Election 2008: A family man

"A family man" has become one of the sloppy adjectives trotted out by journalists when describing any public figure, and it rarely has anything to do with how they may behave in general, let alone to their family. It is a shorthand way of saying - a good person - which used to be performed by the adjective "Christian" around 30 years ago.

Now we live in a more secular age, so it is harder to find adjectives which can do the trick, and suggest some kind of devoutness. But as we have "family values" - another loose and extremely poorly defined ethical marker - so now we can also have "family man", another meaningless piece of lazy journalese:

"The proposer said that 35-year-old Mr Tindall was a family man who had the full support of his wife Julie, who is a trademark expert."

" A family man and Chair of Governors at Haute Vallee School..."

"I am a Jersey born, happily-married family man with three daughters..."

Sir Peter was a great family man who was devoted to his wife and children.

In his essay "The Sermon and the Lunch", C.S. Lewis recalls a vicar who was preaching on "the family", and who said:

And so the home must be the foundation of our national life. It is there, all said and done, that character is formed.. It is there that we retreat from the noise and stress and temptation and dissipation of daily life to seek the sources of fresh strength and renewed purity.

Lewis comments that "The sermon, for all practical purposes, was over; the five minutes for which the preacher continued talking were a total waste of time- at least for most of us." Lewis noted how, from his own experience at the vicar's house for lunch, prior to the service, the vicar kept interrupting the other members of the family, the children were at odds with their father, the father raised his voice, the mother got hurt feelings, the daughter got sarcastic. "Then a few hours later he spoke on how wonderful family life is."

He [the Vicar] keeps on talking as if "home" were a panacea, a magical charm which of itself was bound to produce happiness and virtue. The trouble is not that he is insincere but that he is a fool. He is not talking from his own experience of family life at all: he is automatically reproducing a sentimental tradition- and it happens to be a false tradition. That is why the congregation have stopped listening to him.

But this sentimental and false tradition is still alive and well in the world of the cheap sound-bite. Michael Shermer, in In "How Thinking Goes Wrong: Twenty-five Fallacies That Lead Us to Believe Weird Things" notes how often it is trotted at to show the reliability of someone, a reliability which is misplaced.

Farmer Bob in Puckerbrush, Kansas, may be an honest, church-going, family man not obviously subject to delusions, but we need physical evidence of an alien spacecraft or alien bodies, not just a story about landings and abductions at 3:00 A.M. on a deserted country road.

After, all, as a another headline noted, the "family man" can be a cover for all kinds of nastiness lurking beneath the surface:

A HIGHLY respected 'family man' who engineered ten operations to import nearly £50,000 worth of drugs into Jersey has been jailed for nine years.

and in a recent book, "The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History", we are told that:

"Heinrich himself emerges-not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family."

So when someone says to you (wanting your vote) they are a "family man", why not say "Like Heinrich Himmler, you mean?" And don't vote for them. Anyone who thinks that such a spurious argument can sway a voter is capable of anything. If they certainly don't bother to think about what they are saying, how will they make up their minds in States' debates?

Links

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/sherm3.htm

http://www.amazon.ca/Himmler-Brothers-German-Family-History/dp/0230529070

Lewis, C. S. (1970). God in the dock: Essays on theology and ethics, (ed. by Walter Hooper). Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.