Family and the State

One area of human activity is definitely gray in considering privacy in personal matters and the duties of the State to regulate relations between its Citizens. That is family matters. To what degree can the State legitimately enter the homes of its Citizens and tell them how to raise their children, dictate what is and is not abuse, require family members to testify against them, dictate what is taught to be moral or immoral?

The Children is the rallying cry of those who want the State to have an eye in every bedroom and an ear in every living room. It is for the Children they will say. What about the right of the Parents to raise their Children to share the same values and beliefs they have always held?

The Right to Privacy as it existed when the US was founded, along with the related right to Free Practice of Religion, and the doctrine of Separation of Church and State would have made most of what family services do today such an insulting violation of personal privacy of the parents that bloody revolution would have been the result.

The tendency is for the State to more and more replace the Parent as the source of all authority. This relieves the Parent of responsibility, lets him or her just spoil the child, and in many ways makes life easier for the Parent. Teachers cannot discipline children because the Parents scream in outrage when they do. Parents cannot discipline children because Teachers and Social Workers scream in outrage when they do.

Emotionally charged words like abuse, children, trauma, etc. are bandied about by either side attacking the other. In many places throughout the USA today neither Parent nor Teacher dares raise their voice to a child and the only discipline that they can legally use is to involve the Police Department and start the child into the Criminal Justice System.

500 years BCE Confucius had a dialogue with one of the Princes of the Chinese States of the time. From the Analects of Confucius as translated by James Legge;

This question of which is more important, the integrity of the family unit or the authority of the state is an ancient one. Confucius put personal relationships ahead of obedience to the laws of the State. He felt that orderly disciplined families would ensure orderly disciplined citizens better than an authoritarian State which destroyed these natural bonds. Today, in the US, most people seem to place obedience to the laws of the State as more important than personal loyalties.

Confucius would have doubted that a father who betrays his son, or a son who betrays his father could be trusted by the state. If a state demands that its citizens violate such a trust, then how can the state expect to have any trustworthy citizens? Confucius was a very wise man, a surprising amount of what he taught remains valid and relevant to the world today.

A free society trusts its citizens and expects that strong citizens will make a strong state. A society which does not encourage strength in its citizens cannot be considered free, and will not be strong. A state which destroys the natural emotional ties and bonds of its citizens is not promoting their strength and well-being. Hobbes has been quoted along the same lines maintaining that to be strong a Sovereign must have strong Citizens.

It is true that families which are more loyal to each other than to the state may conceal their relatives crimes from the state. In any healthy state, the majority of citizens are not criminals and the majority of families do not need to conceal their relatives misdeeds. A policy of destroying the natural bonds and loyalty of family members to one another sacrifices the good of the many for some minor aid in persecuting the few. To demand that families should sacrifice their natural bonds to each other to the interest of the state is to create a great evil for a very small benefit.

As a Confucian value, family loyalty is a religious value. A person who respects and honors Confucius or a similar set of principles has a religious duty to not testify against his family members. Should people be forced by the State to testify against their family members and thus be denied free exercise of religion? It is also a value held in almost all civilizations. Witness the Bible:

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Exodus 21:15

Exodus 21:17

John Locke writing in his “Second Treatise of Civil Government” discusses the legitimate authority of a father over his son and compares it to the authority of the state over an adult to point out that these are not the same and the authority of a state does not derive from an inheritance of paternal authority. This was an important political point in his day, as indeed in much of history. The confusion of the State and the Parent is perpetual in history as many first governments probably derived from habitual obedience to the Father. Locke refutes this notion soundly, but also has this to say of parents natural attitude towards their children,

He also notes repeatedly the duty of the children to the parents,

In this he is not different from Confucius or Solon of Athens who also made the duty of obedience and respect to the parent conditional on the parents raising the children properly.

It is probably wise here to invoke Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Parents can do a better job of raising children if allowed to do so than the State can. The State cannot give all the children of society the attention that they will naturally receive from their Parents who, loving them, will give them that personal attention based upon personal interest and motive which creates Adam Smith’s invisible hand in economic matters. Centralized management of childrearing will not work any better than centralized management of the economy.

The bonds of the family should be respected by the State, it should not insist on family members testifying against each other. It should allow traditional discipline according to the religious or moral standards of the family within the family unit. Only in extraordinary instances should the State interfere in the Family. It is better to err on the side of the integrity of the family unit than to err on the side of violating the family unit.

In order for the State to exercise an authority over the individual parenting of families it must exercise a truly invasive authority within the home. This is the same as quartering troops in the home in time of peace. It violates the intent against such laws which is the basis of the entire Bill of Rights, as discussed in the section of this book on the Third Amendment.

True a policy of setting the Privacy of the Family first and only interfering in the interests of the Child in extraordinary circumstances may allow some abuses. Better a few individual abuses than systematic and universal abuse through bumbling governmental incompetence.

Freedom of Religion and Family Integrity

Family integrity is closely tied to religious freedom. Families go to church together. Families share their moral values through the church. Families find their moral authority in their church. The encroachment of the state into the home and family violates this complex set of related values we refer to as Privacy, Freedom of Religion and Separation of Church and State.

This can have a significant negative impact on society. It is worthwhile here to note a custom peculiar to the Amish. The Amish are a religious sect which to some degree refuses to adopt modern technologies and maintains an old farming lifestyle. They refer to mainstream Americans as the ‘English‘. When their children reach the age of 17 or 18 or so, they cut them lose. They invite them to enjoy sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the culture of the English. They invite them to make a free choice between the orderly traditional lifestyle of the Amish and the modern free lifestyle of the “English”. Such behavior on the part of the Amish could be considered evil and vile and easily outlawed by self-proclaimed children’s advocates.

Something like 95% of their children choose to return to the Amish community. This suggests that in some ways the Amish culture is meeting the needs of its members better than our modern culture is. It is easy to make numerous plausible hypotheses about why Amish culture satisfies the higher needs in Maslow’s list of needs better than our culture does. Close family relationships, traditional respect between family members. Everybody knowing where they stand and what to expect from others. Close home and family ties. The list goes on and on. Such plausible hypotheses are not science. They are just open questions.

If the State invades the home and family and cripples the real practice of traditional religious values to the degree that cultures like the Amish are destroyed, such questions will not be answered. If the State imposes a set of family values based on this or that belief system on its citizens it prevents different subcultures like the Amish practicing and demonstrating the real values of their particular culture or way of life.

The current trend in society is towards ever increasing State interference in family life. This implicitly means increasing interference in free practice of religion, because religion is a voluntary association of individuals normally in family units. It also means destroying the living examples of cultural values that these different religious traditions embody.

This cultural loss is a natural byproduct of the religious war between Secular Humanist sects and traditional religious sects. It is as much to be deplored as the extinction of various species, or global warming. Sub-cultural groups like these should be allowed a certain freedom of competition so that the best may be allowed to survive without State interference, and those which do not expand but, like the Amish remain stable over generations, provide living examples of cultural alternatives for future generations.

It is wise to err on the side of respecting privacy, the family, and free practice of religion than on the side of violating these fundamental principals of human rights. It is doubtful that the State can do as well for human happiness for it’s citizens by imposing a one size fits all rule to people than its Citizens can do for themselves by being allowed to choose the kind of cultural group and family values that they wish for themselves. In addition such personal interference by the state in the most private and personal areas of the lives of the Citizens tends to condition the Citizens to become subjects and violates the penumbra against such conditioning developed in the section on the Third Amendment.