6

Self-control and Social Change

Any contract lenient enough to allow termination of hopeless marriages
cannot at the same time be strict enough to prevent opportunistic switching.

—ROBERT FRANK

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s marriage lasted for forty years, ending only with the president’s death in 1945. Would the Roosevelts have been happier divorced? It’s hard to say. All we know is that they stuck together through thick and thin, and that a lot of good came of their sometimes painful partnership.

It was a different story for Franklin and Eleanor’s five children, who had twenty-nine kids—and racked up nineteen marriages and fifteen divorces along the way. The evolution of matrimony from something like an ironclad contract into an arrangement as likely to be broken as not says a lot about the modern dilemma and the way social changes have altered the self-control landscape.

As Dorothy recognized in The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Kansas anymore. We don’t live the small-town life that was once so maddeningly effective at constraining behavior. The role of women is radically different from what it was even fifty years ago. Americans today are also richer, more mobile, and more likely to live alone. On average they spend many more years on this earth—as Franklin Roosevelt probably would have done with modern medical care. Premarital sex is taken for granted, as is birth control and a little youthful experimentation with drugs. (Think of all the politicians who “didn’t inhale.”) Homosexuality has come out of the closet. Second careers, second homes, second spouses, and even second childhoods are commonplace.

These changes are part of a tectonic social adjustment: a shift, in the developed world, away from tradition and received social structures in favor of personal choice and self-invention. In the non-Islamic world, at least, church and ideology no longer provide much in the way of traditional limits on individual behavior. Communism, with its tyrannies large and small, is dead, and as a character in a Donald Barthelme story once remarked, opium is now the opiate of the people.

Amen, let us hasten to add; who wants someone else to tell us what to do? It’s the same with money; although lots of people are ready to criticize affluence, nobody I know truly craves the opposite. But the result of these changes is that each of us must rely more on ourselves for the kind of restraint that was once imposed externally, back in the bad old days. In those days, “we still inhabited our parents’ moral universe,” the historian Tony Judt recalled recently in describing how circumscribed life was before the social revolution of the 1960s. “Dating was difficult—no one had cars; our homes were too small for privacy; contraception was available but only if you were willing to confront a disapproving pharmacist. There was a well-founded presumption of innocence and ignorance, for boys and girls alike. Most boys I knew attended single-sex schools and we rarely encountered women.”

What accounts for this great change? Simply put, our social arrangements are freer now because we can afford them to be. As the political scientist Ronald Inglehart writes, “In a major part of the world, the disciplined, self-denying, and achievement-oriented norms of industrial society are giving way to an increasingly broad latitude for individual choice of lifestyles and individual self-expression.”

That’s a great achievement, but it comes at a price. Emile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, warned in 1897 of the dangers that come with freedom, affluence, and technology—in particular, of a dangerous condition he called anomie (from the Greek anomia, lawlessness). Anomie means lacking clear norms, standards, or ideals. Aristotle stressed the importance of telos—one’s purpose or goal—but anomie is a kind of Aristotelian vacuum, a demoralizing condition of purposelessness often brought on by rapid change. Durkheim felt that people should live in a web of interlocking networks and institutions that would provide a structure of values; without these values, we might fall into purely selfish and carnal behaviors. “The more weakened the groups to which [a man] belongs,” Durkheim observed, “the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.”

It was a vision far different from the world so many of us live in today. “A Durkheimian society,” psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells us, “would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for outgroups.” The hierarchical family was the model for that society, but it’s on the wane in most of the developed world outside of Asia. The rise of divorce had undermined parental authority by giving children leverage to pry loose disciplinary constraints, if only by playing one parent against the other. And the willingness of adult offspring to move far away from parents—and vice versa, when retirement comes—has further weakened ties that once circumscribed behavior more tightly. In much of the world, the family’s role has evolved from one of economic production to emotional satisfaction, transforming its inherent bias from discipline to indulgence. Families are less likely to be intact, and when a father is present he is less likely to be the authority figure he might have been in the days of patriarchy. My sense is that this role hasn’t been taken up by mothers, although it is sometimes outsourced: witness the popularity of kids’ martial arts classes, in which an instructor chosen for his ability to beat the crap out of everyone demands deference, punctuality, politeness, and respect—just as patriarchs were wont to do at home.

