Slouching Towards Gomorrah (26 page)

A general cultural decline is also suggested by the fact that crime and illegitimacy began to surge at the same time. That means that rising illegitimacy was not then the cause of rising crime. The children born out of wedlock in 1960, no matter how precocious, could hardly have begun committing serious crimes in the same year. That fact does not by any means rule out the inference that, as these processes proceeded, illegitimacy became a major, probably the major, contributor to criminality. But the initial relation of the two reminds us that humans do not respond solely to economic incentives and that a crime wave and a sexual revolution, though perhaps of lesser proportions, were on the way, with or without welfare payments.

Increases in crime are often associated with sudden increases in population, and the baby boom affected all levels of society. The jump in the population of lower-class youths was also a “vertical invasion of the barbarians” that the institutions of the culture—family, school, church—were not fully able to tame. These youths, as much as those destined for prestige universities, had available the new technologies of entertainment, and that entertainment was one of increasingly unbridled emotion and sexuality. The industry that produced such entertainment catered to adolescent fears and discontents, which are as abundant in one social class as another. The factors already discussed as contributing to student radicalism apply in this context as well. Though the trends that made the Sixties were in place long before that decade, the special factors (technology, affluence, etc.) that came together after World War II gave free rein and added impetus to the spirit that had been building.

While they were not influenced to the same extent as the white college students by liberal parents and professors, black youths heard the incessant liberal civil rights rhetoric which insisted then, as it often does now, that the black population’s difficulties were entirely due to racism. That message, endlessly repeated, can lead not only to civil rights laws but to fatalism, the aimless search for pleasure—since accomplishment is, by definition, blocked off—and to anger and violence. It should have been possible to campaign for civil rights laws without rhetoric so false and incendiary.

There is no longer any doubt that communities with many single parents, whether because of divorce or out-of-wedlock births, display much higher rates of crime, drug use, school dropouts, voluntary unemployment, etc. Nor is there any doubt that the absence of a father is damaging not only to the unwed mother but to the prospects of the children.

Add to this the fact that these boys, who have a great deal of time free of oversight, are heavy consumers of the images of violence and sex in television, movies, and rap music, live in neighborhoods where violence and sexual predation are regarded as signs of manhood, and gangs fill the void created by a fathers absence. The wonder is that any of these youths avoid underclass behavior. The correlation of illegitimate births and crime has been well documented. The birth rate for unmarried women aged 15 to 19 increased threefold between 1960 and 1992, while the percentage of all babies born to unmarried teenagers went from 15 to 70 percent.
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It is not surprising then that between 1985 and 1993, murders committed by 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 65 percent, and those committed by 14- to 17-year-olds increased by a staggering 165 percent.
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For a long time many people were under the misimpression that divorce does not have effects on children comparable to the effects of illegitimacy. According to this view, children were better off if the divorce was managed well than they would have been if they continued living with parents who had ceased to love one another. We now know better. “Poverty is one of the most easily measured effects of unmarriage as well as one of the most predictable.
But it is not necessarily the most destructive to mother, child, or the nation. The evidence is now overwhelming that the collapse of marriage is creating a whole generation of children less happy, less physically and mentally healthy, less equipped to deal with life or produce at work, and more dangerous to themselves and others“
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The adverse effects of divorce on children and society may not be as devastating as the teenage pregnancies of inner-city welfare mothers, but they are significant nonetheless.

White Americans tend to think of these problems as pretty much confined to the black underclass of the inner cities, but that is not the case, or it will not be the case for long. Charles Murray, a political scientist, and others point out that black trendlines—of crime, dropout from the labor force, and illegitimacy—all moved sharply upward when the black illegitimacy rate passed 25 percent, which suggests that the tipping point is somewhere around that number. Black illegitimacy now stands at 68 percent of births.

By 1991, however, 22 percent of white births were illegitimate and, Murray notes, the figures get much worse when viewed in terms of economic class.
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For white women below the poverty line in the year prior to giving birth, 44 percent of births were illegitimate, while only 6 percent have been illegitimate for women above the poverty line. This is primarily a lower-class phenomenon, though increasingly women with good educations and income choose to have a child without having a husband. If the tipping point theory is correct, the white lower class is on the verge of becoming an underclass.

Just as the link between illegitimacy and crime is well known, so the association of illegitimacy with the welfare system is increasingly recognized. At a time when the institution of marriage is under attack in the popular culture and in government policy, it is madness to offer an apartment of her own and a steady income to an unmarried young woman or girl if she will only have a baby while remaining unmarried. As she has additional children, her income rises. The availability of welfare relieves the father of any responsibility that perhaps he might have felt.

No one supposes that the relationship between welfare and illegitimacy is unaffected by non-economic factors. James Q. Wilson points out that increases in illegitimate births were strongly correlated with increases in welfare from the early 1960s to about
1980. At that point, however, the value of the welfare package in real dollars flattened out for almost a decade, but the illegitimacy rate continued to rise. (This could be, in part, because the provision of welfare for illegitimacy up to 1980 had drastically weakened the social stigma previously attached to this behavior so that illegitimacy continued to rise even though the economic benefits did not.) There are, moreover, great differences in illegitimacy rates across ethnic groups facing similar circumstances. Mexican-American children, for example, are much more likely to grow up in two-parent families than are black children, and are one-fifth as likely to be on welfare, even though poor. Black illegitimacy is rather low in states such as Idaho, Montana, Maine, and New-Hampshire, even though they have rather generous welfare payments, and the rate is quite high in many parts of the Deep South, even though these states have rather low welfare payments.

