Tuesday, January 27, 2004
(6:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Decline of the Family
The Weekly Standard has an article by Stanley Kurtz on gay marriage in Sweden. It paints a grim picture:
In Sweden, as elsewhere, the sixties brought contraception, abortion, and growing individualism. Sex was separated from procreation, reducing the need for "shotgun weddings." These changes, along with the movement of women into the workforce, enabled and encouraged people to marry at later ages. With married couples putting off parenthood, early divorce had fewer consequences for children. That weakened the taboo against divorce. Since young couples were putting off children, the next step was to dispense with marriage and cohabit until children were desired. Americans have lived through this transformation. The Swedes have simply drawn the final conclusion: If we've come so far without marriage, why marry at all? Our love is what matters, not a piece of paper. Why should children change that?
The argument is that gay marriage further eroded the institution of marriage by centering it on cohabitation rather than parenthood. I basically agree that marriage as an institution is "intended" to create stable families. If we're going to treat marriage as a sacrament, it doesn't make sense to me to sanctify some kind of romantic attraction -- the partners are witnessing to their commitment to forming a stable household together, a household that will be hospitable to others (primarily their own biological children). We can draw different consequences from that. In fact, I think one could draw pro-gay-marriage consequences from that idea, or one could draw anti-gay-marriage consequences.
Anyway:
Two things prompted the Swedes to take this extra step--the welfare state and cultural attitudes. No Western economy has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures--or higher tax rates--than Sweden. The massive Swedish welfare state has largely displaced the family as provider. By guaranteeing jobs and income to every citizen (even children), the welfare state renders each individual independent. It's easier to divorce your spouse when the state will support you instead.
The taxes necessary to support the welfare state have had an enormous impact on the family. With taxes so high, women must work. This reduces the time available for child rearing, thus encouraging the expansion of a day-care system that takes a large part in raising nearly all Swedish children over age one. Here is at least a partial realization of Simone de Beauvoir's dream of an enforced androgyny that pushes women from the home by turning children over to the state.
[...]
There are also cultural-ideological causes of Swedish family decline. Even more than in the United States, radical feminist and socialist ideas pervade the universities and the media. Many Scandinavian social scientists see marriage as a barrier to full equality between the sexes, and would not be sorry to see marriage replaced by unmarried cohabitation. A related cultural-ideological agent of marital decline is secularism. Sweden is probably the most secular country in the world. Secular social scientists (most of them quite radical) have largely replaced clerics as arbiters of public morality. Swedes themselves link the decline of marriage to secularism. And many studies confirm that, throughout the West, religiosity is associated with institutionally strong marriage, while heightened secularism is correlated with a weakening of marriage. Scholars have long suggested that the relatively thin Christianization of the Nordic countries explains a lot about why the decline of marriage in Scandinavia is a decade ahead of the rest of the West.
So what exactly is the problem with all this? I know that the author of the article assumes it must be obvious, but why are we fighting so hard to preserve marriage and traditional morality? The author mentions "protecting children," but only one sentence in the entire article is about the concrete effects on children of altered family structures. The author talks about all manner of social trends, groups countries by their relative decline, makes some remarks about the influences of the Catholic Church and the welfare state -- and a remark about children, who should be the focus of this debate, is thrown in the middle, almost as an aside.
In addition, while he's blaming the high taxes necessary to sustain a welfare state, what to make of the fact that the United States is second only to Sweden in family dissolution? Why not point out that the high point of the "traditional family" in America was also the high point of labor unions? If we're going to make an economic argument, we might as well make an economic argument. If adverse economic conditions (such as high taxes) make for the dissolution of the family, then why not do something to correct the gross inequalities of wealth in our nation?
We need someone to start talking about all these family/marriage/sodomy issues intelligently -- that is, with an eye toward what the goal of marriage is, what kind of society we want, and what the facts on the ground are. This article barely meets the third requirement.
