Joel, the reader who wrote in the previous entry, sends this:

I appreciate your reply.  The sense of abandonment felt by middle-class aspiring males in my generation is immense.  Combine this with the preachiness and sentimentality of most social conservatives from older generations, my mother being a good example, and you get a festering resentment toward more traditional forms of living.

After looking at your recommended articles, I still adhere to my prior criticisms, since what you propose is “after the military coup” sort of stuff.  It’s nothing that has any relevance to current electoral and demographic politics, and I’d receive nothing but derision, if I mentioned your policies in any of the social environments of which I spoke earlier.  

Basically, the problem for traditionalists, like you and Lawrence Auster, is that there’s simply no way to get from here to there, the policies make sense but they are irrelevant for any current political realities.  In this way, you both resemble the more idealist libertarians, who start from a set of foundationalist principles and then construct a nice, orderly, mess-free society from scratch.  One thing you’re going to have to handle is the functional atheism of large numbers of young urbanites, and even suburbanites.  Sure, lots of people will purposelessly assent to the notion that there might be some sort of spiritual world, but there is no functional meaning behind such assent.  They are functionally atheist, even many who attend church, and they are only going to get more numerous as time progresses.

The only policies that are worth anything are those that are electorally viable, bringing voters to the traditionalist party, and that promote family creation by individuals in their early 20s.  All the policies you adovcate meet the second criteria but fail the first.

Laura writes:

Go ahead and stay within the confines of what a corrupt electorate will approve. You will go mad and watch Rome burn as you do.

There is no need to come up with policies that promote family formation in order for family formation to occur. The only thing that is needed is men and women. Creating a new electorate is remarkably easy.

You accuse me of coming up with unrealistic pie-in-the-sky scenarios, “of constructing a nice, orderly mess-free society from scratch.” That is an absurd accusation. If anything, this website is devoted to advising people to go ahead and make the messiest of all things: a family. There is nothing nice and orderly about it, but it carries the solution to many of our problems. Traditionalists have this one major advantage. They are willing and able to make this kind of mess.

Any man who loves the West, who has two nickels to rub together, and who is of child-bearing age should immediately help to rebuild society from scratch. It’s too late to dither around. He needs a wife and four walls. She doesn’t have to be a perfect wife. If she divorces him, he should proceed to find another. I’ve known too many women starving for the love of men to think there are none out there. But if he’s going to wait around for the prettiest, most successful young woman, or if he’s going to wait until they are both rich enough to afford Harvard for their children, I say,”Let them both drown in their tears.”

The important thing is that he create new life and that he convey his love for his civilization to a new generation. The opposition cannot create these children and cannot convey this love. We don’t need “electorally viable” anything. If we go up in flames, at least he will know he has done his duty and tried to prevent it.

                                                            — Comments —-

Karen I. writes:

Your recent posts advocating having families on the young side contain excellent advice. I had started succeeding in a career I had worked hard for when I ditched it to start my family in my mid 20s. The time just seemed right even though finances and the accepted path to career success said otherwise. I often thank God I followed my instincts, because I got very sick in my early 30s, when many of my peers were starting to “consider” having children. I wound up having to have a necessary hysterectomy to save my life after extensive medical intervention failed to cure my worsening illness. I am much better and have been for several years thanks to the operation but if we had followed the modern thinking about the ideal time and circumstances for starting a family, it would have been a tragedy for me and my husband.     

Lisa writes:

Joel needs to stop whining, work hard, save money, and marry someone  he trusts.  The only problem with your advice to him is that under the current legal climate, divorce can be extremely dificult for a man.  It is not as simple as finding another woman and  starting over.  If he had children with the first woman, she can  destroy the second marriage and leave the second set of children destitute.

I think most of the criticisms of social conservatives are just a lot  of whining; people don’t want to hear that the solutions to our problems are unglamorous and a lot of hard work.  However, one  absolutely valid criticism is that nothing is going to get better until family law is reformed.  No-fault divorce needs to be ended and there needs to be equity between the sexes in family court.  We cannot  tell people “just get married” when there really is no legal marriage anymore.

A social movement to restore marriage would include a lot of  marriageable women and would be a good place for someone like to Joel to find a wife.      

Laura writes:

The possibility of divorce is a serious concern. But it is not a reason to avoid marriage. A man who finds a woman who believes in God and a higher moral order is ahead of the game. She is preferable as a wife for many reasons, not simply because she is less likely to divorce him.

Until that day when our divorce laws are reformed, men must become wiser about how to handle the capriciousness of women. A significant minority of women are constitutionally incapable of handling the marital freedoms our society has  granted them. I recommend Michelle Langley’s book The Infidelity of Women, available for download on the Internet. I don’t fully agree with Langley, but she gives some good advice for men. The problem isn’t simply infidelity, but the wandering spirit of women. Our society encourages them to indulge romantic dreams of a life beyond their first marriage.

I agree that it is not as simple as finding another woman and starting over. But at least a man is likely to have children.

Tracie C. writes:

What on earth is stopping Joel and his friends from getting married and starting families? If uneducated peasants in Third World countries, often living under despotic governments and in rank poverty, can manage to do so then it’s ridiculous to think that he cannot. 

