it is reversible or even that it was avoidable. Indeed, virtually all of the social changes we have so recently experienced are the bittersweet fruits of the success of our modern, democratic, liberal, enlightened society – celebrating equality, freedom, and universal secularized education, and featuring prosperity, mobility, and astonishing progress in science and technology. Even brief reflection shows how the dominant features of the American way of life are finally inhospitable to the stability of marriage and family life, and to the mores that lead people self-consciously to marry.
Tocqueville already observed the unsettling implications of American individualism, each person seeking only in himself for the reasons of things. The celebration of equality gradually undermines the authority of religion, tradition, and custom, and, within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons. A nation dedicated to safeguarding individual rights to liberty and the privately defined pursuit of happiness is, willy-nilly, preparing the way for the “liberation” of women, and in the absence of powerful nonliberal cultural forces such as traditional biblical religion that defend sex-linked social roles, the most likely outcome is androgyny in education and employment. Further, our liberal approach to important moral issues in terms of the rights of individuals – for example, contraception as part of a right to privacy, or abortion as belonging to a woman’s right over her own body, or procreation as governed by a right to reproduce – flies in the face of the necessarily social character of sexuality and marriage. The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights-bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply.
While poverty is not generally good for courtship and marriage, neither is luxury. The lifestyles of the rich and famous have long been rich also in philandering, divorce, and the neglect of children. Necessity becomes hidden from view by the possibilities for self-indulgence; the need for service and self-sacrifice, so necessary for marriage understood as procreative, is rarely learned in the lap of plenty. Thanks to unprecedented prosperity, huge numbers of American youth have grown up in the lap of luxury, and it shows. It’s an old story: Parents who slave to give their children everything they themselves were denied rarely produce people who will be similarly disposed toward their own children. Spoiled children make bad spouses and worse parents; when they eventually look for a mate, they frequently look for someone who will continue to cater to their needs and whims. For most people, the mother of virtue and maturity is necessity, not luxury.
The progress of science and technology, especially since World War II, has played a major role in creating an enfeebling culture of luxury. But scientific advances have more directly helped to undermine the customs of courtship. Technological advances in food production and distribution and a plethora of appliances – refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, etc. – largely eliminate the burdens of housekeeping; not surprisingly, however, homemaking itself disappears with the burdens, for the unburdened housewife now finds outside fish to fry. More significantly, medical advances have virtually eliminated infant mortality and deadly childhood diseases, contributing indirectly to a reduction in family size. The combination of longer life expectancy and effective contraception means that, for the first time in human history, the childbearing and childrearing years occupy only a small fraction (one-fifth to one-fourth) of a woman’s life; it is therefore less reasonable that she be solely prepared for, and satisfied by, the vocation of motherhood. Lastly, medical advances quite independent of contraception have prepared the drive toward sexual liberation: the triumph of the sexual is a predictable outcome of the successful pursuit, through medicine, of the young and enduringly healthy human body.
In fact, in his New Atlantis, Francis Bacon foresaw that the most likely social outcome of medical success would be a greatly intensified eroticism and promiscuous sexuality, in which healthy and perfected bodies seek enjoyment here and now without regard to the need for marriage, procreation, and childrearing. To counter these dangers, Bacon has his proposed utopian society establish the most elaborate rituals to govern marriage, and give its highest honor – after those conferred on the men of science – to the man who has sired over thirty living descendants (within marital boundaries). Without such countervailing customs, the successful pursuit of longer life and better health would lead to a culture of protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license, as Bacon clearly understood – and as we have seen in recent decades.
Technology aside, even the ideas of modern science have hurt the traditional understanding of sex. The rejection of a teleological view of nature has damaged most of all the teleological view of our sexuality. Sure, children come from the sex act, but the sex act no longer naturally derives its meaning or purpose from this procreative possibility. After all, a man spends perhaps all of thirty seconds of his sexual life procreating; sex is thus about something else. The separation of sex from procreation achieved in this half century by contraception was worked out intellectually much earlier; and the implications for marriage were drawn in theory well before they were realized in practice. Immanuel Kant, modernity’s most demanding and most austere moralist, nonetheless gave marriage a heady push down the slippery slope: Seeing that some marriages were childless, and seeing that sex had no necessary link to procreation, Kant redefined marriage as “a lifelong contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia.” If this be marriage, any reason for its permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity vanishes.
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite), but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. With adultery almost as American as apple pie, few people appreciate the awe-ful shame of The Scarlet Letter. The taboos against the sexual abominations of Leviticus – incest, homosexuality, and bestiality – are going the way of all flesh, the second with religious blessings, no less. Ancient religious teachings on marriage have lost their authority even for people who regard themselves as serious Jews or Christians: Who really believes that husbands should govern their wives as Christ governs the church, or that a husband should love his wife as Christ loved the church and should give himself up to death for her (Ephesians 5:24–25)?
The Natural Obstacle
Not all the obstacles to courtship and marriage are cultural. At bottom, there is also the deeply ingrained, natural waywardness and unruliness of the human male. Sociobiologists were not the first to discover that males have a penchant for promiscuity and polygyny; this was well known to biblical religion. Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women; lacking woman’s powerful and immediate link to life’s generative answer to mortality, men flee from the fear of death into heroic deeds, great quests, or sheer distraction. One can make a good case that biblical religion is, not least, an attempt to domesticate male sexuality and male erotic longings, and to put them in the service of transmitting a righteous and holy way of life through countless generations.
For as long as American society kept strong its uneasy union between modern liberal political principles and Judeo-Christian moral and social beliefs, marriage and the family could be sustained and could even prosper. But the gender-neutral individualism of our political teaching has, it seems, at last won the day, and the result has been male “liberation” – from domestication, from civility, from responsible self-command. Contemporary liberals and conservatives alike are trying to figure out how to get men to “commit” to marriage, or to keep their marital vows, or to stay home with the children, but their own androgynous view of humankind prevents them from seeing how hard it has always been to make a monogamous husband and devoted father out of the human male.
Ogden Nash had it right: “Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous; higamus hogamus, women monogamous.” To make naturally polygamous men accept the conventional institution of monogamous marriage – rightly deemed necessary for the proper care and rearing of the next generation – has been the work of centuries of Western