Families, Freedom and Responsibility
Ta-Nehisi Coates did a post that described his non-traditional family that somehow produced kids without an abnormal level of dysfunction, and in fact, a whole lot of high-function. Ross Douthat had a very nuanced and balanced take on it, with which I broadly agree. There is a difference in shading, however, that I think would tend to lead in somewhat different policy direction (not that either of them were getting into policy, but somebody has to be the dork here). Ross made the point that pointing to your non-traditional family that seemed to do pretty darn well is, in effect, like pointing to your 97 year-old uncle who smokes three packs a day and saying that this calls into question all this stuff about smoking causing cancer:
But on the other hand, the generalizations matter too. The “artifice” of the traditional family isn’t just an artifice, and the values that social conservatives hold so dear – monogamy, marriage vows, the idea that every kid deserves a mother and a father in his life – don’t just exist to make people in non-traditional families feel bad about themselves. In the aggregate, Dan Quayle was right. In the aggregate, marriage is better for kids than single parenthood. In the aggregate, marriage is better for men and women than long-term cohabitation. In the aggregate, divorce is bad news – for your finances, your health, and your children’s long-term prospects. And in the aggregate, if you’re concerned about income inequality or social mobility or the crime rate or just about any area of socioeconomic concern, then you should be at least moderately fretful about the long, slow decline of the American two-parent family – among blacks, whites, and Hispanics alike.
But I think what is in dispute here is whether these statements of cause-and-effect are correct. I remember reading the famous “Dan Quayle Was Right” article when it came out in 1993. I had the same issue with it then as now. It asserted scientific knowledge about these questions:
According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.
All this says, of course, is that these problems are more prevalent among children of divorce or illegitimacy than intact families. What we don’t know are the counterfactuals: how would these kids have fared if their parents had stayed married or never been married? Despite the “social scientific evidence”, it’s hard to see, at least in a non-totalitarian society, how we could construct random assignment trials to tease this out.
This doesn’t mean that I think Ross’s view on the best family structure on average is wrong. But it should lead us to a whole lot of humility about this belief, and especially that (1) it may not be right for everybody (which Ross doesn’t assert), and (2) that changes in the economy, technology or lots of other things might even change this for the average person over long periods of time. Especially if (2) is correct, the future is likely to arrive unevenly and imperceptibly, and so we would want less central control over this. We would want lots of different arrangements attempted in order to see which ones work, and should expect a variety of different family types to be present. Even those that are not widespread are “reserve options”, like limited species in ecology, that can take off more rapidly when and if conditions change.
The obvious approach in this situation is the libertarian formula: “To each his own”. But there are a couple of limitations to this.
First, if you’re going to live in a way that those around you find immoral, or inadvisable or, at minimum, highly risky, then don’t expect them to provide a whole lot of help when and if you need it. It would not only feel unfair to do this, but more importantly, would prevent forces of cultural evolution from eliminating those family forms which can’t compete. It would stop adaptation. A hothouse effect that simultaneously permits freedom and decouples performance from reward is a breeding ground for decadence. Symmetrically, if you assert that I have a moral requirement to help those in extreme need, then be prepared for strings to be attached to that assistance. If you don’t want the strings, don’t take the assistance.
Second, there is the free-rider problem. As Heather Mac Donald has pointed out many times, it’s one thing to be the one non-traditional family in a neighborhood that can rely on decent public schools, safe streets, cultural trust and so on that (by this theory) require either other traditional families and/or coercive restraints on behavior, but your non-traditional family would have a much tougher time doing well if you had to live in a free society composed predominantly of other non-traditional families. This is unproven, in the same way that the so-called social-scientific findings about families are unproven, but is a theory that, it seems to me, people should be able to test through experience. This observation leads to, as I’ve often argued, allowing experimentation not only at the level of individuals, but also for various neighborhoods, towns, states and so on the have wide flexibility in the kinds of coercive community laws they establish.
In other words, we’re back to my old hobby-horse when it comes to social issues: subsidiarity.
The big effect of the breakdown of marriage was less on the next generation of marriage than the current generation of young men, who now didn’t need to be work-a-daddy breadwinners in order to get women. When northern states raised AFDC payments for single mothers substantially in the first half of the 1960s, crime rates started to shoot up almost immediately. You can see an inflection in the murder rate in 1964-65.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 12, 11:43 PM · #
The liberal states imported two Scandinavian ideas in the 1960s: adequate welfare payments and the end of stigmatization of illegitimacy. In Scandinavian parts of the U.S., those changes worked out okay. In Detroit and the South Bronx, not so much.
