Letters to a Young Conservative (17 page)

But this arrangement was destroyed by the coming of industry. The Industrial Revolution drove the man, and later the woman, out of the house and into the workplace. Naturally, the family was transformed. The first stage of this transformation occurred when the man went to work and his wife stayed home. We consider this the “traditional family,” but it is not. It is a transitional stage away from the traditional family and toward what we have now. In our current situation, most American children are born into families in which both parents work outside the home. I cannot help but suspect that this is a dysfunctional system despite the Herculean efforts of many parents to raise their children well within this framework.

Capitalism has also caused problems for the family by producing affluence. I recently finished reading Tom Brokaw’s book
The Greatest Generation,
which celebrates the virtues of the generation that grew up in the 1930s and came of age in the 1950s. Certainly the 1950s were a happy decade, one in which America somehow managed to combine prosperity and moral decency. Families remained intact, communities were cohesive, people borrowed sugar from their neighbors. Many conservatives regard the 1950s as a near-perfect past. They would like nothing better than to “go back to the fifties.”

Such thinking seems to be short-sighted. Think about this: What made the so-called greatest generation so great? The answer is twofold: the Great Depression, and World War II. The virtues of the greatest generation
were the product of scarcity and war; need and hardship produced the admirable courage, sacrifice, and solidarity of the greatest generation. But why did the greatest generation fail? For the greatest generation did fail in one crucial respect: It failed to replicate itself. It could not produce another great generation.

Why not? The obvious answer is affluence. Earlier, I spoke of mass affluence as a social achievement, and it is, but it also has a moral downside. The parents from the greatest generation wanted their children to have the advantages they never had. And in giving their children everything the children wanted, the frugal, self-disciplined, sacrificial generation of World War II produced the spoiled children of the 1960s, the Clinton generation. Not surprisingly, the people in this younger generation did not value the same things as their parents. They were raised under different conditions.

In a capitalist society, people don’t stay in one place, they go where the jobs are. This mobility, which is an essential feature of capitalism, necessarily disperses the family. When I was growing up in India, dozens of relatives lived within a two-mile radius of my house. Such a situation is so rare in the United States that it if it occurred at all it would be considered peculiar or unnatural. In many countries, however, the American system—which involves sending one’s children away to college with the likely consequence that they will never return home to live and may well end up in another part of the country—would be considered a little weird.

May I mention another great destroyer of family values? I refer, of course, to the automobile. In the days before the car, most Americans lived on farms or in small towns. What protected their virtue may be termed the moral supervision of the community. A man looks out of his window. “Hey, isn’t that Jack Farmer’s son? What the heck is he doing? Hey, Billy-Bob. Stop that! Get out of there!” This moral ecosystem was destroyed by the automobile. Now, for the first time, people (and especially young people) could escape the moral supervision of their community by fleeing to the anonymity of the city.

I have focused on technological capitalism and how it has undermined family values. Another, more recent, cause of the decline of the family is the welfare state. This point was strikingly put by an African American acquaintance of mine. He said, “The welfare state did to the family what even slavery could not do.” At first, I thought he was joking. There is an extensive literature on how bad slavery was for the black family. Under slavery, masters could break up families, sell off children, and so on. No slave state permitted slaves to marry legally. All this is depressingly true.

Yet even so, as the work of Herbert Gutman and others shows, African Americans during slavery struggled against incredible pressures to keep their families together. After emancipation, they went to great lengths to reassemble and unify their families. And the illegitimacy rate for blacks for the next hundred years, from 1865 to
1965, never exceeded 25 percent. This is a tribute to the pro-family values of American blacks.

Since 1965, however, the black illegitimacy rate has soared from 25 percent to nearly 70 percent. Whatever caused this change, it was not slavery. In fact, scholars continue to debate how such deterioration could occur so rapidly. The collapse of the black family came with the passage of civil rights laws, with an expanding welfare state, with affirmative action. The liberals were puzzled. Then Charles Murray published
Losing Ground
in the early 1980s. Murray explained that it was not anomalous to see family breakdown in the era of the welfare state since welfare-state policies were responsible for causing this breakdown.

How? One of the fundamental principles of economics is that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. For more than a generation, American welfare policies subsidized illegitimacy and thus America got more of it. Of course, welfare policies were not intended to promote out-of-wedlock births. They were initially aimed at providing benefits for “widows and orphans.” But under the non-judgmental logic of modern liberalism, the criteria were expanded and changed so that every illegitimate child resulted in a cash payment by the government to the mother of that child. The more illegitimate children a woman had, the more money the government awarded her.

A more perverse policy could scarcely be imagined, as Murray showed, but the liberals continued to resist welfare reform.

Conservatives and libertarians have focused on welfare as a prime culprit in family deterioration, but we should recognize that illegitimacy rates have risen throughout the society, and not just for women receiving welfare payments. What this tells us is that family breakdown is not simply a problem of government failure. It is also the product of the vast social and moral changes that have occurred across the spectrum of society. Earlier, I outlined some of those economic and technological changes; now I want to focus on moral change.

America and the West have witnessed a moral revolution since the 1960s. This is a revolution in the name of self-fulfillment, of authenticity, of being true to oneself, of following one’s inner voice. Rousseau is the great prophet of this revolution. Before the 1960s, most Americans believed in a moral order in the universe that is external to us and that makes claims on us. This moral consensus began to erode in the 1960s. Today people are much more reluctant to believe in an external moral order; rather, they subscribe to the morality of the inner self. I may not be able to figure out what is right and wrong, but I can dig deep within myself and discover what is right and wrong
for me.