This change in the purpose of the family has encouraged the development of youth culture, which inevitably devalues patience, prudence, and other stodgy-sounding values associated with maturity. “Abandon” is a virtue in such an environment; it’s not just what the young do, but what the non-young may embrace, if only to prove to themselves and others that they aren’t old. We may color our behavior, in other words, for the same reason that we color our hair. Once boys in shorts yearned to dress like men, but now grown men dress themselves like boys. In the twentieth century, the historian Eli Zaretsky writes, people “separated from traditional familial morality, gave up their obsession with self-control and thrift, and entered into the sexualized ‘dreamworlds’ of mass consumption on behalf of a new orientation to personal life.”

The Matrimonial Knot

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were married in 1905, when young men and women typically lived at home—or boarded in someone else’s home—until they wed, often turning over much of their earnings to their parents. In those days, for better or worse, only one in ten marriages ended in divorce.

The evolution of marriage since then illustrates the complex effects of technology, affluence, and social change on the problem of self-control. In the century since Franklin and Eleanor tied the knot, readily available birth control—the pill may yet be seen as the most momentous technology of the twentieth century—enabled us to have sex more easily outside of matrimony. Women got the vote and, eventually, legal abortion and other rights. Their growing earning power undermined the traditional patriarchal structure of marriage. Changing divorce laws (enacted by popularly elected legislators) made it easier to dissolve an unhappy union like Franklin and Eleanor’s. And divorce long ago ceased to be a one-way ticket to social disrepute.

In Franklin and Eleanor’s day, marriage was a fairly effective pre-commitment device. It was binding, and it constrained behavior by (ostensibly) putting other potential partners off-limits and raising the price of any breakup. Old-fashioned marriages were kind of like old-fashioned corsets: attractive, perhaps, but uncomfortably rigid once you got yourself into them, and most confining for women. Easily dissolved modern marriages are very different, for absent a lot of impulse suppression by both participants, the partnership will collapse. Marriages today probably consume self-control just as much as they bolster it—if not more so.

Despite all these changes, Americans still love marriage—as they always have. “There is certainly no country in the world,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, “where the tie of marriage is more respected.” Yet never before has marriage had less importance as an American social institution. There are fewer marriages per capita, they happen later, and, unless trends change, half of all marriages today will end in divorce.

Still, we refuse to give up on it. We are more marriage oriented than most comparable countries; Americans overwhelmingly want and believe in matrimony. But we’re probably also more obsessed with personal fulfillment than people in most other places, which might make us likelier to seek out something new rather than live with discontent. These conflicting values of ours make for a turbulent conjugal landscape. Americans have high rates of both marriage and divorce, less-enduring cohabitation arrangements (and more of them), and a higher rate of childbearing by women who are not living with the baby’s father. The churn rate of our domestic relations has rendered family life in the United States uniquely unstable. “No other comparable nation,” the marriage scholar Andrew J. Cherlin observes, “has such a high level of multiple marital and cohabiting unions.”

Would you be surprised to learn that America’s high breakup rate might have something to do with self-control? For there are really two states of matrimony in America—one for those with education, and a much less stable one for those without. (Imagine them as the Denmark and Iraq of nuptials.) The divorce rate among college-educated women—probably the Americans who would score highest in any test of self-control—is much lower than it is among women without undergraduate degrees. And education is associated with better impulse control.

Americans sometimes lament the prevalence of divorce. Yet there is little tolerance for the idea of reversing nofault divorce laws—even though Americans have a shorter wait for a nofault divorce than couples in almost any other Western nation, and as we’ve already seen, speed kills self-control. But there is little evidence that reversing no-fault divorce would make much difference except to perpetuate the very worst marriages—to the detriment of women. Besides, where no-fault divorce is barred, couples often concoct whatever faults the legal system requires. Easing the financial burdens of the poorest married couples might help; then again, Americans have been poorer in the past and divorced less.

