Further reflections on home and work

Everyone's heard by now about Hilary Rosen's comment that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life". Romney, who stayed at home and raised five boys, quickly answered this lazy charge, but this surely won't be the last time that a woman who stays at home will hear this accusation.

What grows personally wearisome is that this line of thought -- that staying home to raise children and keep house is not "work" -- suggests that these things are not because *I* am doing them. The maintenance of children would be work if I were paying someone else to do it; the education of children would be work if I were paying someone else to do it; the business of cleaning and cooking and generally managing a household would attain the status of "work" if I employed a butler, laundress, maid, and cook, but loses this distinction because I perform these activities in my own home for my own benefit and that of my family.

This raises the question of what, exactly, is work. Activity that receives financial compensation? Activity that takes one away from family? Activity done outside the home? Activity requiring management, external accountability, or special training?

Perhaps one of the reasons for the perception of stay-at-home mothers as non-working members of society is that they do things that have to be done even by people who work. Everyone's laundry has to be done; everyone needs groceries. All children need care and education. It's hardly surprising that a woman who, after a long day at work, drags herself to the store and feeds the kids and puts them to bed, might think, "Boy, women who stay at home really have it easy. Why should they complain when I do everything they do, and still put in a full day of work?"

This is a question that deserves to be answered, even if it's not an accurate description of the life of stay-at-home mothers (especially if they teach their children at home as well). The value of what women who stay at home do is not primarily monetary, though there is a large financial advantage in having an adult in a family whose time is dedicated to making the family and household run smoothly. But the stay-at-home mother is able to tailor her work to fit the family's specific needs and style. I know exactly where the stains in all the laundry are, because I'm here when the baby spills something on herself or the boy goes rolling down the grassy hill. I have the time to make meals that cost-efficient, nutritious, and personalized to my family's taste. All these are benefits that it would be very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to replace were I not at home most of the day.

But these are all things that could be done competently by a live-in housekeeper, and even lovingly by a relative. The true value of being at home with my children is that I am the one who is raising them. At every point, whether we're doing schoolwork or cleaning or reading or just hanging around, they're absorbing my values and culture, not that of the daycare staff or the nanny or the neighbor down the street. They're also absorbing my flaws -- any child who takes after me will be a mediocre housekeeper and an inveterate procrastinator -- but it's fine with me that my children have a safe and loving environment in which to encounter the idea that adults aren't perfect. If children are a gift from God, then I see it as my job to be a gift back to them, in the most personalized and effective way possible.

Not every mother is able to stay at home with her children, and not every woman wants that lifestyle, but it's absurd for anyone to denigrate the work of a stay-at-home mother, as if the inherent desire of a woman to raise and care for her own children was the height of decadence and luxury.

UPDATE: Apropos of the discussion of what stay-at-home mothers add to the economy,Rebecca Ryskind Teti reiterates the point she made in her chapter of Style, Sex, and Substance.

The economy exists to be sure each household has what it needs. What that requires may look different for each household (does it make more sense for us to outsource childcare or provide it ourselves?), but it’s the flourishing of the human person that is the point. Is someone sneering at you for not working outside the home? Smile. They work for you!



...The human person is of course not reducible to a mere “worker.” Still, in strictly economic terms, people are our most valuable economic resource and the family is not a nostalgic religious notion, but also the most essential engine of the economy. Stay-at-home moms are not outside the economy, they’re at the heart of it.

Nearer My God To Thee

The fabulously talented mezzo-soprano Anna Egan gave her Junior Recital yesterday. As it happened to be the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, she chose an encore piece that was reputed to be played by the band as the ship sank: Nearer My God To Thee. And since she has a number of siblings who would do anything to oblige her, she was able to get some four-part harmony going on. Alas, the performance video died, but here is an encore of the encore. You know it's at my dad's house because the Christmas tree is still up in April.

(Anna, as faithful readers will know, is the cute one with the curl in the middle of her forehead.)

There Are 2,227 Stories on the Big Ship

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, and so it's time to post a link I've been saving for years for this occasion: the biographies of almost every passenger and crew member on board. I give you fair warning that you can spend hours reading the stories and still not exhaust the human drama of the Titanic.

Your Friday Fix: Existential Edition

About to wrap up my work week, I feel for Henri The Existential Cat

Real Jobs

Foxfier has a good post up over at The American Catholic on the idiotic "being a full time mom is not a real job" attack which Obama proxy Hilary Rosen thought it might be a good idea to launch this week (which is probably about as big a favor as an Obama supporter could do to the GOP candidate apparent that no one on the Right really likes all that much.)

Yeah, I’m posting on that. Some idiot talking head makes a slam at a grandmother with MS and everyone has to comment about it. I think I have something worth saying, though, rather than just talking about it because it’s big.

I’m a stay at home mom. A home-maker. A house wife.

I have worked outside the home, before I got married, in a very similar field—I was a Petty Officer in the Navy, specializing in calibration. (Making sure things that measure are accurate enough.) Before that, I was in another similar field, at least sort of—I was a ranch kid.
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The Quintessential Pie Fight

Years ago, before the advent of the internet and search engines and Youtube, one might see a movie once and never stumble upon it again, which meant that certain scenes, remembered as they were viewed in the first flush of hysteria, achieved a crystalline status as the funniest thing ever.

Do such memories live up to the harsh reality of re-viewing? Not often. And yet, just last night I found a cinematic moment that has haunted me for two decades, and it was everything I remembered, and more:



"You simply must try my pies!"

It also struck me that there was a passing rememblance here to the past weeks of blog conversation at DarwinCatholic.

In Search of the 'Strong Female Character'

I've been continuing to use my commute time (and Audible subscription) to work through long (mostly older) books that I would otherwise have trouble finding the time to read at the moment. By chance, the last several that I've listened to have centered around female characters, and looking back over them I can't help reflecting on the differences and similarities between them and the more modern "strong female characters" one runs into in books and movies. (post contains plot spoilers on all books discussed)

Middlemarch: I found Middlemarch a bit slow to get into (this is where the audiobook format helps, I just have the one audiobook to listen to during all commutes, so there's no real temptation to set it aside and there's nothing else to do during my 30 minutes each way) because the main character, Dorothea, is so clearly chasing a phantom of sorts when we first meet here. Dorothea wants to do good things. When we first meet her, these good things mostly involve advocating for social improvements in her local town, which is pretty much to the good, but very shortly she meets the aged Edward Casaubon whom she is convinced is a Great Man. If, she thinks, she marries him and serves him selflessly, she will be doing Great Things. (You know that the girl is in for problems when she's daydreaming about how wonderful it would have been if she could have been Milton's wife or one of his daughters, because she thinks she would have been happy to have been badly treated by him and serve his genius.) Dorothea proceeds to marry Casaubon, and it quickly becomes clear this is not likely to make either of them very happy, though they muddle on through until Casaubon is taken mercifully off the scene by heart disease. She does learn a bit during this process, and is a more interesting character by the end than she was at the beginning, though she still doesn't know herself all that well for my taste. Given how thoroughly she deceived herself about Casaubon during their courtship, you can't help wondering how well her second marriage at the end of the book is actually likely to go.

Along the way, we get a couple of interesting female counterpoint characters. Rosamond Vincy (later Lydgate) is a character with a strong ability to get her way in interpersonal interactions, but a fairly shallow understanding of life and other people. She's strong in the sense that she sticks to her guns and plays very hard, but her inability to understand people and the world makes it hard to get what she actually wants, and tends to result in her struggles just creating situations that make her unhappy. Her marriage is the worst that we see in the book.

