Spheres in collision

Eddie Thomas asks Gideon Strauss an important question related to the neocalvinist principle of sphere sovereignty:

I assume the sovereignty of the spheres means then that there is no hierarchy of them. How then does one handle conflicts, such as when your work demands that you uproot your family?

I will not claim that a quick or easy answer can be forthcoming. But I think it helps to be able to distinguish between legitimate societal differentiation and an antinormative fragmentation. These are by no means the same thing, although there is a tendency in some quarters, especially those styling themselves conservative, to conflate the two -- and to regret both. I briefly treat this tendency in the third chapter of my book.

Differentiation means that over time the various activities in which human beings engage in response to the cultural mandate tend to disperse themselves into different communal contexts. Thus specific communities known as schools assume the task of educating children, which once occurred within the family itself. Similarly, economic activity increasingly takes place within a business community rather than within the household. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with this tendency.

Where the danger comes is when one of these spheres assumes idolatrous proportions and attempts to crowd out the others. In a consumer society, or what some might call capitalism, economic considerations come to assume larger than legitimate proportions and begin to impinge on other spheres. The family, for example, is reduced to a mere unit of consumption. Education comes to be seen as a kind of business, subject, along with everything else, to market competition.

One of the genuine defects of a consumer society is that stable communities in which people live their entire lives are no longer the norm, but very nearly the exception. When work regularly demands that people uproot their lives, relinquishing longstanding friendships and leaving family behind, this may be a sign that one of the spheres is dominating the others in unhealthy fashion. This is when the conflicts among the spheres are most likely to occur.

I have no immediate solution to this problem. After all, I have willingly uprooted myself at intervals in the cause of procuring higher education. I am now living in a country where I was not born and have no family other than my wife and daughter. Yet whereas in the past this sort of thing was exceptional, it is no longer all that unusual. And that may not be a good thing over the long term.

A healthy society, I would argue, is one in which the various spheres develop in balanced, proportionate fashion, where most people live near family and friends and engage in honest labour in co-operation with co-workers. They work hard, but not at the expense of their other responsibilities. They are conscientious in fulfilling their multiple and overlapping responsibilities as spouses, parents, sons and daughters, employees or employers, church members and citizens, and they refrain from seeking in any one of these their total identity.

When a potential conflict looms, the person weighs his or her responsibilities and decides which takes priority at that moment and in that context. On sunday morning at 11 o'clock I belong in church with my wife and daughter. At noon the next morning I belong in front of my large introductory class. At that moment my responsibility as, say, citizen takes second place. But at 5.30 that evening, except under extraordinary circumstances, I belong at table eating dinner with my family. At that point my role as instructor recedes into the background. If I should be called upon to assume an additional employment-related duty that takes me away from my family at the weekend, then I would need to weigh which takes priority. It is by no means inevitable that work should come first, particularly if my daughter is, say, singing with her church choir that day and needs her dad to be there for her.

As I said, this is hardly a definitive solution to the problem Thomas raises, but it is a place to start.