The Dilettante's Dilemma

It is hard to write seriously about the Iowa dental assistant who was fired.  I am sure it is a serious matter for Melissa Nelson, the dental assistant.  It is probably about to become serious for James and Jeanne Knight because they have set themselves up to be objects of ridicule.[1]   Nevertheless, I will try.  I will be serious.  I will.

According to the news reports, Nelson was fired because the dentist found her too attractive.  According to the opinion of the Supreme Court of Iowa, Nelson was fired because the dentist’s wife, Jeanne Knight, was concerned about the relationship between her husband and Nelson.  Here is the case.  See what you think.

http://www.iowacourts.gov/supreme_court/recent_opinions/20130712/

The question as the court construes it is this: “Can a male employer terminate a female employee because the employer’s wife…is concerned about the nature of the relationship between the employer and the employee?”  Answer: Yes, he may.

The question as I have seen it treated—ordinarily, I would say “discussed,” but this case does not seem to lend itself to “discussion”—is whether the law offers Melissa Nelson any recourse, after having been fired by her employer.  The answer is: No, it does not.  Not, at least, in Iowa.

So here is Melissa Nelson.  If  I were going to take a picture of her as an innocent victim, I would put her in a loose-fitting gray sweater with a scarf around her neck and use a shelf or so of law books as the background.  That’s what they have done here and I applaud their judgment.  If you would like to see extravagantly worse judgment, you may google “Melissa Nelson, dental assistant” and see what has been done with the issue.

I would like to use this very small public forum of mine to look at this issue in three other  ways.  I want to consider the realistic options available to Mrs. Knight; then what a healing intervention by their pastor might have done; and finally, the very difficult legal argument the court was required to use in its decision.  There will be a huge celebration of “the issue” in the online news sites, in the press, and on TV.  It will be ridiculed by everyone.  I think my approach is better.

  My first reaction, when I read in the court’s decision, that James Knight acted at his wife’s urging, was to regard her as a bit player in a drama that was not about her.  But if she values her marriage, maybe it is about her; there is, at least, a way of looking at the issue that takes her interests into account.

Jeanne Knight sees her marriage going away because she has failed to act to save it.  The first question you run into, if you are willing to start there, is: Is my marriage in danger of dissolution?  If you think it is, the next question would likely be: Is there anything I can do to help save it?  I you think there is, you look at the elements of the problem.  My husband, James Knight is more erotically attracted to his dental assistant than he wants to be.  His employee, Melissa Nelson, is much more attractive to him than is compatible with my continuing to have a happy marriage.

Now picture these options.

Scenario 1:      Jeanne has a sit-down talk with her husband and asks him to be less erotically attracted to Melissa than he is.

Scenario 2:      Jeanne admits that there is no way for James to be less attracted to Melissa than he is, but urges him to be very careful about seeming, in any way, to act on his feelings.

Scenario 3:      Jeanne tells her husband that there is room for one erotic attraction in his life, but not for two.  It is time for him to make a choice.

I have to admit that Scenario 3 is the only one in which Jeanne, herself, can act on her behalf or on behalf of the marriage.  By contrast, picture her asking James to feel differently than he does feel or to be continually aware that he needs to refrain from acting on his feelings.  If you are reluctant to dismiss Scenario 2, I ask you to imagine yourself in the position of a patient undergoing root canal at the hands of a dentist whose mind is largely elsewhere.

So much for Jeanne Knight.  Another way to look at this is from the standpoint of the church.  Frank Hearn, a communitarian author and a favorite of mine, has a vocabulary that can help us here.  Most important transactions, Hearn writes, really should be taking place in a community where people know and care for each other.  Some issues that can be handled well only by a community are highjacked and sent off to be dealt with by the courts.  He calls this process juridification.  This question of sexual attraction in the workplace can best be handled by the people who actually know what is going on.  It is a good deal too subtle for the courts to handle competently.

So let’s start with the religious community.  Let’s imagine—I have nothing but the neighborhood church to go on and I am choosing it instead of inventing a church—that all four people are members of the same church.  It would be the Faith Baptist Church of Fort Dodge, Iowa, which looks to be a block or so east of the Knight home.  So Steve and Melissa Nelson would be members of this church and so would James and Jeanne Knight.

It would not be hard for the pastor of the church to recall St. Paul’s words about “taking a brother to court.”  Paul’s advice is, “Don’t do it.”  Here’s the text from 1 Corinthians 6.

