Ross Douthat responds to an essay by Matthew Yglesias that itself is a commentary on the argument over Charles Murray’s new book.
There’s plenty to discuss, but I’d like to focus on one point that Yglesias makes:
The obvious place to look for an explanation of the declining marriage rate is the vast increase in the economic opportunities available to women. Newly empowered and less dependent on male economic support, women have become somewhat choosier and are now less likely to be married than in the past. You can perhaps make the case that this is bad for kids, and that as a society we should return to total economic disempowerment of women in order to force people into two-parent households.
He also argues that many of our indicators of social success (for example, educational attainment, teen pregnancy, and violent crime) are headed in the right direction. So what’s the problem? If we’re headed in the right direction with fewer intact two-parent families, who needs the family, especially if the price to be paid for the traditional family is the “total economic disempowerment of women”?
“Bracketing” the needs and interests of the children, Douthat points to a “happiness gap” between affluent and working-class whites (to former of whom are more likely to have stable marriages than the latter), not to mention a decline overall in women’s happiness. I won’t argue with that evidence or with those considerations, but how is it possible to “bracket” the needs and interests of children?
Yesterday in class I was discussing Alexis de Tocqueville’s presentation and analysis of American associational life as a prophylactic to individualism and the “soft despotism” that might ensue from our failure to take responsibility for “civil society.” I asked my students–almost all of whom had participated in youth sports growing up–how many of the coaches, officials, and other volunteers they had encountered in these programs were government employees. The answer was none. Then who were they? As I expected, the answer was parents. Can a typical single parent coach or volunteer in these programs? (To be sure, I know some who do, but I also know that all the programs with which I’m acquainted would collapse without the time and energy that certain parents–men and women both–give to them.)
If, as we must, we think about our obligation to care for the welfare of our children, I don’t see who we can regard the intact two-parent family as optional or dispensable. Our social indicators may be moving in the “right” direction, but I have my doubts about many of those statistics. For example, one of the reasons for the decline in rates of violent crime may be the decline in the number of young men. And don’t get me started about “educational attainment” when there’s so much evidence suggesting that years in school don’t necessarily imply actual education.
But I return to Yglesias’ assumption that “family” requires the “total economic disempowerment of women.” Why? To be sure, a happy family requires sacrifices from both partners. The men I know who take fatherhood seriously also make economic and career choices that are “suboptimal” if the goal is simply to maximize income. That is, they recognize their responsibilities as men and fathers (which, by the way, are affirmed by their wives); they aren’t children who believe that the one who dies with the most toys wins.
Yglesias seems to think that human life is all about wealth and leisure (understood as play, not as the cultivation of human excellence). Perhaps on that impoverished view he can think of marriage as not necessarily a good bargain for contemporary men and women. But if happiness is more than consumption and if we’re meant (dare I say called?) to cultivate the full range of our capacities (including those for love and caring), then perhaps men and women both can only truly flourish in marriage.
In the end, as most of the readers of this websire know, the argument isn’t just about marriage; it’s about the nature of human fulfillment.
February 27th, 2012 | 9:36 am
This year makes 25 years that I have been married. The early years of child rearing are a blur — but it was easy for me to see the natural gifts of my husband’s and mine come to the fore…he the better provider, me the nurturer, though we had been conditioned to believe that this need not be so.
I firmly intended to get “on” with my writing career once the kids could read directions…instead, more and more of my time went to their school, our church, their activities…because only in this sense was I truly indispensable.
So my journey has been quite different than what I thought it would be, having been persuaded by the culture that my true worth derives from a sense of career accomplishment. I could not be further from the culture’s ideal of feminine empowerment. I remain completely dependent on my husband financially. But he works hard. My working hard, too, would not have lessened how hard he works, so I gave my all at home.
I can’t count the blessings showered upon me on this path. Now that the children are gone, I still see so many needs in our parish…and thanks to my husband, i am able to tend to these as best i can. There are so few women left to serve, we are kept quite busy.
All this just to say: everything I thought I knew as a young bride was mistaken.
February 27th, 2012 | 9:49 am
“But I return to Yglesias’ assumption that “family” requires the “total economic disempowerment of women.””
Well, he is smart enough not to explicitly say that, but it’s clear that it is in fact an assumption underlying his argument. It’s also clear that it is in fact bonkers. His argument (at least as quoted here) seems blissfully unaware of the demographic realities underlying economics and marriage statistics. Families in the middle and upper income brackets feature tons of working mothers, and families in these brackets are also typified by marriages, far more than the lower income brackets where marriage has suffered a catastrophic collapse.
“Yglesias seems to think that human life is all about wealth and leisure”
Just look at the guy’s resume. Of course he thinks this.
February 27th, 2012 | 10:21 am
So what is to be done?
