Corrections
March 1, 2012
IN MY POST earlier today about James Taranto’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal, I incorrectly assumed a typo was made in one of his sentences. He said artificial contraception is not harmful to women who choose career over family or who don’t want children. I thought he also said that artificial contraception is not harmful to women who cannot find husbands. Actually, as he has clarified, he meant that artificial contraception is not harmful to married women. I reply to his clarified point in that entry.
I also made another error. I said his point about the harmlessness of artificial contraception is “stunningly clueless.” That is an overstatement. His point is wrong but it is an opinion obviously shared by the vast majority of Americans and thus is not stunningly clueless. It would have been stunning if he had said that artificial contraception has damaged the bond of trust between the generations even in intact families, contributed to the high incidence of divorce, lessened the love between spouses, eroded the self-confidence of women, and brought us to the brink of cultural suicide.
— Comments —-
Jesse Powell writes:
After reading James Taranto’s article in the Wall Street Journal, I see it as in the mold of the “rational actor” theory of social behavior which tends to assume that people make rational choices given their circumstances and that changes in widespread social indicators are the result of changes in the environment that people then adapt to. This is a kind of “rational economic man” argument applied to the social sciences. In this way of viewing things there might be “unintended consequences” to new developments such as the invention of the birth control pill but there can never be “social pathologies” where people’s behavior is downright pathological and self-destructive both on an individual and collective basis.
Taranto therefore would assert that a woman who prioritizes career over family, does not want children, and is married could not be someone considered to have been harmed by birth control since the woman is getting everything she wants; she has her husband, her career, and no children; just how she likes it. Birth control helps her to maintain her child-free state and therefore is a benefit to her. If her husband later divorces her because of her refusal to have children that is a problem for another day.
Taranto says in the article, “By and large, it is the women of Murray’s ‘Belmont’ who have been the beneficiaries of feminism and the sexual revolution, and those of ‘Fishtown’ who have suffered the ill effects.” Belmont here is meant to represent the upper class while Fishtown represents the lower class. This idea that the upper class has benefited from feminism while the lower class has paid the price is based on the idea that the upper class is enjoying the new freedoms of feminism without suffering much accompanying family breakdown while for the lower class the problems of family breakdown are severe.
Taranto is advocating an argument friendly to social conservatism here but it is from a frame of reference that I think is misguided. I do not think the social phenomenon of the past 50 years can be explained by rational choice in response to changing circumstances. I instead think that what is going on is a social pathology that is not in anyone’s rational interest. The women of Belmont are better off and so are less harmed by feminism but the women of Belmont are still being harmed.
Taranto may claim that such an assertion on my part is ascribing “false consciousness” to those who disagree but I consider the never ending deterioration shown in a wide variety of social indicators as not simple adaptation to changing circumstances; instead something is seriously wrong with the culture. If I was to say that Jessica Olien (referred to in the Illegitimacy and its Legitimizations post) would be better off raising the children she may have in the future with a husband to support her rather than as a single parent as she herself proclaims is her preference does that mean I am ascribing to Jessica Olien a “false consciousness”? If the answer is yes then I am guilty as charged. I do believe that Jessica Olien would be better off raising children with a husband to support her than as a single parent in direct contradiction of what she herself says. The assumption that people always behave in a rational way to maximize their self-interest is simply false.
