Managerialism and the Proclamation on the Family

(With a side helping of hating on Dr. Spock).

From time to time, we manfully try to grapple with the paradox of the Proclamation on the Family, because we have reason to believe from both personal revelation and personal experience that the paradox is true.

The paradox, if you recall, is that on one side the Proclamation says that the husband presides, i.e., is the President, i.e., is in charge of, rules, is the authority, has dominion over the family. We are using a lot of synonyms including some shocking ones because we Saints have mostly responded to the paradox of the Proclamation by assuring ourselves it isn’t there, that ‘preside’ here is a contentless formality akin to being the Emperor of Japan with the wife acting as the Shogun. The results of this view you see around you–declining birth rates, declining marriage rates, and a number of unhappy flabby uninspiring marriages. But on the other side of the Paradox the Proclamation very clearly proclaims that the husband and wife are equal partners. It isn’t just Old Timey Patriarchy.  So…. what to make of it?

One advantage of having bright nerdy friends is that you can be having a casual conversation on, say, current politics and end up getting an impromptu master class on principal-agent problems in hierarchies. I was going to say, in hierarchical organizations, but that would be redundant. All organizations are hierarchical. The guys were specifically talking about corporations and how its hard for the CEO to know what’s actually going on. The numbers always lie. One technique that has been practiced by business executives and kings alike is to go undercover into their own organization. But short of that, good CEOs are always getting down into the line, talking with the people there, taking a turn or two at the machines, keeping themselves in touch with the actual work of the organization. I have a peculiar bent of mine, so my own contribution to the conversation was to talk about status. The person in charge is always high status and whatever they don’t concern themselves with is lower status by default.

This week I saw the connection to why therefore the husband is supposed to be equal partners with his wife. HIs role is not an end in itself. His role has a goal, as does hers, and its the same goal. Children, happiness, the flourishing of the family. Presiding without the tacit implicit knowledge that comes from getting down into the dirty of the diapers and the dishes would be bad presiding. Presiding in a way that implies that the actual work of the family is less important–by refusing to help with the actual work of the family–would be bad presiding. What kind of CEO sends a strong message that he thinks what his company does is gross and demeaning? A pretty bad one.

This is not a complete answer to the paradox of the Procamation, because it only addresses why the husband is equal partners with his wife in performing her role, not she in his. The analogy to a CEO of a corporation is helpful, but only up to a point. The family is not a corporation. The husband is not a CEO.

It does make me wonder about the stereotype of the 1950s dad who refused to get involved. I believe there is some truth to that stereotype. That’s not a natural thing. I can say that with the authority of my own experience as a father. So why did many of those dads end up like that? I can see two possibilities. The first is that they grew up in homes without much leisure at all. 1930s dad didn’t help with housework because it took all his time to do his part of running the household, whether it be splitting wood or grubbing for income. Then, in the new leisure of the long 1950s, dads and moms still stuck to the fairly hard splits they had grown up with.

But to me, the feel is more like they were trying to reconstruct family life from first principles. I can’t prove this, but I get a sense from a lot of family life in the 1950s that somehow the chain of culture transmission had been broken, and they were recreating it from books and movies and TV. That explains the coddling nonsense of Dr. Spock becoming so popular. And it explains dads living out a drastic, performative version of their role. Perhaps the mass mobilization of WWII, transitioning to the mass corporation life of the 1950s, primed these people to a top-down rule-based approach to being human. I don’t know.

But it is always dangerous to tell someone to take on a role to achieve an objective. The role tends to swallow the objective. That is why, I think, the Proclamation in clearly setting out very distinct and traditional men and women’s roles also clearly ‘fudges’ them.