Values, to put it simply, are a set of common ideas and ideals considered important by an actor or a social group. As such, they may be understood in an Aristotelian sense as a shared agreement of something’s worth in term of something else, ergo, what is deemed just and unjust, useful and harmful, right and wrong by a collective (Chilton &
Schäffner 2002, 1–2). Values are often taken as all but synonymous with beliefs, which is not necessarily something that needs to be challenged in every occasion. However, a few critical distinctions between the two should be established here as to make our
interpretation of values more intelligible to the reader. Karl Scheibe (1970) renders an extremely useful commentary on this, propounding that belief statements answer to questions of fact, referring to what is possible, what exists, what happened in history, what a person is and what they can do, while value judgements answer to questions of value, referring to what is wanted, what is best, what is desirable, what is preferable and what ought to be done. The former are thus framed in terms expectancies, hypothesis, probabilities and assumptions, whereas the latter suggest an operation of wishes, desires, goals, passions, valences and morals (Scheibe 1970, 41–42).
What is more, Scheibe (1970, 43) delineates a crucial distinction between the standards and veridicality of beliefs and values, noting that, whilst beliefs often use external criteria of reality in the form of ‘true and false’ statements, the standard of values is not that obvious, for values can be disputed, but rarely in terms of their factual accuracy.
In fact, rather than making discernible attempts at objectivity, values tend to be – more or less visibly – connected to the preference patterns and ideology of different social actors and groups, upon which they remain alterable, limited and conditional (Scheibe 1970, 51). Furthermore, talking about primary and secondary values, Scheibe (1970, 52) makes a valid point about the bi-directional and largely interactive nature of values, by which originally unvalued items may become valued by association with items already valued.
For example, in instances where population growth has been made a major government priority, areas such as the family which have theretofore remained private domains may suddenly become important public concerns.
Consequently, family values typify the demarcation of conceptual boundaries in terms of what constitutes a family and how family as an institution should be, what is the moral or social value families produce and which kind of families are worthy of support – quite possibly at the expense of others. Jill Jagger and Caroline Wright (1999, 1–2) suggest ‘family values’ being something of ‘a catch all, cure all phrase in contemporary social life’, as a result of which the adjacent attempts to define the term are anything but unequivocal, not to mention precise, but rather vary significantly according to the political and ideological objectives of the actors involved in their conceptualisation. At the very core of the debate around family values are the contemporary changes in family life, gender roles and household compositions and their perceived consequences to society in general (Jagger & Wright 1999). The evolution and fragmentation of these domains is
often treated in negative light as something that allegedly jeopardises the pre-existing social order by the official defenders of social conservatism and the so-called ‘traditional’
or ‘conservative family values’, who see the family as a natural unit of human social organisation and, as such, a stabilising cornerstone of society (Fox Harding 1999; Gilbert 1999).
According to Fox Harding (1999, 123), the main concerns of the ‘family values’
position for conservative governments usually constitute: stable marriage and childbearing; a gender division of roles; the confinement of sexuality to the permanent married heterosexual unit of the nuclear family; and the support of these patterns through government policy. Fox Harding (1999) identifies three essential thematic focal points of conservative family policy: parenthood, marriage and sexuality, ideals and institutions of which the policies aim to define and support. The conservatives, in theory at least, appear to have an appetite for increasing parental responsibility and authority, encouraging motherhood, strengthening and revitalising the institution of permanent marriage as well as normalising heterosexuality at the expense of other sexual identities and orientations.
Yet, in practice, the conservative programmes may exhibit inconsistent policies and conflicting results versus their nominal objectives, for instance, by sustaining social structures and legislation amid which divorce is made an easy undertaking and abortion readily available or by failing to provide enough material and social resources, e.g. child support, to make parenthood seem like a desirable option. (Fox Harding 1999, 126–127.) This, of course, goes to show that even policymakers, such as the Russian conservative government, portraying a pronounced political ideology supposedly supporting ‘the traditional institution of the family’ remain somewhat ambivalent in their relation to the family which remains a hybrid of public concerns and private matters.
Paul Gilbert (1999, 136) has detected that ‘much nationalism draws on metaphors of family which is seen as exemplifying the relationship of members of a nation in miniature’. If we consider nation-building as a political strategy to give the population of a state a sense of being a single nation with a cohesive value base and a sense of belonging to one particular state (Kolstø 2005, 8, 19), then we may appreciate the suggested functional relationship between the idea of a nation-state and the family. Gilbert (1999) talks about a specific liaison between right-wing politics – usually standing for social conservatism in some form – and family values that presents family as a ‘natural state’
with supposedly ‘naturally given’ (most times understood as biological) ties and loyalties between members, which translate into natural ties of loyalty between compatriots. The relationship between family and nation becomes thus a natural given as well, and in this view, the heterosexual nuclear family remains the only viable family form as it is the sole natural procreative unit. Gilbert (1999, 137–141) sees the political use of family as a model for the nation as means to legitimise the state and gather its citizens’ loyalties by presenting a compound notion of the family/nation as if it were something pre-scientific and pre-political, a naturally arising and inherited national character, not shaped by the state – albeit used by it. Still, whilst governments may present family as a natural fact, the values around it are always socially constructed by those agents who hold political power in society and who shape and transmit these values via family discourse contingent upon specific objectives, ambitions and contexts (Gilbert 1999, 140–141).