I think that it was G. K. Chesterton who said that radicals say “I don’t understand why this social custom exists; we should throw it out” while conservatives (in the Burkean conservative sense) say “I don’t understand why this social custom exists; we should keep it”. In his column today, Nicholas Kristof reminds us about Pat Moynihan’s warning:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a federal official, wrote a famous report in March 1965 on family breakdown among African-Americans. He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.
“The fundamental problem,†Moynihan wrote, is family breakdown. In a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families … never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.â€
That message was rejected by the Democrats of the day but Mr. Kristof doesn’t do a good job of explaining why it was rejected and, indeed, instantiates the very problem he’s criticizing:
My point isn’t to cast judgment on nontraditional families, for single parents can be as loving as any. In fact, when one parent is abusive, the child may be better off raised by the other parent alone. And well-off kids often get plenty of support whether from one parent or two.
Unfortunately, there is no ready substitute for social stigma. When every social arrangement is treated as having the same legitimacy and value to the society as every other it will inevitably lead to the rejection of policies and attitudes that support the traditional social arrangements, even if those policies and attitudes are demonstrably beneficial and their abandoning demonstrably harmful.
“Nontraditional” lifestyles will always have the most serious consequences for poor blacks and the least serious for the white bourgeoisie who are the custodians of the social mores. What’s the misery of a few black kids compared with a few white folks being able to throw off the bonds of social convention?
Wait, this says its on The Glittering Eye, but reads more like an iSteve post….
I don’t get it.
Points being made that have been tropes of Steve Sailer’s for some time. If only there were a Paul Walker reference….
Also, I believe you have some formatting errors.
I think I’ve corrected them. I only know of him by hearsay.
I was thinking similar thoughts on reading the Atlantic Monthly article a few months ago about re-stating the case against single parents as a case for planners and against unplanned pregnancy. The discussion was over-laden with the contraception issue, and I think condescends to believe that poor people are victims of material limitations and would not want children if they had a choice. I think that is far less true than it once was, and children can be as attractive as anything to anyone. You can have one marshmallow now are two some day. Emphasizing the difference btw/ planning and not planning seems to purposefully avoid the classism inherent in this type of discussion.
I think you may have it backwards. There was certainly still a lot of stigma attached to girls getting pregnant out of wedlock while the rate was increasing in the 60s-80s. It has always seemed to me that we reached a point where there were so many that it became kind of meaningless and it is hard to stigmatize what 30%of the population is doing anyway.
So I remain dubious that attaching stigma to it again would do much, since I don’t really think the lack thereof was a primary driver, but rather a way to accept what already happened. We should still reverse those policies that we can that lead to one parent families, like ending the War on Drugs.
Steve
In the black community where it was already the norm by that time? Please produce evidence.
Go back to the title of the post, steve. Changing society mores has consequences. I agree with you that it would be hard to reverse course at this point.
The widespread availability of recreational drugs is another social change that has consequences. It would sure be interesting to see some evidence that a drug-addicted biological father in the home is better than a father in jail. I’m not taking a position one way or another, just curious about the actual implications.
I think it would be nice if there were a consensus that two good, caring, sober biological parents in the home should be the norm but I’m afraid there isn’t even that consensus nowadays. I don’t know how coherent a society can be without such a consensus. Maybe that just shows that I’m old.
Among the nursing and support staff at all of the places I work now (a lot) there is no shortage of single moms, of all different colors. They virtually all want to be married. AFAICT, the ideal of the two parents raising kids is still alive, but it just isn’t possible for quite a few. The minority incarceration rate is high enough that there is a shortage of men. Add in the fact that many really can’t get work after being incarcerated and a lot of the men “available” are not suitable. Why marry a guy you are going to have to support? (Yes, in theory they could do child care. In reality, it aint happening very often.) And this is not entirely a minority thing. In coal country the white girls have the same problems.
Steve
The best wisecrack I’ve heard in a long time (from an 85 year old woman) is that men are like parking places. The good ones are taken. The ones that aren’t taken are handicapped.
Women want to marry “up”. Combine that predisposition with women working, the lack of stigma in having children outside of marriage, the desire for children, and that so many of the jobs available these days are in fields that preferentially hire women and it’s a formula for lots of kids gowing up without dads in the house.
I don’t know what role incarceration for non-violent drug offenses plays in all this. The stats are hard to wade through because so many of them are produced by organizations with axes to grind. My instinct is that not as many men are being imprisoned for simple possession as the advocates might want you to believe. I find the notion that we’d be a lot better off if we legalized the use of cocaine and heroine hard to believe.
Nabbing people on possession allows the judicial system to get people they know are bad off the streets. Even that doesn’t always work, but it’s something. Try getting someone sent to prison for beating their wife/girlfriend/baby momma/fuck-of-the-moment when the women won’t prosecute. Hard to do. Catch the guy with a bad of weed, though, and you don’t have to sweat all that stuff as much.
And seriously, if too many minorities were going to prison, shouldn’t the crime rates in minority neighborhoods be a lot lower? Living the dream in the hood like I am, I can tell you that there are a lot of folks walking around free that deserve to be in prison for all manner of offenses.