Responsibility
Despite our determination to separate pleasure from duty, it remains an inescapable fact of our anatomy: sex leads to babies and the responsibilities of child rearing. Just as sin has led us to make an end run around marriage, so, too, we have sought to avoid the responsibility intended to go hand in hand with sexual pleasure. Birth control—which is used by 62% of all U.S. woman of reproductive age —and abortion are common options. Although it is encouraging to note that abortion rates in the U.S. are now at an historically low 18% of all pregnancies, this still represents 227 aborted lives per every 1000 live births. But, for the purposes of this brief section, the complex social and theological issues of birth control and abortion will not be addressed. Rather, responsibility will be considered as it pertains to those who have children, the impact that unmarried mothers are having on society, and the very problematic statistic that, increasingly, they are uneducated and white. Much of this insight comes from the 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, in which Charles Murray analyzes demographic data based not on the whole of the nation, but on its majority race.
For decades now, trends in American life have been presented in terms of race and ethnicity, with non-Latino whites (hereafter, just whites) serving as the reference point—the black poverty rate compared to the white poverty rate, the percentage of Latinos who go to college compared to the percentage of whites who go to college. . . . This strategy has distracted our attention from the way that the reference point is changing. . . . And so this book uses evidence based overwhelmingly on whites in . . . the new upper class [and] the new lower class. . . . My message: don’t kid yourselves that we are looking at stresses that can be remedied by attacking the legacy of racism or by restricting immigration. The trends I describe exist independently of ethnic heritage. (Charles Murray, 12)
To synthesize and give narrative to the data, Murray comes us with two prototypical towns: Belmont, which represents the new upper-class—also know as “the cognitive elite”—in which 63% have BAs and the median family income in 2000 was $124,200, and Fishtown, which represents the growing lower class—a town in which some will finish high school, get GEDs, go to community college for a year or so, but most will work in both high and low-skill blue collar jobs, and only “8% of the adults” have college degrees. We will use Murray’s depictions of upscale Belmont and lower-class Fishtown to show how “over the last half century, marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes.” That fault line is leading with frightening speed to the “fracturing of human society” in America.
Trends in marriage are important not just with regard to the organization of communities, but because they are associated with large effects on the socialization of the next generation. No matter what the outcome being examined—the quality of mother-infant relationship, externalizing behavior in childhood (aggression, delinquency, and hyperactivity), delinquency in adolescence, criminality as adults, illness and injury in childhood, early mortality, sexual decision making in adolescence, school problems and dropping out, emotional health, or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life—the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. (Murray, 158)
Tracing data as far back as the American Revolution, nonmarital births to white women held steady at well below 5% up through the 1960s. “White children were conceived outside marriage at varying rates in different social classes, but hardly ever born outside marriage in any class.” Up through the 1960s, American marital norms had followed what Bronislaw Malinowski has referred to as a “universal sociological law.”
Every culture, he concluded, had a norm that ‘no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community.’ Without that man, ‘the group consisting of a woman and her offspring is sociologically incomplete and illegitimate.’ (Murray, citing Malinowski, 160)
As cited earlier, “for the first time in human history,” American society no longer considers a single, unmarried mother’s children to be “illegitimate.” With the stigma removed, one might think that white women across all classes—including the celebrated Murphy Brown-style successful single career women— would take advantage of this new “alternative,” but they do not. The increases in nonmarital white births in America can be correlated almost entirely to education. With fewer than 16 years of education, it is more likely than not that a young woman will have a baby without a husband. “For women who did not finish high school, the percentage was closing in on levels in excess of 60 percent of the live births that previously have been associated with the black underclass.” This was not always the case. In 1963, “the marriage percentages for college grads and highs school dropouts were about the same.” Marriage, in America, was never just for the chosen few. It was, as the founders intended, the bedrock of society—all of society.
From RECLAIMING THE WISDOM OF HOMO INCURVATUS IN SE: “MAN TURNED IN ON HIMSELF” AS AN ENTRY POINT FOR THE DISCUSSION OF SIN IN 21ST-CENTURY AMERICA by Heather Choate Davis
Heather Choate Davis 