Harper's Family Values

The essence of this conservatism is, according to Russell Kirk, "the preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors: they are dubious of wholesale alteration.

This same argument applies equally to a range of issues involving the family (all omitted from the Throne Speech), such as banning child pornography, raising the age of sexual consent, providing choice in education and strengthening the institution of marriage. All of these items are key to a conservative agenda.

 

I have a question; how does Harper define "family?"

The impression I take from his speech is that he's referring to the nuclear family of one dad, one mom and 2.5 kids.  If Harper spent a little time committing sociology, he'd come to see that the concept of the nuclear family is hardly a "traditional" one, nor is it gospel cross-culturally.

Yes, same-sex parents, unmarried parents and partners without kids but view their pet canine as part of the family are all part of the mix these days, but that's just the tip of the kinship chart.

What about grandparents? What of aunts, uncles, cousins? In the majority of the world's societies, these "extended" family members aren't considered "peripheral" to the nuclear family but fundamental parts of the family whole.  How many homes around the world, including here in Canada, have three generations and more than one "nuclear family" living under one roof, sharing domestic duties like child-rearing?

 

This is significant when it comes to the matter of preserving ancient traditions vs what Harper describes as the Conservative Agenda.  As his own Caucus has discussed, there are many places around the world where female children are seen as less desirable than male ones; that's a traditional viewpoint that many older generations still cling to.  Arranged marriage is another one of these nuggets of ancient traditional wisdom that one finds in various cultures around the world.  When parents insists that their kids must become doctors or lawyers to be deemed successful, does that foster a skills/employment opportunity gap?  How does this social conservatism jive with economic conservatism?

 

Already we see that there's cognitive dissonance in Harper's positions, but we've only begun to scratch the surface.

 

In his speech, Harper talks about  "the so-called spanking debate" and seems to suggest families should have the right to discipline their kids through smacking them.  To me, that's like saying it's okay to use the word "fuck" if you can't think of any better way to express yourself, but everyone's entitled to their own beliefs.  Here, is Harper's quandary:

 

Who, in the PM's view, constitutes family when it comes to spanking or more broadly, disciplining children?  Is it just the parents?  How about grandparents, aunts or uncles, elder siblings?  If it's just parents, do they then have the right to give permission to others to spank/discipline their kids when they're not around?  What's the accountability mechanism in this?  We've seen from experience that when kids' perspectives aren't valued, abuses can happen and go unrecognized.  That's a problem.

 

And again, we come up against cultural definitions.  In some places in the world it's perfectly acceptable for grandparents to discipline kids - even kids not of their own family.  In Korea, for instance, seniors are referred to as grandfather (harabogie) and grandmother (harmonie) by all youth.  From my time living in a small city in the south-west of the country, I saw random seniors speaking their mind to any youth they felt wasn't acting appropriately or showing appropriate respect, with the youth accepting admonishment as part of their role.  That was tradition, but it certainly doesn't fit within Harper's definition of family. 

 

Parents empower teachers and daycare providers to discipline their kids every day, though not through spanking; because of diverse needs and diverse comfort levels of parents, standardized rules have to be found that are socially acceptable and that outlier parents can be made comfortable with (this is where government comes in).  It sends mixed signals to kids if dialogue and responsibility are part of the discipline process at school, but being smacked on the bum is the totality of discipline at home.  That's another committing sociology thing, I guess.

 

So - to respect traditional wisdoms and empower families, perhaps Harper is a fan of home-schooling, removing kids from the socialization process and ensuring they have consistent training and disciplining from parents; that's a pretty standard social-conservative position, sometimes expanded to a religious group (winking at you, John Tory) where again, parents off-load responsibility for the well-being of their kids to an institution for large portions of a day.  Naturally, there's a problem with this model in the big picture, too - it supports a variety of traditional education systems, value systems and yes, kinship systems that might be close to universal in the places in which the families of practitioners originated, but are just part of a multicultural mix here in Canada.  What happens when kids with completely different appreciations of social order, kinship and even things like standards of cleanliness interact in the post-school world?  When and how do they learn to compromise those traditional values to engage meaningfully and productively with others of different systems?

 

How do parents of mixed ethnocultural background apply differing social norms to their kids except through revisiting traditions?  That's an adaptive process every immigrant in every country and the subsequent first-gen kids go through; where adaptation doesn't happen, social exclusion and all the consequences thereof come in to play.

 

If you want to have a series of cultural silos that don't interact lest traditional cultural norms come at odds with each other, fine - but how does that allow for economic growth?

 

Some ancient traditional wisdoms define the role of women as being at home, rearing children and tending the fires.  Evidence, however, shows that social problems decrease and economic/quality of life well-being increases the more women are engaged in society. 

 

It's pretty clear that when Harper talks about Conservatives respecting the wisdom of their ancestors, he's referring not to cultural or ethnic ancestors but rather ideological ones (hence all the academic/philosophical references in his speech).  I would be very curious to know the composition of the room demographics when he made his speech.

 

Of course, that speech was made in 2003 - ten years is a long time and people that are even a bit open-minded change their perspectives over time.  It's clear that Harper has moved beyond his limited scope of understanding family and culture; in fact, but looking for common elements that people of diverse backgrounds can rally around, he's been committing sociology all this time.  Jason Kenney, in fact, is the Minister of Sociology Committing - out and about connecting with ethnic communities that don't have the same view of the world that Harper 2003 did.  And that's a good thing.

 

Harper's Prime Minister of a majority government, now - he's clearly picked up a few things since his ideological fire wall/ivory tower academia days.  He's come to understand that comprise, cohesion and above all adaptation are necessary for social survival and growth.

 

In fact, I'd say that Harper's evolution as a politician has proved at least some traditional wisdom true - that which fails to adapt doesn't survive.

 

That, friends, is what progress is all about.