One of the things that makes me a fusionist (who combines libertarian and conservative ideas) rather than a libertarian is that I believe illegitimacy is a very bad thing. So these statistics are bad news:
The trend in unmarried childbearing was fairly stable from the mid-1990s to 2002, but has shown a steep increase between 2002 and 2007. Between 1980 and 2007, the proportion of births to unmarried women in the United States has more than doubled, from 18 percent to 40 percent.
Iceland (66 percent), Sweden (55 percent), Norway (54 percent), France (50 percent), Denmark (46 percent) and the United Kingdom (44 percent) all have higher proportions of births to unmarried mothers than the United States. Ireland (33 percent), Germany and Canada (30 percent), Spain (28 percent), Italy (21 percent) and Japan (2 percent) have lower percentages than the United States.
Just think about that. More than double since 1980, and approaching the awful numbers in Northern Europe. People really need to be thinking about what has caused this and how it can be addressed. Same sex marriage is the big issue concerning marriage, but this should be it instead.
I got this information from Robin Hanson's blog. His two posts on the subject are quite good, and make the situation sound even worse. While many people decry the effect on children of a world where women do not get married to their children's fathers, few speak much about the disruptive effects this may have on the large number of men who are do not have long term partners and to the many men who are denied the joys of intimacy. (The latter occurs because in a world where women do not choose men to be long term partners, they have sex with a smaller number of "sexy" men, leaving the less sexy men with fewer opportunities for intimacy.) Sadly, the stereotypical social networks in the inner city do suggest the harm produced by the combination of these effects.
It is my understanding that college educated women have much lower illegitimacy rates -- if memory serves, something like 5 percent. This suggests that the incentives and norms in our society need to change to improve the situation for the noncollege educated.
Update: I have found support for the claim in the last paragraph. In particular, in the 1960s, the rate of illegitimate births was 5 percent for the top educated third of the population and forty years later that number has barely budged.
One need not hybridize with the "fusionist" label. Just be clear that your libertarianaism is not founded on utility, but on optimality.
Happiness can be understood not as being in pleasure and avoiding pain, but as the opportunity to pursue excellence of being. Aristotelian happiness is the best underlayment for sound libertarian thought: "Let us be!" Everyone is happiest as they move toward being more excellently what and who they truly are. Additionally, since we are not born nor exist in isolation, one cannot feel excellence in one's own being while those with intrinsic relation to you are constrained in their own opportunity in pursuit of excellence in their own being. Impediments to the excellence of others offend one's own sense of extended being in the intrinsic relations one has with other people.
While no one can or should say exactly what anyone else's being is or should be, much less how it may or should be pursued toward excellence -- objective constraints to the pursuit of excellence are fairly trivially identified and can, and should be dealt with. Whisky is good, but we feel pity for a drunk in the gutter. That pity motivates us, whether we act on it or not, to wish him out of the gutter, dried out and finding ways for him to avoid his personal and objective constraint of debilitating consumption of alcohol. That alcohol impedes his happiness, and that he should avoid it, and we should aid him in that effort, is not, objectively speaking, a constraint on his happiness -- it frees us both to pursue an excellence, individually and in personal relations that a drunken stupor generally precludes.
On the other hand, trying dictate to people who may or may not suffer an objective constraint from a given activity, on some theoretic view of a "constraint" or a collective preference for certain types of excellence is an objective constraint on optimality, as it bars the pursuit of excellence for those whom the theoretic constraint is not objectively constraining, or forces people into, or misallocates social resources toward endeavors that are not actually increasing excellence.
In other words, unless one takes the narrow hedonistic view of the utilitarian, social and individual aspects of libertarianism and conservatism do not conflict. Excellence, optimality, is an indefinite striving, and open-ended, contingent evolutionary process of being -- over definite impediments. We should define only to limit -- and so should define only impediments, and seek their removal or limitation, and not try to define modes of excellence -- because to define is inherently limiting and therefore does not aid an optimal way of being.
Posted by: G.R. Mead | July 12, 2009 at 07:34 AM
Who remembers this? http://www.mfc.org/pfn/95-12/quayle.html
A united front of homosexuals, pedophiles and, oh, yes, so-called "Libertarians" has been waging culture war on marriage and all restraints in sexual matters.
A few years ago, the Philadelphia School District allowed its curriculum of sex education to be formulated by something called the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Task Force. Written policies and guidelines were promulgated, and teachers were told that deviation from the party line was grounds for dismissal.
Much more sinister than the written materials, which after all might make their way into public or legislative notice, were the videos shown in teacher staff meetings and training sessions. These were dramatiazations of teachers struggling with how to deal with the sex ed materials, and how to field questions beginning with, "My dad said. . ." or "My reverend said. . . " The videos showed the teachers being brought, Socratically, to the position that ". . .there is no right and wrong with respect to sexual matters."