A half-century ago, when people divorced, they frequently regarded themselves as having failed in one of their most important undertakings in life, and many people in unhappy marriages nevertheless stayed together “for the sake of the children.” One may say that whether people got divorced or not, the moral pressure
was inevitably on the side of staying, of working it out somehow. What has changed is not that people get divorced but that the moral pressure today is on the side of leaving. Many people feel they cannot possibly stay in a marriage so sterile, they worry that their lives would be a waste if they did, they become convinced that the decision to leave is a mark of courage and independence and perhaps even of liberation. As for the children, they are rarely considered a sufficient reason to keep the marriage together. People contemplating divorce defiantly say, “How could my children be happy when I am unhappy?”

The reason I tell you these things, Chris, is to caution you against the supposition that these economic, social, and moral changes can be easily reversed. Nor would we want to reverse them all. Irving Kristol once quipped that “America does not have a single moral problem that another Great Depression would not cure.” This is probably true, but who wants to endure an economic depression in order to improve the moral state of the country? Rather, the preferred objective, it seems to me, is to restore old values under new conditions. In the old days, people borrowed sugar from their neighbors because they didn’t have any sugar at home. In previous generations, couples sometimes stayed together because they could not afford to live separately. How do we foster those virtues of intact families and close-knit communities when the circumstances that gave rise to those virtues have changed? This is our dilemma.

One encouraging development is that people continue to want closer families and the sense of community that made life so meaningful for earlier generations. Also, technology and affluence are giving more people the time and the means to foster these relationships. For instance, you’ll notice that in many of America’s more affluent neighborhoods, women don’t work outside the home. The reason is that the additional income would not significantly change the family lifestyle. These women—and they are educated women—would prefer to be stay-at-home moms than career moms. They have realized the truth of G. K. Chesterton’s dictum, “Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?”

Since affluence gives increasing numbers of women the means to stay at home without losing their standard of living, it is helping to make the family structure of the 1950s viable again. Also, technology has made it possible for many women to work part-time at home and for many men (including me) to work full-time at home. Thus the separation of home and workplace, caused by the Industrial Revolution, could be undone over time by new technologies. Family life is sure to benefit if this happens.

Finally, a word about government policy. For the past several decades, foolish government policies have harmed the family. One example of this is the so-called “marriage penalty,” in which couples filing a joint return pay a higher tax rate on their combined income than
they would pay if they had filed individually. Another example is government programs that have encouraged illegitimacy by paying women to have children out of wedlock.

These policies have come under severe attack, and even many liberals have come to understand that they are destructive. And so we have had welfare reform, and there are several proposals to make our tax law more marriage-friendly. These changes are all to the good, and it makes perfect sense for government policy to seek to strengthen the family—an institution that is the primary incubator of morals and the “school of civilization” for the young. Let us not, however, expect these reforms, even when they are all enacted, to fully restore “the world we have lost.” That world, I am afraid, is gone forever, and the best we can do is to preserve aspects of it in the new world that we inhabit now.

Dear Chris,

I knew the time would come when you would ask me about the abortion issue. This is a hard one, and I am by no means an expert on the subject. I have learned a great deal about it, strangely enough, by studying the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These debates were about slavery. But look how closely the arguments parallel the abortion debate.

Douglas, the Democrat, took the pro-choice position. He said that each state should decide for itself whether it wanted slavery. Douglas denied that he was pro-slavery. In fact, at one time he professed to be “personally opposed” to it. All the same, Douglas was reluctant to impose his moral views on the new territories; instead, he affirmed the right of each state to choose. He invoked the great principle of freedom of choice.

Lincoln, the Republican, disagreed. Lincoln argued that choice cannot be exercised without reference to the content of the choice. How can it make sense to permit a person to choose to enslave another human being? How can self-determination be invoked to deny others self-determination? How can choice be used to negate choice? At its deepest level, Lincoln was saying that the legitimacy of freedom as a political principle is itself dependent on a doctrine of natural rights that arises out of a specific understanding of human nature and human dignity.

If Negroes are like hogs, Lincoln said, then the pro-choice position is right, and there is no problem with choosing to own them. Of course they may be governed without their consent. But if Negroes are human beings, then it is grotesquely evil to treat them like hogs, to buy and sell them as objects of merchandise.

The argument between Douglas and Lincoln is similar in content, and very nearly in form, to the argument between the pro-choice and the pro-life movements. Pro-choice advocates don’t like to be considered pro-abortion. Many of them say they are “personally opposed.” One question to put to them is, “
Why
are you personally opposed?” The only reason for one to be personally opposed to abortion is that one is deeply convinced that the fetus is more than a mere collection of cells, that it is a developing human being.

Even though the weight of the argument is strongly on the pro-life side, the pro-choice side seems to be winning
politically. This is because liberals understand that abortion-on-demand is the debris of the sexual revolution. If you are going to have sexual promiscuity, then there are going to be mistakes, and many women are going to get pregnant without wanting to do so. For them, the fetus becomes what one feminist writer termed “an uninvited guest.” As long as the fetus occupies the woman’s womb, liberals view it as an enemy of female autonomy. Thus liberalism is willing to grant the woman full control over the life of the fetus, even to the point of allowing her to kill it. No other liberal principle, not equality, not compassion, is permitted to get in the way of the principle of autonomy.