In the first part of this book, I discussed the vital role institutions play in a pluralistic society. Institutions are rules and customs for how groups of people self-organize and work together outside the state. Hence the term “mediating institutions”—the formal and informal organizations, customs, and rules that “mediate” the space between the individual and the state, often called “civil society.” This is the world of work, church, and community. Most of the work of civilization and of our individual lives is conducted in this space.
By any measure, the most important mediating institution in any society is the family. Healthy, well-functioning families are the primary wellspring of societal success. Unhealthy, dysfunctional families are the primary cause of societal decline. The family is the institution that converts us from natural-born barbarians into, hopefully, decent citizens. It is the family that literally civilizes us. Before we are born into a community, a faith, a class, or a nation, we are born into a family, and how that family shapes us largely determines who we are.
The healthy family is also the keystone of civil society. Many of the most important mediating institutions relate not simply to individuals but to the families behind them. If you ever explore the question of how any thriving school, small town, sports league, church, mosque, synagogue, or almost any other non-government-run civic event or tradition does so well, the answer almost always involves the involvement of certain families, usually led by a few determined women and reinforced by cadres of obedient husbands and fathers.
“Capitalism,” Joseph Schumpeter said, “does not merely mean that the housewife may influence production by her choice between peas and beans; nor that the youngster may choose whether he wants to work on a factory or in a farm; nor that plant managers have some voice in deciding what and how to produce. It means a scheme of values, an attitude toward life, a civilization…”1 This scheme of values, this attitude toward life and civilization, begins in the family, which is traditionally defined as a marriage between one man and one woman and their children.
And this system is breaking down. The family as an engine of civilization is in deep trouble. In a way, the breakdown of the family is an illustration of my larger argument in miniature. Many critics of bourgeois morality are indeed right when they say that the nuclear family—one man, one woman, married to another—is not natural. It’s not altogether unnatural either. But it’s true that the historical and anthropological record is full of different types of families. Combatants on both sides of the intellectual wars of the family often commit the naturalistic fallacy: assuming that if something is “natural” it is right or good. Many traditionalists insist that the nuclear family is the natural way, “as God intended.” Advocates for new ways of organizing and thinking about family point out all of the different ways families have been organized and say many forms are just as natural.
But whether it is natural or not misses the more salient point: The nuclear family works.
But before we explore that point, we should review—very quickly and summarily—the world we came from when it comes to families.
Non-human primates have a variety of sexual dynamics. In gorilla communities, the alpha male has sex with all the females. Among chimpanzees, it’s more like a free-for-all, with males competing with each other for sex with as many partners as possible. In both species, the difference in size between males and females is a symptom of these sexual politics. Males must defeat other males to become the alpha or even to get a first shot at the most desirable females. Around 1.7 million years ago, our human ancestors started to deviate from this norm, and the size differential between the sexes shrank (though it still exists). “This shift in size is almost certainly a sign that competition between males had diminished because of the transition to the pair bond system,” writes Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors.2 The pair-bond is what you could call natural or primitive monogamy.
However, even chimps have a kind of stealth monogamy. The females may be obligated to have sex with all the males, but, once having fulfilled that duty, they tend to pick a favorite male “consort” they spend more time with. They even have trysts off in the forest with them for weeks at a time and delay their ovulation so they can increase the chances that their preferred partner succeeds.
Our human ancestors improved on this system with the pair-bond. Among the benefits of this adaptation, all the males—or at least a lot more of them—had a chance to reproduce, which introduced a good deal more social peace and stability to primitive societies. In this way, primitive monogamy may be the driver of mankind’s success as a species. By taking the need to fight with other males out of the equation and giving each male an incentive to protect the group (specifically his own offspring), males became much more cooperative and willing to make sacrifices for their tribe (or, more accurately, their band or troop). In evolutionary terms, the pair-bond was a mixed blessing for the females. “The females,” Wade writes, “must give up mating with all the most desirable males in the community and limit their reproductive potential to the genes of just one male. On the other hand they gain an implied guarantee of physical protection for themselves and their children, as well as some provisioning.”3
But here’s the problem: The pair-bond is not fully baked into our instinctual programming the way, say, the fight-or-flight instinct is. Monogamy is natural—except when it isn’t. It’s a tendency, not an imperative. Culture, law, material circumstances—and sometimes mere opportunity—can easily override this real but often weak evolutionary drive. Also, in a world where few humans lived past the age of thirty, the notion of being bound to one person for fifty, sixty, or seventy years seemed unimaginable.
