic system, is along the lines which modern science is pursuing in the field of medicine. It is isolating certain specific organisms which invade the system under favorable circumstances and disturb its equilibrium. But it finds that the best, and in fact the only ultimate protection against disease is in the general "resisting power" of the living process. This power may be temporarily aided by stimulation or surgery, but the ultimate source of its renewal is found in the steady rebuilding of new structures to replace the old stagnation; the retention of broken-down tissues means weakness and danger. The social organism does not escape this law. Science will succeed in pointing out the specific causes for many of the moral evils from which we suffer. Poverty, crime, social injustice, breaking down of the family, political corruption, are not all to be accepted simply as "evils" or "wickedness" in general. In many cases their amount may be greatly reduced when we understand their specific causes and apply a specific remedy. But the great reliance is upon the primal forces which have brought mankind so far along the line of advance. The constant remaking of values in the search for the genuinely satisfying, the constant forming, criticizing, and reshaping of ideals, the reverence for a larger law of life and a more than individual moral order, the outgoing of sympathy and love, the demand for justice—all these are the forces which have built our present social system, and these must continually reshape it into more adequate expressions of genuine moral life if it is to continue unimpaired or in greater vigor.

We do not know in any full sense whence the life of the spirit comes, and we cannot, while standing upon the platform of ethics, predict its future. But if our study has shown anything, it is that the moral is a life, not a something ready made and complete once for all. It is instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it to higher levels. Ethical science tracing this process of growth, has as its aim not to create life—for the life is present already,—but to discover its laws and principles. And this should aid in making its further advance stronger, freer, and more assured because more intelligent.