[A review of Charles Murray's "Coming Apart"]

The products of the entertainment industry still usually validated American norms. Subjects such as abortion and homosexuality were never touched upon in television shows, only rarely and disapprovingly in movies. Most liberals were willing to say that extramarital sex was wrong. Only three and one-half percent of American families were headed by a divorced parent. In many neighborhoods, houses were left unlocked and children could go about unsupervised.

But American women had “much to be outraged about,” the author tells us, such as being expected to marry and have children! If Murray gets portrayed as a ‘hard-rightist,’ it is only because presenting data honestly is now all such a designation requires or implies.

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Murray writes that “being a single mother is tough, and it is appropriate to sympathize with women who are in that situation.” He does not say it is appropriate to be sympathetic to the manchildren of Fishtown, and most readers will be left with the impression that what they need is a good kick in the pants. Yet I wonder whether the same factors did not produce the undesirable behavior of both men and women that he notes today.

In the America of 1963, a high school graduate might expect to find a job which would allow him to marry and permit his wife the leisure to stay home raising a few children. He could buy a freestanding house and a car, and still afford to take the family on a two week vacation every summer. The wife would have been reared with a view to preparing her for the duties of marriage and motherhood; she may even have taken ‘Home Ec’ in school.

Then gradually, beginning in the 1960s, women became convinced marriage was an imposition to be ‘outraged’ about. Helen Gurley Brown began whispering in their ears that an independent career path could be filled with exciting romances involving attractive men, free of the ‘drudgery’ to which marriage consigned their mothers. The family income was abolished in favor of ‘equal pay for equal work.’ The law was changed to permit women to divorce their husbands unilaterally and without grounds. (Wives are responsible for around ninety percent of divorces.)

None of this much affects the men at the top of the income and status hierarchy. They make enough money that even women with personal incomes perceive them as supporters and are willing to marry them. If a wife leaves after the baby is born, child support payments are manageable and a replacement wife is easily found.

The Fishtown girls who might have married working men in 1960 may well be earning more than such men today just by sitting at desks entering data. They can obtain higher quality sperm from more desirable men without submitting to the constraints of lifelong monogamy; the ‘ex’ and/or the taxpayer is made to provide for any resulting children. They even enjoy the sympathy of male commentators for the terrible hardship all this supposedly represents. Is it any wonder such women are reluctant to devote their lives to raising the children of ill-paid construction workers?

The contemporary Fishtown man, his wages reduced by female competition and the ever-decreasing market value of upper-body strength, has correspondingly slim chances of earning enough to make himself an acceptable suitor to any woman with an income of her own. These men are not ‘retreating from the marriage market’; they are being driven from it as a matter of deliberate policy.

Even if a particular working class man beats the odds and finds a girl to marry, he cannot expect the satisfaction of supporting her; she may well end up supporting him. And what self-respecting man wants to end up like that poor sap uselessly tagging along behind his wife who just bought all the groceries?

But this is still not the worst. Prospective husbands stand a good chance of losing everything in the divorce settlement within a few years of the wedding. Child support is not so easy when it must be paid through low-skilled labor. Even if you avoid being jailed as a ‘deadbeat dad,’ you will certainly not have enough left over to contemplate a second marriage.

In short, the American dream of a home and family through honest labor is now far out of reach for an increasing number of low-status men. Under these circumstances, what is such a man to do with his life? I’d say an unconstrained bachelor existence with plenty of time for amusements looks very much like a rational choice. The male commentariat may make you out to be a bum, but that sure beats years of performing all the hard work traditionally required to support a family and then not getting the family.

Aristotle understood that certain virtues have social presuppositions: liberality, for example, can hardly be expected from persons living hand-to-mouth. Male industriousness, I would suggest, also presupposes certain social arrangements. Monogamy and the family wage system give you the Irish immigrant who strives to make gentlemen of his children with every blow of his axe; liberated women earning equal pay for their equal work bring forth the men of the Sunshine Club.

So single motherhood and the decline in male industriousness our author describes cannot be spirited away simply by getting men and women to the altar. ‘Outrageous’ though it may seem to a generation steeped in feminist propaganda, the natural economic basis of marriage must also be restored. White men are programmed by evolution to be providers. If you deliberately rearrange society to render this function superfluous, do you have any right to complain when men stop knocking themselves out to perform it?