Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Preserving a place for families

Joel Kotkin writes at the Orange County Register,
The current progressive cultural wave may itself begin to “overreach” as it moves from the certainty of liberal sentiment to ever more repressive attempts to limit alternative views of the world, including those of the religious.

In the next few years, social conservatives need to engage, but in ways that transcend doctrinal concerns about homosexuality, or even abortion. It has to be made clear that, on its current pace, Western civilization and, increasingly, much of East Asia are headed toward a demographic meltdown as people eschew family formation for the pleasures of singleness or childlessness.

Although sensible for many individuals, the decision to detach from familialism augurs poorly for societies, which will be forced to place enormous burdens on a smaller young generation to support an ever-expanding cadre of retirees. It also frames a spiritual crisis in which people no longer look out for their relatives, but only for themselves, inevitably becoming dependent on government to provide the succor that used to come from families.

Conservatives, in particular, need to give up the idea that the fifties – the era of “Leave it to Beaver” – will ever come back. Too many factors, such as women’s growing role in the workplace and the sexual revolution, have altered reality permanently. Only 45 percent of children live in intact married families, and those who cherish the institution of families have little choice other than to embrace other models, including blended families, single-parent households, as well as same-sex parent households.

German, Greek, Spanish and Italian birth rates are among the lowest in the world, despite the largely unwelcome presence of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor Africans and Middle Easterners. Phil Longman compares Europe to a woman whose “biological clock is running down. It is not too late to adopt more children, but they won’t look like her.”

Democrats, in particular, seem to be pushing this trend, seen by some as beneficial to their political trajectory. Single women have become a critical constituency for Democrats, what pollster Stanley Greenberg has labeled “the largest progressive voting bloc in the country.” Some Democrats, and their media allies, seem determined to use gay marriage as a wedge to undermine the credibility, and even the legal future, of many less-pliable religious groups.

Yet celebrating singleness and unmarried families is not progressive in the sense of how it effects children. Broken families are associated with every kind of social dysfunction, from criminality to poverty and mental illness. Human beings, particularly children, Sigmund Freud noted, need a sense that they matter more to their parents than others; substituting “social” values for familial ones does not make up for the need for the love that comes naturally to parents.

...we need to prioritize the building of the kind of lower-density and affordable housing vastly preferred by families. A future built around the models of expensive and densely populated places – Washington, D.C., Manhattan, San Francisco and, increasingly, much of Southern California – would mimic places with the lowest rates of family formation in the nation. In Manhattan, half of households are single, while, in San Francisco, there are 80,000 more dogs than children.

The goal here, however, should not be to engage in a full-scale reactionary culture war. A successful profamily policy cannot abandon the social gains made by women and gays over the past half century. In the long run, a more tolerant view of marriage – reflecting a greater interest in libertarian approaches to social issues – is a prerequisite for reviving familialism. Seeking to preserve a place for families requires us to move beyond nostalgia and focus on how this most precious institution can be reinvigorated amidst the challenges of modernity.
Read more here.

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