advantage? Is marriage a vehicle for personal fulfillment and private happiness, a vocation of mutual service, or a task to love the one whom it has been given me to love? Are marital vows still to be regarded as binding promises that both partners are duty-bound to keep, or rather as quaint expressions of current hopes and predictions that can easily be nullified should they be mistaken? Having in so many cases already given their bodies to one another – not to speak of the previous others – how do young people today understand the link between marriage and conjugal fidelity? And what, finally, of that first purpose of marriage, procreation, for whose sake societies everywhere have instituted and safeguarded this institution? For, truth to tell, were it not for the important obligations to care for and rear the next generation, no society would much care about who couples with whom, or with how many, or for how long.
This brings me to what is probably the deepest and most intractable obstacle to courtship and marriage: a set of cultural attitudes and sensibilities that obscure and even deny the fundamental difference between youth and adulthood. Marriage, especially when seen as the institution designed to provide for the next generation, is most definitely the business of adults, by which I mean people who are serious about life, people who aspire to go outward and forward to embrace and assume responsibility for the future. To be sure, most college graduates do go out, find jobs, and become self-supporting (though, astonishingly, a great many return to live at home). But though out of the nest, they don’t have a course to fly. They do not experience their lives as a trajectory, with an inner meaning partly given by the life cycle itself. They do not see the carefreeness and independence of youth as a stage on the way to maturity, where they take responsibility for the world and especially, as parents, for the new lives that will replace them. The necessities of aging and mortality are out of sight; few feel the call to serve a higher goal or a transcendent purpose.
The view of life as play has often characterized the young, but today, remarkably, it is not regarded as something to be outgrown as soon as possible. For their narcissistic absorption in themselves and in immediate pleasures and present experiences, the young are not condemned but are even envied by many of their elders. Parents and children wear the same cool clothes, speak the same lingo, listen to the same music. Youth, not adulthood, is the cultural ideal, at least as celebrated in the popular culture. Yes, everyone feels himself or herself to be always growing, as a result of this failed relationship or that change of job. But very few aspire to be fully grown-up, and the culture does not demand it, not least because many prominent grown-ups would gladly change places with today’s twenty-somethings. Why should a young man be eager to take his father’s place if he sees his father running away from it with all deliberate speed? How many so-called grown-ups today agree with C.S.Lewis: “I envy youth its stomach, not its heart”?
Deeper Cultural Causes
So this is our situation. But just because it is novel and of recent origin does not mean that it is reversible or even that it was avoidable. Indeed, virtually all of the social changes we have so recently experienced are the bittersweet fruits of the success of our modern, democratic, liberal, enlightened society – celebrating equality, freedom, and universal secularized education, and featuring prosperity, mobility, and astonishing progress in science and technology. Even brief reflection shows how the dominant features of the American way of life are finally inhospitable to the stability of marriage and family life, and to the mores that lead people self-consciously to marry.
Tocqueville already observed the unsettling implications of American individualism, each person seeking only in himself for the reasons of things. The celebration of equality gradually undermines the authority of religion, tradition, and custom, and, within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons. A nation dedicated to safeguarding individual rights to liberty and the privately defined pursuit of happiness is, willy-nilly, preparing the way for the “liberation” of women, and in the absence of powerful nonliberal cultural forces such as traditional biblical religion that defend sex-linked social roles, the most likely outcome is androgyny in education and employment. Further, our liberal approach to important moral issues in terms of the rights of individuals – for example, contraception as part of a right to privacy, or abortion as belonging to a woman’s right over her own body, or procreation as governed by a right to reproduce – flies in the face of the necessarily social character of sexuality and marriage. The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights-bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply.
While poverty is not generally good for courtship and marriage, neither is luxury. The lifestyles of the rich and famous have long been rich also in philandering, divorce, and the neglect of children. Necessity becomes hidden from view by the possibilities for self-indulgence; the need for service and self-sacrifice, so necessary for marriage understood as procreative, is rarely learned in the lap of plenty. Thanks to unprecedented prosperity, huge numbers of American youth have grown up in the lap of luxury, and it shows. It’s an old story: Parents who slave to give their children everything they themselves were denied rarely produce people who will be similarly disposed toward their own children. Spoiled children make bad spouses and worse parents; when they eventually look for a mate, they frequently look for someone who will continue to cater to their needs and whims. For most people, the mother of virtue and maturity is necessity, not luxury.
The progress of science and technology, especially since World War II, has played a major role in creating an enfeebling culture of luxury. But scientific advances have more directly helped to undermine the customs of courtship. Technological advances in food production and distribution and a plethora of appliances – refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, etc. – largely eliminate the burdens of housekeeping; not surprisingly, however, homemaking itself disappears with the burdens, for the unburdened housewife now finds outside fish to fry. More significantly, medical advances have virtually eliminated infant mortality and deadly childhood diseases, contributing indirectly to a reduction in family size. The combination of longer life expectancy and effective contraception means that, for the first time in human history, the childbearing and childrearing years occupy only a small fraction (one-fifth to one-fourth) of a woman’s life; it is therefore less reasonable that she be solely prepared for, and satisfied by, the vocation of motherhood. Lastly, medical advances quite independent of contraception have prepared the drive toward sexual liberation: the triumph of the sexual is a predictable outcome of the successful pursuit, through medicine, of the young and enduringly healthy human body.
In fact, in his New Atlantis, Francis Bacon foresaw that the most likely social outcome of medical success would be a greatly intensified eroticism and promiscuous sexuality, in which healthy and perfected bodies seek enjoyment here and now without regard to the need for marriage, procreation, and childrearing. To counter these dangers, Bacon has his proposed utopian society establish the most elaborate rituals to govern marriage, and give its highest honor – after those conferred on the men of science – to the man who has sired over thirty living descendants (within marital boundaries). Without such countervailing customs, the successful pursuit of longer life and better health would lead to a culture of protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license, as Bacon clearly understood – and as we have seen in recent decades.
Technology aside, even the ideas of modern science have hurt the traditional understanding of sex. The rejection of a teleological view of nature has damaged most of all the teleological view of our sexuality. Sure, children come from the sex act, but the sex act no longer naturally derives its meaning or purpose from this procreative possibility. After all, a man spends perhaps all of thirty seconds of his sexual life procreating; sex is thus about something else. The separation of sex from procreation achieved in this half century by contraception was worked out intellectually much earlier; and the implications for marriage were drawn in theory well before they were realized in practice. Immanuel Kant, modernity’s most demanding and most austere moralist, nonetheless gave marriage a heady push down the slippery slope: Seeing that some marriages were childless, and seeing that sex
