Michael Baron, one of the more insightful American cultural commentators, published a piece recently on family fragmentation. Here are the facts:
About 40 percent of babies born in America these days are born outside of marriage. That’s true of about 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites, more than 50 percent of Hispanics and more than 70 percent of blacks.
Sociologically we know that children in broken families do worse psychologically, emotionally and economically than children from intact families where the mother and father are married. This affects children of all classes, but those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum seem to fare worst, as Charles Murray showed in his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. This is not a race thing; fragmented families affect any and all races. But as we see in inner city black America, family breakdown is literally a matter of life and death.
Barone looks at a study that interviewed 40 experts on the family across the ideological spectrum, and all agreed this is a tremendous problem for America’s future. Like all “experts” they attempt to find answers to such problems, but in this case none were confident there really are any answers. The reason is simple: it’s a cultural problem which cannot be fixed by government or any other programs.
Why is the American family fragmenting? It’s pretty clear that when the dominant culture doesn’t value the family as traditionally understood, then those families will tend not to fare well. The denigration of the family goes back a long way among Western cultural and intellectual elites, mainly because the traditional family was associated with religion, specifically Christianity and Judaism. The limitations of such a family never sat well for those who wanted to be a law unto themselves.
The perception of the traditional family as patriarchal and oppressive was pretty much limited to intellectuals and artists types for much of the 19th and 20th Centuries, but the damn burst in the 1960s with the sexual revolution, no fault divorce, and the acceptance by many or most Americans of the family as just another lifestyle “choice.” Popular culture did a quick pivot within a handful of years from a promoter of traditional values to a denigrator of them, along of course with promoting their opposite. In the 21st Century while disparaging the traditional family is no longer common, the idea that it is just one among many family arrangements, and that all are just as valid and good as the other is widespread. Thus the popularity of the hit TV series Modern Family. And with the drive to redefine marriage where gender is irrelevant to what marriage means, the idea that there can be an ideal family structure is culturally kaput.
So when these experts are not confident that there are any answers to family breakdown, they are right because the problem is cultural. The problem is that most people don’t see this as a problem! In fact, I would wager that most secular/liberal types, the ones that dominate popular culture, media and education, are convinced that family as just another lifestyle choice is a positive moral good! Why limit people’s freedom and choices? But when those same secular/liberal types think that certain choices harm people, they are all for limiting those choices and stigmatizing any who make them. One very simple example is smoking, from ubiquitous cultural acceptance 50 years ago, to unmitigated evil today. Alas liberal hypocrisy is a cliché.
As long as the professions of cultural influence I mentioned are dominated by people whose values are inimical to traditional, religiously infused values, the family doesn’t have a chance. Sadly many more people will have to suffer as a consequence.
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