Mary Garth on the other hand is probably the actual strongest female character in the book. She works hard to support herself and her family (she's one of the poorer characters), understands people well, and toughs it out through several fairly unpleasant situations. Given this calm strength, one of Mary's more surprising choices is to marry Fred Vincy. Yes, he's had an affection for her ever since they were children, but he's also somewhat spoiled, a spendthrift, and not very good at buttoning down and holding a job. However, Mary manages to both admire him and steer him towards better behavior at the same time -- promising him she won't marry anyone else, but at the same time saying she won't marry him until he's able to provide for a family in a way she can respect. He does turn himself around, and from the epilogue they sound like the most successful marriage.

Of the three, I'd rate Mary Garth as the best "strong female character", though she does this in a fairly quiet way (and is honestly a comparatively minor character in the book.)

Jane Eyre: The book is a biographical novel, following Jane from her very young days through her marriage, and all other characters are fairly minor other than Jane Eyre herself and Mr. Rochester. As I wrote while I was still reading it, I was surprised how appealing I found the book and the title character. Confronted with a fairly Dickensian childhood and no prospects of marriage (due to being an orphan with no fortune, who is no great beauty and whose family is not interested in putting her forward in society) Jane has fairly limited prospects but makes the best of them quietly and with a good deal of self discipline. After teaching for several years in the school where she had been a pupil, she advertises for a position as a governess and finds herself at isolated Thornfield Hall teaching the young French ward of the absent Mr. Rochester.

As a male reader, I found Jane a very appealing heroine in that she is "100% girl", with strong feelings and a very feminine way of dealing interacting with Rochester, but she's neither a flirt nor an emotionally self-indulgent character. She seems both like someone who would be rational and enjoyable to work with, but also very womanly, not "one of the guys" like some tomboyish heroines. And, of course, her moral strength and ability to deal with adversity throughout (especially in the period when she has to leave Thornfield Hall suddenly and finds herself effectively homeless in the Victorian countryside for several days prior to finding help and then work) are impressive and admirable. Jane was definitely my favorite out of these characters, and I think she also comes across as being the strongest -- though in a way that is intensely feminine, not "doing things just like a man." Julie and Scott had a good discussion of the book over at the A Good Story Is Hard To Find podcast, and Julie brought up (with prompting from her daughter) some interesting points contrasting Jane with more modern "strong" heroines that I want to get back to in a bit.

Persuasion: I'd read this Jane Austen novel several times before, but it had been a good 6+ years since I had read it, so in some ways I was coming at it fresh. Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quieter heroines, she lacks the conversational sparkle that makes Eliza Bennet and Emma Woodhouse so enjoyable to read, but then Anne is 27 (the other two are both 20) when the book opens and the story focuses heavily on regrets: When Anne was 19 she fell in love with and was briefly engaged to the ambitious but poor young Commander Wentworth, however she was persuaded by family and friends that it was imprudent to become engaged to a man who did not yet have any way of supporting a wife, and so she broke the engagement off. Just over seven years later, in the brief peace before Napoleon's return from exile, he is now Captain Wentworth and has amassed a very good fortune in prize money, while Anne has faded and spends much of her time trying to bring some order and propriety to her rather self-absorbed sisters and father.

As an older character who doesn't expect much from life, Anne is a very quiet character, but she does have a quiet strength to her as she tries to guide her father's financial retrenchment from behind the scenes and make peace in her sister Mary's chaotic household (Mary's in-laws still wish that Mary's husband had married Anne instead). And, of course, she has a very strong loyalty to Captain Wentworth, even long past expecting that he will ever propose to here again -- a loyalty which causes her to turn down several other men in the intervening seven years, despite the increasingly likelihood this will leave her always unmarried and thus at the mercy of her families whims and finances. Her strength is probably best summed up by this exchange from Chapter 23:

"Ah!" cried Captain Harville, in a tone of strong feeling, "if I could but make you comprehend what a man suffers when he takes a last look at his wife and children, and watches the boat that he has sent them off in, as long as it is in sight, and then turns away and says, 'God knows whether we ever meet again!' And then, if I could convey to you the glow of his soul when he does see them again; when, coming back after a twelvemonth's absence, perhaps, and obliged to put into another port, he calculates how soon it be possible to get them there, pretending to deceive himself, and saying, 'They cannot be here till such a day,' but all the while hoping for them twelve hours sooner, and seeing them arrive at last, as if Heaven had given them wings, by many hours sooner still! If I could explain to you all this, and all that a man can bear and do, and glories to do, for the sake of these treasures of his existence! I speak, you know, only of such men as have hearts!" pressing his own with emotion.

"Oh!" cried Anne eagerly, "I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures! I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as -- if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!"

The Portrait of a Lady: I'd never read any Henry James before, and after reading The Portrait of a Lady, I don't know if I necessarily shall again. Here again we have a female main character, Isabel Archer, who shows up at the house of her rich uncle in England and promptly has everyone she meets fall inexplicably in love with her despite the fact she shows few really interesting qualities other than being young, pretty and seemingly full of potential (potential for what neither the reader nor the characters never seem all that clear.) Compared to the preceding heroines, Isabel Archer is a fairly weak and un-knowing main character. However, her consumptive cousin (who, of course, is in love with her) convinces his father (who is kind of in love with her in a dying-old-man sort of way) to leave her a fortune, and so having had a big fortune-hunter bulls-eye painted on her, she heads off to Italy on tour after her uncle's death, and there falls victim to the two interesting characters in the book: The accomplished and beautiful widow Madame Merle (for whom Isabel proceeds to develop an excessive admiration) and her old friend who exceeds her in both cool and lack of principles, the widower Gilbert Osmond. With Madame Merle's help, Osmond manages to cause Isabel to fall in love with him and marry him -- while along the way turning down proposals from several young men who, while not fascinating, are very rich and probably would have treated her well.

What makes the book gripping for the last third to quarter of its length is the presence of thoroughly fascinating villain in the form of Gilbert Osmond, who after initially fascinating Isabel and causing her to construct and almost wholly false idealized image of him, proceeds after their marriage to make her life a misery while almost never actually stepping outside the bounds of correct behavior. I kept waiting for something more fascinating to happen with him to make the novel worth while, but the conclusion in some ways just trails off rather than tying off what I found most interesting about the latter part of the book. Still, just watching him work is absolutely involving. Isabel does not come off as a particularly strong character, however, nor a very appealing one. If there's a strong female character in the book it's Madame Merle, who plays co-villain to Gilbert Osmond, but is, in the end, a far more human character.

Anna Karenina: I'm still only about a third of the way through Anna Karenina, so I won't say a great deal about this one, but thus far Anna doesn't seem to be shaping up as a very strong character either. She's even more led by her feelings and her illusions than Isabel Archer, and lacks Isabel's ability to even carry through with her own wishes or convictions, giving new reinforcement to the 'man is a rationalizing animal' witticism. While I get the impression Anna herself is going to be a gradually worsening car wreck of a character, I'm curious to see what trajectory her husband and her lover follow (at the moment neither seems hugely interesting) and what goes on in the Levin/Kitty side plot, as well as with the increasingly on-the-rocks marriage of Stiva and Dolly. Thus far, I'm not seeing any female characters looking likely to stand out.