Is one of you with a complaint against another so brazen as to seek judgment from sinners and not from God’s holy people?  …when you have matters of this life to be judged, you bring them before those who are of no account in the Church![2]  I say this to make you ashamed of yourselves.  Can it really be that it is impossible to find in the community one sensible person capable of deciding questions between brothers, and that this is why brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?

Of course, Fort Dodge, Iowa and ancient Corinth are not similar places and we don’t categorize “the church” and “the world” that way anymore.  Still, it is not hard to imagine a pastor who cares about saving relationships as well as people to think of the situation more broadly.  Here is something he might have said.

“I’m glad the four of you were willing to sit down with me to talk about this.  The media will have a field day with us all if this gets into the court system.  All of you are going to be damaged if that happens and we don’t need to do that.  Here’s what needs to happen.  Melissa needs an apology.  James and Jeanne, that’s your job.  She is going to lose a job she likes and is going to become a figure to be ridiculed.  If she is going to have to take another job, she needs a sincere apology, a letter of recommendation that sounds like it came from God, a guarantee of a new job without any loss of income.

Melissa, you and Steve and going to have to find some charity in your hearts for James and Jeanne.  Jeanne is not crazy to be concerned about whether her marriage is going to be destroyed.  Marriages get destroyed by workplace flirtations all the time.  James has crossed the line that is supposed to separate employer conduct from sexual flirtation.  That was wrong.  On the other hand, he tried not to cross that line for a long time and under the circumstances, I think you can find it in your hearts to forgive him when he was not successful.”

Let me stop and remind you that most of that is made up.  It isn’t implausible, however, and it does defeat the threat of juridification.  Actual persons apologize and forgive.  Actual persons have their financial well-being taken into account.  I think it is a pretty good outcome.  It does require that the pastor take a very broad look at the issue and a pretty aggressive approach to the two couples, but I have seen pastors do that.

And finally, what happens if the matter is not handled within the community.  It goes to court.  And Nelson’s attorney employs the “but-for” strategy.  Nelson would not have been fired “but for” being a woman.  Not so, says Dr. Knight’s attorney.  It was the nature of the relationship and the threat to the marriage that are the issue.  Absolutely, says Nelson’s attorney, and you are telling us that there would have been this threat to the marriage if Nelson were not a woman?  That’s what you are telling us.

The Iowa Supreme Court wound up contrasting a “condition”—unjust treatment of an employee—with a “motive:” this was done to save the Knight’s marriage.  That just seems like bad law to me.  It doesn’t seem stable.  And the only court in the land to which this case could be appealed is the U. S. Supreme Court and I would have no hope at all that the legal issues would be sorted out there.

Today is a rescue operation.  I am going to try to rescue the term “paternalism.”  Very likely, I won’t succeed, but I have learned a phrase from my wife that I now use a good deal: “How bad could it be?”

Once you know that paternalism is bad, you really don’t need to know what it means.  In this, it parallels “racism” and “sexism.”  To the best of my recollection, racism was once a way of ordering the several races in a hierarchy.  It meant that “my race”—all of the members of my race, without regard to personal traits—is better than “your race,” with the same wall to wall erasing of personal distinctions.  In that form, it is false.  You can have any kind of grading system you like, provided that it grades individuals, and “racism” in that form can be shown to be empirically false.

Over time, the term came to mean the recognition of any racial differences at all.  I think the operating theory must have been that if a fact is established, people of ill will can use it to the disadvantage of the targeted race.  And since there is no way to prevent people of ill will from using facts in this manner, it is up to you to deny the existence of those facts.  Or, if you are not willing to deny them, just ignore them.  That will work just as well unless you are put on the spot.[1]

Sexism works the same way.  One sex is better than another.  That has meant that men are better than women.  But it doesn’t work the way race does.  You simply can’t say that every man is better at everything than any woman.  You can get most of the heavy lifting done, however, if you denigrate the value of the things women are better at.  I trust you will notice the pun.[2]  So men are better “at the things that really matter” than women are.  This runs into the factual problem, of course, just as racism did, and the options for people who know what the facts are are the same: deny the facts or shut up about them.

This brings us to paternalism.  That ought to mean that fathers—not “men,” but “fathers”—are better at everything than mothers—not “women,” but “mothers”—are.  No one thinks that.  The fallback position would be that fathers are better at all the most important parts of parenting than the mothers are.  Hardly anyone thinks that either, although there remains the question of just what “the most important” parts are.

This brings us to the text for today.

