Justin Trudeau’s So-Called “Social Justice”

Whenever I hear the expression “social justice” I am reminded of what T. S Eliot had to say about this phrase in a footnote to the introduction of his excellent Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Eliot wrote:

I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the current term ‘social justice’. From meaning ‘justice in relations between groups or classes’ it may slip into meaning a particular assumption as to what these relationships should be; and a course of action might be supported because it represented the aim of ‘social justice’, which from the point of view of ‘justice’ was not just. The term ‘social justice’ is in danger of losing its rational content—which would be replaced by a powerful emotional charge. I believe that I have used the term myself: it should never be employed unless the user is prepared to define clearly what social justice means to him, and why he thinks it just. (1)

Today, almost seventy years after the first edition of this book was published, that the rational content of “social justice” might be replaced by a powerful emotional charge is no longer a danger but rather something that has long since come to pass. It does indeed, now, mean a particular assumption as to what the relationships between groups or classes should be, namely that all groups and classes ought to relate to each other as equals, with, of course, the understanding implicit in all egalitarian dogmas that some, as Orwell wrote, “are more equal than others”. Moreover, almost every course of action that is justified today by the cause of social justice, stands condemned as unjust before the tribunal at which “justice”, as Plato and Aristotle understood this term, an understanding which corresponds quite well with the use of the same term in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, sits as judge.

True justice, in the classical understanding of the term, is both the external requirement that we pay what we owe to God, the law, and to other people and the internal virtue of habitually so doing. This excludes any form of egalitarianism for our obligations towards God and Caesar are different from each other, and our obligations to our fellow men vary greatly in accordance with our relationship to each. What a man’s owes to his wife and children he does not owe to his neighbour’s wife and children, and all men are under greater obligation to their friends and neighbours than they are to strangers, and to their countrymen than to foreigners.

In the Christian faith we are taught that we have obligations to the poor, the sick, the stranger, and in general, those who are in need. Sadly, there is a tendency among many who profess faith to read these obligations into all secular talk of social justice.

Recently, Christian Week, a monthly periodical with at least two titular inaccuracies, ran an article by columnist Josh Valley entitled “Evangelicals Should Applaud Justin Trudeau’s Sense of Social Justice”. In this column Valley asks if we ought not to “forgive” or “overlook” the liberalism of leaders like Trudeau when “it’s clear they’re compassionately sold to welcoming the least of these and bringing forth justice for the vulnerable and mistreated”.

The question was worded so as to elicit the response of “yes” from his readership. Who in their right mind, after all, would oppose and not support “bringing forth justice for the vulnerable and mistreated”? Valley then goes on, however, to give examples of what he considers to be the Prime Minister Trudeau’s compassionate commitment to justice. The very first example he gives is this:

Although overly ambitious and imperfect, the Trudeau government’s efforts to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada should cause Evangelicals to applaud Trudeau’s sense of social justice.

Oh really?

The unemployment rate in Canada has been over 7 percent since August of last year, jumping to 7.2% this past month. With our economy in the state it presently is, as reflected in the low value of the Canadian dollar, things are likely to get worse, probably much worse, before they get better. Yet, at the Prime Minister’s behest, the governments of Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, and it would be fair to assume every other province in the Dominion, have been offering taxpayer-funded incentives for employers to hire the incoming Syrians.

When 7.2% of Canadians are unemployed, and the provincial governments are giving incentives to employers to hire Syrians, the Prime Minister’s efforts to bring large numbers of these Syrians here will only make things worse for Canadians who are out of work.

Why exactly are evangelicals expected to applaud this?

Valley goes on to say: “What we do for the least of these should not only define who we are as Canadians, but who we are as Christians as well.”

If, however, we think of “the least of these” in terms of the poor and unemployed members of our own society, then these are the ones who will be most adversely affected by Trudeau’s Syrian policy. Perhaps Mr. Valley thinks that “the least of these” on a global scale trumps “the least of these” within the context of one’s own national community, but this is not what Christianity has historically and traditionally taught.