In other words, teachers could be fired if they neglected to "liberate" the children from all those old bad rules imposed by their parents, pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus or whatever.
Cultural war has been upon us for years. Never be surprised by the casulties we are taking.
Posted by: Lou Gots | July 12, 2009 at 08:08 AM
Another thought.
Respect for tradition, for the mos maiorum, the ways of the ancestors, is one of the marks of a healthy society. As the data under discussion indicates, the elite, the most intelligent and best educated, are generally capable of conducting themselves. It is the less intelligent, the less educated, the less well-off who are lost to social dysfunction when they depart from tradition and give themselves up to shameful lusts.
The tragedy is that ordinary people are lost without the guidance of culture-preserving institutions. The bastardy revolution confirms this, and more than Murphy Brown are to blame.
Posted by: Lou Gots | July 12, 2009 at 03:07 PM
The ticking time bomb for the upper educated women is that they won't have a supply of comparably educated men to mate with.
Women grossly outnumber men in our higher education system, and it seems to be getting worse. Who will today's university women mate with?
And why are men bailing on university education? Could it have anything to do with men leaving a system that systematically villanizes them?
Posted by: krome | July 13, 2009 at 09:14 AM
the comments on this particular post are full of verbal vomit. Although I love the always reliable lumping of homosexuals and pedophiles in the same sentence - absolutely priceless.
Posted by: Johnny | July 13, 2009 at 01:51 PM
Johnny, please be fair in your defense of the indefensible. My point had not been that homosexuals are necessarily pedophiles. Of course that would have been an unfair generalization. What my earlier comment had condemned was the cultural deconsruction practiced by all the enemies of permanent things in the area of sexual customs--all those who, like the Gracchan villains in the Oratio Prima in Catalinam, ". . .lust after new things."
Homosexuals want to change how we think about relationships; pedophiles want to change how we think about relationships. These are not unfair observations. Changing how we think about relationships has disasterous consequences for the real, live human individuals who try to live outside of traditional folkways. Tragically, innnocent children are the victims of social experimentation aimed at succoring the sensibilities of the deviant.
Posted by: Lou Gots | July 13, 2009 at 06:40 PM
"Changing how we think about relationships has disasterous consequences for the real, live human individuals who try to live outside of traditional folkways. Tragically, innnocent children are the victims of social experimentation aimed at succoring the sensibilities of the deviant."
No offense Lou, but that is absolutely absurd.
Posted by: Johnny | July 14, 2009 at 02:25 AM
That anyone might think it "absolutely absurd." it an extremely important point. I am only too aware that to very many, the traditional core values or our civilization are foolishness and a stumbling block. In what passes for modern thought, a value such as the centrality of an intact family to child-rearing is not just mistaken, it an sinister vestige of the mythic patriarchate, under which all women and all homosexuals had been trodden down and mararginalized to perpetuate male privilege.
Now here is the lesson. We are facing each other across an almost unimginable gulf. The skies are very different colors in these separate universes. All the words have different meanings. On this side of the chasm, the word "patriarch" refers principally to the heroes of the Jewish scriptures, those we revere when we say in the Litany of the Saints, "Ye holy patriarchs and prophets, pray for us."
There are valid, secular, honest, scientific, and,yes, objective, reasons why a culture which favors intact families possesses advantages over the normless. We should ask ourselves on which side of the chasm are the dreamers and on which are the realists.
Posted by: Lou Gots | July 14, 2009 at 08:21 AM
"intact families" is code for your definition of what a family should be. Why cant a gay couple have an "intact family"? Can multi-racial couples be "intact families?" I'm sure that for a long time very many people thought there are "valid, secular, scienfitific, and yes, objective reasons" why multi-racial families would be bad for society.
Posted by: Johnny | July 14, 2009 at 01:25 PM
My comments are in response to Mike Rappaport's observations. Your blatant error in fundamental logic, namely attacking an arguement against same-sex couples by attacking prejudice against mixed race-couples underscores the cultural gulf of which I had written.
Our topic once had been illigitimacy: never had miscegenation been under discussion. Let us return to judging whether cultural deconstruction contributes to illigitimacy. Obviously I hold that it does. I hold that being a Michael Jackson fan contributes to illigitimacy, as does wearing one's baseball cap on sideways.
Likewise, when we impute "code words" to our partners in conversation we would do well to concentrate on the subject matter under examination. My 8:21 A.M. comment does in fact contain "code words," (which apparently remain wholly undeciphered) but these have nothing to do with "intact families."
I have asserted that my interpretation of the data referenced in Mike's posting is that advocates of changing definitions of family relationships contribute to anomie, and undermine family stability. Is that right or wrong?
Posted by: Lou Gots | July 14, 2009 at 04:08 PM
nice backpedal.
Posted by: Johnny | July 14, 2009 at 08:47 PM