The Controller Speaks
March 24, 2011
JESSE POWELL writes:
It is sad to learn that divorce and illegitimacy have come to Sioux County, Iowa. I didn’t know that rural white areas had much lower rates of divorce and illegitimacy than the nation as a whole not so long ago.
Reading the comments from the peanut gallery, however, the mood is much more triumphant. It is quite shocking to read all the cheerleading and celebrating over the increasing divorce rate to be found in rural America; city folk seem to be pleased that finally their rural counterparts are “getting with the program” that divorce is something to be welcomed and celebrated. As the comment with the greatest number of “Recommend” votes by far puts it:
MKM Ohio March 24th, 2011 7:46 am
“Women have always gotten a bad deal when it came to marriage. Marriage has never been good for women. All the housework, laundry, cooking, childbearing (that includes taking care of an adult child – husband). All for what? A roof over your head? No thanks. Women can work and keep their own roof over their heads now – without having to put up with all the garbage from a husband and in-laws. Face it, marriage sucks if you’re a woman. Why even bother?”
Laura writes:
“MKM’s” comment reminds me of the vivid scene in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which the Controller explains to his young students at the Conditioning Centre how revolting life was in the past when women bore their own children and families (families!) lived under one roof:
“Try to realize it,” [the Controller said,] and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering through their diaphragms. “Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.”
That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.
“Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.”
They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.
“And do you know what a ‘home’ was?”
They shook their heads.
…..
[The Controller continued,] Home, home – a few small rooms, stiflingly overinhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.
(The Controller’s evocation was so vivid that one of the boys, more sensitive than the rest, turned pale at the mere description and was on the point of being sick.)
And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the memebrs of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children) ….. brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, “My baby, my baby,” over and over again. [Brave New World, Chapt. 3, pp. 23-24]
— Comments —
Peter S. writes:
Apart from the remarkable bias toward women of the previously linked New York Times article, as well as that of many of the article comments following, the most salient aspect of the piece is this: the most rock-ribbed of American women are catching up to some of the most destructive cultural habits of their hip, urban, liberal sisters. Not all women, of course: many – a majority – remain faithful to their husbands and marriages. But the trendlines for marriage and family life continue to degrade year after year. Further, so far as American women in general follow such trendlines – as shown, for example, in the graph accompanying the article – it becomes progressively more problematic for a man to identify a potential wife with whom he can jointly establish a durable commitment for marriage and the raising of children. It is not enough for a man to find, say, a conservative, churchgoing woman, marry her and assume that all will be well; on the contrary, there is a fair chance that all, quite possibly, will not be well – and by “not well”, one might do well to review an authority such as Stephen Baskerville.
As the article rightly point out, a durable commitment to their marriages – such as one enforced before the advent of no-fault divorce, now available in every state of America – will inevitably trap some women in abusive, unsupportive, loveless or other types of poor marital situations. Such tragedy on the margins can never be wholly eradicated from the human condition. But the extension of female choice through elimination of a durable commitment to marriage by the State has had the perfectly foreseeable consequence of causing disincentives toward marriage in the first place, particularly on the part of men, who are most at risk in the event of marital breakdown, given the greater propensity for women to exit the relationship, the presumption of mother custody, and the ensuing transfer of payments in the event of divorce.
What should be obvious is that without durable marriage as a dominant societal institution, Western culture cannot be sustained, either in terms of replacement birth rates or in terms of the socialization of the young to carry the knowledge, practices and values of that culture forward to the next generation. The double lesson of both black urban societal breakdown in the United States, as predicted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and white lower-class societal breakdown in Great Britain, as described by Theodore Dalrymple, shows how quickly this process may occur, as quickly as two or three generations.
As a final point, given the recent discussion of “game”, it should be fairly noted that the interest in “game” on the part of some married men stems typically from a fundamentally different motivation than that of unattached lotharios employing “game” in a rather different context. As reductive and corrupting as “game” can be, the motivation for “game” on the part of married men is, quite transparently, an attempt to armor themselves against potential ruination at the hands of their wives. An unanswered question for such men is this: given sufficient time, the tragedies of life may be relied upon to occur. One cannot be “on game” continuously over the course of decades. What then?