Nor is it merely a question of jobs. Last year Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors of her country to “Syrian refugees” on a much larger scale than Trudeau has attempted, with the consequences that on New Year’s Eve all major German cities saw their young women subjected to robbery, sexual harassment, and even rape by gangs of these migrants. What kind of justice demands that a country expose its young women to this sort of thing in order to show compassion to foreigners? Will Mr. Valley still be suggesting that we applaud Trudeau's "social justice" when Canadian women are subjected to the same treatment?


According to Mr. Valley, we should be proud that our Prime Minister “cares about the vulnerable and the abused in our midst”. Yet a few paragraphs later he acknowledges that Mr. Trudeau takes “position on issues like abortion, marijuana and euthanasia” that would be problematic for evangelicals. That is a bit of an understatement. Mr. Trudeau has taken the most extreme pro-abortion position possible – that there should be no restrictions on a woman’s “right” to kill her unborn child up until birth, and that there should be no further discussion of the issue. What does it say about Mr. Trudeau’s “care” for the “vulnerable and the abused” that he not only refuses to protect the vulnerable and abused unborn, but won’t allow others the freedom of conscience to do so either?

“God does not call us”, Mr. Valley writes “to be moral crusaders, but peace-makers and love-proclaimers.” As true as this is, it needs to be pointed out that “social justice” is a banner under which a different sort of moral crusader marches. Furthermore, while the person crusading against abortion, homosexuality and euthanasia, seeks to impose limitations on people’s behavior and actions – or rather, to restore the social limitations on these that were in place several decades ago - the social justice crusader seeks to impose limitations on people’s thoughts and feelings, and is by far the more oppressive of the two.

Finally, just because someone likes to portray his agenda as being one of “love” “compassion” “peace” and the like does not mean that we ought to shut down our brains and blindly follow him. These kind of soft words sound pleasant to men’s ears, much more so than the hard words in which truth must often be spoken, and are for this reason the kind of words that deceivers love to use. Mr. Trudeau’s words may be full of caring and compassion, but his actions sing another tune, at least as far as the unborn, the unemployed Canadians who will be competing for fewer available jobs thanks to his Syrian program, the women who he is potentially exposing to the kind of harassment we have just seen in Germany, and the future generations who may end up defrauded of the Canada their ancestors once enjoyed and which should have been theirs, are concerned. There is nothing in this for the thinking Christian to applaud.


(1) T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1948, 1962, 1967), pp.16-17, footnote 2.

Contemporary Compassion is not Christian Compassion

When you read or sing the Psalms you cannot help but notice how frequently God is described as being “full of compassion”. In the Authorized Version this expression occurs no less than five times in Psalms 78, 86, 111, 112, and 145. Furthermore, the Psalms are hardly the only place in the Bible where the word compassion is used as an attribute of God. The Synoptic Gospels frequently speak of Jesus being “moved with compassion” or “having compassion” on someone or some group of people.

These are verses which are very difficult for contemporary readers to understand for the reason that the word “compassion” has become completely and utterly debased in our day and age. It has been stripped of all that made “full of compassion” an expression of praise in the Psalms and reduced to a mere sentiment.

Something similar could be said about the word “charity”. In the Authorized Version of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians charity is the greatest of what are traditionally known as the three theological virtues – the other two being faith and hope – of which a famous, extended description is given in the thirteenth chapter. The English word charity is derived, through the French, from the Latin word for this virtue, caritas, which in Latin versions of the Scriptures is frequently used to translate the Greek agape. Today, however, the first thought the English word suggests is that of “giving to the needy” and it seldom expresses anything beyond that. Organizations that provide help and relief to those who are poor, sick, or otherwise in need are called charities. No-one, unless he is reading the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians in the old AV, is likely to associate charity with long-suffering, seemliness, bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things, and all the other qualities listed in the fourth through seventh verses, and verse three which reads “ And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” would be incomprehensible to anyone reading it with the contemporary meaning of charity in mind.

