Freedom and the Family
My dad died. It was sudden. We will circle back to that, but first let’s talk about freedom and the family. For reasons that outstrip this piece, freedom is what makes our institutions good. But freedom does not look the same in every institution: the freedom of property, that is, the ability to lay claim on external objects, looks markedly different from the freedom of morality — the ability to hold people responsible for what they do on purpose; which looks different from political freedom — the freedom to participate in engaging the levers of public power to codify and clarify the political objects in the world, e.g., medicare or public school, that affect everyone.
All of these institutions — property, morality, and politics — and later on we will include family and civil society, can be legitimized as institutions of freedom, but they are also easily abused as institutions of oppression. There are exploitative abuses of property, e.g., polluting land; abuses of morality, e.g., a cult that holds people morally responsible in order to coerce them into engaging certain degrading rites or judging them for not intentionally engaging in those degrading rites; abuses of family, abuses of civil society, e.g., job discrimination; and abuses of politics, e.g., secretly using a political office to steer contracts to family, relatives or business associates.
However, in addition to being institutions of oppression, all of these institutions — property, morality, family, etc. — can be made legitimate as institutions of freedom and are required for the highest expressions of externalized freedom: right. For example, property and morality, when combined, allow people to engage in freely selling and contracting objects or time. Property gets you the ability to lay claim on external objects. Morality gets you the ability to be held accountable for what you do on purpose. When put together, they allow you to be held responsible for buying and selling by signing on the dotted line, that is, morality and property enable meaningful contracts.
Rights are simply what freedom looks like when externalized through institutions like property, family, and civil society. Rights are freedom made concrete. Property rights are required for freedom. Morality, the right to hold people accountable for what they do on purpose, is required for freedom. Family rights, the right to be and be recognized as participating in an immediate unity with certain others, are rights. Civil rights, the right to be and be recognized as participating in a mediated unity with certain others within civil society, pursuing and acquiring commodities through what Hegel calls the “system of needs”, including employment and joining volunteer organizations, are rights. And political rights include the right to participate in co-determining with others as equals and shape of the political world through which we all move.
While each of these institutions can be abused, all of these institutions can be justified as institutions of freedom, and the stronger argument is that all of these institutions are required for freedom to be made concrete. Freedom made concrete, that is, freedom externalized as rights, only emerges in a particular way in a particular form. The potential for property, morality, family, civil society, or the political theater to be abused does not negate the necessity for the correct use and order of these institutions for freedom, any more than the ability to eat unhealthy food negates the necessity for wise dietary choices for a healthy life.
The necessity of these institutions for freedom legitimizes these institutions as institutions of freedom. Yet, simply because property, morality, et. al., are institutions of freedom does not mean that freedom is identical in its expression through all of the institutions. Freedom emerges in the world through these institution in a way that retains all of its previous movements. For example, the freedom of morality develops from the freedom to lay claim to property. If morality is what allows you to draw a distinction between someone who steals a bicycle on purpose and someone who walks off with the wrong bicycle by mistake, morality already entails an account of property for how, whether by accident or maliciously, the thief unrightfully possess someone else’s property. If the thief maliciously stole the bicycle, not only must she return it for the situation to be made whole as a matter of property right, she must be held accountable for the moral wrong of trespassing the rightful owners’ rights on purpose.
How does this relate to family? Like the other institutions, the family is good insofar as it promotes freedom. This is not to say that all families promote freedom. This is to say that legitimate families, the kind of families that ought to be justified by law and morality, promote freedom. The family can be an institution of right. That simply means that the family can be an institution that offers a way to externalize freedom. The freedom family promotes is the freedom from the dictates of convention, on one side, and the freedom from market predations on the other side.
It’s a freedom for co-determination between family members for an immediately common end. What do I mean by that? Since rights are simply the externalization of freedom, rights, as rights, are harmonized so that everyone recognizes everyone else’s equal opportunity to exercise that right. Rights are always about promoting common ends, else, what we call rights would simply be individual privileges or prerogatives. For example, I can’t have property rights, yet rightfully kill someone else to take their watch, because to do so would not recognize their property as a part of right. A property right isn’t just about my end; for property to be a right, it has to extend universally for everyone to exercise, or we cease talking about rights and are merely concerning ourselves with the privileges of power. Freedom entails institutions that promote common ends, not an individual end at the expense of others. How freedom promotes common ends looks different in each institution of right.