— Steve Sailer · Feb 12, 11:47 PM · #
If you are going to throw anectdotal data, Dr. Manzi, may I point out….President Obama is the product of a single parent family while Matthew Murray the Colorado church killer was homeschooled by a “traditional” deeply religious two-parent family?
You don’t know jack.
Evolutionary theory of culture 101— culture doesn’t shape people as much as people shape culture according to their needs.
— matoko_chan · Feb 13, 12:20 AM · #
Marriage is undergoing cultural evolution.
You can’t stop it.
BTW Ta-Nehisi is himself in a long term cohabitation arrangement.
If you are going to be pro-family, you must be for ALL families, black families, gay families, single parent families, brown families, or purple families.
I think the inexorable irresistable glacier of secularization that is currently accelerating its crawl over America is the perfect wild justice.
You were bad stewards.
Now you will evolve or go extinct.
— matoko_chan · Feb 13, 12:28 AM · #
Gee, Matoko Chan, I guess I’ll start being pro-family in your sense of the word, just as soon as you can explain to me exactly what a purple family is. In other words, how exactly are you defining your terms?
Or to put it another way: can one be both “pro-growth,” and also anti-cancer? Can one be “pro-life” and use anti-bacterial disinfectants?
And since you seem to believe in inexorable cultural evolution, how would you suggest we best allow survival of the fittest to do its work? Maybe some version of Family Feud, but with deadly weapons?
— Ethan C. · Feb 13, 01:27 AM · #
motoko_chan:
It sure seems to me like you’re arguing with something I didn’t say. I think I’m proposing that we avoid restricting cultural evolution.
— Jim Manzi · Feb 13, 02:23 AM · #
It’s all very well for people from the far right edge of the Bell Curve to endorse “cultural evolution.” They won’t pay the price of discarding traditional wisdom. They’ll figure out how to succeed. But how has “cultural evolution” worked out for the left half of the Bell Curve over the last 45 years?
— Steve Sailer · Feb 13, 03:10 AM · #
I think I’m proposing that we avoid restricting cultural evolution.
No you are not.
May I remind you, polygamy was the evolved traditional form of marriage for thousands of years.
Having failed to force a national approved “normative” form of marriage, you are retrenching to attempt to impose local standard forms.
It simply won’t work.
Marriage will evolve to support the needs of society.
And that means many forms.
You know what I know, Steve Sailer.
The 40percenters need religion— they don’t have the substrate for humanist values—and they dont see themselves as part of tribe homo sap…..and religion is hardwired anyways.
And I’d say the last 45 years were excellent for the left half….they thrived and prospered and were able to impose their ethos on minority tribes for a long time.
It is the next 45 years that are going to be a bitch.
— matoko_chan · Feb 13, 04:14 AM · #
And…“traditional wisdom” is a dead paradigm.
The internet and the flattening of information killed it.
Anyone can be a sage in the 21st century.
— matoko_chan · Feb 13, 03:39 PM · #
The tendency of the “left” as we will call them is to define traditional institutions in terms of the exceptions, not the rules. Sure, you see exceptions which seem to violate the rule, but you rarely see or hear about the vast majority which make up the rule.
The sad fact is that statistically single parenting (or in the case of Coates serial single parenting) will generally result in seriously dysfunctional kids. We are then asked to support a system which is clearly not built to raise kids in an optimal fashion, and are called upon to support the resulting mess as an affirmation of our open mindedness.
Much the same with SSM, the argument of “domesticating the wild gay” seems to be one of the bedrock “practical” arguements for supporting SSM. Never mind the cultural imperative that directs the very nature of marriage in almost every society, the exceptions to the rule (childless couples, people marrying in the dotage, etc) are called upon to invalidate the obvious cultural nessicity of socially bonded male/female couples to produce and raise children.
The inevitable result of Mr. Coates upbringing is not to shoe how the system is broken, but to further break they system, trivializing an institution already hammered the by last 40 years of declining moral standards.
— M00se · Feb 13, 10:27 PM · #