March 1, 2005
'TIL DEATH:
To Have and to Hold, for Richer for Poorer (DAVID BROOKS, 3/01/05, NY Times)
Leo Tolstoy wrote a lovely novella called "Family Happiness," narrated by a young woman who goes out for a walk with a man she loves. They talk about nothing in particular - frogs, actually - but exchange looks and gestures. "He said goodbye as usual and made no special allusion; but I knew that from that day he was mine, and that I should never lose him now."They are married but grow apart. She likes parties, while he doesn't. Then one day they are sitting at home and her heart suddenly grows light. She looks around and realizes that the courtship phase of their relationship has ended, but it has been replaced by something gentler and deeper:
"That day ended the romance of our marriage; the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time."
Tolstoy's story captures the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice.
It also illustrates how the family is a countervailing force in society. Public life is individualistic. It's oriented around goals like self-development, self-advancement and personal happiness. (This is, of course, even more true in America today than in the Russia of the 19th century.) The goal of family life, on the other hand, does not revolve around individual choices but around the unconditional union of souls. When we get married, and then when we have kids, we learn, sometimes traumatically, to say farewell to the world of me, me, me.
Which is, of course, why the Left has systematically attacked marriage and the family over the past century. Any institution which intervenes between the individual and the State must be destroyed in order to increase the atomization and dependence of the public. Thus are Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, Children's Right, Secularism, Separation, the Right to Choose, the Right to Die and all those other pleasantly libertarian sounding nostrums ultimately just the covert means by which Statists seek to achieve their end of subjugating individuals.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2005 5:59 PM
My wife has instantly certain that The New Math fell into that same category. Breaking up intergenerational communication and all.
Posted by: ghostcat at March 1, 2005 8:24 PMCertainly the metric system:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1248/
Posted by: oj at March 1, 2005 8:29 PMVery well put. Let us now ask Cicero's question: "Who stands to gain?" What makes someone an enenmy of civil society and of every institution which stands between man and the state?
We all know the answer: The dissatisfied, the disaffected, the other, the outsider--all those who lust after new things. That the Catalinarian may have a just claim for redress of grevances does not make stripping away the thing standing between us and the lidless eye of the state a good thing.
Posted by: Lou Gots at March 1, 2005 11:40 PMVery well put. Let us now ask Cicero's question: "Who stands to gain?" What makes someone an enenmy of civil society and of every institution which stands between man and the state?
We all know the answer: The dissatisfied, the disaffected, the other, the outsider--all those who lust after new things. That the Catalinarian may have a just claim for redress of grevances does not make stripping away the thing standing between us and the lidless eye of the state a good thing.
Posted by: Lou Gots at March 1, 2005 11:41 PMThe article cocluded with a romaticization of joint checking accounts. 2 problems.
In the good old days when papa was the boss that was not how it worked. Papa pocketed the pay and gave mama an allowance. In a lot of families she might not know how much he made or had until the day after he died.
2. Now my wife and I both have business and personal accounts for starters. Then it gets complicated. When we were first married we only had one account. Of course we didn't have any money.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at March 2, 2005 2:16 AMBut hasn't history shown that when we allow a religious denomination to dominate our lives in the way that you guys seem to view the secular state as trying to do that the results are pretty bad? Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Dark Ages, Counter-Reformation Spain, Tibet, Bhutan, Israel (if the religious parties took over) are not my idea of decent places to live.
Free means just that. Some people choose marriage others don't. The State stays out of the marriage business, but comes down real hard on things like child support. People looking for validation of 'lifestyles' most cultures reject as deviance should remain disappointed. That is something of a different order from letting them do the nasty with each other in their own homes.
Robert, as an aside, I work with several Indians. My friend, Vijay, has his check deposited in the account of his father who is a retired accountant in Georgia, and then gets back an allowance. Vijay is my age, and married with a kid. Apparently, such arrangements are quite common among Hindus.
Posted by: Bart at March 2, 2005 6:51 AMBart:
Similarly, I have an Indian friend who lives at home with his sister and parents. Everybody throws their money into a pot. He says it will all shake out in the inheritance.
Posted by: Rick T. at March 2, 2005 10:01 AMTerrific post and great comments. Thanks. Let me add this: The ideal "citizen" is a homosexual; and the ideal "statesman" is the intellectual. Both are perfectly fit to inhabit Benito's World - "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State".
Posted by: Luciferous at March 2, 2005 12:35 PMIt's very easy to blame our sociey's degradation of family life on the bogeymen of secularism and leftism, but such trends as increased divorce rates, dual careers, dual checking accounts, increased acceptance of sexually explicit content in films and tv, etc. have become societal standards across the left/right, secular/religious spectrum. If you accept any or all of these new social realities, then you are to blame.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at March 2, 2005 12:36 PMRobert:
Yes, that's right, which is why secularism has to be fought tooth and nail. It destroys the entire civilization.
Posted by: oj at March 2, 2005 1:21 PMLuciferous: It begins with Plato.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at March 2, 2005 4:26 PMBart:
Children need to be raised by married parents far more than they need anonymous child support.
Posted by: Vince at March 2, 2005 8:34 PMNo, OJ, this isn't a secularism problem. America is not a secular nation, it is religious. But like a frog boiling slowly to death in a pot without noticing, American Christians are giving in to the temptations of modernism.
Your battle-cry sounds very stirring, but besides the fact that it is not aimed at the guilty parties, what exactly could you hope to accomplish by this war on secularism? As the article states:
Scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity. By their daily activity, most "Christians" regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex, and self-fulfillment.
The findings in numerous national polls conducted by highly respected pollsters like The Gallup Organization and The Barna Group are simply shocking. "Gallup and Barna," laments evangelical theologian Michael Horton, "hand us survey after survey demonstrating that evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general."1 Divorce is more common among "born-again" Christians than in the general American population. Only 6 percent of evangelicals tithe. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Josh McDowell has pointed out that the sexual promiscuity of evangelical youth is only a little less outrageous than that of their nonevangelical peers.
So your "solution" can't even muster a placebo effect. It has zero effect on behavior. Do you expect to cure the problem by doubling the dose of the placebo?
Posted by: Robert Duquette at March 3, 2005 12:04 AMVince,
Do children need to be raised by two parents living together who become violent or despondent when in each other's presence? Do they need two parents when the two have nothing to do with each other and quite visibly cannot stand or even have basic trust of each other? Is that healthier than a situation where the kid lives with one and the other kicks in the bucks and shares responsibility under a separate household?
Posted by: Bart at March 3, 2005 7:40 AMBart:
Yes, they do. Studies show the happiness of the parents has little to do with the superior effectiveness of a two parent family.
Posted by: oj at March 3, 2005 8:07 AMOJ,
How do you intend to do that? You can't leverage Christianity, because that has already been tainted by modernity. What is your leveraging point on which to push back the tide of history?
Robert:
We're doing it now and have been for years. Devolving government services back to churches, voucherizing education, building great Christian universities, moving against abortion, homosexuality, obscenity, etc..
Posted by: oj at March 3, 2005 10:56 AM