As I mentioned, there was an interesting side conversation in the A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast on Jane Eyre relating to how Jane stacks up against more modern "strong female characters". Julie's daughter had put together a list of the six characteristics of the modern "strong young woman" character, particularly slanted towards genre YA novels, but I think fairly widely applicable:

• She is independent to the point that she spends little time with her family (whom she loves) and relies little on family or her one or friends for help. She and her one or two good friends very themselves as outsiders and while that may be true for her friends, she is most likely held in high regard by others, simply inapproachable.
• She had a lack of self-awareness of her good qualities, including but not limited to physical attractiveness, intelligence, leadership, etc, which she generally possesses in abundance. Because of this, she is prone to self-doubt.
• She has little to no interest in romance unless with a childhood friend whom she views as inaccessible. Because of this she is uninterested in her own beauty, never wearing makeup or a dress unless forced.
• She is averse to a leadership position, but excels when it is thrust upon her, generally because of a special ability she discovers she has.
• She is proficient (or aspiring to be) at a physical skill such as hunting, combat, survival, etc.
• She is surprisingly unobservant or uncritical of society until shown its flaws by someone else, typically her love interest. However, she is perceived as being highly intelligent because of her tendency to speak her mind, something she attributes to how bad she is at lying.

This strikes me as a moderately accurate description of a lot of a lot of modern "spunky" heroines one runs into, particularly in SF/F, and it's a very unisex sort of "strong character" writing. (Come to that, it applies to a de-masculinized sort of hero as well -- for example, what was done to the movie version of Aragorn.) It's also a fairly striking contrast with a strong classic heroine like Jane Eyre.

There's Something To This DarwinCatholic Thing

Razib pulls some data from the General Social Survey and find that not only are Catholics more likely to consider the theory of evolution to be correct than Protestants, conservative Catholics are more likely to consider it correct than liberal Protestants. 58% of Catholics who also identify as politically conservative (and 71% of those who identify as politically liberal) agreed with the statement, "Humans beings developed from animals". However, only 26% of Protestants who identify as politically conservative and 53% of those who identify as politically liberal agreed with that statement.

It turns out, however, that race is a significant factor in the results. Many Protestants who are Black are politically liberal by reject evolution. If you filter the results on non-Hispanic whites, 65% of politically liberal Protestants consider evolution to be correct.

I'm a little surprised that so many Catholics actually doubt evolution, given that the Catholic Church has never been explicitly against the theory of evolution and Pope Pius XII specifically stated there was no conflict between the faith and evolution back in his encyclical Humani Generis back in 1950, something John Paul II echoed in his letter Truth Cannot Contradict Truth in 1996. However, since concern about evolution is fairly common among religious people in the US overall, it's probably not hugely surprising.

Game Over

This pretty much sums up my reaction to "game" as a source of wisdom in interacting with the opposite sex.

Source

Philosophies of Reproduction

Ross Douthat links to a New Yorker review of three books dealing with "how many children should you have".

The first two books, which the New Yorker author clearly has more sympathy with, are Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate by Christine Overall and Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar.

Overall, who teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, in Ontario, dismisses the notion that childbearing is “natural” and therefore needs no justification. “There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon,” she observes. If we’re going to keep having kids, we ought to be able to come up with a reason.

Of course, people do give reasons for having children, and Overall takes them up one by one. Consider the claim that having a child benefits the child. This might seem self-evident. After all, a child deprived, through some Knowltonian means, of coming into existence, loses everything. She can never experience any of the pleasures life has to offer—eating ice cream, say, or riding a bike, or, for the more forward-thinking parents among us, having sex.

Overall rejects this argument on two grounds. First of all, nonexistent people have no moral standing. (There are an infinite number of nonexistent people out there, and you don’t notice them complaining, do you?) Second, once you accept that you should have a baby in order to increase the world’s total happiness, how do you know when to stop?

Apparently Overall then goes on to examine and reject other arguments as to why one should have children.

I think this goes off the rails pretty much at the get-go, where she argues that having children is not natural and thus needs some sort of justification. Given that we, as a species, are designed to reproduce and can only continue to exist by reproducing, it seems odd to assert that we need to come up with a rigorous justification for reproducing or else refrain. Yes, it's true that there are many "urges apparently arising from our biological nature" which we shouldn't act upon, but there are also urges resulting from our biological nature which we must act upon unless we are making an active choice for suicide. I have an biological urge to consume food. I may (wisely) choose not to eat all the time, or not to eat some given thing, but if I refuse to eat at all, I'll end up dying after a while.

Now clearly, any given person is not obliged to reproduce. Unlike eating, the individual can thrive without producing offspring, and that may well be the calling of some people. However, the species as a whole cannot exist without many of its members reproducing, and given that it seems a little odd to me to insist that none of us should do so unless we can come up with a really good reason to. Unless, of course, we think that it's better that we go extinct. Interestingly, this is exactly what David Benatar believes:

The volume is dedicated to his parents, “even though they brought me into existence,” and to his brothers, “each of whose existence, although a harm to him, is a great benefit to the rest of us.” (It’s fun to imagine what family reunions with the Benatars are like.)

Benatar’s case rests on a critical but, in his view, unappreciated asymmetry. Consider two couples, the A’s and the B’s. The A’s are young, healthy, and rich. If they had children, they could give them the best of everything—schools, clothes, electronic gaming devices. Even so, we would not say that the A’s have a moral obligation to reproduce.

The B’s are just as young and rich. But both have a genetic disease, and, were they to have a child together, that child would suffer terribly. We would say, using Benatar’s logic, that the B’s have an ethical obligation not to procreate.

The case of the A’s and the B’s shows that we regard pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed out on by the nonexistent doesn’t count as a harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the recipient is a nonexistent one.

And what holds for the A’s and the B’s is basically true for everyone. Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone—that is, had the life never been created—no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it.

“One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad—a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick—is worse than no life at all,” Benatar writes.

He acknowledges that many readers will have difficulty accepting such a “deeply unsettling claim.” They will say that they consider their own existence to be a blessing, and that the same goes for their children’s. But they’re only kidding themselves. And no wonder. Everyone alive today is descended from a long line of people who did reproduce themselves. Evolution thus favors a kind of genetically encoded Pollyannaism. “Those with reproduction-enhancing beliefs are more likely to breed and pass on whatever attributes incline one to such beliefs,” Benatar notes.

People sometimes wonder why this blog is called "DarwinCatholic", and the answer is pretty much that last line: Those who have a philosophy of life which opposes reproduction are unlikely to pass on their view, while those whose philosophy provides a reason to foster family life will thrive.

In this regard, the third book reviewed in the article is a bit off on its own, Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think is one that I've been curious to read for a while, but it sidesteps more philosophical questions to focus on the practical (perhaps typically, given that Caplan is an economist).

According to Caplan, a professor at George Mason University, the major mistake that parents (or prospective parents) make is overvaluing the present. This is a common enough error. Workers in their twenties and thirties don’t save enough money for retirement because it seems such a long way off. Then their sixties roll around, and they wish they’d spent less on S.U.V.s and HDTVs and put more into their 401(k)s.

Couples, he argues, need to think not just about how many children they might want now, when they have better things to do than microwave Similac, but how many they will want to have around when they’re old and lonely and watching “The View.” Caplan recommends what he calls the “take the average” rule:

Suppose you’re thirty. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your thirties is one. During your forties, your optimal number of kids will rise to two—you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your fifties, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by? Finally, once you pass sixty and prepare to retire, you’ll have ample free time to spend with your grandchildren. Five kids would be a good insurance policy against grandchildlessness.

