“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet,
balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die
gallantly. Specialization is for insects"
--Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
The modern era has been marked by specialization. Workers
have been drained from the broadness of the countryside to the narrowness of
the cities, where they found factories offering long hours doing highly
specific tasks. In the process, the rest of human life, too, became more
specific. No one accustomed to agrarian life would have suggested that women --
sharing many of the duties on the family farms -- were dependent upon men any
more than the reverse was likewise true.
But the specialization of urban life took its toll. Economic
viability now depends on one’s ability to devote nearly every waking hour to a
specific skill. As early as the 18th century Adam Smith noticed that city workers
were being deprived of “subject(s) for thought and speculation," and in
the process were losing the “power of judgment, even as regards ordinary
matters.” If there is not an app to attend to each of life's particular
labors, in time perhaps there will be a government bureau.
On the other side of the equation, the value of the
generalist -- almost universally, the woman -- decreased. As G.K. Chesterton
noted, “Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the
contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside
the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of
monomaniacs.”
Even human sexuality has been specialized, with the
gratification and procreative functions becoming separated in the public mind
even by the early 20th century (and probably much sooner than that). In the
first part of that century, every Christian denomination still officially
taught against contraception. By the 1930s, however, the Anglicans first
started to allow it, and even the Washington Post expressed concern that
this would lead to the collapse of traditional sexual morality.
Marriage, too, became specialized -- so specialized, in
fact, that not just each couple but the couple’s individual constituents could
determine its significance. And, if that determination should change, either
spouse was empowered to end the marriage unilaterally, regardless of the impact
to the community or the children of the marriage. There were 639,000 divorces
in California in 1969, the year of the first No-Fault law; there were 1,036,000
by 1975.
According to developmental psychologist Hilary Towers, the
upshot of this policy, now near-universal in the Western world, is that “[a]n
unfaithful spouse can single-handedly—and with the court’s stamp of approval
and aid—end a marriage and swiftly “move on” with the adultery partner and half
or more of all the family income and assets—pulling the children along with him
or her (at least part-time).”
This liberation was assisted by the 1972 Supreme Court
decision in Baird v. Eisenstadt, expanding the right to legalized birth
control, first announced in the watershed case of Griswold v. Connecticut
applicable to married citizens, to all citizens irrespective of marital
status.
Eminent sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, in a book called The
American Sex Revolution, had predicted in 1956 that “sex freedom” and “sex
anarchy” would lead to critical social ills, including rising rates of divorce
and illegitimacy, abandoned and neglected children, a coarsening of the arts
high and low, and much more. “Sex obsession”, argued Sorokin, now “bombards us
continuously, from cradle to grave, from all points of our living space, at
almost every step of our activity, feeling, and thinking.”
As Pope Pius XII would put it two years later, "History
is not mistaken when it indicates the alteration of the laws of marriage and
procreation as the primary cause of the decadence of peoples.”
Another Harvard sociologist, Carle Zimmerman, would likewise
write around the time in Family and Civilization that modern
contraception would lead to “the atomistic family type,” including rising
divorce rates, increasing promiscuity, juvenile delinquency, and neglect of
children and other family responsibilities. “The United States”, Zimmerman
concluded, “will reach the final phases of a great family crisis between now
[1947] and the last of this century”—one “identical in nature to the two
previous crises in Greece and Rome.”
The cranks have been proven right. Liberation has been
depressing.
In recent decades, “women’s happiness has fallen both
absolutely and relative to men’s in a pervasive way among groups, such that
women no longer report being happier than men and, in many instances, now
report happiness that is below that of men.” Betsey Stevenson and Justin
Wolfers, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," American
Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1, no. 2 (2009): 190. Moreover, “this
shift has occurred through much of the industrialized world.” Id.
An interesting paradox surfaced in a 2009 "narcissism
index." Psychologist Jean Twenge published her findings from a personality
test based on research collected from 16,000 college students. Twenge reported
a sharp rise of young women's self-affirmations. Jean W. Twenge and W. Keith
Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New
York: Free Press, 2009).
The index indicates that only 12% of students in the 1950s
agreed with the statement “I am an important person”; that percentage exploded
to 80% by the late 1980s.
Yet around the same time in 2006, Psychiatrist Miriam
Grossman reported that psychiatric-consultation hours among 2,000 UCLA students
had doubled within a few years, coupled with a 90% increase in serious
psychiatric problems. Her own cases reflected many students afflicted with
excessive drinking, drugging, one-night sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and
other accoutrements of hookup-culture. Miriam Grossman, Unprotected: A
Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession
Endangers Every Student (New York: Sentinel Trade, 2007).