It is for this reason that the translators of most of the more recent English versions of the Holy Scriptures use the word love instead. This can hardly be said to be an improvement, however, as the word love has been as debased as the words charity and compassion. In Greek and Latin, the basic word for love was closely related to the word for friend and Greek had several other words when a more precise concept of love was called for. In English today, the word love would almost never be used of friendships – at least male friendships – thanks mostly to the imposed new acceptance of homosexuality. Sexual love has eclipsed all other concepts of love – and not the exalted eros discussed in Plato’s Symposium, either, but a version of the latter that has been stripped of all of its higher connotations, and reduced to a romantic affection tacked on to animal lust. So substituting love for charity in translations of 1 Corinthians 13 produces no net gain in comprehensibility.

While the decay of the English language is obviously what I have been describing here, it is also the rot and ruin of Western ethical thought and, for that matter, Western thought in general. That thinking and language stand and fall together ought to go without saying. Language is the medium through which we communicate our thoughts and, what is more, words are the very building blocks out of which we build our thoughts in the first place, at least if we are talking about the kind of thinking necessary for a civilized life that goes beyond the merely animal and mechanical. The Cultural Marxists, who have been so effective over the last sixty years or so, in tearing down Western civilization from the inside out, clearly understand this, which is why there is so much emphasis on linguistic theory and literary criticism on the intellectual side of what was accurately called the New Left forty-five years ago, and why their most devastating instruments, such as the phenomenon of so-called “political correctness”, involve the manipulation of language.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré who became a godfather of sorts to American neoconservatives, and George Grant, Canada’s greatest conservative thinker and patriot of the old British Canada as she was before the evil Trudeau gang first got their hands on her, were among those who a generation or two ago observed that Western ethical thought had taken a turn for the worse in the twentieth century, as modern Western man had come to think in terms of “values” rather than “virtues”, and traced this shift back to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. Virtues were central to the old, pre-modern, Western tradition of ethical thinking, with roots in both the ancient Athens of Plato and Aristotle and Jerusalem, birthplace of Christianity. Virtues, were praiseworthy habits of behaviour, that manifested themselves in praiseworthy acts or deed, and which presupposed the existence of an established, transcendent, hierarchical order of good, that was not created by man, but to which man must conform himself through the cultivation of virtue, to achieve happiness. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of the modern philosophers who had preceded him and the discoveries of modern science had rendered belief in this order impossible and had left man with two paths open to him, that of a “last man”, content to live out his mediocre existence as a cog in the great societal machine modernity is building, or that of an “overman” who will create a new set of values to fill the void left by the collapse of the old order. That we have come to speak of values rather than virtues, demonstrates how pervasive the Nietzschean version of modern thought has been. Virtues, point to an unchanging order beyond ourselves, values we create for ourselves.

This can clearly be seen in the “Canadian values” of the Trudeau Liberals. People have been driven from their careers, in Canada, for expressing ideas on immigration and multiculturalism that were no different from those held by Stephen Leacock, Conservative economist, social critic and humourist, W. L. Mackenzie King, Liberal Prime Minister, and J. S. Woodsworth, Methodist clergyman and founder of the CCF, the predecessor to today’s NDP, on the grounds that these ideas are contrary to “Canadian values”. “Canadian values”, therefore, have little to do with what real Canadians thought or think, but are rather what Pierre Trudeau decided and declared they would be.

Social conservatives, tend to express their opposition to abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and the like as a defence of “family values.” George Grant, himself an outspoken opponent of this kind of moral decay, argued that this was a mistake, because it is self-defeating to use the language by which the modern replacement for the old moral order has been effected, to defend the old order.

If the replacement of virtues, grounded in a transcendent order, with man-created values, was a step down the stairway of moral and ethical decay, their further replacement with sentiments, of the sorts represented by the current meanings of “compassion”, “charity” and “love”, was a slide down the bannister in comparison.

