Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.
Very true. Nowadays society/state is supposed to replace what extended families provide, but they can not replace the warmth of the family.
Unfortunately, incarceration, low life expectancy, poor fitness, alternative lifestyles, minorities, poverty (and criminalization of poverty), and immigration have strong correlations to not having as much family available and not being accepted by the church.
All the data and anecdotes I’ve seen suggest the correlation is in the opposite direction. Especially when it comes to race; in many minority groups grandma is very much part of the stereotypical family home.
To your anecdotes and the article's credit, yes, many minority groups (or approaching majority) do often use larger extended family units.
This is not to say that the the people who need help (from government or church) always have the option -- or that it doesn't have additional costs. (Though to several of the cases mentioned above, extended families are replacing a missing nuclear family member.)
> Liberals believe that the state and government should provide this support.
Perhaps this was just careless wording, but I challenge you to find a liberal who thinks the state should replace the family in this regard.
Liberal policies in the west are overwhelmingly framed in terms of safeguards and safety nets. For example, it would be great if churches and family structures would prevent homelessness, but when that fails, what is to be done? For liberals, the answer naturally involves a state enterprise.
> Perhaps this was just careless wording, but I challenge you to find a liberal who thinks the state should replace the family in this regard.
I think a better phraseology might be that liberals are insensitive to the fact that safety net social programs may displace support provided by charities and family.
For example, consider two families, each with a retired grandfather, in a country where the state pays for child care. These subsidies are typically not available where care is provided by relatives. That creates a weird situation where both families are better off if each grandfather takes care of the other family's child.
To slightly change the hypothetical, say instead of subsidizing child care you’re subsidizing baby formula. There is in fact strong opposition to such subsidies, even (and often especially) among liberals. The reason is that by making formula free you reduce the incentive to breastfeed (which is perceived as more beneficial).
The false premise is that you can design a safety net program that only kicks in "when [community or family support] fails." The safety net becomes an alternative to community or family support, and disincentivize relying on the community or family for help. You don’t just affect the small number of people who have no alternative, you alter the whole equilibrium.
Your argument and examples make logical sense to me, but I'm deeply skeptical of the practical effects.
I grew up in a religious conservative family, so I'm steeped in the conservative tradition that government welfare programs displace the social welfare functions of church and family. It's common for robotic conservatives (obviously not talking about you now) to take this straight into New World Order conspiracy land, where liberals are actively trying to destroy the church and family so they can have more power. Or something. This comes up over and over again in my circles.
On the one hand, I see the logic in the non-conspiratorial flavor of that theory, and I think your examples are plausible. However I've never seen evidence that it actually happens to any significant degree.
It seems like every conservative politician and pundit in America is required to publicly pine for the good old days when families and churches kept poor people fed, clothed, sheltered and healthied-up. But they won't tell us when or where these good old days existed. I'm unaware of any time in modern history when church/family has provided the measure of social welfare and insurance that we now expect from the state. Not even close.
In the present day, I think the scale of the government's welfare and insurance functions is hopelessly beyond the capabilities of religious organizations. A 2004 book published by the Brookings Institute, Sacred Places, Civic Purposes, contains a well-put quote by John DiIulio, who briefly advised the GW Bush admin on this issue:
> But, make no mistake: while faith-based organizations can supplement and strengthen public social service programs, they can by no means substitute for government support. To dramatize the point, just consider that even if all 353,000 religious congregations in America doubled their annual budgets and devoted them entirely to the cause and even if the cost of government social welfare programs was magically cut by one-fifth, the congregations would barely cover a year’s worth of Washington’s spending on those programs and never even come close to covering total program costs.
EDIT:
I neglected your main point:
> liberals are insensitive to the fact that safety net social programs may displace support provided by charities and family.
I think that's true. I'd actually say most partisan liberals are reflexively hostile to the idea.
> > liberals are insensitive to the fact that safety net social programs may displace support provided by charities and family.
> I think that's true. I'd actually say most partisan liberals are reflexively hostile to the idea.
