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.

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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

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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

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