Caplan does the math and concludes that in this case “the best number of kids is three.”

Although the figure may vary from one family to another, the same calculation, Caplan argues, applies across the board. Kids are a pain in the ass when they’re small. They require lots of care just at the time their parents tend to be busiest establishing themselves in their careers. As a result, most people stop producing children before they’ve reached the number that would, over the long haul, maximize their self-interest. “Typical parental feelings paired with high foresight imply more kids than typical parental feelings paired with moderate foresight,” Caplan writes. (Unfortunately, he does not explain what parents should do if their ideal number of children includes a fraction.)

Caplan concedes that some may feel compunction about having more (or any) children when they are already short on time and resources. Wouldn’t it be better to provide one or two children with a decent upbringing than to give three or four a lousy one? Here the good news, according to Caplan, is: it doesn’t matter. He cites a variety of twin and adoption studies showing that genetics swamps parenting on traits ranging from children’s health and intelligence to their chances of going to prison. There’s no need to monitor a kid’s French-fries consumption, or ferry him to music lessons, or teach him to avoid felony charges. As long as you “don’t lock him in a closet,” he’ll be O.K. Or not, as the case may be.

Parents who realize just how little difference hard work makes will work less hard. This should, in effect, drive down the cost of procreation and, by the logic of the marketplace, increase its appeal. “If kids are the product, consumer logic still applies: Buy more as the deal gets sweeter,” Caplan writes. At the very least, the additional kids will provide the world with more consumers and more labor: “Many think there’s no place for unskilled workers in the high-tech economy of the future, but someone has to do their jobs.”

Benatar’s child-rearing advice, if followed, would result in human extinction. Caplan’s leads in the opposite direction: toward a never-ending population boom. He declares this to be one of his scheme’s advantages: “More people mean more ideas, the fuel of progress.” In a work that’s full of upbeat pronouncements, this is probably his most optimistic, or, if you prefer, outrageous claim.

Actually, it strikes me that Caplan's rationale has a built in cut-off feature: If the world were such that it seemed clear that having children would not add to one's happiness at any point, then the conclusion one would reach from his argument would still be not to reproduce.

As I say, I'm mildly curious to read Caplan's book (which is more than I can say for the other two) in that he's a personality I find mildly interesting online. However, it does strike me that he doesn't really articulate any kind of a philosophy that explains why reproduction is a good -- he simply assumes that you at root understand this (having children will make you happy) and then encourages you not to make to it too hard for yourself and also to consider long term happiness above short term. At a pragmatic level, this may make a fair amount of sense, and as I said above, I don't think one must abstain from being fruitful and multiplying unless one can rigorously prove a justification for it, but generally speaking people do want to have some sort of comprehensive philosophy which explains why they should do difficult things, and Caplan doesn't so much provide that as assure you it's not really that hard.

Whether “you could bear the idea of marrying me”

Given all the talk about marriage here of late, what better time to feature one of the greatest proposals that the English literary scene has to offer: that of Evelyn Waugh to Laura Herbert.

“I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me. I am restless & moody and misanthropic & lazy & have no money except what I earn and if I got ill you would starve. In fact it’s a lousy proposition. On the other hand I think I could do a Grant and reform & become quite strict about not getting drunk and I am pretty sure I should be faithful. Also there is always a fair chance that there will be another bigger economic crash in which case if you had married a nobleman with a great house you might find yourself starving, while I am very clever and could probably earn a living of some sort somewhere.” 

“All these are very small advantages compared with the awfulness of my character. I have always tried to be nice to you and you may have got it into your head that I am nice really, but that is all rot. It is only to you & for you. I am jealous & impatient — but there is no point in going into a whole list of my vices. You are a critical girl and I’ve no doubt that you know them all and a great many I don’t know myself.”

I myself would be inclined to accept this proposal, if I weren't currently married and Waugh hadn't made the offer in 1936.

h/t to Angelico's comment at the Korrektiv

On Living In A Sub Culture

Chris at Dark Brightness was kind enough to blogroll us, filing us under "Nutraditionalism because there is not place in the blog for 'Catholic Amish'". The "Catholic Amish" description comes, I think, from one of the commenters over at Dalrock's blog, who described those with a Franciscan University of Steubenville background thusly:

I have had some dealings with people from FUS, and I think what others need to understand is that, in effect, the people who come from FUS (and the handful of similar very conservative Catholic institutions scattered around the US) are basically akin to the Amish. A huge percentage of the people there get married either while they are still in college at FUS or immediately thereafter. They’re not geographically concentrated like the Amish are, or technologically limited, but they are similar in that they are a very small separatist-type group that doesn’t generally participate in the culture at large — even in the *Catholic* culture at large that you may see in your local Catholic parish.

I have a vague admiration for the Amish, but it strikes me that the orthodox Catholic sub-culture with which I'm familiar isn't all that much like the Amish, and having stated that there is a difference I find myself wanting to explore in a little more detail what that difference is, because I think it relates to how one can get by in the modern world while not being "of it".

The Amish, it seems to me, effectively form a separate culture. It's not just that they reject certain technological innovations which necessarily involve disconnect from the wider culture, but also that they live in fairly self-contained communities, living and working with other Amish in fairly un-mixed communities, if only because us "English" don't have an interest in living in the sort of way that would result in fitting in with Amish society.

Thinking about the Catholic circle in which I move, there is definitely a shared culture of sorts which the rest of the mainstream culture (even the rest of mainstream Catholic culture) does not necessarily say. There are books and periodicals and TV and radio shows that most of us will have heard of, even if we haven't actually followed them. (So, for example, I know a fair amount about EWTN even though I never watch it -- while I would imagine that many mainstream Catholics, much less non-Catholics, would have no idea that there even is a cable channel called EWTN.) On the other hand, it's probably worth noting that most of these are not consumed exclusively by members of the sub-culture, it's just that we consume a lot more of them and thus have much greater familiarity. A more mainstream Catholic might see magazines and newspapers in the back of church or in the church bookstore that we actually subscribe to or read the websites of. And the books that we know well are in many cases the same ones that a mainstream Catholic might pick up as a confirmation present, or stumble across in bible study or reading group.

There is a surprisingly small social network that seems to tie many people in the sub-culture together. We've often met other orthodox Catholics at some sort of social gathering only to find that we already have several acquaintances in common. For instance, the transitional deacon recently assigned to our parish turned out to have a sister in Texas who reads our blog, and also to know my wife's brothers and borther-in-law. However, this isn't because orthodox Catholics don't socialize with other Catholics (or with non-Catholics) but due to two factors: 1) A lot of us have certain experiences in common (certain faithfully Catholic colleges, certain lay movements, etc.) and 2) Even in a parish with 2000+ families, almost all the activities and ministries are run by a fairly small number of people who actually spend significant amounts of time doing church-y things. If you have nationwide connections among the orthodox Catholic sub-culture due to factor 1), and then also have local and diocesan connections due to factor 2), Catholic circles can start to seem like a fairly small world very quickly. And although we may not be "mainstream" Catholics, it's pretty usual to find a several families who are members of the orthodox Catholic sub-culture who are part of that very involved group of people who run most of the activities in the parish.

Laying all this out helps show why "sub-culture" is the apt term here. Orthodox Catholic circles aren't so much a group apart as a sub-group within mainstream Catholic culture. In general, we form only a very small minority within the parishes we go to. We read Catholics books and periodicals which are available to all Catholics, we just read them far more often. (We also tend to have strong opinions about which books and periodicals are "solid" and which aren't -- whereas Catholics who spend less time around on these might not make clear distinctions.)