The kids are not alright.
Married, monogamous people are more likely to be happy.
Divorced men, in particular, face health risks—including heightened drug use
and alcoholism—that married men do not. The Rand Corporation reported that,
based on about 140 years of demographic evidence:
“The health benefits obtained by men who stay married or
remarry stem from a variety of related factors, including care in times of
illness, improved nutrition, and a home atmosphere that reduces stress and
stress-related illnesses, encourages healthy behaviors, and discourages
unhealthy ones such as smoking and excessive drinking. Influences of this type
tend to enhance a man’s immediate health status and may often improve his
chances for a longer life.”
Lee A. Lillard and Constantijn (Stan) Panis, "Health,
Marriage,, and Longer Life for Men," Research Brief 5018, Rand
Corporation, 1998.
Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox also agrees traditional
marital norms confer benefits: “[C]hildren who grow up in intact, married
families are significantly more likely to graduate from high school, finish
college, become gainfully employed, and enjoy a stable family life themselves,
compared to their peers who grow up in nonintact families.” W. Bradford Wilcox,
ed., Whene Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America
(Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia, National Marriage Project; New
York: Institute for American Values, 2010).
Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof explained in
1996 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that the sexual revolution --
contrary to common prediction -- had led to an increase in both illegitimacy
and abortion. Akerlof wrote again in 1998 that decrease in marriage and married
fatherhood for men led to a simultaneous increase in substance abuse,
incarceration, and arrests, among others.
Raquel Fernandez and Joyce Cheng Wong, writing in Free to
Leave? A Welfare Analysis of Divorce Regimes, NBER Working Paper
(June 2014), posit that unilateral divorce, rather than liberating women,
actually disproportionately benefits men: “Conditioning solely on gender, our
ex ante welfare analysis finds that women would fare better under mutual
consent whereas men would prefer a unilateral system.”
To the contrary, women would be happier under traditional
norms: "How many unhappy couples turn their marriages around?" ask
Dr. Waite and Maggie Gallagher in their book, The Case for Marriage. "The
truth is stunning: 86 percent of unhappily married people who stick it out find
that, five years later, their marriages are happier, according to an analysis
of the National Survey of Families and Households by Linda Waite. . . ."
Can we, or can we not, "have it all"? Certain of
mankind's ancient burdens we should like to wear more lightly, but throwing
them off entirely has proved harmful. Sexual and family norms are among the
demolished walls that we are now beginning to understand were load-bearing. “A
society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long
run a society adverse to women,” predicted C.S. Lewis in “Have We No Right to
Happiness,” published shortly following his death in 1963. Women tend to value
domestic happiness more than men, and men tend to value their mate’s looks more
than do women. “Thus,” concluded Lewis, “in the ruthless war of promiscuity
women are at a double disadvantage. They play for higher stakes and are also
more likely to lose. I have no sympathy with moralists who frown at the
increasing crudity of female provocativeness. These signs of desperate
competition fill me with pity.”
And yet still in these dark hues do we paint the visions of
women’s new roles in modern society. When the progressive liberal genius
Bertrand Russell agitated for women’s suffrage, no points did he award to
marriage, no credit to raising families, for producing happy and meaningful
lives. Russell earned a considerable fortune as a public intellectual, turning
in prolific comments on human affairs and civic order. But if ever it did occur
to Lord Russell that the family was the basic unit of civil society, the addled
20th century version of it proved unequal to his sexual appetites: Bertie left
his devout wife, Alys, for a tryst with a married woman, before taking up with
yet another mistress. Gaunt and bookish as he was, Lord Russell more than made
up for his homeliness with high self-regard. "I am important," he
might have thought to himself while stepping out on Alys.
To paraphrase Sir Compton Mackenzie, women will find it no
more difficult than Sir Russell to behave like men, but they will find it
extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen.
One cannot expect any better treatment from elites like
Russell who advocate for the individual’s political rights to more college
degrees, more employment, and more divorce, and more birth control. In their
purely political world, an individual is not protected by a society of
families, communities, husbands and fathers, wives and mothers; rather they are
pursued by CEOs and Bertrand Russells.
To the modern elite, the individual is reduced to
constituent parts. The individual is specialized. The individual is an insect.