But paternalism, modestly construed as an expectation of achievement cushioned by a responsible willingness to provide guidance and support, has both a firm basis in male tradition and a present utility.[3]  As with many of the important criteria of manhood, it expresses tension between judgment of performance and a loving association with the performer: one measures one’s son and tries to help him through the measurements.[4] (p. 194)

This from Peter N. Stearns, a social historian and long-time observer of the pattern of gender roles.  In that whole description, I see only one weasel word, which I think is truly admirable.  The word I see is the “modestly,” after “paternalism.”  He gets to say what a “modestly construed paternalism” is and the men’s liberationists and feminists who have attacked him for this view (the book was first published in 1979) “just don’t understand” the kind of paternalism he has in mind.

I do, though.  I had a mentor.  My brother, Karl, was a pediatrician for most of his adult life.  He saw a lot of family settings and a lot of whole and balanced kids and a lot of seriously messed up kids.  He looked for two elements in the family setting.  He said that if these two elements were there, nearly every kid, however varied the personalities, had a good foundation for all the later choices.  The two elements were: love and firm rules.

That’s the way I remember it from all those years of conversation, but I called him last week to be sure I remembered it correctly and I discovered that he has clarified “love” a little.  He said he counted that a little boy was “loved” if there was someone in the home who was willing to listen to him.  Karl is a pediatrician, remember, not a child psychologist.  What he needs is a rough and ready criterion for “home setting,” something that will help him judge whether a child’s health is supported or abraded by the conditions at home.

I’ve remembered those two criteria over the decades since I first heard him say it, and they were in my mind when I read Stearns’ account.  In “loving association with the performer,” I see Karl’s insistence that the child is cared about and listened to.  In “judgment of performance,” I see the firm and clear rules that Karl thought were so important.

I see two kinds of dilemmas that will need to be addressed if this “modestly construed paternalism” is to be developed.  One has to do with the children; the other with the wife.

Stearns says that the decline of “traditional fathering” since the beginning of the industrial era has left men with a confusing situation. 

“Now that men cannot train their sons for work, and work with them during an overlap of careers, it has been difficult to find an alternate style with will produce guidance and authority…  Leisure activities, to which men now resort for so many of the satisfactions of manhood, have been the best surrogate, for they combine friendly association with training in skills and, where the father keeps up his own abilities, with the possibility of ongoing contact.” (pp. 192—193).

Being “buddies” with your children is often not what the child wants.  Furthermore, if one chooses to be a buddy rather than a father, it is not likely to be what the child needs, either.  The “judgment of performance” part of the father’s role is not really compatible with “being a buddy.”  If you have been to highly organized sports for children, you have seen fathers trying some way to play both roles at the same time.[5]

Before the industrial revolution changed family life so drastically, the father was the master of a set of skills he could teach to his sons.  This loaded the scale in favor of the judgment of performance criterion and against the “loving association with the performer” criterion.  Or, in Karl’s terms, the scale was loaded in favor of the rules part and against the “loving and listening to” part.  The Little League father is looking at a scale loaded the other way, even for the relatively minor part of essential family life that is played out in sports.  There are difficulties both ways.

Then there are the difficulties the wife presents.  Women have long borne the brunt of caring for the family.  The idea that the husband is going to be at home more now and therefore available to help bear the burden of family life has been an idea long welcomed.  On the other hand, when the women did all the work, they defined the job the way they wanted it and had no notion at all that it involved an exercise of power.  When the men enter the family to a new extent, being freed from the workplace to an increasing extent, they see “caring for the family” in their own way.  They don’t see themselves as apprentice mothers; they see themselves as fathers.

The family is, or should be, a field of male action in which men insist on defining a clear role for themselves, including a style of parenting.  Women complain that despite important strides to mutuality, men actually remain dominant in more cases than not.  This is doubtless true in many aspects of husband-wife relations.  But it is less likely true in areas of family activity, including child rearing, over which women have long maintained a virtual monopoly.

Men who want to be fathers, in this sense, are going to have to find a way to make it OK with their wives.  If the wives can’t find a way to assimilate a new adult at home, the children will be denied the “modest paternalism” that Stearns argues is the gift men have to give at home, or engage in protracted conflict about how to raise the children, particularly the boys.

I have no idea how these stresses are going to work themselves out.  I am quite sure it will not happen in my lifetime.  Stearn’s view is that the industrial revolution distorted gender patterns for several hundred years.  It would be odd to imagine that men and women—fathers and mothers—would devise some new balance on the fly and apply it collegially to the new challenges.  That is asking too much and I am not asking it.

What I am asking is that “paternalism” be removed from the listing of social pathologies it shares with sexism and racism.  Some way needs to be found for men to be men and fathers and husbands at the same time under confusing post-industrial circumstances.  I think this word can help us.