The really big change isn’t in the law but in us. I think we’re more willing to put our own happiness first. People who find their marriages unfulfilling want to split up, and there is no longer much social pressure to keep them together. Should there be? Probably. A little social pressure can do a world of good, as it has against smoking, and as with smoking cessation, third parties would benefit. For implicit in the way marriage has changed in the past half century is a shift in priorities that favors adults at the expense of kids.

While there is debate over how bad divorce is for children (some researchers argue that the problem for kids is domestic strife or poverty or family instability rather than marital dissolution), I am not aware of anyone arguing that our high rate of coupling and uncoupling is good for children. What we do know is that, for kids, divorce goes along with more suicide, delinquency, drug and alcohol addiction, poor school performance, domestic abuse, and other problems. Children of divorce are themselves more likely to divorce when they grow up.

The picture is even bleaker when you look at cohabitation. America’s high rate of family reshuffling is unique in the industrialized world. In splitting up so often, we may be transferring significant costs to children, kicking the can of misery down the road to the next generation in our restless search for fulfillment today. If so, we are beggaring the future on behalf of the present, just as we have done with our overspending and our over-warming of the planet.

There is no simple answer. What we’ve lost in our modern domestic arrangements is a strong if inflexible structure for channeling our actions to the benefit of others, even if we later change our minds about things. What we’ve saved are the lives of a good many women. The economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, partners who study marriage but so far have declined to engage in it, have found that “total female suicide declined by around 20 percent in the long run in states that adopted unilateral divorce.” Domestic violence rates in those states also fell by about a third from 1976 to 1985. Unilateral divorce may also have helped reduce the murder of women. Violence was reduced so much, the economists concluded, that it must have gone down not just because some bad relationships ended, but because it fell in ongoing ones as well. Easier divorce, it seemed, was forcing men to treat their wives better. This would not have surprised Montaigne, who claimed that in Rome, “what made marriages honoured and secure for so long a period was freedom to break them at will. Men loved their wives more because they could lose them.”

It’s not even clear, in the age of divorce on demand, whether the legal part of marriage matters much anymore. An acquaintance of mine tells of having attended a large, lavish wedding as one of the very few guests in on the bride and groom’s secret—which was that their wedding was a sham, since it had everything except the marriage license. The couple had decided that being legally married would result in too much of a tax penalty, and that they could have all the advantages without giving any role to the state. But keeping the secret was crucial, for if someone had let the cat out of the bag, it would have undermined the social pressure they wanted to bring to bear on themselves in favor of staying together.

For better or worse, some people are trying to rehabilitate marriage as a powerful commitment device. Three states—Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas—permit “covenant marriages,” a type of marriage that is harder to get into and quite a bit harder to get out of. Covenant marriage seems to be largely a creature of Christian evangelism, and relatively few people choose it in the states where it’s available. Those who do might be the least likely to get divorced in any case. But perhaps the concept, or something like it, deserves wider availability, and not just for the sake of the kids. There is some evidence that people are happier with the choices they make when those choices are irrevocable. (Covenant marriages can be ended, by the way, but usually only on very limited grounds, like imprisonment or adultery.) Covenant marriage tries to reassert the commitment function of marriage, which as an institution used to be something different from mere legally sanctioned cohabitation. And in general I like the idea of government offering people voluntary ways to constrain their own behavior, something I’ll talk about a lot more later.

Meanwhile, people can do this sort of thing for themselves. A prenuptial agreement, for example, might contain a legally binding pledge to give a big chunk of the marital assets to some third party (who would know of the arrangement and strive to collect) in the event the marriage collapses. A Wall Street Journal blog reported on a similar real-life example that might also help stave off divorce—a prenup that imposes hefty fines for infidelity: “the spouse that cheats has to pay the other a percentage of his or her assets.”

The family’s decline probably contributes to another phenomenon that stealthily undermines our self-regulatory capacities: loneliness. “To be free is often to be lonely,” W. H. Auden rightly observed, and we find ourselves today very free indeed. Social isolation seems to be increasing, and researchers have implicated it in overeating, poor diet, drug and alcohol abuse, bulimia, and suicide—all of which reflect a fundamental mispricing of the future compared with the present. Lonely people have a harder time concentrating (attention management is a key element of self-control), are more likely to divorce, and they get into more conflicts with neighbors and coworkers. The lonely also exercise less and sleep less efficiently.

