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A Problem Beyond the Reach of Politics — Troy Senik
A few years ago, while giving a series of talks on a long essay I had written about the malignant influence of teacher unions in California, I got a question from an audience member (or rather the kind of monologue that often substitutes for a question), in which the interlocutor, agreeing with my basic points, essentially said that all of the problems facing public education would fade away if only the union influence was undone.
I agreed that such a scenario would reap substantial dividends, but had to balk at the utopian idea that it was a silver bullet. Even if education was reformed along the exact lines that conservatives preferred, I argued, there’d still be plenty of problems. Why? Because the underlying variables are human. There’s no public policy fix to make kids study instead of goofing off, to get parents more engaged in their children’s education, or to make a 15-year-old think on a time horizon that extends beyond the next weekend. These things either happen or they don’t. Public policy might affect them at the margins, but they are shaped primarily at the social and individual levels.
I couldn’t help but think about that exchange while reading Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the growth in single-parent families has had an economically destructive impact. Maranto and Crouch end on a similarly stoic note:
There is no quick fix. Welfare reform beginning in the mid-1990s offered only modest marriage incentives and has been insufficient to change entrenched cultural practices. The change must come from long-term societal transformation on this subject, led by political, educational and entertainment elites, similar to the decades-long movements against racism, sexism—and smoking.
No quick fix indeed. And is what little we can do through public policy even worth the candle? Every time I hear about tax incentives for having children, for instance, I always think “do we really want to encourage parenthood amongst those who can only be induced to it by a tax break?”
I think Maranto and Crouch are probably right that the change has to be cultural. What worries me, however, is that I have a hard time envisioning that happening. Of course you could mobilize elite opinion in opposition to racism, sexism, and smoking. The importance of equality and health are two of the only values that cultural elites actually recognize. Here in Los Angeles, you could murder a man with your bare hands and it’d be excused as the logical product of a troubled childhood. Light up a cigarette after doing it, however, and you’re regarded as tainted by an evil that’s been with you since the womb.
But the importance of the family? Of not having children out of wedlock? Who on the West Side of Los Angeles or the Upper East Side of Manhattan is going to carry that torch? It all seems a little … judgy. And no one at the commanding heights of polite society wants to be fighting the same fights as Rick Santorum, regardless of the merits.
I find it almost impossible not to despair on this issue. After all, it’s not as if people will learn from experience. As Peter has repeatedly noted, the rate of out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed since Daniel Patrick Moynihan first brought the problem to the nation’s attention. Is that really a surprise? Once you’ve learned the lesson, it’s generally too late to do anything about it.
There is no issue on which I’d rather have my pessimism unseated. So over to you, Ricochet. With government essentially powerless and elite society inert, is there a realistic way that you can envision the centrifugal forces at work on the American family being arrested?
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That could be a 400-comment post, a lot of snark, a lot of bitter opposition … and probably a whole lot of fun. Go for it, Mendel!
This strikes me as exactly right — And highly unlikely to actually occur. As you suggest, Scott, it takes a Nixon to go to China.
This is one of the reasons, by the way, that I’m irritated with the small band of conservatives who’ve taken President Obama to task for his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative to help young minority men. It’s one of the few times he’s embraced his unique potential to set an ennobling example for the black community. My only gripe with it is that he hasn’t done it enough.
A hopeful example, I agree. That said, I think it’s an immensely more complicated process to reverse widespread social trends than to correct dysfunctional governance at the ballot box.
Ah yes, the “spiritual, but not religious” posture, which I’ve always read as “I’m a good person unbound by the constraints of any theology.”
I’m not throwing him under the bus. The point of that passage was to explain the point of view of those cultural elites that Maranto and Crouch hope will save us. That’s a group that tends to think of these kinds of issues as the exclusive preserve of “those people.” The cultural hostility, in other words, likely outweighs the merits of the issues.
It’s an interesting contention, of a piece with the broader argument that, because conservatives essentially outbreed liberals, the future will be kinder to the right than we imagine. At its heart, of course, it’s an empirical question: how heritable should we expect the social/political mores of parents to be for their children? I don’t know the answer to that, but I suspect, even if it cuts our way on net, that it may be slightly more complicated than the Taranto analysis suggests.