When the Psalmist says that God is “full of compassion” he is not singing about God’s feelings so much as about His actions. Similarly, whenever the Gospel writers speak of Jesus “having compassion” or being “moved by compassion” they are describing something He does, whether it be healing the sick (Matt. 14:14), casting out a demon (Mk. 5:19), or feeding the multitude (Mk. 8:2). Compassion in the Bible is that within God which motivates Him to act in a benevolent way towards people. It is far more, then, than a mere feeling. This is further evident in the way the Scriptures enjoin compassion upon men. They are clearly telling people how to act, not how to feel, because it would be pointless to do the latter, as feelings cannot be produced at will or in obedience to commands.

Today, however, the word compassion denotes a feeling. Worse, it is a feeling for which people demand and expect all of the praise and credit that is due to a virtue. Jesus in His earthly ministry condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. In His famous Sermon on the Mount, after going through three pairs of Old Testament verses and expounding them in such a way as to show that the righteousness God demands of people is an internal righteousness and not just an external adherence to His Commandments, Jesus warned those assembled to hear Him against practicing their alms “before men, to be seen of them”, as the hypocrites do, drawing an amusing hyperbolic picture of a hypocritical Pharisee walking into the synagogue blowing a trumpet to announce that he was giving alms, but to give their alms in secret, for “thy Father which seeth in secret Himself shall reward thee openly.” What He was here condemning in the Pharisees, was doing something good – giving alms, for the wrong reason – to be praised by men. The Pharisee who was blowing his own horn, was at least doing the alms-giving for which he received the praise he wanted. Today, the “caring” and “compassionate” expect credit for shedding a few tears for the plight of the unfortunate and having warm fuzzy feelings towards them, whether or not they actually do anything to alleviate their condition. The Pharisees had nothing on them when it comes to hypocrisy.

Perhaps, however, I am being too hard on them. When you look at what has actually been done in the name of the huggy-feely type of compassion these days, you will find that much of it falls into two basic categories. One of these is harm done under the guise of helping, such as all the “poverty relief” money that was funnelled into the support of Third World Marxist guerillas in the twentieth century by the kind of churches who have reduced the “Christian” message to nothing but the debased, sentimental, kind of compassion by getting rid of more trivial aspects of the faith, such as the idea that the Son of the true and living God, came down to earth from heaven, was born a man by the Virgin Mary, died on the cross to take away the sins of the world and reconcile fallen man to God, descended to hell, shattering its gates and releasing the captive spirits of the saints, before rising in triumph from the grave and ascending back into heaven, to sit at His Father’s right hand. The other is to make other people pay the costs of your supposed “compassion” while you get all the credit. Most, if not all, government policies and programs that are labelled “compassionate” are examples of this.

If this is what modern “compassion” looks like in action, perhaps it were better that it be nothing more than a feeling after all.

Welfarism

“Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization” – Samuel Johnson




What does a “decent provision for the poor” look like?



Many people today would answer that question by describing government programs that are intended to ensure that nobody in our society falls below a minimum standard of living. Such programs would include unemployment insurance programs that provide people with income in the event that they lose their job, social security programs that provide people with income when they are too old to be employed fulltime, social assistance programs that are designed to ensure that low-income families have adequate shelter, clothing, and food, and government health insurance that ensures people have access to health care if they cannot afford to pay for it themselves. All of these programs and others like them, taken together, comprise what we call a social safety net.



Is this social safety net what Dr. Johnson had in mind when he made the remark I have placed in the epigraph of this essay? More importantly, is the social safety net the answer to the question of what “a decent provision for the poor” looks like?



Neither question can be answered with an unqualified yes or no. The social safety net did not exist in the form in which we are familiar with it today in the eighteenth century. A “decent provision for the poor” would seem to involve, at the very minimum, some way of ensuring that the basic necessities of life are available to all, and circumstances might sometimes dictate that this must take the form of government assistance. The problem is that that the social safety net as it exists today is virtually inseparable from the welfare state. While there is much that can be said, both positive and negative, about the social safety net, the welfare state is definitely not a “decent provision for the poor.”