Loneliness not only subverts behavioral self-control but also weakens the human organism’s unconscious ability to control its own systems for optimal health. Loneliness “disrupts the regulation of key cellular processes deep within the body,” reports the psychologist John Cacioppo, who has studied social isolation for years. It harms our immune systems, degrades cardiovascular performance, and may be “hastening millions of people to an early grave,” even if only because the lonely are so much less able to resist harmful foods and intoxicants. In a study purporting to be a taste test, for example, lonelier people ate more cookies and rated their flavor more highly. Thomas Buddenbrook, the aging patriarch of the eponymous family in the novel by Thomas Mann, had a similar problem with loneliness and smoking. In explaining to his doctor—in 1874!—why he can’t give up his beloved cigarettes, this most public of men complains of isolation: “One is so frightfully alone . . .”

Ultimate Ends

If the purpose of the family has changed, so too has the purpose of life, even if we don’t often think about it. The historian Darrin McMahon has noted “the steady erosion of other ways of conceiving of life’s purpose and end,” such as virtue or honor, instead of just pleasure. “In a world that places a premium on good feeling and positive emotion, these other ends have nowhere near the power to channel and constrain our choices that they once did. The same may be said of religion—long considered the ultimate end—but which today, even in places like the United States, where religious observance remains strong, is more often than not treated as a means to a better and happier life.”

Some religious constraints seem absurdly arbitrary, of course; my favorite is the ban on blended cloth in Leviticus. Yet most traditional religions, in one form or another, also usefully emphasize sobriety, sexual restraint, moderation, and mindfulness generally. Buddhism, for example, recommends a variety of sensible measures for avoiding temptations, including looking out for them in advance. It was no less than Mark Sanford, freshly back from a visit to his paramour on the pampas, who observed that, “God’s law is indeed there to protect you from yourself.”

South Carolina’s straying governor notwithstanding, people who have religious faith may well have more self-control. Maybe it’s because religions tend to deemphasize the here and now in favor of one’s eternal soul or, at the very least, participation in some mystical unity, the grandeur of which makes overspending and marital infidelity seem petty and foolish. The very notion of an afterlife encourages future-mindedness and, once upon a time, made people defer gratification right up until they were dead, which I am prepared to admit is probably a little too long.

It’s obvious even to an infidel like me that religion is a useful way for people to find meaning, or belonging, or even just solace in a harsh and chancy world—and in the absence of religion people are more likely to seek those things by pandering to their own less-welcome desires. Take away religion and you seem to create a vacuum that shopping and the like rush to fill. Spiritualism, which is flourishing, isn’t the same thing; it doesn’t forbid much of anything except perhaps self-awareness. And religious practice without genuine faith doesn’t seem to work either; apparently rituals have to be faith based, like any other placebo, to have any benefit.

Where religion does persist in the Western world, it’s less bent than it used to be on telling us what to do and what not to do. In a movement that started perhaps a century ago, modern pastors more than ever are rolling out a feel-good version of the old-time religion which says, essentially, that what you’re doing is pretty much okay and by golly you ought to feel good about it. In this they are only responding to the marketplace, which wants the same good feelings from God as it does from movies. (Think of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or All Quiet on the Western Front or even Von Ryan’s Express. Commercial pictures today aren’t produced with such unhappy endings. Tragedy is out.)

Traditional religious practices persist in places, but here, too—as the Amish discovered—the challenges of modernity have ratcheted up the pressure on the self in self-control. Take the custom of shomer negiah among the Orthodox Jews, who consider interactions between unmarried men and women so combustible that they are forbidden even to touch one another. The practice evolved for a different world, one in which the faithful lived in closer-knit communities, nuptials were arranged by family, and young adults didn’t remain single for long. But the world has changed, with the result that Orthodox Jews of both sexes find themselves struggling to remain chaste—well into their twenties and thirties.

“Historically, people got married much younger,” says Rabbi Yosef Blau, who counsels students at Yeshiva University, “so the whole notion of being physically mature and holding back expressing it was not really applicable. The level of control expected is greater than ever because society functions so differently.”