Free The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff Page B

trigger the social changes themselves. What raised divorce rates in Western society, but not in Japan, was the Western endorsement of values of individual autonomy, which in turn eroded the fabric of female self-sacrifice upon which the family depended as an institution.
    Forty years after these changes, we are still trying to take account of their effects. The ledger has many double entries. There is more sexual freedom and more divorce. There are more varieties of sexual identity and more confusion about what kind of sexual beings we actually are. Abortion rights have increased the freedom of women, while at the same time raising bitter and contentious debate about our right to terminate the life of the unborn. 5 There are more types of families — same-sex, single-mother, single-father — and yet more anxiety about whether family intimacy and stability can endure.
    In this lecture, I want to tell the story of this double revolution in rights and sexual conduct and ask whether rights talk is weakening or strengthening our capacity to sustain intimate life. We all need intimacy, children especially, but intimacy requires permanence. Is the rights revolution threatening permanence? Is there too much talk of rights in intimate life and not enough talk of responsibility?
    Questions like these are not new. Indeed, they are the hardy- perennials of modern self-doubt. By modern, I mean any society based on markets and individual rights. In North America and Western Europe, we have been living in such societies at least since 1700 and ever since then social critics have contended that market life endangers stabilizing institutions such as the family. As the great Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter argued, capitalism depends upon values such as trust and mutual confidence; without these, no one would feel safe enough to enter into contracts and exchanges. 6 Now, the source of such values is the family. But the “creative destruction” of the capitalist investment process recurrently overturns stable ways of life and work based on existing technologies. These convulsions make it difficult for families to maintain continuities of care. If wage pressure and time pressure deplete the emotional reserves of family life, children are less likely to learn the values on which the larger society depends. Children who do not learn how to trust and how to love turn into selfish and aggressive adults. The result, if family breakdown becomes general, is a brutal and uncaring social order. This chain of reasoning is very familiar. There is no more enduring fear in capitalist life than that the system erodes the very values it needs to maintain order.
    Capitalism’s chronic instability used to be chiefly blamed for harming family life. But newer critiques emphasize the destabilizing effects of abundance. Abundance changes the moral economy of a society by favouring values of consumption over saving,self-assertion over self-restraint, present-mindedness over future-orientation. Abundance has other moral effects as well. Societies of scarcity are obsessed with distribution and therefore with equality; societies of abundance care less about distribution once poverty ceases to manifest itself as absolute deprivation. Paradoxically, abundant societies that could actually solve the problem of poverty seem to care less about doing so than societies of scarcity that can’t. This paradox may help to explain why the rights revolution of the past forty years has made inequalities of gender, race, and sexual orientation visible, while the older inequalities of class and income have dropped out of the registers of indignation. Abundance has awakened us to denials of self while blinding us to poverty. We idly suppose that the poor have disappeared. They haven’t. They’ve merely become invisible.
    There is little doubt that the rights revolution of the 1960s is the product of the most sustained period of affluence in the history of the developed world.