What is the role of interests, on the one hand, and of values on the other, in the building of democratic societies? How are interests and values related in that process? What do we mean by these two terms in the first place: are these terms antonymous or synonymous? But further, how do we acquire the democrats, i.e., the human material, from which democracy can be built? This last question is the focus of this paper. The preceding questions map the terrain in which this question is located, and thus require brief introductory notice.

To what do the terms, "interests" and "values," refer? Though their meanings seemingly differ, both terms connote objects or qualities that appear desirable. In ordinary conversation we tend to rely on the context to suggest our intended meaning. But ambiguities readily arise. At times interests and values appear as synonyms. James L. Connor, director of the Woodstock Center at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, summing up the results of a conference on interests and values held there earlier this year, concluded: "To my mind, ‘interests’ are ‘values,’ and vice versa."¹ Values accordingly can be viewed simply as the interests that persons or groups pursue.

In other contexts, however, such as in the theme of the present conversation, interests and values appear rather more as antonyms. While interests can be treated as the values which their exponents espouse, values are values primarily because they possess properties that transcend and sublate interests. Conceptually then, if interests and values appear to overlap, they nonetheless remain irreducible, the one simply into the other. Their relationship can perhaps be visualized by the "Venn diagram"--two circles drawn in a partly overlapping manner, thus distinguishing three phenomenal spheres--the overlapping commonality and the two distinct areas, the latter pair connoting interests as interests, on the one hand, and values as values, on the other.

Thus understood, the relation between interests and values somewhat parallels the age-old quandary concerning the many and the one or parts and wholes; by extension, individuals and collectivities, or in sociological jargon, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (community and society). In the former, Ferdinand Tonnies observed already a century ago, "(individuals) remain essentially united is spite of all separating factors, whereas in Gesellschaft they are essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors."²

As we well know, the emergence of democracy, of popular sovereignty, means far-reaching emancipation of individuals and interests from the hegemony of Gemeinschaft, of primordial solidarity. Whereas in traditional or "pre-modern" societies, the inter-human equilibrium tilts strongly toward the priority and unity of communal wholes, modernization shifts the balance in the opposite direction. Individuals, and hence individual interests, become ascendant. Values in that context refers to "goods" that transcend, unify, and restrain the atomizing potential of multiple individual interests and actions.

In that sense values connote the common good in contrast to the particularity of interests. To that extent, the relation between our two concepts, interests and values, is antonymous rather than synonymous, or dialectic rather than univocal. And while each of these two domains has its own intrinsic characteristics, and hence effects in the democratic process, here I shall focus on the emergent properties arising from their antonymous dialectic. What is/are the value(s) that harness or sublate particular interests, and how do they become articulate?

My dictionary³ lists 20 definitions of interest and 16 of values. According to definition #12 (out of 20), interest can be regarded as "the group of persons or organizations having extensive financial or business power." "Values," on the other hand, can be defined sociologically as "the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard" (#10 out of 16). Interests energize and articulate; values restrain and unify. Even so, the distinction is more clear analytically than really; value inheres in interest, interest in value.

Concretely, in human affairs, the distinctions between interests and values are functions of social differentiation, and thus become increasingly pronounced with advancing modernization.⁴ Socially and culturally modernization entails the drastic curtailment of primordial solidarity (spontaneous familial and local affiliations and their varied extensions) in favor the continuous division of labor, the separation of roles from persons and from communal integration.

Here social discourse draws heavily on the language of theater. Stage performances consist of stories enacted by players recruited to perform the roles whereby the story unfolds. Much of the interest evoked by the play turns on the manner in which given roles are performed. The principles of the automobile assembly line, as an example of modern social organization, are analogous to the theater. Like a theatrical play, the blueprint of automobile manufacture is worked out, and then workers are recruited and trained to perform the necessary tasks. Family and kinship groupings likewise consist of pre-defined roles--mother/father, wife/husband, and the like--but familial roles are far more lasting and engrossing than those of the stage and the assembly line, and cannot be rotated.