Marriage, whatever form it takes, is a social construction, an artificial institution and cultural adaptation. For instance, in certain areas where resources are scarce, societies developed polyandry—the practice of one wife and many husbands. This was a common practice in the mountain communities of China and Tibet. Far more common is polygyny, the form of polygamous marriage where one man has many wives. Some 85 percent of human societies through history, according to one commonly cited estimate, have been formally polygynous, which is to say harems of wives were allowed.4 This practice is still widespread throughout much of the Muslim world and Africa.
So polygyny is natural—except for when it isn’t. As for what the God of the Bible intended, tell Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon that they were defying God’s will. (Meanwhile, Jesus was remarkably silent on the topic, though the few hints that exist suggest he opposed it.)
Now, back to the more important point. Monogamous marriage of the sort that defines the nuclear family works better for society (although I can’t speak to whether it works better for every individual). Societies where monogamy is the norm tend to be much more economically productive, politically democratic, socially stable, and friendlier to women’s rights.
Men in monogamous societies are more economically productive than men in polygynous societies because each married man is a stakeholder in his own family, and there are more families. Large-scale polygyny tends to destabilize the male population as young, poor men find themselves increasingly desperate for sexual relationships. Eric D. Gould, Omer Moav, and Avi Simhon, in their paper “The Mystery of Monogamy,” demonstrate that polygyny emerges in societies with high levels of inequality, where wealth is largely derived from natural resources, particularly land. In societies where wealth comes from human capital—ingenuity, innovation, etc.—the marriage market is defined by a search for quality (by males and females alike), while in societies where wealth comes from landholdings, the market is defined by the strictly male emphasis on quantity. “In particular,” they write, “skilled men in modern economies increasingly value skilled women for their ability to raise skilled children, which drives up the value of skilled women in the marriage market to the point where skilled men prefer one skilled wife to multiple unskilled wives.”5
This is surely too reductionist. Other historical, religious, and cultural factors must be involved in an institution that spans much of the globe and that existed in nearly every ancient society in one form or another. But Gould and his colleagues are also surely right when they write that it is no accident that monogamy is the norm in every economically advanced democratic society. It is impossible to know how much the traditional nuclear family is responsible for the social and democratic stability and economic growth of the last three hundred years, but there is little doubt that it played an important role. The institution of marriage as we know it on a society-wide level and a personal level requires work. Just as capitalism is sustained by how we talk about it, so is marriage.
As a practical matter, I don’t object to claims that monogamy is natural or in sync with God’s plan, because that is an important way civilizations talk about settled questions. Making the ideal of monogamy a matter of unquestioned dogma simply strikes me as a good idea, even if honesty requires us to acknowledge that is what we are doing. We talk about murder and rape as unnatural as a way to heap deserving opprobrium on the practice even though, as we’ve seen, neither is actually unnatural. Adultery is wholly natural, but we condemn it as a violation of important norms to keep the habit to a minimum. “Very often those things we have condemned as ‘unnatural’ are things that we know will flourish if we leave them alone,” writes Robin Fox in The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind.6 We ban and condemn polygyny because we know that, if we don’t, many men will imitate our gorilla cousins and our ancient human ancestors and form a harem.
In other words, when we say that traditional marriage is “natural,” what we really mean—or should mean—is that it is “normal.” We made traditional marriage normal through centuries of civilizational trial and error because countless generations of wise people figured out that it was a best practice for society. And over those centuries we heaped layer upon layer of law, tradition, and custom on top of the institution. It has become dogma so old that we have forgotten all of the reasons for it. But rather than respect its time-tested value, we instead subject it to the razor of reason. We think that, because we cannot see—or remember—its myriad functions, they must not exist.
The family—in form, function, and ideal—has changed a great deal in a remarkably short period of time. Divorce has lost most of its social stigma, as has out-of-wedlock birth. Even adultery and “open marriage” are accepted or even celebrated by certain segments of society, particularly among some bohemian elites. A recent New York Times Magazine essay asked the question “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?”7 The popular medical website WebMD article on open marriage reports that “those who practice open relationships or polyamory often say they are ‘hardwired’ this way and that laying the ground rules for multiple relationships spares everyone hurt and disappointment.”8
Open marriage is not an epidemic. But, again, that misses an important point. The way we talk about marriage has changed profoundly since the 1960s, and that by itself has profound consequences. Marriage as an institution depends upon how the society around it talks about it. The rhetoric around marriage affects its desirability, for both men and women. When the sophisticated opinion is “Who needs it?” there are real consequences, both in law but also in the far more important climate of expectations people have about how to live a fulfilling life. When the mainline Protestant churches caved in to the bourgeois cultural populism of the “me decade” by removing or loosening many of the stigmas, rules, and customs that attached to divorce, they were downgrading the status of marriage.
