The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and some among its membership are celebrating “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” and the anniversary of its publication. In this video, BYU professor of political science (and one of my father’s colleagues) Dr. Ralph Hancock presents what I think is an important counterargument to theoretical liberalism and the relativity of moral values. He does this by examining how liberal theory and the theories of its progressive and revolutionary “off-shoots” do not survive contact with lived experience unscathed.
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Essentially, liberalism presents a theory of the world which does not represent how the world actually is. When it comes into conflict with competing theories, liberal practitioners like journalist Jonathan Rauch, expect those competing theories to make adjustments that will allow liberal theory to maintain a hierarchically superior position and application in political life and discourse. Rauch, according to Hancock, is demanding that his own liberal theories for meaningful political existence in the world be accepted de facto as the foundation for society.
Another way of putting it could be that Hancock sees Rauch as promoting a form of knowledge he favors in order to disqualify other knowledges. This would reflect a form of Foucault’s historico-political discourse.
I think Hancock’s counterargument is important in that it does reveal how modern incarnations of liberal theory struggle to maintain their theoretical relevance when they are put into application. Ultimately, though, I think Hancock misrepresents the situation and does so in order to accomplish the very thing he seeks to prevent liberalism from achieving. The problem doesn’t really seem to be the ability of liberal theory to survive contact with experience and maintain its ideal form. The problem is that liberal theory takes the wrong principles for granted.
The Family Proclamation is not a historically or culturally meaningful document. What I mean by that is it does not present a description of how families actually are or how cultures actually practice and shape their familial institutions. It presents a theory of the family, and one that does not survive contact with experience, currently or historically, while maintaining its ideal theoretical shape. Furthermore, it makes historical claims presented as truism which are not supported by evidence nor meaningfully representative of history.
Additionally, Hancock’s representation of liberalism is somewhat contradictory. Towards the end of the interview, he maintains that the liberal worldview is one that requires a pure commitment to freedom and equality without anthropological limits and without a higher reference point in God and nature. And yet the main thrust of his counter argument to this point is that liberalism limits the ability to legitimately appeal to anthropological limits and higher reference points. His counter to Rauch is that Rauch does, in practice, impose limits he may not recognize and admit in theory.
He also implies the “offshoots” of liberalism (communism, socialism, capitalism, etc.) develop from pure liberal theory and does not seem to consider these as theoretical adjustments to and deviations from liberal theory when it does not survive lived experience. Communism is not a “purified” version of liberalism. It is the product of liberal theory seeming unsatisfactory in explaining how the world is and shaping how it ought to be.
Also, The Family Proclamation suffers the same within the community that produced it. There is cultural debate, in theory and in practice, on its application. This contention stems from the Proclamation’s sometimes inability to satisfactorily reconcile its theory to the lived experience of its practitioners. The theoretical model of the family it advocates does not line up with all families. The principles it demands be taken as givens for meaningful existence in the universe do not always and everywhere result in meaningful familial existence. This causes debate through discourse and practice within the LDS community which sometimes attempts to shift the theoretical understanding of the Family to align more generally with experiences of families.
I’d love to have some discussion of these points, even if it’s to tell me what a moron I am. I’ll engage. That doesn’t mean I’ll accept counter arguments as givens, but I will do my best not to dismiss them in that same way.