contractualism

If you look at three earlier posts in this series –

First, The Mill on the Floss and George Eliot’s own family experiences

Next, the Das family in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Then, Robert Hayden’s poems about his own upbringing

— you’ll see that they concern (in Robert Frost’s words) “what to make of a diminished thing” when the thing that has suffered diminishment is one’s family.

Two features link these three accounts.

The first is that each situation arises from the assumption that — to borrow and adapt a famous distinction originally made by Henry James Sumner Maine — family is a function of status rather than contract. That is, you do not enter into a breakable contractual agreement to be a blood relation of someone else; that relationship is a status that you inherit.

The second is the demonstration in each account of the effects of forgiveness — the healing that arises when people, even people who have been hurt in multiple ways, even people who may rightly claim to be victimized by their family members, forgive them.

Now, let’s be clear about some key points:

It would be wrong, I think, for me or you to demand of any greatly wounded persons that they immediately forgive those who have trespassed against them. As a Christian, I believe that forgiveness is indeed what we are all commanded to offer, but for the broken to get to a place where the extension of forgiveness is even a possibility may take some considerable time. Praying for such people is a much more effective strategy than making demands upon them, and is more compassionate also.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are different concepts and different experiences. In the Christian account, forgiveness comes first, but reconciliation can only happen when those who have been offered forgiveness repent. (Those who nailed Jesus to the cross had not repented when he pleaded with the Father to forgive them.) I wrote about that process here. In short: the extension of forgiveness is not the end of a journey but the beginning of one, and the person who forgives can never know in advance how the other party will respond — and can never control that response.

One consistent theme in the best accounts of forgiveness is the good it does for the forgiver, regardless of what it might mean to the forgiven. In Clear Light of Day, Bim seems to expand and enrich her love her of family first for her own sake, so that she might help to offload the “stupendous caravan of sin” that she is bearing.

Many of the complexities surrounding forgiveness are explored in the current issue of Comment — I highly recommend the entire issue.

Okay, with those points duly made, I resume.

One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.

But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points. Thus:

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

(Note, by the way, that Scruton is including erotic love alongside family membership as something unchosen. Many years ago I wrote on that theme here. I’ll come back to marriage — and possibly friendship, which in its strongest forms is also unchosen, in later posts, but for now I’m only talking about mothers, fathers, children.)

Scruton makes two important points here. The first is that “the ties that we never contracted” often cannot be “rectified,” that is, put right. They remain wounded, damaged in some way — as I say above, diminished. But such diminishment is no reason to abandon them, because — and this is Scruton’s second point — such ties matter to us “far more than our deals and bargains.” (Note, perhaps to be developed later: To say that they matter more to us does not mean that we consciously prefer them.)

If Scruton is right, and I think he is, then a development I have mentioned in earlier posts on this topic, the growing move of younger people towards cutting their parents wholly out of their lives, is based on a fundamental misreading of what it means to be human. That development — which you can read about here, here, and here — is unlikely for most of its adherents to achieve the “liberation” and “empowerment” they seek. Instead, they are likely to discover that that by trying to sever themselves from “a diminished thing” that have actually diminished themselves.

To accept that being human means that I am bound to my family even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolutely had it with them, is the beginning of something. But only the beginning. The people you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Boundaries must be set, then re-negotiated, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the family members you have most offended will do the same for you.