“Prior to the late 1960s,” writes the University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox, one of America’s leading marriage researchers (and an AEI colleague of mine), “Americans were more likely to look at marriage and family through the prisms of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. A successful, happy home was one in which intimacy was an important good, but by no means the only one in view. A decent job, a well-maintained home, mutual spousal aid, child-rearing, and shared religious faith were seen almost universally as the goods that marriage and family life were intended to advance.”
This is what Wilcox calls the “institutional model” of marriage.9 Sex was reserved—according to the ideal, at least—for marriage. Certainly marriage was the only legitimate, or at least desirable, model for having children. In short, the old attitude was that one must work for the marriage. The new attitude was that the marriage had better work for me. In 1962, roughly half of American women agreed with the statement “When there are children in the family parents should stay together even if they don’t get along.” By 1977, only one in five American women agreed.10
Where the culture goes, so goes the state. Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law as governor of California in 1969. As so often happens, where California “leads,” much of the nation follows.
In the decade and a half that followed, virtually every state in the Union followed California’s lead and enacted a no-fault divorce law of its own. This legal transformation was only one of the more visible signs of the divorce revolution then sweeping the United States: From 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled—from 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women. This meant that while less than 20 percent of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50 percent of couples who married in 1970 did. And approximately half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents part, compared to only about 11 percent of those born in the 1950s.11
No-fault divorce was just one way in which the state accelerated the cultural trend. Under the Great Society, with an overabundance of good intentions, the federal government started subsidizing women who had children out of wedlock. For instance, a program—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—originally intended to provide modest pensions for the widows of coal miners became a broad entitlement for single mothers, paid out on a per-baby basis. The problem is that the way the program was structured, the funds were cut off if the recipient got married, thus penalizing mothers for seeking a more stable family. Welfare reform in 1996 fixed some of these problems, but it didn’t eliminate them. According to a study by C. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a single mother working full-time at a minimum-wage job who marries a man also working full-time at the same wage would lose $8,060 in cash and noncash welfare benefits.12
Trying to pinpoint single causes for the profound transformation in attitudes and practices around marriage is pointless. This is a big, diverse society, and big, diverse phenomena have big, diverse causes. Still, the statistics speak for themselves. Roughly seven out of ten black children are born out of wedlock. The out-of-wedlock birth rate for whites (29 percent) is now higher than what it was for blacks (24 percent) when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his (in)famous 1965 report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.13
Since 1974, roughly one million children per year have experienced the dissolution of their family, and these children “are two to three times more likely than their peers in intact marriages to suffer from serious social or psychological pathologies.”14
Now, it must be acknowledged that the transformation of ideas about marriage had some benefits. This is not all a tale of woe. Whatever complaints you might have about various forms of doctrinaire or radical feminism, the core gains from the women’s rights movement are not ones even most social conservatives would be comfortable rolling back, starting, of course, with women’s suffrage, but also the broader acceptance that women have an equal right to pursue happiness to men. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a world where women’s occupational choices were limited to a few “women’s jobs” like teaching, retail sales, nursing, and working at telephone switchboards. As the son and husband of successful “career women” (already a kind of antiquated term) and the father of a teenage girl whom I expect to follow in their footsteps, I welcome many of these changes. Nor would I like to see anyone trapped in an unworkable marriage.
In other words, we can acknowledge that important progress has been made, but we should also recognize that the implosion of the institutional model of marriage has had profound consequences for society, especially children.