Modern societies thus appear far more as systems of roles, rationally ordered and linked, than do pre-modern human aggregates. Modernization entails the continuous decomposition of kin-based social affiliations and groupings in favor of rational, instrumentally organized coordination. Meanwhile it also presupposes the existence of "free-standing" individuals, available for recruitment into the multiple, diverse and limited roles of which it consists. Conversely it also presupposes the role- transcending autonomy of the person in a role. This fact was dramatized, albeit in a flawed manner, in the Nuremburg Trials following World War II. In modern society, individuals, often overloaded with multiple, frequently conflicting roles, resemble the juggler who has thrown more balls into the air than he can keep bouncing.

The extraction of individuals from primordial solidarities, on the one hand, and the creation of role-based systems of activity, on the other, enormously enhance the human enterprise. Task specialization and exchange of production vastly increases both the scale of social interaction and the total production. simultaneously these processes enlarge the spheres of human possibility and freedom. Yet these gains exact a price, principally with reference to the integration and regulation of activity. This must be met, in part by society by means of formal organization and control, in part by personal agency and responsibility. Contrary to the common complaint that modern societies are "impersonal," they are instead too "personal," that is, they demand degrees of individual or personal autonomy that are beyond the reach of many.

Given the pervasive tenacity of consanguinity ("blood tie") in pre-modern social orders, conflict between modernizing and familial impulses was doubtlessly inevitable. Robert Nisbet, a contemporary social theorist, observes that from "Plato’s obliteration of the family in his Republic, through Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Marx, hostility to family has been an abiding element of the West’s political clerisy."⁵ Already in 1861, the British legal historian, Henry Sumner Maine, could write:

The "forms of Status," Maine explains, "were taken from, and to some extent are still coloured by, the powers and privileges anciently residing in the Family." Contracts, on the other hand arise as indicated as "the free agreements of Individuals."

In the present setting, two assertions in Maine’s description require particular attention. First is "the growth of individual obligation" that follows upon "the gradual dissolution of family dependency." That is, the modern self, both unconsciously and deliberately, must perform and integrate actions and interests previously realized in the interdependencies of familial solidarity. Ironically, thus, in modernization the self is called upon to do more with less! I will return to this problem below.

Second is the contrast between "relations of family" and "relations of persons." Relations of the latter type "arise from the free agreement of individuals," as "contract." In earlier political thought, political authority was viewed as extension or outgrowth of familial patriarchy. "Social contract" theory, already in the 17th and 18th century, had already disposed of that claim. Social contract thinkers, however, had wrestled unsuccessfully with the legacy of the family, primarily because of the difficulties they encountered with the marital covenant. They were stymied by the cultural legacy of the inequality of women to men that survived from antiquity, a legacy that they softened yet failed to surmount.

By definition, contract was thought to require equality between the contracting parties. Thus, still regarding women as unequal to men, contract theorists could not regard marriage as fully contractual, nor in any case as contractually archetypal. Even for John Locke, who included women in civil society, within marriage they remained subordinate, with the husband owning the property and controlling the relationship. Carole Pateman, on whose work the preceding paragraph is based, suggests that since the 1970s, contract theory is of greater interest than at any other time since the original era noted above. Nonetheless, even in this renewed discussion, she reports, "The sexual contract is never mentioned. The sexual contract is a repressed dimension of contract theory, an integral part of the rational choice of the familiar original agreement."?⁷

The logic espoused by Nisbet’s "political clerisy," as noted above, implies contract "all the way down;" that is, all human ties reduce to contract. Contracts are both limited and soluble. Until recently, however, except in utopian speculation, neither family nor marriage appeared thus reducible. In any event, the problem of the status of women has never been resolved. Even in the USA, where the accidents of history and territory gave unusual rein to the contractual impulse, women were accorded the franchise only as recently as 1920. (Thus at my birth my mother was not yet a full citizen!)

Meanwhile there has always been a dissenting stream of social and political thought to the application of contract theory "all the way down." Nisbet, an exponent of that tradition, in the work cited above, continues:

It should be obvious that family, not the individual, is the real molecule of the society, the key link of the social chain of being. It is inconceivable to me that either intellectual growth or social order or the roots of liberty can possibly be maintained among a people unless the kinship tie is strong and has both functional significance and symbolic authority. On no single institution has the modern political state rested with more destructive weight than on the family (emphasis added).