My husband and I married 25 years ago, when I was 19 and he 21; our first child arrived 14 months after the wedding ceremony. We began married life very poor, by any definition, but our lack of funds never stopped us. At that time, young couples just starting out were expected to not have much – success came later, when your children were older and you were more established in your career. So many young people today don’t seem to want to make compromises anywhere, and seem to expect to start out with what took their parents many years to achieve. 

Incidentally, our son, age 22, just recently got married. He and his new bride live in San Diego, which consistently rates as one of the most expensive U.S. cities to live in. If he had waited until his income fit his economic and social surroundings, he’d probably still be single into his 50’s.  

Lisa continues:

It occurs to me that what Joel needs is specific instructions for  finding a wife.  I don’t have any ideas, other than “go to church.”  I  think it’s actually easier for a marriage-minded woman to find a husband.  As a good friend of mine of says, if you want a man, go to where the men are and pick one.  Take up competitive shooting, learn Linux, go to Libertarian Party events and science fiction conventions.  Serious, marriage-minded women don’t waste time in the singles social scene.  Even gold-diggers don’t bother.  It always  makes me laugh when guys online complain about the bars being full of materialistic gold-diggers.  Real gold-diggers don’t go to bars; they  go to yacht club parties.

Laura writes:

Mature women  used to devote their lives to helping their sons and daughters, and the other young men and women they knew, find mates. That’s what kills me. It’s another tradition lost. I see middle-aged women having a great time in their off-hours while their adult children slog to bars to find someone to love. Courtship today is a disaster. Granted, it’s never easy, but today it lacks all conventions. It’s a shapeless free-for-all and some women become lesbians out of revulsion while some men retreat to their video games at home.

It’s difficult for men who want to marry in their twenties because there’s no pressure for women to commit when they’re young. Women waste their time in offices and in casual relationships while their childbearing years fly by. They are fed the lie that this somehow represents the height of progress for women. In truth, it represents the very pinnacle of stupidity and a form of mass cultural suicide.

Of course, the men are wasting their time too. They are every bit as much caught up in the hedonism of it all.

Alan Roebuck writes:

So what would I say to a young man contemplating the current sexual dystopia? I’d say this:

“Young man, you have to make a choice. You have enough awareness to know that the current social order of America is radically unjust and disordered, so you’ll have to decide whether to play according to the false and degenerate rules of the current liberal order, or to seek out a remnant of a better order. If life is primarily about getting what you want, then by all means, master the rules of Game. But if you want to live better, you need to seek out people (especially women) who reject the current disorder, and who acknowledge and seek to live according to a better order, one that reflects truths about man, society and God.

“These people are usually called ‘fundamentalist Christians,’ but why would you trust a label given by the people who are busy destroying our nation in the name of their false and often evil ideals? Indeed, many people who seek to live in accordance with better ideals are not ‘fundamentalists’ according to any sane definition of the term, and some of them are barely Christians at all. But they do exist, and they can be found if you make the effort.

“Looking just to get laid is the outlook of a sissy boy. If you want to be a man (and of course you should), you need to reject the childish hedonism in which liberalism wants you to wallow.

“And think of it: if enough young men do as I’m counseling, then the liberal order will start to collapse for lack of enough competent people to maintain it. And then you’ll have the last laugh.”

Laura F. writes:

I’ve been reading Joel’s comments and I just don’t get them. Late marriage is common, but no-one is being forced to wait until 30 to get married. I met my husband while we were both doing masters degrees. We got married at 25 while he was doing a PhD. I earned a little money doing translations on my laptop and he had no job at all (and no grants for the PhD). Our first baby was born after we’d been married a year and a half and he was finishing up his thesis. I stopped doing any paid work. Then he got a very poorly paid job at a private high school. Now he has another academic job that pays about the same, although the cost of living in our current town is lower. We now have three children. I have started doing a little translation work again, bringing in maybe $2000 a year. It’s not a large income but we get by, and families can lend each other things (like children’s clothes). I never felt any pressure to delay my marriage or childbearing. I’d like to read a more specific explanation of what is making people feel they can’t get married in their twenties.

Laura writes:

I understand exactly where Joel is coming from. When men and women are both caught up in getting traction in serious careers, the idea of getting married and having children in the middle of it  seems like a quaint artifact from a simpler time. Besides why bother? You can already have the intimacy without marriage.

One of my favorite movies about newlyweds is Barefoot in the Park. Jane Fonda is presumably a woman in her twenties, indifferent to career. In fact, there isn’t the slightest mention as I remember of a job for her. She and Robert Redford have a bare-bones New York walk-up with a tiny bedroom and kitchenette. She is exhilarated to be a new wife and puts every ounce of herself into it. There are not many young women that age today – certainly not women from elite colleges – as openly excited to be brides. They put all that romantic verve into becoming human resource directors or lawyers. Then when they’re in their 30s and have already slept with a dozen men, they plan a wedding to rival that of Princess Di.

One of the interesting leitmotifs of this movie is that the couple apparently has not had sex before the honeymoon. They spend days sequestered in the Plaza Hotel. Who needs a lavish wedding when marriage is as exciting as that? 

Laura F. writes:

To clarify, I understand why people might choose to get married late, or not at all, but I don’t understand why people would feel pressured to do so. Joel seems to believe that there’s no point in encouraging people to marry young because their circumstances won’t permit it.

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