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ACF PoMoCon #31: Marriage Problems
So the podcast’s back after our long election-to-inauguration holiday. America’s still standing, thank God, but the madness continues, which we’ll have to bear the best we can. Today, I bring you one of my scholarly friends, Scott Yenor, who has a wonderful book on the successes and failures of feminism: Choice as far as the eye can see, and unhappiness on its heels. It’s called The Recovery Of Family Life and it analyzes the feminism, sexual liberation, and contemporary liberalism ideas and policies, and their unintended consequences. Scott points out that the great middle-class republic seems to be turning into a different regime because of family problems: Family is rare among the poor–but even though it is dominant among the rich, it is superfluous rather than foundational. Marriage comes last.
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Published in Podcasts
Good to have you back.
Hey, there! Glad to be back!
Very timely book and discussion. Thanks. It would be interesting to know how much of the anger people are acting out during the pandemic is actually their (sub-conscious?) realization that they are just living a materialistic, utilitarian life with no meaning to it. Even the Dutch are rioting! Will people who have no sort of connected, family life rebel and riot because they have nothing else to do? If so there will not be enough police officers in the world. Better get the Soma manufacturing up and running.
Indeed. It sometimes seems our elites take Amusing Ourselves To Death as a strategy…
Afternoon Titus,
Great conversation, I could take another five hours of it for starters. I would like to know if Mr. Yenor’s students sense the conflict of autonomy and the desire to be part of a team. Do the students feel that the relationships between men and women are not right? Lastly, concerning Mr. Yenor’s students, do they perceive the different world when they look back at older societies as they read the plays and novels of an earlier time?
To continue with my requests, could you take on an analysis of the change in how men a women interact in our movies, novels, and plays? Perhaps you and a friend could give us a short course on the effect of this drive for autonomy on how men a women are increasingly pulled apart.
Loved this topic. Your observation that this summers riots was more to do with the absence of marriage and not the problem with injustice was spot on.
Very good questions I would also like to ask! Scott’s of course busy teaching students, so it might be until semester’s end to get to talking about the students. But we’ve planned a sequel already…
I’ve given this a lot of thought for many years. But it takes so much time & there’s no money anywhere that I can see. Maybe now that everything’s online I can simply sell it, see if anyone’s buying, & proceed with this kind of America at the movies conversation. I’ve held forth & lectured on romantic comedies, what they were prophetic about, what they got wrong, how they disappeared, & where they stand to elites & ideology, but nobody’s paying me to write. In a way, the problem is that this is not what conservatives consider intellectual stuff, ideas, policies, much less wonky quant studies. Nor is it partisan anger… This year, since I’ve gotten sick of facebook banning my friends, I’ve stopped most social media stuff & considered creating something worthwhile for people, smart & respectful of basic dignity.
Thanks, Jim! It’s the sort of thing no one’s willing to say or at least print. But if we had more sense, we’d talk about it publicly, it’s our society at stake after all… I suppose this is why liberals can win so easily–they pretend crusades for justice are real & noble while profiting off the misery. On our side, since we’re not willing to do much of anything, we also have learned to keep quiet about the real problems. Inaction has dulled speech, to say nothing of reason…