No matter how impressive a single mother—or a single father—may be, the simple fact remains that, as a generalization, two parents are better than one. Such statements are upsetting to many Americans, who believe that to say such a thing unfairly stigmatizes single parents and the children of single parents. One can sympathize with the desire not to make an already formidable burden even heavier, but facts do not care about feelings (which is why we are in the midst of a war on facts on all sides these days).15
A recent study by Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution reported that “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.”16
Sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur determined that adolescent children of divorced parents were almost three times more likely to drop out of high school (31 percent to 13 percent for children of intact families). They also found that a third of adolescent girls with divorced parents became teen mothers (whereas 11 percent of girls from married parents became teen mothers). More than one in ten male children of divorce (11 percent) spent some time in prison before the age of thirty-two. “Only” 5 percent of boys from intact homes were ever incarcerated.17
It is a cruel fact of human nature that evolution makes us biased toward our own kin in ways the rational mind cannot always accept or explain. Andrew J. Cherlin reports that even remarriage isn’t the solution many of us hope it will be. In The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, Cherlin recounts that “children whose parents have remarried do not have higher levels of well-being than children in lone-parent families.”18
Cherlin attributes this to the stresses associated with moving and bonding (or not bonding) with stepparents and siblings. No doubt that’s part of it, but there are surely deeply rooted biological factors at play as well. “A parent’s patience will tend to run out with stepchildren more quickly than with biological children,” notes Steven Pinker, “and in extreme cases this can lead to abuse.”19 A dismaying study by Nicholas Zill of the Institute for Family Studies found that adopted children have a harder time at school than kids raised by their biological parents. What makes this so dismaying is that adoptive parents tend to be better off financially and are just as willing as traditional parents, if not more so, to put in the time and effort of raising kids.20
Zill’s finding highlights the problem with traditional family triumphalism. Adoption is a wonderful thing, and just because there are challenges that come with adoption, no one would ever argue that the problems adopted kids face make the alternatives to adoption better. Kids left in orphanages or trapped in abusive homes do even worse. Similarly, the well-established finding that parents of non-biological children often struggle with non-biological offspring doesn’t mean that people with children should not remarry. What is required in such marriages is extra effort to compensate for the inevitable pull of human nature.21
Obviously, I believe this is much more than an argument about economics, but looking at the family through an economic lens helps us see the real-world consequences in ways table-pounding rhetoric and nostalgic nostrums about “the way things used to be” cannot. Consider the stress so many families go through when elderly parents can no longer care for themselves. The pressures involved can hardly be captured solely by economic considerations. The feelings of obligation adult children have toward their parents and to their own children cannot be easily or fully translated into financial terms. But they can be illuminated by them. A RAND Corporation study found that elderly people with no children end up paying far more over their remaining lifetime for nursing home care. Why? Because they spend more time in nursing homes. People with children, particularly daughters, spend less because the kids make a nursing home less necessary.22 The data are silent on the emotional significance, but it’s not hard to fill in the blanks.
How we take care of the elderly is an important issue, but how we raise children matters more for the future of the country. The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill—no Bible-thumping right-winger—has found that 20 percent of the increase in child poverty since 1970 can be attributed to family breakdown.23 A study by Brad Wilcox found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty.24 On most economic indicators, the Washington Post summarized, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”25
Also left out of the conversation is the incredible economic benefit marriage has for men. Married men, controlling for all factors, make 44 percent more than single men.26 Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes that the wage benefit for marriage is roughly equal to, if not greater than, that of going to college.27 But, he adds, economists are quick to extol the vital importance of going to college but are loath to emphasize—or even talk about—the benefits of marriage.28
Ron Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, has identified what he calls the “success sequence”: “at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.” If young people do just these three things, in that order, they are almost guaranteed to climb out of poverty. “Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year).”29 Undoubtedly, some teenagers could be persuaded to follow these steps with appeals to cool reason. But is it really so ridiculous to claim that society as a whole would have an easier time persuading more kids to follow this sequence if they were in families that modeled this practice themselves? Or if celebrities and other elites openly promoted these lifestyles? Or if they put just a smidgen of stigma on out-of-wedlock births and “baby daddy” culture?