In this claim of Nisbet we meet the crux of the problem of modernity for human existence and identity. Insofar as the problem is fundamentally existential, it remains theoretically aporetic. Logically, given the physical embodiment of the individual human, the claim of contract "all the way down" appears plausible enough--take away people and groups disappear as well; dissolve or scatter groups, yet individuals remain. But conversely, Nisbet appears to argue, sociability is a collective, not an individual phenomenon. Sociality is a molecular, not an atomic reality. Unsocialized, the human potential of the organism is unrealized, in effect, aborted.

Until the advanced stages of modernization emerge, this question can be avoided. Step by step families have adapted to both reduction in scope and to inner transformation. The most important adaptation has doubtless been the emergence of the nuclear family, in contrast to a variety of pre-modern extended forms. Not only is a global trend toward family nuclearity everywhere reported, but at mid-century, at least in the USA, it was briefly thought that in its nuclear form, "the family" had been viably integrated into modernity.

Soon afterwards, however, that happy ending collapsed in a series of upheavals whose end is not yet in sight. Basically, modernizing trends suggest that the expectations of the "political clerisy" are being realized. While numerous variables are involved, the most far-reaching impulse doubtless has been the women’s movement, or rather the structural transformation of which that movement is an articulation. Marriage itself is rapidly being reduced from covenant (see below) to contract, to a temporary, terminable relationship like any other. This era is meanwhile marked with rising anomic pathologies, though not unidimensionally traceable to marital redefinition.

The bonding impulse between two particular persons, a male and female, is everywhere attested, from the earliest times to the present, though diversely expressed. At the same time, however, that impulse has widely been eclipsed by other priorities, and became institutionally enshrined as procreative means. Family systems, to which marriage was thus subordinate, both socialize the young and anchor adults in society. So deeply was this conception rooted in both culture and consciousness, and linked as well to the above-noted conception of the human female, that the conjugal ethos in Western societies was poorly prepared for the conjugal autonomy that modernization abruptly thrust upon it.

Consequently the inner meaning of both family and marriage were in part misconceived. With family procreatively defined, its basic mission was biological reproduction and the socialization of the young. The social, this implied, already existed, and needed only to be transmitted and instilled. As the emerging society increasingly assumed functions earlier carried by family and kinship, families retreat defensively to become "havens in a heartless world." "The family" came to be viewed as a pre-modern vestige, sheltered from the turbulence of society, rather than the societal germ or "molecule" that Nisbet proclaims (but see below).

Historically familial arrangements possessed a givenness, a sanctity in societies, that were transcendentally grounded; that is, appeal could be made to nature, to natural law, to religion, even to tradition, thus to "absolutes" beyond the flux of the visible order. Given the mounting pluralization and secularization of advancing modernity, such claims are no longer convincing, even to many practitioners of religion. To the extent that this occurs, moral relativism appears to be the only possible outcome.

Perhaps, however, the search for unidimensional absolutes may have been misconceived. Perhaps too lightly we toss aside the pre-scientific idioms of thought because of their non-empirical articulation. Here I turn to an ancient Hebrew myth that offers a rather different reading of the conjugal union. I do so at considerable risk, since given the limitations of the present context I must abstract it from its historical and spiritual matrix. If one recognizes that thus abstracted this story cannot be full comprehended, one can nonetheless respond to its intrinsic logic.

The LORD GOD said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him" So out of the ground the LORD GOD formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him. So the LORD GOD caused a deep sleep to fall on the man, and while he slept he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the LORD GOD had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

"This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. Genesis 2:18-24.

Contextually this story appears highly anachronistic. Scholars date it around the time of King David, about 1,000 BCE. Hebrew society at the time was patriarchal, tribal, and in today’s language, sexist. Hints of this setting appear at the margin, though here caution is needed. If on the surface, there are clear patriarchal overtones, the transfer of attachment from parents to wife in marriage could also be read matriarchally. Apart from these overtones, however, the thrust of this account might well be described as late modern.

Given its historical setting, what is immediately arresting about this story is the absence of a procreative reference, to which there is at most a secondary allusion. As one writer points out, the conjugal pair are husband and wife before they are father and mother. And as the story is told, that conjugal relation has its own telos, its own significance, apart from any possible procreative outcome. Offspring in effect appears as effluent of the conjugal mystery rather than its essential raison d’etre.

