Ross Douthat, the token conservative at The New York Times, is, tonally, the very soul of moderation. For those of us of a more foamingly right-wing bent, he can, indeed, be excessively mindful of his readers’ sensitivities – and a fat lot of good it does him. So this week he writes about some of the consequences of the sexual revolution – all very sober, very measured. At the Times website, the commenters immediately retreated to the most cobwebbed tropes: bozack of dc thinks “nonmarital sex is an unalloyed good thing, a part of personal fulfillment”, and that any suggestion to the contrary is all about social conservatives “wanting to control women’s sexual decisions”. A reader from Seabeck, Washington thinks we need “public sex workers or educators” to come up with “new ideas about how humans can live in groups and still fulfill the biological desires that sex entails”. Etc.
Out in the wider blogosphere, meanwhile, they just cut to the chase:
CWalz: Speaking as one of those “sluts” I found virginity highly over rated. Ross is just afraid that some of us “experienced” women will find folks like him woefully inadequate in the sack if we have someone to compare him to.
Sukabi: I think Douchehat’s wife is a very unsatisfied woman, and when she complains about his random poking in the sack, he calls her a slut and proceeds to write one of these columns…
DrDick: I am still not convinced that Ross is not still a virgin. I have seldom encountered someone as anti-sex and pleasure in my life.
As you’ll have gathered, these are the educated types – sophisticated middle-class liberals who read New York Times columns. But what’s going on in the wider world? I’ve written previously about the celebrification of family life:
The story of the last 30 years is the mainstreaming of rock-star morality: instant gratification, do your own thing, whatever’s your bag. Jodie Foster and her turkey baster are rich enough to weather any unintended consequences of their fling, but the evidence suggests that, for the general population, defining celebrity down is more problematic. ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ is easy for Britney to say, less so for Kaylee at the hair salon.
But the new school soldiers on, arguing that chastity, fidelity, monogamy, etc, are mere social constructs: We’ve been indoctrinated into them by repressed cultural hierarchies. Sexual promiscuity is part of our nature: You should be getting it on with that hot chick at Number 27. And her husband. And get your wife in to video it. Screwing whatever you want whenever you want in whatever combination you want is as natural as wearing a mammoth pelt and sitting round the cave rubbing two sticks together – and the way the economy’s going we’ll all be doing that soon enough. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá wrote a rather laborious book on the subject, Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality, that demonstrates by frequent recourse to biology, anthropology, ethnography and primatology that the idea of lifelong heterosexual marriage is a crock imposed on the world by party poopers. Your hunter-gatherer was the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP.
At this point in the argument, it’s customary to bring up bonobos. No, not the bloke from U2. He loves Africa, too, but not in that way. The bonobo is some kind of chimp that lives south of the Congo River, and is apparently the closest extant relative to humans. And, like us, he’s a bi-guy who can’t get enough casual sex. So, if he’s hip to it, why have we got so many hang-ups?
“Moderate” Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they’re fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism. As Congressman Mike Pence put it, “To those who say we should simply focus on fiscal issues, I say you would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family collapses.”
But the collapse of the traditional family is already well advanced. In the midst of an essentially economic argument, Jim Manzi writes:
In 1965, almost no mothers with any level of education reported that they had never been married. Today, this still holds true for mothers who have finished college: Only 3% have never been married. But that figure stands in stark contrast with the nearly 25% of mothers without high-school diplomas who say that they have never been married. In fact, last year, about 40% of all American births occurred out of wedlock. And about 70% of African-American children — as well as most Hispanic children — are born to unmarried mothers. But this situation obtains for low-wage, non-college-educated whites as well: It is estimated that about 70% of children born to non-Hispanic white women with no more than a high-school education and income below $20,000 per year were born out of wedlock.
The level of family disruption in America is enormous compared to almost every other country in the developed world. Of course, out-of-wedlock births are as common in many European countries as they are in the United States. But the estimated percentage of 15-year-olds living with both of their biological parents is far lower in the United States than in Western Europe, because unmarried European parents are much more likely to raise children together. It is hard to exaggerate the chaotic conditions under which something like a third of American children are being raised — or to overstate the negative impact this disorder has on their academic achievement, social skills, and character formation. There are certainly heroic exceptions, but the sad fact is that most of these children could not possibly compete with their foreign counterparts.
Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse – like the legions of daughters abused by their mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Congressman Pence’s doomsday scenario is already here: Millions and millions of American children are raised in transient households and moral vacuums that make not just social mobility but, as Manzi says, even elemental character formation all but impossible. In a post-prosperity America, those sophisticated New York Times readers won’t even be able to afford to buy them off with bigger welfare checks. In a land of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease and growing ethnocultural resentments, the shattering of the basic social building block will have consequences in the years ahead far beyond the healing powers of “public sex workers or educators” attuned to your “biological desires”.
You want to live like the bonobo? Be careful what you wish for.
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