The Limits of Social Conservatism

Social conservatism can be quite a good thing.  The stability of marriages and families, the reciprocity of familial duties--of husband and wife, of parents to children and children to parents--is a good thing.  The role of family, neighborhood and community in creating social bonds and harmony, and in fighting the disorder that can destroy community--disorder like crime, drug addiction, and extreme promiscuity--is a good thing.

Yet we sometimes need to be reminded of the limits of social conservatism and of the fact that classical notions of freedom and liberty--in what used to be called in the 19th century 'liberalism'--sometimes war against traditional notions of social order and custom, creating new individual possibilities.

I was reminded of this the other night as Mary Beth and I watched once again the movie 'Yentl', one of our favorite.  In this marvelous film, directed by and starring Barbra Straisand, a young Jewish girl in early 20th century Poland is yearning to study Talmud at the Yeshiva.  Yet tradition and social custom prevent her as a woman from doing that.  Instead she is supposed to get married and have children, leaving the life of the mind to men. 

Stubborn as she is, Yentl reluctantly takes matters into her own hands--cutting her hair, dressing up like a boy, and running away from home--and by dint of her own courage and effort, gains entrance into a Yeshiva to study the Jewish Law.  Eventually, she is found out (by way of falling in love with another Yeshiva student) and decides to go to a place where there is more individual freedom--America.

This is a very moving story of the universal yearning for freedom, that definitely cuts against the conservative grain of traditional life.  (It's also the underlying theme of another of our favorite movies, "Fiddler on the Roof".)  Individual freedom vs. social conformity--here is one of the great paradoxes of modern conservatism that has yet to be resolved.  Indeed, this unresolved conflict can be seen in the modern Tea Party, between the social conservatism of Christine O'Donnell and the libertarianism of Rand Paul.  Or in several social issues convulsing our nation currently: gay rights and the right to smoke marijuana, just to name two.

Here is another agonizing example of it, this time in the yet-to-be-liberalized world of Islam, from an article by Theodore Dalrymple, an English physician and writer:

A 16-year-old Muslim girl was referred to me because she had started to wet the bed at night. She was accompanied by her father, an unskilled factory worker of Pakistani origin, and was beautifully dressed in satins and chiffon, her ankles and wrists covered with gold bangles and bracelets. Her father was reluctant to let me speak to her on her own but at my insistence eventually permitted me to do so.

I realized at once that she was both highly intelligent and deeply unhappy, Because of my experience in such cases, it took little time to discover the source of her unhappiness.

Her father had decided that she was to marry in a couple of months' time a man—a cousin—of whom she knew nothing. She, on the other hand, wished to continue her education, to study English literature at university and eventually to become a journalist. Although she controlled herself well—in the circumstances, heroically—there was absolutely no mistaking the passionate intensity of her wishes or of her despair. Her father, though, knew nothing of them: she had never dared tell him, because he was likely then to lock her in the house and forbid her ever to leave, except under close escort. As far as he was concerned, education, career, or choice of husbands was not for girls.

She saw her future life stretch endlessly before her, married to a man she did not love, performing thankless domestic drudgery not only for him but for her in-laws, who, according to custom, would live with them, while always dreaming of the wider world of which she had caught so brief and tantalizing a glimpse at school.

I interviewed her father, also on his own. I asked him what he thought was wrong with his daughter.

"Nothing," he replied. "She is happy, normal girl. Only she is wetting the bed."

There was nothing I could do, other than to prescribe medication. Had I tried to interfere, I could easily have precipitated an extreme reaction on his part. The girl's fears of being locked up were by no means exaggerated or absurd. I have known many instances of girls such as she who were imprisoned in their homes, sometimes for years, by their relatives; there is even a special unit of the local police dedicated to rescuing them, once information has been laid that they are being held at home against their will.

Not that fleeing the parental home is necessarily an answer for a girl in such a situation, for a number of reasons. First, her own feelings towards her parents are likely to be highly ambivalent: family bonds are extremely strong and not easily broken. The daughters love and respect their parents, whom they normally honor and obey, even though the parents inflict upon them a future which will cause nothing but the most prolonged and unutterable misery. The parents are not neglectful and incompetent, like those from the white underclass: according to their lights, they are highly solicitous for what they consider the good of their daughters.

Moreover, the "community" will condemn the girl who runs away and regard her, quite literally, as a prostitute. Since these girls are not fully integrated into the rest of British society and have hitherto led very sheltered lives, they have nowhere to go and nobody to turn to.

In the parents' scale of values, the respect of the community comes higher than the individual happiness of their offspring and indeed is a precondition of it. The need for this respect does encourage a certain standard of conduct, but it depends upon the offspring carrying out without demur the obligations laid upon them by the parents. Thus, once a marriage has been arranged, it is indissoluble—at least by the woman. I have known many young women who have been mercilessly and brutally treated by their husbands, but whose own parents recommended that they put up with the ill-treatment rather than bring public shame upon the whole family by separating from him.

A young patient of mine tried to hang herself. She had had an arranged marriage, but on the wedding night her husband had come to the doubtless mistaken conclusion that she was not a virgin and had administered a severe beating, of which the rest of his family naturally approved. Thereafter he locked her up, beat her regularly, and burned her with a cigarette lighter. She managed to run away, though her husband had said in advance that if ever he caught her doing so, or after having done so, he would kill her, to pay her back for the loss of face she would have caused him in the community. She returned to her mother, who, horrified by her behavior, said she should return to her husband at once (even if he were going to kill her), in order to preserve the good name of the family. Her other daughters would be unmarriageable if it became known in the community that this was the kind of conduct to which the family was prone. If my patient did not return to her husband, she—her mother—would commit suicide. Torn between the threatened suicide of her mother and the prospect of murder by her husband, she took to the rope.