It is also possible that other factors are pressing toward earlier and more frequent sexual activity, so that even a thorough-going welfare reform, while it would help, would probably not return illegitimacy rates to pre-1960 levels. The attitudes of sexual liberation continue to influence teenage behavior through television, films, popular music, and magazine advertisements. Those attitudes are made all the more potent because boys and girls mature sexually at much earlier ages than they once did. Thus, there is a much longer period of intense sexual desire before marriage would be emotionally or financially appropriate.

Sex education in the schools appears to operate more as an incitement to sexual activity than as a heeded caution. Chelmsford (Massachusetts) High School employed Suzanne Landolphi of Hot, Sexy and Safer Productions to give two performances for students in the ninth through twelfth grades in which she gave sexually explicit monologues and discussed penis and breast size and advocated oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual activity among minors. Parents were not told in advance and students were not permitted to opt out. Some parents and students sued, so far without success. Stories like this abound, but even when the advocacy is less open, the message that the students are expected to engage in sex is always there. Opportunites for teenagers to engage in sex are also more frequent than previously: much of it takes place in homes that are now empty because the mothers are
working. The modern liberal devotion to sex education is an ideological commitment rather than a policy of prudence. But even if we could abolish that counterproductive policy, the other factors remain as stubborn facts.

Whatever our dilemmas in these respects, it is clear that the welfare system makes matters far worse than they need to be. This is not a recent insight. I was startled to discover that the point was made in a 1971 article by Irving Kristol,
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and even more startled to learn from that article that Alexis de Tocqueville made the same point in his
Essay on Pauperism
in 1835. We appear to be slow learners.

An obvious line of attack, then, is the drastic restructuring of welfare. That will be difficult for several reasons. For one, there is a major constituency opposed to any change—any change, that is, other than an increase in welfare benefits. This constituency is made up not just of welfare recipients; its most vociferous component is modern liberals of the welfare-is-a-right-not-a-privilege persuasion. The left wing of the Democratic Party finds it profitable to resist any welfare reform on the stated ground that they are protecting poor children from Republican rapacity that would have those children sleeping on the grates.

Political disingenuousness aside, even those who realize that reform is imperative are far from agreement on what it should look like or how best to accomplish it. A Brookings Institution Occasional Paper shows the range and complexity of the issues to be studied: entitlements versus block grants; family caps on benefits; teenage mother exclusions; work requirements, work support, and participation requirements. About some of these questions social science apparently provides varying degrees of guidance, so that much remains in doubt. Unfortunately, debates over welfare frequently seem less informed by research than by ideology.
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For the moment, all one can unhesitatingly recommend is experimentation, and experimentation means allowing states greater freedom to innovate. The one certainty is that federal control is not working. Reform at the federal level would produce a single solution for the entire nation, which would almost certainly be the wrong solution. A diversity of programs would not only respond to very different local conditions but would constitute experiments that could, if successful, be adopted by other states or localities, and if
failures, be avoided by them. When the best social scientists admit to uncertainty about what will work, decentralization is the rational course. There is no guarantee that a workable solution, if there is one, may not prove more expensive, perhaps much more expensive, than existing welfare programs. But the object is not to save money—existing welfare programs are not that expensive. The object is to save children, and thereby save a civilization.

What should the states do? Charles Murray makes a strong case for adopting a policy that no welfare will be given to support an illegitimate child conceived after the policy has been announced. A welfare mother with illegitimate children would realize that having more would lower her and their standard of living. A young woman or teenager would understand that having a first child out of wedlock would not give her an apartment at public expense or a welfare check. Presumably, these realizations would operate as strong deterrents. It might also, Murray thinks, involve her family in the girl’s support, thus encouraging the family to teach and monitor better behavior. John Dilulio, a political scientist at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, doubts, however, that ending welfare would bring the unwed mothers family back into the picture in enough cases. Many of those families, even if they consist of more than an unwed mother of the unwed mother, are so dysfunctional that the children would most likely experience terrible squalor and malnutrition.

Murray recognizes these problems, of course. That is why he, Dilulio, and Wilson favor a strategy of altering the inner-city ethos by means of private redemptive movements, supported by a system of shelters or group homes in which at-risk children and their young mothers can be given familial care and adult supervision in safe and drug-free settings. Living there would be a condition of receiving public assistance. Boarding schools might be provided for children of mothers who, because of drug addiction or for other reasons, cannot cope. No one knows if this would work, if large programs can do what some small programs have accomplished, or if even the best programs, whose successes pre-dated the arrival of crack cocaine, can salvage people from that drug.

Myron Magnet suggests that welfare payments not be raised to mothers who have a second welfare child, and that out-of-wearock pregnancies be made much less attractive by refusing to
set up unmarried mothers in their own apartments. Instead, they would have to live in group shelters with rules of behavior and work requirements. Resident single mothers would have to attend daily workshops on child care and rearing. Many welfare single mothers are abysmally ignorant of such matters. Pre-school children would be in the shelters day care center during working hours, where a program like Head Start would give them values and knowledge that underclass children do not adequately acquire. If welfare mothers chose not to participate and failed to support their children, the state will take the children away as it does now.
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A further question needs to be answered, however. After the child is taken away, what is to be done about the mother, now presumably without support and also likely to produce more children? Giving her welfare to keep her alive would put us right back in the old system; not keeping her alive or letting her sink into utter misery is unthinkable.