This is a fascinating thread! You and rayiner are having a laudably introspective and low-charge discussion of this stuff, so I’ll try to throw in my (hyper-progressive) take on this:
I’m certainly not insensitive to the fact that government social support tends to be a substitute for faith-based social support (and the presence of substitutes inevitably weakens any marketable good).
From my perspective, religious traditions that have offered social support, but only with strings attached, resorting to shunning when those expectations weren’t met, have caused so much trauma to people I love that I am, at least in unguarded moments, quite happy to acknowledge that I want to break down the economic foundations of those groups.
On the other hand, my wife is an immigrant whose family was sponsored by a church. I am immensely grateful to religious communities offering love and support to the neediest without any strings attached. The Unitarian congregations I’m familiar with have consistently impressed me with their wise, worldly social support without any hint of shunning.
So while I don’t think I’m hostile to people of faith offering support, there’s no doubt I want robust well funded alternatives.
It’s definitely true that there is a culture war at play for progressives, and I agree it’s disingenuous to pretend weakening religious institutions isn’t at least a foreseeable, if not actively pursued, effect of many social policies I support.
> From my perspective, religious traditions that have offered social support, but only with strings attached, resorting to shunning when those expectations weren’t met, have caused so much trauma to people I love that I am, at least in unguarded moments, quite happy to acknowledge that I want to break down the economic foundations of those groups.
I think this often is true, and its unfortunate. At the same time, I think people overlook the effect on other people. What about the people who fit into church culture and weren't excluded in the past? Are they doing better or worse under a culture that embraces permissiveness? Put differently, in an effort to minimize the harm that a religious society imposed on one group of people, are we disregarding the benefits it provided to other people, and to social stability and cohesion generally?
> Liberal policies in the west are overwhelmingly framed in terms of safeguards and safety nets. For example, it would be great if churches and family structures would prevent homelessness, but when that fails, what is to be done?
That depends where in the West. In America, certainly there remains a place for churches and philantrophic clubs even among liberals who want a strong state-provided safety net. But if you look to e.g. Finland, the Church (there Lutheran and Orthodox) has stepped away from any real charity role now that there is a welfare state. One doesn’t tithe directly to one’s church, but instead a portion of one’s tax money goes directly to the Church one is a registered member of, and that money generally just pays that Church’s administrative bills instead of being spent on societal woes. That is, even the Church believes that the state is broadly a more effective force for these things than private charitable endeavours. Lions Clubs and Rotary Clubs still exist in the Nordic countries, but there are very niche compared to elsewhere.
IMO, this type of communal living strategy is the best remedy to a lot of the problems faced in America and in western cultural in general. Many of the problems were already stated in the article, so I'll just add suburban sprawl, the high cost of individual ownership of everything, including the house, and the increased workload that results from not sharing the labor of common tasks like cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. BF Skinner's Walden Two is a good read that goes more into detail on the advantages of communal living. As a non religious person weary of politics, neither the state nor church are good options.
I felt like I just read the same points being repeated over and over. Pretty rambly to essentially claim "extended families > nuclear families." Yes, perhaps, if you don't mind giving up some of your individuality and liberty for family collectivism and control. There's cultures outside the US that uphold this to the extreme (Asian cultures come to mind). It's not a mistake in either case. You give up one thing for another.
Brooks’s point, it seemed to me, was to make an erudite case for why the nuclear family is, even in the US, a historical oddity. This is not a point that’s routinely made in US cultural discussions, so it needed a fair amount of background.
His next point was that what comes next is path dependent, and may not look like what’s come before.
So it seems overly dismissive to say that Asian cultures offer an alternative trade-off, end of story.
There are other possibilities besides tight genetically related extended families and nuclear families.
It seems like the author had an idea, then looked for anything that could help support the idea. The problem is the person only looks at the facts through their original idea.
Very true. Nowadays society/state is supposed to replace what extended families provide, but they can not replace the warmth of the family.