[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Also this whole "breakdown of marriage" is inane to me. Women nowadays don't have their success tied to being one half of a marriage, and thus often they choose not to tie themselves down. My parents both had a father present in their lives, but one of them was a PTSD riddled alcoholic and the other was an alcoholic, drug addicted pedophile. Just because fathers were present in those days doesn't mean they were always good fathers. It just meant that their wives had no option but to stick it out if they wanted to keep their kids.

Sorry, the jury is out there isn't any question that the decline of marriage and the increase of out-of-wedlock births a strongly correlated to economic decline and poverty.

How America's Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse (the Atlantic)

The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.

Marriage is the new class divide (the Globe and Mail)

Today, these classes live in two different worlds, one in which neo-traditional marriage is flourishing and one in which two-parent families are dying off. Ironically, the people who have constructed traditional families for themselves are often loath to condemn the behaviour of others, for fear of seeming unenlightened, intolerant or judgmental.

Originally Posted by jammies

That's the one myth of the left I really take issue with - cultural relativity. It's contradictory with the liberal idea of human progress, for one: if all cultures are equal, why even try to change your culture, since you're just going to end up with something different, and not better? It's a pessimistic view of humanity that is logically only consistent with fatalism.

If you accept that progress is possible, the inescapable conclusion is that some cultures really have progressed more, and are better, than others. This shouldn't be a cause for complacency and smug self-congratulations, but rather an opportunity to look at other cultures to see what *they* do better than *we* do, then to understand how they do it, and then to emulate them.

Well said. I wish I could thank this post twice.

Originally Posted by wittynickname

The "breakdown of traditional family" is a myth. Black communities are plagued with limited resources, poor education, excessive enforcement of archaic drug laws, excessive punishment for minor non-violent crimes, for-profit prisons which reward recidivism, etc.

But poor and working-class whites are now following the same trajectory in out-of-wedlock births, single-parent families, and economic decline.

Here's a thought-provoking column by David Brooks in the New York Times on the subject of family, morality, and decline.

The Cost of Relativism

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do...

The first response to these stats and to these profiles should be intense sympathy. We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.

But it’s increasingly clear that sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.