Who Are You Calling Dysfunctional - Road to the Middle Class

HOW WOULD YOU define a dysfunctional family? Probably, like Wikipedia, you would say “a family in which conflict, misbehaviour and even abuse on the part of individual members of the family occur continually, leading other members to accommodate such actions.” You would say, like the University of Illinois Counseling Center, that it involves parents with “addictions or compulsions,” that use “the threat or application of physical violence as the primary means of control.”

But then the good people at the UI Counseling Center add another kind of family, the kind that “rigidly adhere[s] to a particular belief (religious, political, financial, personal). Compliance with role expectations and with rules is expected without any flexibility.” They must be referring to liberal feminist mothers that force their daughters to play Little League baseball with the boys.

Of course, they aren’t. The dysfunctional family they are concerned about is the rigid conservative family. That is what an alert parent discovered when she found a curious handout from school in her son’s backpack. It’s “another example of liberals gone wild,” as columnist Mona Charen put it. The handout from the health teacher included “a list of some of the unworkable rules found in dysfunctional families.” The rigid rules included: “Boys shouldn’t cry... Girls should always be nice... Elders always deserve respect and come first... There is only one way to do things.”

It’s is interesting how this works, isn’t it? You start by battling against some generally-agreed pathology, but end up smuggling your cultural/religious agenda into health class at the government school. Only you don’t admit that you are talking about values; you talk about “dysfunction” as though your only concern is social competence.

To understand what is going on you need a good theory. In this case, we need a good psychology to shine the light of knowledge on these busy liberal beavers. My preference is the developmental psychology of Clare Graves and his followers, for which you can find links here.

In our industrial society there are mostly four kinds of people. There are red impulsives, who experience life as helpless victims and believe that power, or lack of power, explains everything They are the kind of people who ask: What’s in it for me? as they break the law.

Then there are blue purposives. They believe in the One Truth, in rules and traditional roles. There are also orange creatives who believe that life is an adventure, a game to be won.

And finally there are green communitarians who believe that power leads to cycles of violence, rules lead to stunted lives, and risky business ventures should be governed by the Precautionary Principle. These green communitarians are members of the nation’s only established church, the Church of Positive Self-Esteem.

In Wikipedia’s definition of dysfunctional family we are talking about the red impulsives, people with compulsions and addictions, so Wikipedia’s contributor is in effect calling the red impulsive culture pathological. The liberals at the UI Counseling Center agree that the red impulsives are pathological, but then they stretch the definition a little by calling the blue purposive culture problematic. The public school health teacher has made the final step: the rigid rules and roles of the blue purposives are pathological.

It is one thing to call someone dysfunctional. It is another thing to do something about it, especially when the helping professionals of state university counseling centers and public school health teachers start to act like ministers of the established Church of Positive Self-Esteem. Pretty soon the prelates of the government church start persecuting the independent churches.

That is happening right now in Britain to the enterprising souls trying to duplicate Chuck Colson’s prison ministry in British prisons. Colson’s program, writes Charles Moore, is called “InnerChange. The idea was ‘the transformation of lives through the love of God’... In Texas, it is claimed that recidivism dropped from 55 per cent to eight per cent for those who took part in InnerChange.” Unfortunately, in the British prison system the InnerChange program is running into difficulties. An “Area Psychologist” took a look at it and “reported that the leader of the programme believed ‘the root of offending is in individual sin,’ and she opined that this ‘lacks basis in specific scientific research.’”

In the Graves system, which may not be specifically scientific enough for Area Psychologists, the leap from red impulsive culture to blue purposive culture occurs when a person who lives life as a helpless victim of powerful forces decides to be a victim no more. Instead of blaming the world for his problems he takes responsibility for his life and his actions, and finds, miraculously, that he is freed from the burden of life-as-a-victim. In the Christian symbology, this is called sin and redemption.

Apparently, in this diverse, multicultural society, some of our Area Psychologists have not got the message that we are all supposed to celebrate the differences.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

mysql close