That’s certainly part of it, but I’m wary of saddling the homo economicus model with more weight than it can bear. Does our system of social benefits subsidize this pathology? Absolutely. But I suspect that a lot of this behavior emanates from people who aren’t making especially rational calculations in the first place.
I love this whole comment, but this paragraph is especially golden.
Yes. I love the logic of this argument, but haven’t conservatives been out-breeding liberals since, well, forever?
Since we are going under I suspect family will be more important in the near future.
As I read this post, my mind jumped to a scene from the children’s book A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle. To relate the scene at the climax of the book directly would be far too complicated, so allow me to simplify it to an almost ridiculous level:
There are young beings, “free” in a sense from entanglements, but without root and easily deceived. There are older beings, full of life and wisdom, rooted and grounded, and yet far “freer” than it would outwardly appear. The young have been deceived, and set about to destroy their older brethen, all the while unwittingly ensuring their own destruction, because to forsake the ways of their elders is to undermine their own future. In the story, of course, light wins the battle over darkness, but the war continues.
The trajectory of our society has been to elevate the individual over the family. Yet society does not, and cannot value the individual the way the family can. Family is the bedrock of our identity as individuals. Our best initial sense of who we are should come from our family, and the best hope is that it is healthy.
(con’t)
(con’t)
Furthermore, the government claims to value the individual, but it is a false claim. The purpose of the politics of the individual is to empower the politician, not the individual. It conditions us to serve the institution of government, and to sacrifice the institution of the family. This is why I sometimes view with skeptical eyes “pro-family” policies as much as those that work against the family construct. I don’t want government to be the patron of my family. I already have One who fills that role.
So there is no confusion in my use of the L’Engle illustration: this is not a battle between the young and the old, but rather a philosophical battle that dates back at least to the Enlightenment. Family humanizes; government (and hyper-politicization) dehumanizes.
What can we do? Light a candle to the darkness. Don’t be afraid to wage the battle, for the war continues. The deceived don’t know they are deceived because they are deceived. So we must continue to tell the truth. Better to be a Jeremiah, and hope for a remnant.
Good points, Jim. I’ve always thought that we don’t spend enough time making the distinction that while liberty (understood as freedom from coercion) is an extremely high — if not the highest — political good, liberty (understood as freedom from obligation) is an extremely low social good … and functionally a social evil in many contexts.
Just to clarify my claim that we live in a stupid age–I think a great deal of that stupidity relates to sex and technology. Humans might think they want pleasure without responsibility or cost of any sort, but where does that lead? Our bodies are created to have a pleasurable reaction to sex, and a reproductive one, but also an emotional response that helps create a bond that ties people together to deal with the natural consequences–babies. When technology came along that could reliably deter that particular natural consequence, people hoped that new sexual mores would be justified without thinking about the multitudes of other consequences. Turns out sex still creates emotional expectations. Turns out that a sexual free-for-all makes marriage less likely. Turns out people have a harder time committing to one person and staying married if they have participated in a sexual free-for-all. Turns out that children actually want to know the two people whose genetic material made them and are better off if these two people marry and raise them. Turns out that sexual mores and restrictions had a useful social purpose. Who knew? Everybody over 30.
I’m of the “Great Awakening” school even though I’m pessimistic about the chances of it happening. Problems of this sort need an an injection of correction and power from a transcendent source (and no I don’t consider the state transcendent). In my opinion one of the larger tragedies of the state taking over public assistance from private and or religious groups was the simultaneous decoupling of moral power from the exchange. Ennobling concepts like charity and giving were replaced by payroll deduction and confiscatory wealth transfer. Both the giver and the recipient are separated from community. There is no more sense of “ought”. For the person of means “I ought” to give to those less fortunate, and for the person in need “I ought” to be grateful and take no more than I need to get past this crisis. And for both parties the sense that they “ought” to be responsible to the community is broken.
While I agree that gov’t can’t fix the problem I also think it’s wrong to say that it can’t do anything at all. I think we see in the past that the gov’t helped to maintain the “inertia” of social norms and mores. If it can indoctrinate, or influence, kids and the public to change their behavior when it comes to smoking or sex then I think it can do something in other areas. Again, not a complete fix, but you don’t have to change all of a person’s deepest convictions to change their behavior when it comes to family.