Again, different from the Amish, members of the Catholic sub-culture lead fairly ordinary lives when not engaged in church activities. Yes, there are certain things that mark us out. Many of us have more than the average number of kids, operate as single income families and a fair number of our families homeschool. You may notice use eating something vegetarian at business lunches on Fridays through much of the year, or see some of the more dedicated slipping off to early morning or noon weekday masses. Sometimes just the books that sit on our selves can be a tip off. Not long after I started at my current company, I had a meeting in the office of one of the top executives and noticed a breviary and some books by John Paul II and Benedict XVI tucked away on a corner of his bookshelf. I never said anything about it, but a while later I made a couple inquiries via friends with wider business networks that mine and quickly found a couple people who knew him and who informed me that he was friends with a couple of the writers who move in orthodox Catholic circles. (No, this didn't lead to any advantages for me in the company -- I never brought it up with him, though I was pleased to note a fellow member of the sub-culture.)

However, there is a certain separateness to our culture. But we don't we live apart or work apart or go to separate churches. We spend the majority of our time around people who aren't part of the sub-culture. However, living and believing differently from the mainstream culture is hard, and so one naturally seeks out others who live and believe similarly. As is observed in Genesis, "It is not good for man to be alone." It's not impossible to stick to one's beliefs without the support of like-minded company, but it's a lot harder and more lonely. When it comes to not only living out but passing on one's beliefs, a community of like-minded people becomes virtually essential. While I know people who do it, I can't imagine trying to live and pass on my faith to my children with a spouse didn't fully share it. And actually, that concern was one of the main reasons I opted to go to Steubenville, a college very much a part of the sub-culture, rather than one of the secular colleges on my list. It's also why we try very hard to always have a core social group of fellow orthodox Catholic families with kids of similar age for our kids to spend time with -- because although many of their friends on the street are nice kids, as they get older we want to make sure that they have friends who are also struggling to live the same faith that they are. And when the time comes, I'll strongly encourage my children not to date or marry someone who does not share their beliefs. So while we certainly do not live in a closed community only seeing other orthodox Catholics, our closest friends are nearly all other members of the sub-culture, and having that sub-culture for support and community is very, very important to us.

Thinking about all this, it seems to me that a better analogy than the Amish would be some of the conservative Jewish communities (who, in my experience, tend to be very much in the world while still having a clear religious sub-culture that is very important to them and their identity), with the big difference that membership is much more fluid: at least half the orthodox Catholics I know did not grow up Catholic or else were baptized Catholic but spent a period of time away from the Church.

Happy Easter, Chums

Ah, it's nice to be back. I was good and didn't cheat on my internet fast all week, although I was dying to read Brandon's post comparing Casanova and Don Juan after Darwin mentioned it to me.

Still, I took great advantage of my copious internet-free time on Tuesday to do lots of useful stuff around the house read David Copperfield all day. Considering all the recent discussion of marriage, I found lots to chew on in David's farcial first marriage to the unbelievably childish Dora. Obviously Dickens was having a great deal of fun writing this character, both for her zany self and in contrast to the long-suffering Agnes, but Dora is perfectly calculated to make anyone's teeth ache. Dickens knows this. He knows that Dora, as he chose to write her, is not a character who is capable of participating in a marriage (or in any adult occupation, really), which is why her early death is sad but necessary in a literary sense.

The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever. and addressed me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I loved my wife dearly, and I was happy; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting.
...What I missed, I still regarded -- always regarded -- as something that had been a dream of youthful fancy; that was incapable of realisation; that I was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men do. But that it would have been better for me if my wife could have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I had no partner; and that this might have been; I knew.
"The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart." These words of Mrs. Strong's were constantly recurring to me, at that time; were almost always present to my mind. ...For I knew, now, that my own heart was undisciplined when it first loved Dora; that if it had been disciplined, it never could have felt, when we were married, what it had felt in its secret existence.
"There can be no disparity in marriage, like unsuitability of mind and purpose." Those words I remembered too. I had endeavoured to adapt Dora to myself, and found it impracticable. It remained for me to adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and still be happy. This was the discipline to which I tried to bring my heart, when I began to think.

What sadness in these words, and (to my mind) how much better not to marry than to live with such "disparity in marriage" as "unsuitability of mind and purpose". Dickens doesn't choose to trace the course of such a marriage through the long slog of years, but I shudder to contemplate it.

He Is Risen!

Good Friday

Holy Thursday

I'll be off the internet during the Triduum, so I'm leaving Fra Angelico in charge of the blog.

A blessed Holy Week to all!

I Can't Not Post This Picture

Arthur C. Clarke on How To Destroy Marriage

In Arthur C. Clarke's 1953 novel Childhood's End the aliens invade, and they mean us nothing but good. A space race between the US and USSR is about to lead to war in space when giant alien space ships settle over all of Earth's principle cities, and an alien race, who refuse to show themselves and communicate only through the head of the UN, announce that they are taking over responsibility for enforcing peace on the planet. These aliens (called the Overlords) generally take a hands-off approach to humanity, saying they will reveal themselves in 50 years when humans are ready to see them, but in the mean time they provide two inventions: a 100% effective oral contraceptive, and a 100% accurate paternity test.

The result is that over the next 50 years, while peace and prosperity reigns due to the guiding hand of the Overlords, marriage, traditional morality and organized religion all vanish.

Of course, Clarke actually thought this was a good thing, and the rest of the novel is about humanity moving onto the next stage of evolutionary development: as a non-material group mind. But in a sense, that's the really interesting thing, that as someone who saw traditional marriage, morality and religion as a problem back in 1953, Clarke say the two inventions most likely to get rid of all three as being completely reliable contraception and paternity testing.

Coming at things from a Catholic point of view, G.E.M. Anscombe saw the same trends, now well advanced, in relation to contraception, morality and marriage in her 1972 essay "Contraception and Chastity". Some key bits:

I will first ask you to contemplate a familiar point: the fantastic change that has come about in people's situation in respect of having children because of the invention of efficient contraceptives. You see, what can't be otherwise we accept; and so we accept death and its unhappiness. But possibility destroys mere acceptance. And so it is with the possibility of having intercourse and preventing conception. This power is now placed in a woman's hands; she needn't have children when she doesn't want to and she can still have her man! This can make the former state of things look intolerable, so that one wonders why they were so pleased about weddings in former times and why the wedding day was supposed to be such a fine day for the bride.

There always used to be a colossal strain in ancient times; between heathen morality and Christian morality, and one of the things pagan converts had to be told about the way they were entering on was that they must abstain from fornication....

Christianity was at odds with the heathen world, not only about fornication, infanticide and idolatry; but also about marriage.... But the quarrel is far greater between Christianity and the present-day heathen, post Christian, morality that has sprung up as a result of contraception. In one word: Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.

And if there is nothing intrinsically wrong with contraceptive intercourse, and if it could become general practice everywhere when there is intercourse but ought to be no begetting, then it's very difficult to see the objection to this morality, for the ground of objection to fornication and adultery was that sexual intercourse is only right in the sort of set-up that typically provides children with a father and mother to care for them. If you can turn intercourse into something other than the reproductive type of act (I don't mean of course that every act is reproductive any more than every acorn leads to an oak-tree but it's the reproductive type of act) then why, if you can change it, should it be restricted to the married?

Today, we can see pretty clearly that both Clarke and Anscombe were right.