Further, behind this account stands quite unmistakably the shared and equal humanity of the conjugal pair. Sexual differentiation does not entail qualitative difference. We are asked to view their differing complementarity through the prism of their common humanity, and not vice versa. Nonetheless, outside or prior to this relationship, they are incomplete, mere asocial monads. In leaving the unwilled parental dependence for their willed convenantal relationship the pair complete their own humanity. The act whereby the two become one is of ontological consequence.

The marriage and family paradigm thus outlined, challenges our traditional view of the family fundamentally. Not the socialization of the young, but the humanization of the spouses, the parents, who in the establishment of their union move from the unwilled determinism of nature to willed commitment in the realm of indeterminate freedom, is the defining axis of the family. It is not good for the human to be alone. The family is thus not in the first instance a shelter from society, but rather the very germ of society. If family is the social "molecule," it is not in the first instance because it produces and socializes the young, but because it is the cradle of covenanting freedom. And only insofar as it is that cradle, can it fulfill its procreative destiny.

As we know, a reduction in the repertory of fixed "instincts," compared to other species, distinguishes Homo sapiens. Included is a neural system that permits our intellection to transcend the bounds of space and time. On the other hand, as creatures of time and space, our world must be ordered. Thus while we are freed to choose among alternatives, that very freedom compels us to choose (cf. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor). In the conjugal union that realization is existentially acknowledged, indeed prototypically or archetypally so. The often life-long trauma experienced by children of divorcees testifies to the germinal (or molecular) significance of pair-bonding in the creation of the human.

A redefinition of marriage and family in these terms, however, is not a call for crusade or draconianism. If, on the one hand, it suggests the possibility and need for a radical transformation and renewal of the family ethos, history and contemporary experience underscore the malleability of the human species. Gender complementariness is a vital ingredient throughout societies. But the unmarried, the widowed or the divorced are not for those reasons less than human. Nor are all others who find themselves in "deviant" situations simply to be pilloried. Single parents can succeed. Orphans can be brought up by others than their biological parents. Broken lives can be repaired. Nonetheless healthy marriages and families provide the social ambiance within which diversity and compensation can be contained and elevated.

Meanwhile there is plenty of work for all the specialized services that complex societies can provide. Societies, regimes and dynasties undergo cycles of growth, prosperity, and decay. As they collapse, populations settle back on the "safety valve" of elementary configuration, on the primordial cells of human aggregation. This tends to occur as well at other stages when people "fall through the cracks" of larger scale activity.

In effect I here offer a two-step thesis. First, the irreducible, paradoxical social molecule lies in the conjugal, and only subsequently, in the consanguineal tie; and second, that ascent assumes priority over descent in social construction. This second claim is implicit, but also often obscured, in the struggle for human rights now making its way around the world. The attribution of sovereignty to the people rather than to "the divine right of kings" (in all its variations) underscores the derivative, indeed the artifical character, of large scale social organization. This reality appears in the concept of subsidiarity, formulated classically in 1931 the papal encyclical, Quadrigesimo Anno, which states:

Here, as elsewhere in emergent phenomena, the ascending, larger wholes are more than mere sums of the constituent elements, yet those elements are not to be either destroyed or absorbed. Only insofar as individuals become fully autonomous, fully moral beings, can those larger wholes flourish. When lower level accountabilities abort or atrophy, totalitarian, top-down excesses loom.

* Presented at The Transcaucasian Institute, Tbilisi, Georgia, November, 1996.

1 Woodstock Report, Number 47, October, 1996, p.1.

2 Community and Society (Michigan State University Press, 1957 [German original, 1887]). Quoted here from the Harper Torchbook edition, 1963, p.65.

3 Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (New York/Abenel, NJ: Gramercy Books, 1983.)

4 Modernization here is a summary reference to the configuration of revolutions--scientific, technological, industrial, political, etc.--that since the 18th century at highly uneven rates are transforming the material existence of the human species.

5 Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 260

6 Ancient Law. Its Connection with the Early history of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas. Dorset Press reprint, 1986, pp. 139-140.

7 The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

8 Cited here from Walter M. Abbott, S.J., ed. The Documents of Vatican II (New York: America Press, 1966) p. 300.