We will consider the reasons why this is the case momentarily. First we need to define our terms so that we understand what exactly we are talking about. The welfare state is not just another name for government assistance for the needy. It is an idea about the nature and purpose of government, an idea which calls for a particular model of the social safety net. The concept of the welfare state is that government’s purpose is to ensure the well-being of the people it governs. This concept calls for a social safety net that is highly centralized, i.e., organized and controlled by a country’s central state. Even when regional and local authorities are involved in the practical administration of the programs of the welfare state it is understood that they take direction from and are the agents of the central government. The relief programs of the welfare state are not thought of as emergency measures to be undertaken when all else has failed but as active measures to eliminate the evil of poverty from society.



It is the elements just described which make the welfare state what it is and distinguish it from other forms of government social assistance. The criticism that is to follow pertains to the welfare state as described and viewed as a whole. It is not a criticism of particular social programs, such as assistance to widows with dependent children, nor is it a criticism of government assistance in general. Each government social program should be evaluated on its own particular merits and demerits, which evaluation is way beyond the scope of this essay. As for the general concept of government assistance we will take is as being granted, by all except the most cartoonish of stereotypes, that providing for those in genuine need is a good thing and that sometimes this might require the involvement of the government.



Why is the welfare state not a “decent provision for the poor”?



For the same reason that prescribing a treatment that does more injury to the patient than his actual disease would have is bad medicine. Primum non nocere is a Latin saying that expresses an ancient principle of medical ethics – first, do no harm. The welfare state is not “a decent provision for the poor” because it harms the people it is intended to help.



How does it do so?



One way in which the welfare state harms the people it is supposed to be helping is by undermining the family. Christopher Lasch called the family a “haven in a heartless world” (1). What Professor Lasch meant by this was that the family, in which there exists a union of love and authority, provides a shelter of psychological and emotional support, comfort and security that has become all the more necessary as other areas of human life have become more and more filled with conflict and stress. The family is all of that, and more. Everybody needs the support it provides but the people who need it the most have always been the poor and the needy.



What sort of effect would we expect the welfare state to have upon the family, a positive or a negative one?



Those who believe in the welfare state, unlike classical socialists (2), have long tried to sell their idea as one which will benefit families. It is difficult, however, to see how the welfare state could ever have had anything other than a deleterious effect upon the family. Throughout history the family has been not only the emotional haven that Prof. Lasch described but the primary means of economic support in times of hardship and need. If someone had a need that he could not meet himself, he looked to his relatives first and if for some reason they were unable to help, he then turned to the church and to his local community. Under the welfare state, however, the government takes over this role from the family. The architects of the welfare state may not have been consciously aware of this but it is the inevitable outcome of the concept of the welfare state.



The welfare state that we are familiar with today was built in the twentieth century, although it had forerunners in the social legislation of the late nineteenth century. It is very much a product of the age of centralization, of the concentration of power and authority within a country’s central government, and it bears the image of the age which begat it. The welfare state is the state that considers the wellbeing of those it governs to be its responsibility and reason for existence. When government takes a new responsibility upon itself it must take it from someone else and with the responsibility it assumes the power and authority that goes along with that responsibility. A large part of the process of modern centralization involved the central government taking upon itself the traditional responsibilities of regional and local authorities and so assuming much of their power and authority along with the responsibilities. In the case of the welfare state, by taking upon itself the responsibility for the wellbeing of the people it governments, it has taken upon itself a responsibility that has historically and traditionally been born by the family and in taking that responsibility, it has therefore assumed much of the family’s power and authority. The only effect we can reasonably assume that this would have upon the family is to weaken it.



We come to the same inevitable conclusion when we approach the matter from a different angle. The members of a family are related to each other by blood, marriage and adoption. Each relationship within the family comes with a set of mutual obligations. A father and mother, for example, are obligated to care for, provide for, and bring up the children they brought into the world, and those children are obligated to honour, respect, and obey their parents and, when their parents can no longer care and provide for themselves, to do so for them. The more the members of a family accept these obligations with a sense of duty that is fueled by love the stronger the family will be.



So what happens to that sense of duty when government takes over these obligations? What happens when the government takes over control of the schools from local school boards and parents and begins to incorporate more and more of the training that had traditionally been reserved to parents into the school system? What happens when the government so completely takes over the role of providing for the elderly, with its pensions, social security plans, and assisted living facilities that no responsibility is left to their adult children? Does the loss of this sense of duty make for a stronger or a weaker family?