Escaping the Gravity Which Diminishes

Darwin remains to field arguments and be unflappable, but for myself, I am stepping away from the internet until Easter. In recent days I have failed at every point at which I could have chosen charity, and though this is mainly attributable to my own weakness, this weakness has been exacerbated by my wearying myself with easy access to the follies of others. Here is my meditation for the next few days, drawn from today's reflection in the Magnificat:

The Fathers of the Church maintained that human beings stand at the point of intersection between two gravitational fields. First, there is the force of gravity which pulls us down -- towards selfishness, falsehood and evil; the gravity which diminishes us and distances us from the heights of God. On the other hand there is the gravitational force of God's love: the fact that we are loved by God and respond in love attracts us upwards. Man finds himself betwixt this twofold gravitational force; everything depends on our escaping the gravitational field of evil and becoming free to be attracted completely by the gravitational force of God, which makes us authentic, elevates us, and grants us true freedom... 

Of ourselves, we are too weak to lift up our hearts to the heights of God. We cannot do it. The very pride of thinking that we are able to do it on our own drags us down and estranges us from God. God himself must draw us up, and this is what Christ began to do on the cross. He descended to the depths of our human existence in order to draw us up to himself, the living God. He humbled himself... Only in this way could our pride be vanquished: God's humility is the extreme form of his love, and this humble love draws us upwards... 

All these means of "ascent" are effective only if we humbly acknowledge that we need to be lifted up; if we abandon the pride of wanting to become like God. We need God: he draws us upwards; letting ourselves be upheld by his hands -- by faith, in other words-- sets us aright and gives up the inner strength that raises us on high. We need the humility of a faith which seeks the face of God and trusts in the truth of his love. 

--Pope Benedict XVI

How To Marry a Nice Girl

Manosphere blogger "Dalrock" has linked to me under the apparent misapprehension that because I wrote that it is okay for someone (even, some were shocked to hear, a woman) to intentionally remain single so long as he or she remains celibate, MrsDarwin and I are promoting fornication. This seems to be about on par with Dalrock's previously shown abilities to read and understand the arguments of others, and once again I can't help responding, especially because he attempts to make an argument from data while clearly using an incomplete historical trend and generally not knowing what he's talking about.

[Before I get into this, an editorial note: Last time I unleashed a broadside at the manosphere in general and Dalrock in particular, I was spoiling for a fight after watching Dalrock's readers flood into the comboxes of Patheos in response to a post by Elizabeth Duffy and behave pretty badly while doing so. (This ranged from garden variety rudeness to calling the author a c***.) So when I stepped in with a response post, I was in the mood for a fight. When one of Dalrock's readers started propounding the idea that regardless of repentance any woman who had sex before marriage was "a slut" and could never get married, I grew tired of dealing with the situation, banned him, and closed the thread. Since I'm responding to Dalrock again, I'm permanently lifting the ban on that commenter, and will leave the thread open to any manosphere types interested in engaging in conversation. That said, I want to make it clear that the standards around here are different from those in the manosphere, and so just in case anyone is unclear, being generally derogatory towards women (or men) is unacceptable behavior around here. So, in general, is the use of terms like "slut", "ho", "c***", etc.]

Now, to respond to Dalrock's post, the first very odd thing is a conviction Dalrock seems to have about how what he terms "trad cons" view marriage and sexuality. He's his summary:

Most Traditional Conservatives are obsessed with creating and enforcing rules of the road for fornication. There is an unspoken assumption that young women engaging in uncommitted sex have a right to swing from man to man on an ultimate path to marriage. Once the woman tires of the carousel, Christian and secular Traditional Conservatives ride in on a white horse and start demanding that whichever man the woman is having uncommitted sex with now must do the honorable thing and marry her. However, Trad Cons go a step further and also create elaborate rules of the road for fornication in their desperate attempt to make the carousel as pleasurable and rewarding an experience for women as possible.
...
Yet Trad Con moral angst is directed almost exclusively at the men in the fornication market who they feel aren’t playing by the rules. It isn’t that these men are fornicating, it is that they aren’t doing it the way Trad Cons want them to do it. As I wrote above, this comes from a generally unspoken assumption that fornication is the logical path for women to follow to marriage. Therefore their partners in fornication need to live up to a set of high fornication standards. With seemingly no discussion this idea has somehow become sacred, something which must not be challenged.

Now, I'm pretty used to the fact that the circles I move in are a very tiny portion of the US population. The Catholic sub-culture in which we live is radically different even from the more mainstream Catholic culture that tends to show up in surveys (you know, the one in which only 25% of people go to mass and the majority don't follow the Church's teachings on contraception). However, with that proviso: I certainly have never heard traditionalist conservatives (a group in which I number myself) say that sex outside of marriage is fine so long as you follow certain social norms. The message that we keep putting forward is that sex belongs only in marriage. If you are not married do not have sex. It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman, if you think of yourself as an "alpha" or a "beta", if you think you are deeply in love and committed or if you are just out for a good time, sex does not belong outside of marriage and violating this moral law is not only a sin but (and for those with an understanding of moral law this is an obvious corollary) it will also end up causing short and long term problems for your current and future (if any) relationships. While I'm stating the unpopular, let trot out the point that really gets scorn heaped upon us traditionalist conservatives: Not only should you not have sex outside of marriage, but sex itself is inextricably linked with procreation. So even after you're married, if you don't want to get pregnant at the moment, there are going to be periods of time when you need to abstain from sex even though you're married. In accordance with the Church's teachings and natural law, we traditionalist conservatives use Natural Family Planning and reject artificial birth control and the contraceptive mentality that goes with it. What's the difference between these two? Put briefly, NFP involves not having sex during the fertile part of the wife's cycle, while artificial birth control involves taking fertility out of the woman's cycle so you can have sex whenever you want.

If all this sounds a bit dour, it's worth pointing out that married couples using NFP report higher sexual satisfaction, better communication, and a 5% divorce rate -- staggeringly better than the population in general. As the Skeptics point out, some of these studies on the benefits of NFP are not as rigorous as one might like. This is one of problems when you have small and poorly funded groups. On the other hand, the studies line up pretty well with my personal experiences. Of all the couples our age (mid 30s) we've known living our kind of life in the Catholic sub culture, only one that I knew personally has gotten divorced. That would be highly unusual in most other parts of society.

Having made the claim that we traditional conservatives are all for fornication so long as it's on terms that the manosphere doesn't like, Dalrock then tries to diagnose the real problem:

Why do the Darwin Catholics and Pastor Driscolls of the world look at women engaging in the hookup culture and see marriage material? At the same time, why do men like FFY see these same women as good for a good time and nothing more? I think the answer to both questions can be found in the shift from a dating/courtship/marriage Sexual Marketplace (SMP) to our current hookup/serial monogamy SMP, and this is closely related to the changing age of marriage...

He then does a little bit of pop sociology in which he points do the increasing age of average marriage over the decades from 1950 to the present and engages in some imaginative reconstructions of how these average marriage ages indicates changing attitudes in women towards men and the "sexual market place". Here's a sample:

Fast forward a decade to the 1960s. As you can see, the trend has continued but the fundamental SMP hasn’t changed; the median age of marriage has increased by only a few months. If you are an 18 year old young woman, you still find that your peers just a few years older than you are very likely to already be married. The pressure is on to find a husband. Screwing cads for sport might be enticing, but there is no time to waste, and developing a reputation would harm your near term goal of finding the best husband you can attract.