The most likely to marry now are the college educated. One might try to get many more people to go to college. But if you promote higher education, you’re being a snob and trying to push people into liberal-dominated institutions to be indoctrinated (says Rick Santorum). I think the only practical way to significantly increase the number of people seeking higher education would be for the federal government to do something. But would Republicans ever support it?
What is a practical plan to encourage marriage for those who are going to have children, and to discourage out-of-wedlock births?
February 27th, 2012 | 11:08 am
Here’s one program in my home state:
http://www.georgiafamily.org/center-for-community-initiatives/383
February 27th, 2012 | 11:38 am
David,
Better evangelism and the recognition that the majority of our “intellectuals” have acted treacherously for the past century.
That may not be the answer you want to hear but it is the only solution. The government may try but they cannot force the moral character needed to inform communities.
February 27th, 2012 | 11:42 am
I think that the coaches and officials will become government officials. My city is already offering stipends. These will expand as needed.
Retirees might also volunteer, and the growing group of single men might be tapped.
But marriage is dying. You can be happy or sad about it. But it is dying.
February 27th, 2012 | 11:57 am
Mr Nicol,
Interesting observation “The most likely to marry now are the college educated. One might try to get many more people to go to college…” etc, but perhaps you’re putting the cart before the horse. The better educated might just be better educated because they adhere to a better set of values, and so are more likely to be better educated and married. We’re seeing the result of the decline in values in the culture, resulting in fewer successful values. Higher education isn’t a requirement to be successful in marriage (or life in general, necessarily), but the people who have the self discipline to get though a university also have the character traits to make a marriage work.
February 27th, 2012 | 12:08 pm
I would like to see an honest study of the economic “empowerment” of unmarried mothers. How many of these women are living as independent adults, forging careers, paying all their own bills, living on their own, etc.? Are they more likely than married mothers to be dependent on government welfare or family handouts, to drop out of college, to be living in grandma’s basement at age 30?
also, Yglesias has a strangely black and white notion of the lives of mothers (we are either economically empowered or totally disempowered). I wonder, too, did the word “self-actualization” crop up in his argument?
February 27th, 2012 | 12:11 pm
David: Aren’t you using the exact same logic that said that since middle class people own houses, we should have policies that allow poor people to own houses in order to grow our middle class? What could possibly go wrong? There can’t possibly be any gaping flaws in that argument, right?
The very last thing that the government should be doing is to encourage even more people to go to college, especially without a pretty radical rethinking (by our society in general, NOT NOT NOT by the government) of what exactly a college education is supposed to signify. Recent moves to do so have, on the whole, been nothing more than the setup of a massive wealth transfer from young adults to college bureaucracies.
At this point, given the collapse in marriage among the lower income cohort, I have no idea what to do. I don’t think there’s any historical precedent to look to, either. We’re in seriously uncharted territory. Given that the modern welfare state as it’s been known for the last half-century is going to go the way of the dodo, I have faith that things will work out somehow.
February 27th, 2012 | 3:09 pm
Women can’t flourish in marriage if it involves domestic violence, and the truth is that many marriages end for that reason. Maybe we need to help men learn to get what they want by persuasion rather than force.
February 27th, 2012 | 4:49 pm
The feminists have (mis)led women into thinking that you need to put career “first” – as in, before you have your child.
But if a woman is going to do both, it makes sense for her to do it the other way around: have the child young, then become increasingly more involved in career concerns as the child (or children) grow older and need less.
Doing it the feminist way requires outsourcing the entire process of motherhood. This probably appeals to the celebrity feminist (“feminist leaders”), who obviously wish to be more like males in any way they can – and obviously have taken the “breadwinner” role. The problem, though, is that this requires they inflict on someone else the exact terms they themselves define as “oppression”: someone has got to raise the child.
(Raising a child for cash is only economically advantageous when compared to raising a child within a family setting if one assumes that the family setting is going to end with the mother being thrown out of the house with nothing at all as soon as she is no longer needed – which is probably what the feminists assume?)
The problem with having the child first is that you have to have a husband – and realistically, you have to have an older generation to help out. There is no way for an 18 year old or a 21 year old to raise a child without assistance – and the “assistance” one gets from the government is not healthy assistance.
February 27th, 2012 | 11:26 pm
The domestic violence argument would be rather more persuasive if a woman who is head of her own household were less likely to be battered than a married woman.
Since it’s the other way round, not very persuasive.
February 28th, 2012 | 6:50 am
I agree with the author that the debate is about the nature of human fulfillment. But then, I dont think conservatives actually get eudaimonia quite well. Thousends of years of patriarchy (from religious and non religious sources) have them confused about the roles of women in family, rasing kids, etc. When they finally get that, then we can sit and have a serious discusion about family. That cannot be done with their fantasies of returning to their “idilic” world of the 50´s, where women were only housewifes limited to domestic labors and “submited” to their husbands.
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