The equal opportunity to exercise common ends occurs immediately in the family, as spouses co-determine what is good for the family unit, but in civil society, this equal opportunity to achieve common ends is mediated through market-based volunteer organizations characteristic of civil society. People seek their particular goals, and it’s washed through the market based system, or as Hegel said, “the system of needs”, so that, in total, common ends are achieve through each individual seeking their particular end. If civil society were simply about individuals seeks their individual ends, it could never be legitimated as a system of right.
Remember, I’m not giving an account of every family or civil society as they happen to occur in history. I’m giving an account of how families and civil society can be justified. There are lots of unjust families andmarket-based societies. Here is where conventional political theory, Locke, Hobbes and the stuff that’s taught in schools so that we can make sense of America, fumbles because it can’t account for all of the stages of freedom past property rights.
The popular illusion is that once we figure out the problems of property rights — how we account for property, how we dispose of property, how we distribute property — then we know all we need to know about freedom. This overwhelming concern for property rights is largely because Hobbes was preoccupied with the conditions of property, including one’s body, and Locke did him one better by throwing on top of that worries about morality, that is, what one does on purpose, so that we can make a distinction between how one violates property rights on accident and how one violates property rights on purpose. We study Locke and Hobbes because the Founders did, and that’s that. The problem is that there are multiple stages of rights that extends past property. This is one reason we needed to keep having Amendments to the US Constitution, to start getting at the social and political rights that depend upon property and morality, but extend past property and morality.
Once we can account of freedom in terms of property and morality, what’s left? A whole lot. Let’s say you are in one of these retrograde religions that has normalized that all sex is heterosexual and for a man’s pleasure, and that the enjoyment women get through sex is only accidental. This account relies on property relations, e.g., the spouse’s body exists for the husband’s sexual purposes. And in our more enlightened retrograde religions, this account can even rely on moral responsibility, e.g., the woman retains her body as her property, but she is supposed to let the man use her on purpose, lay down and take for the Lord and country. Under this view of morality, she is a bad woman if she doesn’t purposefully create the conditions for her use on his demand. This retrograde religion entails an account of property rights, that is, the ability to claim one’s body for another’s use, and a rich account of morality, where each is held accountable for what they do on purpose, i.e., she is supposed to purposefully give over her body and act as a good woman does. In fact, the oppressive conventions of this religion rely on a sense of property and morality.
However, since we don’t have an account of co-determination that’s emancipated from the dictates of one’s pre-modern religion, this wife is not yet free. Even if she is recognized as the owner of her own body, she is morally judged for denying her husband access, as a bad wife or a bad mother. In the same way that a pharmaceutical millionaire can be morally sanctioned for gouging an impoverished community by disproportionately raising prices, even if he owns the patent.
Property and morality don’t get this wife freedom, because she needs to be emancipated from the conventional dictates that govern her received idea of marriage, dictates that blame her for not having sex with her husband on his demand. She needs freedom from the morality of these pre-existing conventions. You can have property and morality and still all of your actions dictated or judged by received, oppressive conventions.
Let’s say you are emancipated from the dictates of an oppressive religion, it’s not as if you can just be a free individual. As an individual, every interaction you have in civil society has a predatory quality. Now that the oppressive convention no longer guides or judges your action, ever single person or institution you interact with has a design on how they’d like you to act to meet their needs. The dynamic of competition is such that markets require institutions to try to impute desires in you. Your church may want to save your soul, but it also needs you to tithe and show up. All of your clubs, societies, jobs, etc. are slightly predatory because they have their own ends.
The institutions of civil society have their own ends. Their marketing is designed to extract from you particular commodities, and impute particular desires in you. And since all of your actions within this market-based civil society are defensive against it’s predations, these are not free actions.
Walking around in this civil society without a family is like being on a date with a partner who constantly looking for an opportunity to be handsy. It’s stressful business.
The legitimate family is a space that’s free from both the dictates of received conventions and the predations of the market based civil society. The freedom of the family comes in the form of co-determination, along with property right and morality. Co-determination gets its expression in the just family because the family is an immediate unity that does not need to take its imperatives from clan, caste, kin, etc. Rather, in the legitimate family, each spouse co-determines a common end with the other spouse, the end is not legitimate because it’s dictated by received convention, the end is legitimized because each spouse takes it as a common end for the family.
Hegel emphasizes the nuclear family as especially characteristic of this freedom from conventions. This is not to say that all families are just; however, insofar as the family is a legitimate institution, that is, an institution of freedom, a family is going to marked by co-determination of ends, else being “one flesh” quickly devolves into tyranny. Now, Hegel is also stuck on heterosexuality, but I follow Winfield in thinking that Hegel’s fixation on heterosexuality is a pre-modern vestige invading what is otherwise good philosophy.
