How Confucian is the US?

I hadn't realized just how widespread the concept of "filial responsibility" is in American jurisprudence.  It turns out that 28 states have laws on the books that state that children are responsible for the care of their elderly parents.   A brief NYT post explains:

The rationale, which you can trace back as far as ancient Roman law, is that children have a duty to care for parents. The law sees this as a matter of ethics and reciprocity: Your parents took care of you as children; now it’s your turn to take care of them.

At one time, filial responsibility laws were far more common. As recently as the 1950s, 45 states and the federal government had them on the books. They began to erode during the New Deal, when the Social Security Act passed and the concept of government rather than familial responsibility started to take hold.

But 28 states still have filial responsibility laws: Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia.

Sixteen of these impose civil penalties — they can come after your assets or income if you fail to support your parents. In the eight states where filial responsibility entails criminal penalties, a prosecutor could actually put you in jail. Four states take both approaches.

In Massachusetts, for instance, someone who “unreasonably neglects” to support a parent who is destitute or too infirm to maintain himself could face up to a year in prison plus a $200 fine.

Who knew?  As a Massachusetts resident. I guess I should be relieved that I did not "unreasonably neglect" my mother and her end of life care.  At the time, I was wholly ignorant of the law but struggling to do the right filial thing.  It would all depend, I imagine, on how the lawyers define "unreasonable neglect"...

The article goes on, however:  "But filial responsibility laws are very rarely enforced; 11 of the 28 states that have them have never used them."

"Filial responsibility," would seem to be more of a principle than a practice, at least in the legal sense.  And if that is the case, then the US is not a Confucian society (surprise!) because Confucianism requires that we actually perform our duties.

But in fact Americans, quietly and out of the media spotlight, do perform their familial duties.  A 2009 survey (pdf!) suggests that "caregiving" is very prevalent in the US:

In the past 12 months, an estimated 65.7 million people in the U.S. have served as unpaid family caregivers to an adult or a child. About 28.5% of the respondents surveyed reported being caregivers.

"Caregiving" here is defined as caring for an adult or a child with special needs, not routine child care.

So, maybe we are more Confucian than we realize.  Maybe "filial responsibility" laws are not enforced because most people most of the time do what they can to care for their family members.  Of course there are instances of neglect and abuse, and these must be attended to by legal authorities.  But for most of us it might be that this excerpt from Analects 1.2 rings true:

The noble-minded cultivate roots.  When roots are secure, the Way is born.  To honor parents and elders - isn't that the root of Humanity?

Comments

[Matt Cooper]

Good post as always, Mr Crane.

I also think the 'Confucian' character of the American public is much deeper, in point of fact, than that of our formal legal institutions. We have neither the cherished memory of monarchy (the embodiment of the parent-child relation writ large in government, in the form of a person rather than in the form of an impersonal state mechanism) nor of 'religious' establishment to posit ourselves in any way as 'Confucian' on the national scale. Our formal institutions are predicated upon the haggling of various interest groups, and thus are far too vulnerable to the predations of the nexus of 力 power and 利 private interest to be considered so. This includes (sadly) our legal institutions.

That said, many of us still do feel a sense of filial responsibility. I am not sure exactly why or how it has lasted to this point, but it may have something to do with the fact that, as a massively immigrant-based culture, many families have retained (and in some cases Flanderised) the folk traditions of the 'old country' from whence they came, or have tried (as many African-Americans have) to recover and reinvent those traditions where they had been lost in the Middle Passage.

It would be interesting to see...

[dada]

Surely filial piety (or at least respect and gratitude and a desire to see your parents live long happy lives, and to provide care for them in their old age, as they provided to you when you were a baby) is a (nearly?) universal value of human societies worldwide and not something the Chinese invented on their own - it certainly is in my family and my friends and neighbors who have never had any Confucian education.

The real story of Confucianism that the world should know about concerns the limits of Confucianism in China. As my Chinese friend once said "He's not in my family, I don't have to care about him" and you will see that attitude everywhere in China, with horrifying consequences (truck drivers running over babies and driving away, etc.). Whats truly amazing is that China ever adopted socialism, because there is not a grain of genuine social concern in Chinese culture - there is an immense void between my family and my nation that is filled with selfishness and greed.

[Xander]

Not at all Confucian! You’re forgetting the key values of Confucianism lie not only with family responsibility, but government and example. An elected and democratic government is about as anti-Confucian as you can get (since government is ruled by majority, rather than nobility and meritocracy as Confucius wished), couple that with a legalist attitude and you have a very un-Confucian society. The issue with this as far as Confucius (and indeed Mencius) is concerned is that passing laws to make children respect their parents is less Confucianist that not having such laws. After all, the key belief in Confucianism is that one should voluntarily observe proper rites. If one has to have a law to tell you to care for your parents, then you only care for them out of fear of punishment. A truly Confucian society would have morals enough to not need a law to tell them what to do.