The answer to those questions should be fairly obvious, but if perchance it happens to have eluded somebody, he need only open his eyes and look around him. The state in which we currently find the family is surely evidence enough that the effect of the welfare state on the family has been a deleterious one. (3) It is also evident that the poor and needy have been hurt the most by the weakened condition of the family.



A second reason why the welfare state is not a “decent provision for the poor” is that it separates obligation from relationship.



The obligation to help the needy was traditionally diffused throughout society. It was not distributed evenly but this did not mean that it was unfair. Obligation went hand in glove with relationship. The obligation to provide for the needs of a helpless infant fell upon his parents and if they were incapable of meeting that obligation for some reason or another it then fell upon their nearest relations. Obligations were not equal but were greater or smaller depending upon the closeness of the relationship. Within the Christian church, for example, a particular congregation would have obligations to help the needy throughout the church catholic, stronger obligations to the needy in its own diocese, and the strongest of all would be to the members of its own parish. People would have greater obligations to their friends and neighbors than to strangers and greater obligations to members of their own community than to members of a community miles removed from them.



The welfare state changed this. It took all of those obligations and concentrated them into one large collection and placed it upon the central government. The central government now administers and pays for programs to help the widow and orphan, the sick and elderly, and others in need. Since the government has no money to pay for those programs except what it receives in taxes the obligation does ultimately return to us but now it is separated from relationship. The taxes we pay are not assessed based upon the degree of our relationship to the needy recipients of welfare programs but upon our level of income.



Therefore under the welfare state we are as obliged to support someone who is completely unknown to us, who lives on the other side of the country, who we have never met and are never likely to meet as we are to support our own brother or sister who has the same need. This is more significant than it might appear at first. It is not just that obligations are easier to bear in the context of relationships and that obligations without relationships breed bitterness and resentment, although both of these things are true and important. What this means is that the welfare state is an instrument of social atomization.



Traditional society is organic in nature. It is not just a random group of individuals, its members are connected to each other through a number of different relationships each of which has its own unique set of mutual expectations, rights and obligations, out of which relationships the various groups, levels, and layers of society, beginning with the family, are formed. Social atomization is the process of breaking down traditional society by absorbing its duties and powers into the state and reducing its members to a collection of isolated individuals. The pulverization of society like the breakdown of the family affects everybody negatively but hurts the poor and the needy the most.



A third reason why the welfare state is not a “decent provision for the poor” and the last reason we will consider in this essay (4) is that the welfare state kills genuine compassion and charity.



The welfare state is portrayed by its advocates as the embodiment of compassion and charity. It is nothing of the sort. You can personally display compassion and charity towards someone by giving of yourself, your time, and your resources to help that person in a time of need. A group of people can display a collective form of compassion and charity by voluntarily pooling their resources to help people out who are in need. The welfare state does not and cannot fall into this latter category of collective compassion.



When you are called upon to personally display compassion towards another person it is in circumstances in which you have been personally confronted with his need. If you persuade several people you know to join you in helping another person to do so you ordinarily must acquaint them with the particular need. In both cases you are helping real people who you are aware of with their actual needs and problems.



The welfare state is the exact opposite of this. It is not particular real needs of particular real people that it is interested in. The welfare state deals with generalizations – poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, etc. – as abstract problems to be solved by finding the right formula. It does not have to persuade people to voluntarily give their resources to support its programs because they are funded by compulsory taxation.



The welfare state actually kills charity and compassion. When the government tells people that it has taken responsibility for the well-being of all members of society and that it has created programs to solve problems like poverty this puts a damper on people’s sense of “other people are suffering, I should do something to help” and generates the idea “it’s the government’s problem now, not mine”. This is especially true when they find their taxes have skyrocketed to pay for the enormous expense of the welfare state.



As with the decline of the family and the atomization of society, the loss of genuine generosity, compassion, charity, and benevolence in society, hurts the poor and the needy more than anyone else.