This is why freedom needs a sense of co-determination. Property rights entail at least two people recognizing each others’ ownership. Morality merely concerns judgment about what is done on purpose. But without co-determination, the relations between morally accountable people can be governed by received conventions that are horribly oppressive.
The problem is that although co-determination gets you in relations with persons undetermined by outside conventions, the ends that are co-determined are immediately universal, not particular. That means we lose the individual. Before we lost the individual because they were guilted/shamed into doing whatever the church, clan, caste, etc. wanted them do to, but through co-determination we lose the individual through because none of their ends are merely theirs.
The couple has won freedom from the dictates of dicey pastors and patriarchs, only to be 100% accountable in everything to their spouses. Which is great for sexual relations and the raising of our children, but I don’t want my spouse co-determining my dissertation, whether I pick a blue pen or a black pen, where I go for lunch on campus, etc., and that’s why the next move for freedom is to win a space for individuality. Individuality emerges in a well-ordered civil society: we get to choose which clubs to join, jobs to have, in what Hegel calls a “system of needs” governed by the market, where individuals pursue their particular aim mediated for individuals to act in a way both retains the freedoms of property relations, moral responsibility, and co-determination. Score!
But remember, Hegel is considering a just civil society, not all market societies that happen to be lying around. Like co-determination is a feature of a just marriage, not any old family. Civil societies as they happen to be lying around are shot through with under-employment, economic coercion, etc. are just as unfree as marriages that are shot through with spousal rape.
The failure to take co-determination seriously frustrates the way we think of family rights and civil rights. It’s easy to think that you don’t have to take co-determination of the family as a stage of right seriously, but you can’t have a civil society that promotes individual freedom without it. While co-determination is not the characteristic feature of civil society, it — like property and morality — is an element that is contained within civil society. You need co-determination to account for the progress of social groups, for example, for the internal dynamics of a labor union. You may even need it to account for the dynamics of a winning sports teams. (I suspect it may not be an accident that Popavich and Phil Jackson created winning teams. The Bulls didn’t win until Jackson taught Michael Jordan to pass, and appreciate the immediate unity of the team, rather than his own statistics. Even Tom Brady wins a quality of freedom by knowing that he and his offensive line share the same end, and everyone is not just throwing their bodies around for an individual paycheck. In military philosophy, it may be the difference between a mercenary army and nation’s army.) As a classical musician, you definitely need co-determination to play chamber music at a high level. I suspect you need an awareness of co-determination to have non-rapey sex.
Property rights — Morality — Family Rights — Civil Rights — Political Rights
So now that we have all of these different freedoms, let’s drill down on political authority and show how all of this interlocks. Let’s start from property rights and work up. Politics is what clarifies and codifies how morality is used to check abuses of property rights. For example, it is through politics that we clarify what counts as fraud, that is, we’ve outlaw purposeful deception in order to usurp someone else’s property. Now let’s go up the ladder on step. Politics is what clarifies and codifies how family rights are used to check morality, e.g., if a church tries to blame you for what you do on purpose, politics clarifies how no dogmatic order has the authority to dictate how you and your co-determining partner should have purposeful sex. Politics is what governs how civil rights are used to check family rights. Politics outlaws a kind of neopotism that can distort civil society insofar as civil society depends on the equal opportunity to meet your needs in a way that’s mediated by the market within the system of needs, without the family’s immediate unity causing a conflict of interest.
Politics-Civil Society-Family- Morality-Property
We have to understand how good politics uses the family’s co-determination to check civil rights, e.g., you want spouses to have special privileges in the hospital. That’s a part where being recognized as “one flesh” with immediate common ends is good. Politics uses morality to check family rights, there is a limit to what even married couples can co-determine with respect to their family, e.g., mandatory vaccinations for the kids, or whether parents can co-determine bloodletting rather than antibiotics for a sick kid. Politics is what uses property rights to check morality, for example, it doesn’t matter whether one purposefully buys a winning lottery ticket or one happens upon a ticket in the couch cushion of a use sofa that is bought “as is.” You own the lottery ticket, even if you didn’t come by it on purpose. At the highest level of ethical life, all of these spheres are included all in an interlocking manner.
What does all of this have to do with my father dying? When we think about his legacy, we think about his contribution to humanity, what makes him memorable, and I suspect that the things that make anyone memorable as humans are tied to some form of right, that is, how they’ve externalized their freedom. We can think about how free he was, not merely how much property he acquired, but how responsible he was for what he did on purpose, how amenable he was to co-determination, how deftly he managed the play of civil society which contains all of these previous rights, and finally how he advocated politically for institutions that ensured everyone’s freedom against extant varieties of institutional oppression.