Indeed, this highlights the profound failure and hypocrisy of elites in our culture. Amidst all the talk of marriage’s decline, an important trend often gets overlooked: Marriage among elites is doing okay. The divorce rate among affluent Americans stabilized in the late 1980s and has largely recovered, at least among whites. The share of young white women with college degrees who were married in 2010 was just over 70 percent. That’s pretty much where it was in 1950.30 Less than 9 percent of college-educated white women had an unwed birth in 2011, very close to the number for women in 1950.31 A Pew Research Center analysis of the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data found that marriage is more correlated with socioeconomic status than at any time in our history.32 College-educated Americans tend to get a degree, get married, and have children—in that order. Meanwhile, marriage, particularly among the working class, has gone out of style. (Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 exhaustively documents these trends.) Not surprisingly, college-educated professionals tend to marry other college-educated professionals, widening the rift between elites and everyone else. “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” Andrew J. Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times. Up to 40 percent of the growth in economic inequality may be attributable to changes in the pattern of marriage in the United States. “The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan added. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”33 Wilcox attributes these trends to the degradation of the institutional model of marriage and to the subsequent ascendancy of the “soul-mate” model. The romantic ideal of finding a soul mate has deep historical roots, but for most of human history, marriage was a political, religious, and economic institution largely removed from notions of “true love” and soul mates. That started to change not long after the economic miracle of the Lockean Revolution. Soul-mate marriage is not a uniquely American ideal, but it has been most intensely idealized and democratized in America, and this ideal is arguably America’s greatest cultural export, though marriage for love is still not the norm in many parts of the non-Western world.34
The big change in recent years is the one Brad Wilcox identified. Finding a true life partner was always an important consideration, but it was not the sole criterion. It was always nice in an arranged marriage when the youngsters found each other agreeable, but it was hardly the only item on the checklist. Even after arranged marriages ceased to be an acceptable norm, the checklist approach endured. Women—and their parents—still defined a “good match” beyond the narrow calculus of finding “the one.” Would the man be a good provider? Would the woman be a good mother? Did he or she come from a good family? Practice the right faith? And so on. A few generations ago, marrying purely for love was a luxury largely reserved for the affluent. We are in some respects returning to that model, the difference being that in the past the poor still got married. Not so much anymore.
Today, the soul-mate model works on the self-centered though not necessarily selfish view that there is a single person out there who will allow me to be the person I want to be. This pursuit of happiness, newly defined, has much to recommend it, particularly for women. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to a time when the choice of whom to marry didn’t reside entirely with the couple involved (except in the case of my daughter, where I would like veto power!). The problem isn’t that men and women have the right to choose their own life partners; it is that, culturally, the range of factors taken into account for that choice has narrowed. And that has drawbacks.
For starters, it is more likely to lead to divorce. If marriage is all about romantic notions of personal fulfillment, there is precious little left to fall back on when marriage isn’t all you hoped it would be. By telling poor people, especially, that they must “hold out for ‘the one,’ ” society is, if not closing, then at least narrowing access to the best institution for raising children, getting and staying out of poverty, and finding meaning beyond purely individualistic terms. It is remarkable that, in all of the hand-wringing about the rise in economic inequality, the issue of marriage’s dissolution almost never makes an appearance in the debate.
Family lays all the crucial groundwork for the kind of person you will become. When I say that the family is the gateway to civilization, I mean that literally. The family civilizes barbarians. It imprints them with language, customs, mores, values, and expectations for how society should work. If culture is a conversation, then the family is where all conversation begins. To be sure, other institutions pick up and round out the work of the family. Some researchers claim that peers have more influence on kids than parents do. Maybe. But parents have a huge role in who their peers will be—from where they live to where they send their kids to school to what hobbies they pursue and associations they form. Still, as nearly every teacher in the world will tell you, the first and most important work starts in the home.
In 2012, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy asked a good question: Why is African-American participation in professional baseball at an all-time low?35 Economics doesn’t offer much insight. Baseball offers the highest return for professional athletes of any professional sport. But culture plays a big role, albeit one that is hard to quantify. Basketball and football are more popular and glamorous. Baseball is a slower sport, less amenable to television coverage. Public policy plays some role as well. Local governments find baseball diamonds an expensive line item.
But one partial answer jumped out: fathers. “If you did a survey, I believe you’d find that the one thing average and above average players have in common is a father,” Gerald Hall Jr., the baseball director for a local youth league, told Milloy. “Baseball is, at heart, a father-and-son sport. And if you’re a kid that has nobody to throw to, nobody to talk to, nobody to discipline you in the way that baseball demands, you’re not likely to play the game.”
Tony Davenport, a local coach, agreed. “You have to catch the kids early, start with the basics—how to hold a bat, the proper throwing motion, catch with the glove, not your hand,” he said. “A lot of kids really enjoy it if they continue to be provided with guidance.”
