Broken Family, Broken CivilizationWhat kind of society produces little children who curse and attack cops?
Rod Dreher
July 12, 2022
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Now, to business: I was communicating last week with a friend from Baton Rouge who recently moved with his wife and kids when he took a job elsewhere, and who is bearish on the city’s future. He said that the truth is, violent crime is really bad there, and it’s never going to get much better. The truth is, he said, that the crime is overwhelmingly committed by young black males, usually victimizing other black people. He doesn’t see things getting any better because the multigenerational poverty of north Baton Rouge, which is predominantly black, is tied to the collapse of the black family.
My contribution to the conversation was to relate an anecdote I’ve shared with you readers before: something I heard from an older white friend who lived in north Baton Rouge until fairly recently, the only white person in his neighborhood. He told me that the collapse of the family was at the root of all the problems he saw in his neighborhood. He was close to the grandmothers and grandfathers of his own generation who lived in the block, and said that those elderly men and women are the last things standing between the community and anarchy. And they are dying out. I asked this older white man what white Baton Rougeans can do to help. He said that he was at a loss to know, saying that whatever solution is going to have to come from within the black community, because whites have zero authority or trust among black folks.
The other day, sociologist Brad Wilcox noted:
https://twitter.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/1545366042884595714Wilcox and his colleague Chris Bullivant recently wrote a USA Today op-ed saying that family collapse is at the heart of so many problems plaguing black America, but elites don’t want to hear it. Excerpt:
When it comes to confronting some of our country’s most serious problems – from child poverty to school failure to mass incarceration to the fading of the American dream – one of the biggest factors driving these problems cannot be uttered in our national conversation.
It’s verboten.
This is a factor that predicts school suspensions, neighborhood trends in incarceration, state patterns in child poverty and the health of the American dream in communities across the country better than many of the factors that dominate that conversation.
In mainstream media outlets, on college campuses, in public schools and the halls of Congress, we hear that race is the critical issue, or poverty, or income inequality or inadequate public spending on issue after issue.
All the while, the social factor that often supercedes these other factors is left unmentioned.
We’re talking about the F-word. Family. For all of the problems mentioned above, for instance, family stability is a better predictor than factors like race, government spending and education. In other words, whether or not children grow up with two stably married parents or live in neighborhoods dominated by lone-parent families often ends up being more important than many of the factors that occupy the attention of our ruling class.
We can’t talk about this — not how it affects black people, or how it affects white people, or anybody else — because to do so would mean negating a core belief of the Sexual Revolution: that realizing individual sexual happiness is the summum bonum. So we have to redefine family, and pretend that the collapse of the traditional family as a binding social ideal is no big deal. Reminds me of the historians who downplay the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, saying it was rather a period of “transition” to a different social system. The Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins says this is crazy talk: that the fall of Rome was an overwhelming catastrophe in terms of living standards and stability. Similarly, you can’t lose the family and expect to have a civilization. The black community in the US was the first to experience this, but unless something radical intervenes, it’s coming for the rest of us eventually.
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I was just on the phone talking with a criminologist friend, who has a paper soon to be published, predicting a future of more violent crime and turmoil based on two social trends: the inability of larger numbers of young males to find a permanent marriage partner, and the steady proliferation of fatherlessness, as the family crumbles. The paper will soon be published, so I can share it with you then. His essay is based on data and historical analysis. He says that the historical record of civilizations shows that polygyny is the normal form of social order. That is, strong and wealthy men attract a large number of wives, who prefer to share a rich husband with other women than to struggle in life alongside a poor husband devoted exclusively to them. Current social science shows that for women, social status and financial resources are what women find most attractive in a man; for me, it’s the physical attractiveness of the woman. The real-world result of contemporary social and economic dynamics are that a small percentage of men are competing for a majority of women, and a majority of men are competing for a relatively small number of women. It seems that as Christianity, with its social norms, fades away, the old ways are reasserting themselves.
The scientist points out that fatherlessness is the single most accurate predictor of whether or not a child will grow up to be poor, sick, and/or involved in crime. A staggering 85 percent of men in prison were raised without fathers. I won’t say much else about the paper, pending its publication, but his conclusion is this: that we have collectively forgotten the habits and customs it takes to maintain a civilization. The most important one is building and maintaining stable families, and family systems. Post-Christian liberal individualism has done a woodchipper act on the family. You think all these young people being educated by elite Western institutions to explore their genderfluidity, and chop their own breasts or nuts off, are going to have the psychological maturity to be stable husbands and wives, and raise sane kids?
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/broken-family-broken-civilization/