Since the women are still looking for dads and not cads, as a young man the signal is still strong; work hard and prepare to act as a provider. Young women will spot the young men with the best potential and want to be with them.

Dalrock keeps this up until he reaches the present, with an average age at first marriage of 26.5 for women, and from this concludes:

Skip ahead to the generation that survived Y2k. Women are marrying roughly an additional year later than they did a decade ago, and 7.5 years later than they did in the 1950s. An 18 year old woman’s peers aren’t looking for a husband, and neither are the women 2 and 4 years older than her. The women who are looking for husbands are in a very different life stage than she is, so this removes her sense of urgency. The only thing holding her back from fully embracing the now raging hookup culture would be a strong moral belief that sex shouldn’t occur before marriage. For the rest, why not go after the hottest men they can find? There will be time to paper it over with stories about college boyfriends later. Besides, everyone is doing it.
...
As you can see, the trend of women having “relationships” with men for an extended period of time has continued in the most recent years data is available for. Unfortunately, Trad Cons are so obsessed with the rules for the road of fornication they can’t focus on bringing us back to a truly moral situation.

So, the clear conclusion is that telling people not to have sex until they're married doesn't work (and according to Dalrock, we Trad Cons aren't doing this anyway) and the solution to this is to get back to where the average marriage age for women is 20 so that women will want "dads not cads".

There are a couple basic problems with this analysis which Dalrock may or may not be aware of. One obvious weak point is that there's a limit to how low the average age of marriage can practically go. (Well, unless you wear white robes and carry an AK-47.) 20 is pretty low, especially for those of us who expect to go to college. There are those who advocate getting married in college, but since a man isn't able to support a family while in college, and a woman finds it difficult to finish a degree while having children, I advise against it. MrsDarwin and I chose to date chastely for nearly four years after meeting a couple weeks into our Freshman year and got married seven weeks after getting our degrees. I continue to think that was the right choice even for people who met at 18. It's also why I personally have a low level of sympathy for the argument that it's impossible to remain a virgin a long time for marriage. I personally waited four years, despite knowing very quickly that MrsDarwin was the person I was going to marry. And I know good Catholic guys (and also good Catholic women) who are in their late 20s or early 30s, still looking hard for the right spouse, and still saving themselves for marriage. We are not ruled by averages -- we rule ourselves through moral choices. Moreover, a big part of the problem is that in the sexually permissive society that has sprung up in the wake of the "sexual revolution" the average age of first pre-marital sex has steadily gone down. In the 50s it was 20.4 but now it's 17.6. We can hardly tell people that they should all be married by 17. Rather, the correct message is that they shouldn't be having sex before marriage at all, whenever that age is.

Secondly, by starting in the 50s, Dalrock misses a fact I imagine he's not aware of: the 50s marked a low point in the average marriage age in the US. This table shows median age at first marriage (rather than average), so the numbers are very slightly different from what Dalrock's quoting, but the trend is very clear: the median age at first marriage fell steadily from 22 for women in 1890 to 20.3 for women in 1950. It didn't rise to the 1890 rate again until 1980. Was 1890 a racy period of constant pre-marital sex in which alphas ruled and betas suffered? No. Indeed, from what data we have pre-marital sex was significantly less common in the 1890s than the 1950s (in part, no doubt, because contraception was less available and abortion more dangerous, not to mention that morals had not degraded as far in this area as they had by the '50s) and divorce was far less common then than in the 1950s. Nor was 1890 a fluke.

Here are three papers that deal with the "European Marriage Model", the way in which Western Europeans tended to regulate fertility by marrying later, and by more people never marrying at all.

This one gives average age at first marriage in 1600-1649, 1650-1699, 1700-1749, 1750-1799, and 1800-1849, the results for women are: 26, 26.5, 26.2, 24.9, and 23.4 respectively.

Here's one that gives the average age of first marriage for women in 1790 for several Western European countries (see Table 2 on page 9):

Belgium 24.9
France 25.3
Germany 26.6
England 25.2
Netherlands 26.5
Scandinavia 26.1

And finally, check out Table 5 here and the percentage of women aged 25-29 who had never married in these countries in 1890-1900:

Great Britain: 42%
Switzerland: 45%
Sweden: 52%
Portugal: 41%
Germany: 34%

Again, these were not, in 1900, hotbeds of sexual immorality. People could not afford to get married, or they couldn't find someone to marry, and so they just didn't marry and (in the main) did not have sex.

The US in the 1950s was not some sort of world norm for what age people marry at when they're not being sexually promiscuous prior to marriage, it was the product of a particular time in which affluence was reaching unheard-of heights, birth control was becoming available, and sex before marriage (while increasingly common over the last 50 years) was still socially disapproved of. However, once again, we don't marry averages, we marry people. There is not a perfect age to marry that will guarantee you a faithful spouse. Rather, there is a right person to marry, who shares your beliefs about marriage, who is willing to join you in a happy marriage.

Third and lastly, Dalrock's amateur sociology by decade leaves out an obvious problem: People who divorce in one decade probably got married anywhere from 5-20 years before. Take a look at this chart of US divorce rates since 1860 (with some historically significant events marked as well) and note that far from guaranteeing marital stability divorce rates were already relatively high in the 50s compared to the past (in which people married older) and when they shot up in the 60's and '70s, it was often as not people who had married 10+ years before who were getting divorced.

[source]

In other words, marrying a 20-year-old woman is no guarantee you won't get divorced. Lots of those women who married young in the 50s and 60s proceeded to get divorced in the 70s and 80s.

Does this mean you shouldn't marry young? Obviously, we don't think so, since we married at 22 (well under the average marriage age in 2001.) But it is true that all data these days suggest that those who marry young are more likely to divorce than those who married older. That didn't worry me, because I wasn't marrying "woman aged 22" and I wasn't marrying 100 women and hoping to get the maximum percentages of those marriages to last; I was marrying one woman who shared my beliefs about the nature of marriage (as taught by the Catholic Church) and who had been in a faithful and chaste relationship with me for the last three and a half years.

Alright, so I've spent a lot of time shooting down Dalrock's explanations. Clearly the open question is: If you're a guy who wants to have a happy and lasting marriage in this day and age (when that's certainly not the norm), what should you do?

Have a Reason
I recall a while back listening to one of the EconTalk podcasts where host Russ Roberts (who is a practicing Jew) was observing that while many people talk about how they want to forgo aspects of modern technology and follow a simpler life, one of the few groups of people that do this with any regularity is the Amish, who do it for religious reasons.  He speculated (analogizing Jewish religious practices, particularly Orthodox ones) that when you have a lifestyle which has some attractions but is very, very hard to stick to, in general it's only going to be people who have a religious-strength reason for following that lifestyle who are going to follow through.

In this day and age, not having sex till marriage (which these manosphere types seem expect of women, though I'm less clear whether they expect if of themselves) and remaining married until death after marrying is very, very countercultural.  Why would you go through the work?  For us, it's because we believe that acting otherwise would be a mortal sin -- a sin for which, unless truly repented of, one goes to hell.

If you believe that too, you're a good part of the way there.  Now just find a woman who shares that belief just as deeply as you do.  It is, to my mind, far more important that a potential wife truly shares your deepest beliefs about what marriage is than how old she is or what her sexual history is prior to reaching those beliefs -- if you are dealing with a woman who routinely violates her own stated beliefs, as opposed to having had a history prior to reaching those beliefs, you may well have a problem on your hands and should do some very, very serious thinking.