It sounds like a tall order, but my dad was a funny guy. He used to laugh at my Spartan lifestyle and say things like, “You aren’t doing enough for the American economy.” Part of that was a matter of him excusing some of his peculiar spending habits, but another part of it was an inchoate awareness of the dignity of civil society and the system of needs for establishing individuality. I suspect the proudest part he took from working for a small business was that his contribution ensured the company always made payroll.
The saddest part of my father’s story as a story of freedom, was how failures in co-determination deformed him. Remember, the family isn’t good because it feels good, it’s good because its unity is justified as a necessary movement in the spirit of right. It’s good because the just family is the institution of co-determination that civil society that depends upon, e.g., that aspect that allows people to repeatedly lose votes without a violent revolt because they know that on a deeper plane, the parties share a common goal. However, if co-determination is not taken seriously as a movement in the spirit of right, neither of the parties have any reason to believe voting is nothing more than war by another means.
Make no mistake, if you go straight from conventional determination of, say, an oppressive religion, to a liberal, market based civil society, without the stop off in co-determination, then all of your interactions with people will be commodity relations. You never have a space for an authentic, immediate we. You are trying to provide something of a service to them in exchange for a service they provide to you, without the authenticity of an immediate we.
What Hegel argued about civilizations, my dad embodied in a life. He was born in a conventional society where his Ghanaian father had four wives at the same time, and forty years later, he found himself being divorced in a liberal American society from the only wife he ever had. After that, there was no real co-determination in his life. He did not have an immediate unity. He was alone against the predations of the world he could not rightfully trust because it very much did have designs on him, because without a family, civil society very much is there to feed upon you. Not necessarily eat you whole, but it is there to snack on you a bit. I was not the greatest son. I hadn’t worked much of this out until I moved from home. When my parents split up in a no-fault divorce when I was a child, the stakes didn’t all click for me regarding my father until our last phone conversation a few weeks ago, where he lamented that everything costs. His son and daughter have moved away and now he has to pay for people to do everything for him. For the last thirty years, since his divorce, all of his relationships were tinged with a low grade commodity exchange, because without co-determination, that’s what’s left. Commodity or convention, but without co-determination, no real, immediately free interactions with people.
In a profound way, nobody was immediately in it for him. His friends were close, but even those relationships were business relationships and as a necessity were a matter of him plus whatever money he could bring in or dole out. He could not be free with them. It’s easy to think that in the three decades between his divorce and his death, he should have just gotten over it. Even if he got over my mom, he never really got over the betrayal of the institution of marriage itself, a relationship that, in his mind, promised one thing but delivered another. It promised for richer or poorer, but delivered abandonment when he hit a bad patch. There is a profound way in which he shouldn’t have had to get over that betrayal. The play of freedom in his life broke, and it’s not something that he got back, and the rest of his life was simply not free. He died alone. In his condo, of a cancer he had not divulged.
I suspect the moral of the story is that we need to take relationship education seriously. We cannot confuse the immediate unity of the family with the market-mediated unity of civil society. And there is a lot at stake in getting our appreciation for the role of family for freedom right. And black people, I think we simply have to be wiser about this than most, because the predations of civil society are much more vicious to us. The liberal narratives about no-fault divorce destroyed my family by normalizing the mercenary sensibilities of market society into the family. White people can get away with this because there is simply more money around to soften the blow.
Black people in America can’t be conventional because conventionalism supports white supremacy, and they can’t be liberal because liberalism makes black people vulnerable to marketing of institutions that do not have our interests at heart. (Black people, Sheryl Sandberg doesn’t know what she is talking about. If you Lean In, you will be fired. Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t know what she is talking about it, if you Eat, Pray, Love, you will screw up your family for generations. White people can afford to follow this stupid advice because they have access to more money.)
I’m reminded of those young, newly wealth black professional athletes who have to choose between, on one hand, taking conventional money advice like, “Just put your money in King James Bible”, and on the other, the agents, managers and assorted school of sharks civil society has set to feast on him. Neither of those relations are adequately for them.
But black people, we simply need to be wiser than most, and understand that family relations are the only relations structured so that you are free from convention and free from the predatory onslaught of marketing. If you don’t get this right, the market will turn into you a mercenary in your relationships, eventually even unable to participate in a co-determining relationship.
I wrote this post because we don’t take relationship education seriously and there are stakes, and like most stakes, getting this wrong disproportionately hurts the most vulnerable.