Empowering families for change – Part 2

Last week, in part one, we focused on parental inadequacy as a main threat to stable family life. Other threats include:

2. SOCIETAL/FAMILIAL VIOLENCE

We seem to be witnessing an alarming quotient of societal ‘short temperedness’ leading to aggression and resulting in violence, and the number of murders taking place between family members is cause for serious concern in Jamaica.

It must provoke embarrassment for Jamaicans and profound concern for the rest of the Caribbean that, whereas the Irish civil war claimed some 3,000 lives over a 50-year period, Jamaica, over the past 15 years, has been averaging, using conservative figures, some 500 murders per year, with an embarrassing portion of the yearly murder stats being domestic or family murders.

3. SEXUAL LIBERALISM

The sexual revolution, which many countries experienced since the mid-1960s, has only been marginally slowed down by sexually transmitted infections, and even amid the AIDS epidemic, the awful reality is that many, in exercise of their sexual freedom, are ‘doing whatever, wherever, however with whomever or whatever’. Beyond these obvious side effects, though, are two problems that I would like to highlight as directly related to sexual liberalism. First, there is a definite depreciation or trivialisation of human sexual intimacy and, secondly, a subtle tendency to treat persons as exploitable sex objects.

The popular song What’s love got to do with it? adequately sums up the philosophical outlook of many who are sexually active. No more the notion of sexual intercourse as mutual self-expression and self-emptying, but simply the convenient release of physiological tension. It is women more than men who become trivialised and traumatised, as this inadequate view of sexual intercourse pervades societies generally.

Sexual liberals may not readily admit it but sexual liberalism robs human sexual relationships of the critical factors of trust, honesty and emotional depth. The fear of being ‘just another’, or of ‘catching something’ or of ‘being taken for a ride’ (no pun intended) militates against ennobling and enriching relationships.

In light of the prevailing, escalating negative effects of sexual liberalism, it can be defensibly argued that the continued practice of sexual liberalism indicates the victory of human carnality over human rationality. A fourth threat to family life deserves at least cursory mention.

4. SUSPECT ROLE MODELS

In a word, young people must be sympathised with if they become morally confused, since there is enough evidence in our societies to indicate that the most influential are not necessarily the most morally upright.

This list of negative role models includes politicians, parsons, police officers, teachers, musicians, and others. Men and women who have lofty lips but live low-down lives!

Finally, our last threat.

5. MUSIC-MEDIA

As a trained, lettered musician, I maintain that, as shapers of opinion and forces that influence behaviour, the media-music combination, on the popular front, has no close rival. Caribbean societies have yet to appreciate fully the power and pervasiveness of the most popular productions of the print media (e.g. the scandal sheets which parade as newspapers, the magazines and books which elevate the vulgar, the obscene, the immoral and the pornographic). Nor have our societies reckoned seriously with the fact that the most popular/successful films tend to be those which glorify violence or immorality!

Television has become a major thief of communication and relationship time in many families, and that with the complicity of family members.

Popular music should be regarded as an aural drug with very addictive properties. I share the view that, for good or ill, music is at once an index and a determinant of culture, and so the popular musical expression of a people will likely shape the culture of that people. Further, whatever musical expression is loved by a people serves as a key index of that people’s rationality, sensibilities and artistic creativity.

There is, I submit, much cause for alarm, given the content of much that passes for popular music in our region. Taking the time to do a content analysis of some of the songs that bombard the region’s collective eardrum, though deemed ‘not fit for airplay’, could prove very enlightening, if also depressing.

A major source of confusion concerning the value of serious education for youth relates to the easy economic viability of a not too bright DJ vis-a-vis the economic struggles of so many university graduates!

We turn now to the difficult issue of empowering families and family members as agents of change. The dilemma here has to do with the need to temper personal rejection of certain damaging concepts and conduct with intellectual and attitudinal tolerance of those who espouse such concepts and conduct. There is the need to promote a wholesome minority ethic while showing due deference for the contrary majority ethic.

By empowering of families, we mean the process whereby family members regain and sustain the appropriate ethical authority (Greek. exousia), in concepts, and manifest the moral power (Greek. dunamis) that issues forth, in conduct, from such authority.

This empowering, as we have defined it, will give rise, progressively, to a general transvaluation of values because of critical consciousness that the current values on which the majority operates do not, because they cannot, produce the inner moral authority/power that can sustain the wholesome patterns of behaviour that need to become normative in families and thus in society.

Seen thus, empowering is essentially a process of behaviour modification through belief modification designed to produce wholesome behavioural models.

There are people, young and old alike, who, in concepts and conduct, espouse that which is wholesome, but lack the power of conscience to dare to recommend their way of life in the marketplace of competing and conflicting views. Such need the empowering of which we speak, if the modern family is to be rescued and preserved.