Between loyalty, honesty and now family values, I have a feeling some imaginary folks reading this blog are probably just assuming that I hate goodness and decency and am an antisocial miscreant. Maybe one day this blog will be used to prove my moral ineptitude, but I would counter argue that my willingness to be honest about reservations I have about socially upheld values should prove me to be more honest than many people who claim honesty as a virtue. So why does Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett hate families?
I don’t. I have amazing families. I say “families” because “family” is a more complicated concept than people generally give it credit with ideas like “nuclear family” or even “chosen family.” In fact, I would argue, the idea that each person has only one family, highlights one of the biggest problem I have with the social construction of “family values.”
I think, tell me if I am wrong, that one of the core features of “family values” that even folks who hold it as a central defining value is the idea that the individual should be willing to do anything for their family, and that family comes before nation, or the self, or any identity category. I think that can be a very beautiful idea in the right social context, but within a patriarchal society, I am not sure that it is ever possible for a patriarchal figure to actually mean that they value the individual members of their family (I’ll come back to the families thing) more than they value themselves, because, within a patriarchal society, a family is an extension of the patriarch and his lineage. If the (man’s) family name is the most important generational property handed down from father to son (as is inherently the case within patriarchal society), then conditioning everyone in the family to place the family above themselves is really only a power play at getting everyone in the patriarch’s family to surrender their labor, property and independence over to the patriarch. Patriarchal constructions of family inherently turn the belief in family values over as a tool to keep power in the hands of the patriarch of the family. It is, in essence, a kind of selfishness, when espoused by men at the head of a family, in the same way that it is for a king to claim the fealty of his people as necessary for the good of the kingdom, or for the head of an organized crime organization saying that they are doing everything for the good of “the organization.”
That might be a contentious claim to some people, but I think the way we talk about “family” makes it pretty clear that this is how family was intended to work, at least within the rise of the United States as a global cultural powerhouse. The fact that people say “my family” instead of “my families” is a pretty strong example of how a hierarchal authority is supposed to position oneself as the center of their family, as it is only other people’s relationship to the patriarch’s definition of family that matters for their own inclusion in that family. Is a hypothetical cousin or, even more removed, that cousin’s ex-partner a part of my family? Probably only if there is some social or economic benefit for me to claim so, and for them to want me to be a part of their family. The ability to define and control who gets to be a member of “the Family” is at the heart of many current culture war issues, and is an example of how this nation’s patriarchal legal system and definition of property have made it pretty impossible to exist as a person or as a collective group outside of patriarchal definitions of family.
If society was truly going to value the social unit of families as collective power holders, people wouldn’t talk about “my family.” They might abstractly talk about “family” or they would specifically talk about “my families,” recognizing that “family” shifts based upon each person in the social unit, especially over time, and that any one person can belong to multiple families at once. It is only within a patriarchal definition of family that it is necessary for daughters to be sold off for a dowery, to become a baby factory for another family’s name.
Modern US society has taken old patriarchal definitions of family even further into the realm of individualist imaginary by defining the “family” unit most prominently as the “nuclear” family. While children and wives might no longer be as directly defined as property as they once were, a nuclear family in a capitalist society is going to pretty inherently become the defacto property of the highest earning member of that family, which in the United States, is still about 69% male dominated. I think the fact that this has come down from 85% since only the 1970s is actually something that is worth looking into more later, and might be where a very big part of the Manosphere-crybaby attitude of “women now run everything” might be coming from, but that is a little tangential to this discussion of family (perhaps in this pew research center study). With older family members pretty much written out of the nuclear family narrative, or perhaps more arguably written down to tangential family member status, likely to be seen as much of a drain of family resources as a contributor, it becomes even easier to essentialize “my family,” down into the category of “the people I am economically responsible for,” and thus allow for people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who have cheated on partners multiple times and treat their children with various levels of contempt or inclusion in “the Family” business, to claim that they respect “family values” when it appears to most outsiders like that is complete bullshit. The reason why they can appear so sincere when they talk about family though is exactly because they are defining their families along lines that run exactly parallel to how much economic responsibility they feel for the people they are defining as family, and thus as long as they are capable of providing for those family members (while they are still worth calling family members), then, in their minds, they are upholding family values.
This also allows for the richest men to be the laxest in actually doing anything to prioritize their families in their lives and still use “family values” as a bludgeon, especially against people poorer than themselves, because wealth becomes a way to fulfill the contractual obligations of family without actually having those obligations become any kind of meaningful burden or investment. “Family values,” for those rich enough to easily materially provide for a large number of people, becomes a very easy way to present the illusion of caring and compassion, without actually having that mean anything to their sense of self or character. And this is why I am so skeptical of it on a personal level, and the way it has been pushed onto so many people who lack that wealth. Because sincerely caring about the welfare of others is hardest when you have just enough resources to take care of yourself, or maybe a few other people, and when working class people do form family bonds that stretch their ability to provide for those families (by blood or by choice), it can be harrowing, stressful, backbreaking, and soul crushing…but also amazing and compassionate, and an incredibly beautiful act of mutual aid and solidarity. In other words, it can be the kind of thing that ruins some people’s lives while it gives others a purpose worth pushing through all the risk and danger and difficulty. And it really, really pisses me off that rich people get to somehow make some kind of moral claim on knowing what it means to “value family,” especially when they use that claim to manipulate working people into surrendering their time, energy and collective power over to those lying bastards.
Could “family values” mean something beautiful and worth fighting for? I think the answer, at least for me is, yes, sometimes, when it becomes about sharing power willingly with others…but not in a political reality where “family” has been used and defined to maintain the power and authority of wealthy elites who are incapable of actually understanding what kind of unit a family could be.