The welfare state is not what a “decent provision for the poor” looks like.



(1) Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1995). When this book was first published in hardback (Basic Books, 1977) Lasch, who was Professor of History at the University of Rochester, had the reputation of being a conventional radical or leftist. The book received laudatory reviews from conservatives like Nathan Glazer and George Gilder and condemnation from leftists like Mark Poster and Edward Shorter, prompting Lasch to write a preface for the 1978 paperback edition, explaining how both sides had misunderstood his book as being reactionary in nature. By the time Lasch died in 1994, however, he had well earned a reputation as the “social conservative of the left”. This book is a scholarly look at the recent history of the family, its interaction with its social environment, and its impact upon the psychological health of its members, and a largely negative critique of the theories of social scientists who diagnosed the family as causing psychological illness, and offered their “expert” advice as to how to correct this.. Lasch’s sympathies were with rather than against socialism, and he sees the “capitalist” as standing behind the social scientist, using him as a means of extending his control over the private lives of workers, but his concept of the family as a shelter from the conflicts which rage in other aspects of life, is nevertheless a valuable one. “As business, politics, and diplomacy grow more savage and warlike, men seek a haven in private life, in personal relations, above all in the family—the last refuge of love and decency.” (p. xix)



(2) By “classical socialists” I mean nineteenth century socialists, who believed that farms, mines, factories and other “means of production” should be owned collectively by society. Today, the word “socialist” is more often used to refer to a supporter of the welfare state than someone who believes in collective ownership. Nineteenth century socialists were not a homogenous group. While they all believed the private ownership of property was the source of all evil and that its elimination would bring some sort of Paradise on earth, many believed in violent revolution whereas others believed in using the legitimate political process. Some, like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, believed in the family, while most, like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded it as a source of oppression to be abolished in the socialist revolution, an idea which survived into the 20th Century and influenced both the sexual liberation and the feminist movements.



(3) This is not to say that the welfare state is the sole cause of the decline of the health of the family in Western countries. Industrialization brought about the era of mass production in the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. With the era of mass production came rapid population growth and migration from rural areas to urban centres. Prior to the era of mass production, Western economies were centred around agriculture, and the production of other goods was largely in the hands of craftsmen, who worked out of their homes, who had learned their skills by working with their fathers, and who passed their skills on to their own sons in the same way. This kind of economy was good for the health of the family because it allowed them to put down deep roots in local communities. The shift to mass production changed this. Production of non-agricultural goods was removed from the home to the factory, a large part of the population was uprooted, and the planting of roots was discouraged by factory owners who preferred a mobile and atomized work force. All of this played a major part in the collapse of the stability and security of the family. That industrialized mass production and the welfare state are both major contributing factors to the decline of the family is a fact that may not seem to make sense at first. This is due to the confusing terminology of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century socialism came to be identified with the welfare state and capitalism came to be identified with the free market of economic liberalism and these combinations, socialism/welfare state and capitalism/free market were regarded as the polar opposites of each other. The reality is far more complex than this simplistic dualism would indicate. Socialism began in the nineteenth century as a left-wing (progressive, revolutionary) response to industrial mass production. The term “capitalism” was first used as a derogatory label for industrial mass production by the socialists. Economic liberals eventually claimed the term as a label for the free market of their theories, but industrial mass production had not been the product of the free market or of a government policy of laissez faire. The process of concentrating power and authority into central governments was already a couple of centuries old and these central governments played an active role in the transformation of their countries from rural/agrarian economies to urban/industrial economies. The same central governments later developed into welfare states. Industrial mass production (capitalism) and the welfare state (socialism) are therefore best regarded, not as the opposite poles of an ideological spectrum but as two stages of the modern, highly centralized, state. Both stages introduced changes which threatened, weakened, and undermined the family.



(4) There are many other reasons, of course. Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books: New York, 1984) is a study of the American welfare state that shows how many American welfare programs in that era not only failed to solve the problems they were supposed to solve but in fact made them worse and contributed to many other social ills as well.