Basketball is a sport that’s largely picked up from peers. So is football. But baseball is arcane. It requires explanation and patience. You don’t have to subscribe to all the sentimental arguments about the importance of fathers to appreciate how an absent father creates difficulties. A simple division of labor suggests that it’s hard for a single parent to both prepare or provide dinner (or work two jobs) and play catch with a kid or sit on a couch for a few hours watching and explaining a game at the same time. But here’s the important part: This observation is true not just for baseball but for an entire suite of life lessons, skills, and tasks, from playing a musical instrument, to learning a trade, to understanding good habits.
Single parents—either never married or divorced—simply have less time to dedicate to parenting than they otherwise might. This has numerous knock-on effects. Struggling single parents are more likely to let the TV, iPad, or Xbox serve as a babysitter. They take less time vetting peers who might seduce their kids into bad habits. They model behaviors—like serial dating or understandably short tempers—that may not always be ideal.
Of course, the world is full of counterexamples of successful people raised by single parents. In many of these cases, grandparents or other members of the extended family stepped in. In others, the mother did it all. Some mothers can do it all. But that is a lot to ask of them, and not the best way to organize a society.
It all boils down to conversation, gratitude, and remembering. People tend to value what societies celebrate. The broader conversation about marriage, family, and parenthood has decayed. It’s in better shape than it was in the days when Betty Friedan could liken housewives to concentration camp victims and fringe radicals were shouting “Smash monogamy!” Serious people don’t say “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” anymore. But the rhetoric about marriage and parenting is shot through with culture-war politics on the right and identity-politics victimology on the left. In the mushy middle, it’s usually adorned with self-help nostrums and silly verbiage about DIY “life hacks.”
Gay marriage notwithstanding, among the cosmopolitans at the commanding heights of our culture, it is simply déclassé to extol the benefits of the bourgeois married lifestyle, at least in a public forum. Meanwhile, intellectuals and activists hector and demonize anyone who bestows undue honor on marriage or, more often, scorn or stigma on promiscuity, divorce, or out-of-wedlock birth. Dan Quayle, who, as vice president, criticized the TV show Murphy Brown for celebrating out-of-wedlock birth, was vilified by cultural elites for his prudishness and Comstockery. But, as a matter of public policy, he was right.36
Those who would prefer to, at best, ignore the role of culture in the degradation of the family emphasize purely material explanations for the decomposition. The family, they say, has come apart because of the disappearance of the “family wage,” which was held aloft by large levels of unionization. And while it would be foolish to argue that the structure of the economy plays no role in encouraging or discouraging people to form families, such claims are overblown.
The materialists aren’t wrong that economic conditions are important. Their error is in assuming that economic explanations tell the whole story.
The sacrifices inherent to parenthood require an enormous amount of social support to remain attractive, particularly in an age when there are so many enjoyable distractions made possible by the mass affluence of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter recognized that the family was the one indispensable institution to liberal democratic capitalism. The sacrifices it demands of parents, he said, “do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money.”37 They demand more intangible things, like time, emotional commitment, and the subordination of our wants and desires to the needs of our children. These sacrifices need to be honored, publicly and passionately.
At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that the plight of the family traces the larger argument of this book in miniature. In case I did a poor job showing that, let me magnify the point. It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e., principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling. That is to say by modeling right behaviors and instructing people through words and images what right behavior looks like. Institutions, not the government, are the chief mechanisms for communicating and rewarding these values. Moreover, modernity itself requires that citizens have divided and diverse loyalties. One of these is loyalty to self: We all have a right to pursue happiness as we see it. But others include loyalty to family, friends, faith, community, work, etc. Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude—and the effort that gratitude demands—all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually hate the traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in.
Hannah Arendt once observed that, in every generation, Western civilization is invaded by barbarians: We call them “children.” The family is the first line of defense against this barbarian invasion. The metaphor is inapt, because parents aren’t at war with babies themselves. But parents are at war with the darker side of human nature, which we all work to trim away from for our children by inscribing in their hearts notions of decency, fair play, and self-restraint. When parents fail to do that, other institutions, including the government, try to step in and remedy what they can. But no teacher, counselor, social service worker, priest, rabbi, imam, or police officer will deny that, when the family fails to do its part, the work of every institution downstream of the family becomes that much more difficult. This doesn’t mean that every failed family produces criminals, never mind marauding barbarians. But when the family fails, it becomes harder to produce good citizens dedicated to the principles and habits that created the Miracle in the first place.