If, on the other hand, you don't hold these kind of beliefs, if you just think it would be more pleasant not to get divorced and to have a wife without prior history, but you don't think it is wrong for you yourself to have sex before marriage, don't think it's wrong for you to divorce, etc:  In that case, you need to start looking at your expectations and ask yourself why you expect something out of your potential wife that you don't adhere to yourself.

Move Among People Who Share The Beliefs You Want To Live By
You would think this would be a no-brainer, but people violate this principle with surprising frequency and don't understand why it causes them problems. I recall one of my parent's single friends complaining to my mom (many years ago) that the girls he went out with never seemed to want to get married. "You only go to meet women in bars," Mom pointed out. "How about you start going to church again and meet a girl there?"

Now, I know some very nice girls who go to bars at times -- and not just for Theology On Tap, but also just to have a drink once and a while -- but it's true that if you move primarily among people who aren't interested in marriage, or who have a view of marriage as something you might do after cohabiting for a number of years, unless you too want to follow that path, you need to find a new social set. If you never spend time with people who share your beliefs about marriage, no amount of ranting on the internet about your lack of prospects is going to hook you up with someone who does.

Be The Sort of Man That The Sort Of Woman You Want Would Want To Marry
(And that her father, brothers and brothers-in-law won't veto either.)

This is not just a matter of: "I have a good job, male genitals and am not bad looking." If you want to marry a woman who has saved herself for marriage, and you've spent some time realizing that these sorts of women are not exactly thick on the ground in the United States in 2012, it's worth asking yourself: Are you the sort of man that woman is going to want to marry? You've essentially admitted that such women are rare, and rare commodities are precious. Are you worth it to her?

Have you yourself remained a virgin? Have you avoided porn and masturbation? If you haven't done these, or worse yet have no intention of refraining from fornication, porn, masturbation, etc. from here on out, it's time for a reality check. You may not want to compete with theoretical future wife's past lovers, but why should she want to have to compete with your past lovers, your online porn habit or your wanking?

Have you shown that you're a steady guy who's ready to provide for a wife and family?  Are you able to be someone that a woman actually wants to be around?  (Hint for manosphere types, from a guy who's been happily married for a good while and has a lot of close female friends: Most women do not find locker room behavior attractive, nor do they find guys who go around saying things like "The smartest woman is dumber than the dumbest man," a turn on. Don't delude yourself that because you don't say it to her face, she won't pick up on your attitude.)

Do you share the religious convictions that your future wife has? And, see above, are there many women with your religious convictions, or lack thereof, who are wanting to live as you want her to have lived and have a marriage such as you want to have?

If you're coming down on the wrong side of a lot of these questions, it's time for you to do some serious thinking about your desires versus your actions.

Realize That Good Things Are Worth Waiting For
Too many people, whether it's apparently secular manosphere types like Dalrock's readers or strongly traditionalist Christians talking about how everyone should be doing "Christian Courtship" rather than dating seem to think that finding a spouse is something that can be done rapidly with sufficient force of will, and that anyone who isn't succeeding quickly must be being too picky or not really trying.  Maybe I'm an odd one to disagree with this, since I met my wife when I was 18, but I've always considered that to be quite the piece of luck.  Among my friends and relatives, I know a number of people who also married right out of college.  But I also know people who, though honestly searching and wanting very much to get married, took a long time to find a spouse, or haven't found one yet.  This summer I'll be crisscrossing the country to attend the weddings of three good friends, all good Catholic guys in their early 30s who've been honestly searching hard for the right woman to marry, but didn't succeed until quite recently.

And obviously, each of those weddings has a similar story behind it for the woman: good Catholic girls who've been wanting to get married for years but didn't come across the right guy until recently.  And there are other nice Catholic girls who are still searching.

If you have a highly counter-cultural idea of what marriage is, your pool of potential mates is far, far smaller than the average.  Especially if you're spending a lot of your time moving around mainstream circles, most of the people you're meeting simply aren't marriage material for you.  But even if, like MrsDarwin and I, you spend most of your social time in a sub-culture of like-minded people, who share your beliefs and desire in regards to marriage, finding someone you want to spend the rest of your life with and raise a family with (and who shares the feeling) is often going to take a lot of searching.

If, on the other hand, you're convinced that there are lots of women you could happily marry, but they keep turning you down, your problem might be that instead of a specific woman you're just seeing "a piece of marriage material".  Time to slow down and actually get to know a girl. They like that. Trust me on this.

What About Those Who Haven't Been Living The Life Up Till Now?
Given what our culture is, there are obviously a lot of people (men and women) who have not always lived chastely who now find themselves wanting to marry happily and permanently. From what I can make out from the remarks made by Dalrock and his commenters, their solution to this problem seems to be, "If you're a man, dump the woman you're currently sleeping with and demand a virgin to marry, then everything will be fine. If you're a woman, forget about it; you're damaged goods and aren't worth marrying." Aside from the apparent misogynist double standard involved in this thinking, there's an obvious numerical problem. The number percentage of men and women engaging in premarital sex is pretty equal, and if all the men think they're somehow God's gift to virgin womanhood, there's going to be some competition going on that's not going to work out numerically to everyone's satisfaction.

Dalrock accuses me of being in the "man up and marry those sluts column". I suppose it's one of the contradictions of true Christianity that it scandalizes both those who hate the fact that we believe that the moral law exists in the first place (this would be the people who are always telling us we need to get out of their bedrooms and stop judging) and also scandalizes those who've endorsed a sort of post-Christian (or for the Christians, perhaps neo-Puritan) shame-society -- these folks are shocked that we actually believe in forgiveness.

However, it's important to be clear that when Catholics talk about forgiveness and conversion, we're not talking about the kind of tearful altar call feelings that many Protestants are thinking of. Remember, we Catholics don't accept Martin Luther's "snow on a dung heap" image of how forgiveness works. If you want to really see what kind of hard-asses we are when it comes to expiation of sins, pick up a copy of Dante's Purgatorio and read it through carefully.

It's not enough to just be sorry for past sins. Virtue is a habit towards the good. If your virtue muscles are underdeveloped because you haven't been living according to the Church's moral principles, the only way to get back into shape morally is through rigorous practice. Like any kind of strenuous training for those who aren't fit, it takes a lot of time, effort and pain. And it's not something you can just quit once you've gotten in shape if you want to stay that way.

If a couple has been sleeping together for a while, and they're now wanting to get married according to the Church's understanding of marriage, what I would advise (and to my knowledge what any priest is supposed to insist on unless there are very unusual circumstances) is that they completely cease having sex immediately, go to confession, and then successfully continue their relationship in complete chastity for a good solid while before scheduling a wedding. (The usual big exception to this advice is if they're pregnant, in which case they may well want to get married much more quickly, but again, any good priest is going to be very, very cautious about that kind of situation.)

If you're trying to decide whether to marry a woman who has engaged in sexual sin in the past, but who now says she shares your beliefs about sex, then the obvious question is: How long has she been living according to her new beliefs, and how successfully has she done so? Sexual immorality (like any other kind of immorality) is habit-forming, and breaking habits takes time and hard work. If you've had an alcoholic in the family or among your friends, you know that how much confidence you have in that person not relapsing is entirely a function of their level of commitment to staying out of temptation, and how long they've successfully been on the the wagon.

And of course, if you have a history of sexual sin, expect any woman considering marrying you to be asking exactly the same questions about you.



This post is so long already that I'm hesitant to pour more words into writing a conclusion. But then, no one ever said that living a counter-cultural life style would be easy or involve low word counts.