Family Values

Following on from the last post, traditional and humanist China was fixated on family values, to a level which most of us would find oppressive. The West no longer is, it seems.

My wife and I married in our late twenties. Even as sexual mores were changing (and the birth rates falling) in the 70s, it was still what one did. If people marry at all here now it is after a period of cohabitation, usually if children are on the way – but many don’t bother. Except for (many) Muslims and Hindus, where the girls are paired off to their cousins to breed.

We bought a little house, and after only a few years had children, I went to work as the “breadwinner” while wife stayed at home and looked after the children, a social circle of women’s groups and babysitting circles still in existence. It was free choice made by both of us. Neither of us are native to the area, and neither of us are religious. We are still together, after over 30 years of marriage (and yes, there have been some rough passages). This is not exceptional among the friends and relatives of my generation.

This now seems unbelievably archaic. For a start, to be able to buy a house largely on one modest income (albeit a middle class one) is not just not conceivable, except in those parts of the country where there are no decent jobs. Both sides in relationships have to work away, and if kids arrive at all, they have to be juggled with work. As a result social networks revolve around work.

The average length of a British marriage is now 12 years, it seems, and as for cohabiting couples, we don’t know. My instincts are that this is a social disaster (how often do we hear that absent fathers are the root cause of violent young men?) Taking the two main measures of social dysfunction as crime rates and inadequate birth rates (well below replacement) the facts are all over the place, however:

· As marriage rates have gone down, crime rates in nearly all developed countries rose sharply to a peak in the 80s/early 90s, but then have fallen sharply, but still higher than before the social changes that flowed (quite slowly) from the 60s.
· Scandinavia as the exemplar of secular society: marriage is almost dead, sexes very equal, a birth rate comparable to white America, low crime (it’s not like Stieg Larrson novels) except among immigrant ghettos where uber-traditional values still hold. To show it’s not just a post-Protestant thing, France is similar, but somewhat better at integrating immigrants.
· The UK has also seen falling crime rates, but they are higher as is anti-social behaviour, but concentrated in a native underclass: that is probably more the downside of our class system , as well as economic changes. Native birth rates are fairly healthy
· Conversely, those developed areas where cohabitation is still a no-no (southern Europe, east Asia) have disastrous birth rates.
· Americans still marry more than Europeans, even blue staters, but do serial monogamy with gusto irrespective of religious affiliation; crime somewhat higher, especially violent crime, in those areas where “tradtional values” are preached more.
· Capitalism doesn’t care about families, it wants productive units of consumption and production, irrespective of gender or other obligations, and to throw away the unproductive.

I don’t know what to make of all this. I certainly don’t think it has much to do with religion – already largely secular Europe stuck to traditional families till the 70s, and socialist Prime Minister Clement Attlee exhorting the “women of England to go back to their families” at the end of the war is from another age: they did too, and produced an unexpected baby boom. Christianity’s hang up about sex led to ambivalence about families in the early Church, and formal marriage remained secular until the late middle ages – and then mainly among the aristocracy and bourgeois, where property was involved, the only sectors of western society that ever gone in for arranged marriage.

It is certainly a massive uncontrolled social experiment, whose results are uncertain (like chucking all that carbon into the atmosphere). It needs reasoned debate and research, but that seems hard, with entrenched positions from the fornication-is-a-sin school on the one hand and from radical feminists on the other. Divorce or separation may be better than being stuck in an unhappy Victorian marriage, but commitment means something too, and sticking through the bad times of a relationship – and a stable relationship is one of the best indicators of long term personal happiness, and having children of personal fulfilment.

Societies which focus a lot on families have either weak states, or distant autocratic ones, like ancient China - and without the complex layers of social institutions which the West has. Perhaps weak families are then necessary so as not to make society too oppressive.