Put me down on the record though for a Great Awakening. As you go down the list of social problems it seems to me that the only thing that addresses them all is a commitment to the gospel.
I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while – I wanted to write a post titled “Should the Catholic Church be more judgy?” For Catholics, having children out of wedlock is immoral, and it also increases the likelihood of poverty. So if the Catholic Church has an explicit mission to help its members avoid both immorality and poverty, isn’t firmly insisting on marriage a good plan on both fronts? Yet social-justice Catholics seem to dodge the issue. Recently I received an email from the California Catholic Conference on “Public Policy Insights.” One article was titled “California Looks at the ‘Most Effective’ Anti-Poverty Program.” I thought – finally! They’re addressing declining marriage rates and their effect on poverty! But no – the piece was about the Earned Income Tax Credit. We’re not going to tackle poverty by avoiding a difficult look at the systemic roots of the problem. Tax credits are not the solution.
One other thing is that it’s easy to think that trends are fixed and our expectations are certain. Just when we think something is inevitable it changes, to our surprise. I think the better we understand what drives a social trend the more we realize that there are many moving parts.
A couple of disjointed points:
1) For over a generation this debate was shut down by eye rolling of the opposition claiming it was all racist welfare queen rhetoric – Paul Krugman is still in that mindset. Fortunately we have made enough “progress” that we can finally start to address the issue: illegitimacy of all racial groups is much higher than black illegitimacy in Daniel Patrick Moynahan’s day.
2) Maybe technology can offer some hope in the foreseeable future. A male contraceptive would be very attractive to a young lower income male already being hammered by child support obligations, likewise reversible sterilization/vasectomy procedures possibly on the nanotech horizon could be offered in return for higher welfare or other social services programs to encourage socially beneficial outcomes or at least counteract the deleterious outcomes built into our current policies.
Unfortunately, there is no cultural solution in sight. It is not in the interest of the cultural elite to promote “family values”. It is in the interest of the liberal and cultural elites to promote a culture of victimhood in the lower classes, particularly African-Americans. This serves two very strong purposes. Firstly, by promoting a victim mentality it tells African-Americans that no matter what they do they can’t succeed thus eliminating competition for the elite positions in schools and the job market for their children. And, secondly, while practicing “family values” in their lives and pushing their children to excel they can also feel good about themselves by holding the correct political sympathies.
It’s occurred to me recently how much cover the Left gets from racism. Problems that should be blamed on left-wing policies and culture get blamed on minorities instead. I’ve seen a lot of racist talk in my life. Some white people look at inner cities, or Detroit and say, “Well, that’s the way black people are.” I was a good liberal, so I didn’t like that kind of talk, but at the same time I didn’t have a good answer to it. Now that I’m conservative, I have a good answer. If a group has high rates of family breakdown, like in the black community, they’re going to have higher rates of crime, dropping out of school, etc. If the black community had the rates of illegitimacy they have, but did not have elevated crime rates, dropout rates, etc., they’d have to be superhuman.
This is not an issue that can be fixed by the government because the government is nothing more than a reflection of the cuture as manifested by a set of laws, policies and police power. Once you change the culture, then government can follow. How we are going to fix this culture, I have no clue. Unfortunately, we have two strikes against us. One, there is no moral concensus against divorce, infidelity or single parent families. Second, if there were, there’s now a prohibition on judgement that precludes society from enforcing any norms or standards.
See that is the problem. Conservatives send their kids to liberal schools and most of their kids get brain washed. You are a failure as a conservative parent if a majority of your kids don’t become conservatives as adults. That is the one area as a conservative you have the most power over and largest social impact. We can’t go converting and saving others unless we can do it with your own flesh and blood.
I would agrue that is why homeschooling is the only meaningful social movement in America having any long term impact. One Canadian study found not a single homeschool family on welfare. Try beating that with a few billion dollars and a lot of political will.
Brian, you’re right on the money.
Conservatives have been outbreeding liberals for 2 generations now, and too many of my parents’ cohort were fooled by Dr. Spock and other “experts” on parenting.
In my perhaps foolish optimism, I believe the trend can ultimately be reversed. Not fast, but it can happen.