My Sunday column tried to take the ongoing debate over marriage and upward mobility in a slightly different direction, by prodding social liberals to acknowledge the ways in which their own ideological vision and its victories – legal and cultural both – have played a role in the married, two-parent family’s decline. I don’t think my argument has won many converts, but rather than respond to the responses right now I wanted to highlight one of the arguments that inspired the column in the first place: This essay from Steve Randy Waldman (the brother, I believe, of the novelist Adelle Waldman, familiar to my readers from an earlier round of kulturdebating), which makes the case that “marriage promotion” as social conservatives often describe it is “a destructive cargo cult,” with altars and rings standing in for the runways and tarmacs that World War II-era South Sea Islanders allegedly built in the hopes of attracting military airplanes.
In both cases, Waldman argues, any causal arrow runs entirely in the other direction. Just as the airstrips don’t actually attract planes that weren’t already headed there to begin with, rings and vows and weddings and cakes are the fruits of stable lives rather than their seed: “Marriage is an effect of other things that facilitate good social outcomes rather than a cause of its own.” And urging people who don’t have access to those “other things” – a steady job; a solid, dependable potential mate – to just get married anyway, as though some kind of magic will follow from the vows, isn’t just a bad idea; it’s a cruel one, which will likely consign them to worse outcomes when the marriage falls apart.
Along with the vividness of the cargo-cult analogy, what lifts Waldman’s argument above the usual run of liberal writing on this subject is the way it incorporates a point that cultural conservatives are often more likely to make: Namely, that it isn’t just a changing economy that’s reduced the supply of solid potential spouses among the lower classes; it’s also a changing social landscape, in which the well-educated are more segregated from the less-educated, and marriage tends to ratify existing social hierarchies (all those two-lawyer and two-doctor and yes, two-journalist couples) more than it did a few generations back. (Indeed, by coincidence, there is new research on inequality and “assortative mating” out this week.)
Here Waldman engages at length with Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart,” endorsing Murray’s portrait of a meritocratic elite walling itself off from the rest of society, while lamenting the conservative scholar’s failure to fully address how that elite’s self-segregation essentially created the social problems that Murray prefers to blame on “declines in industriousness, religiosity, and devotion to marriage” among the poor. The collapse in marriage, in particular, Waldman argues, is a case where the secession of the well-educated and well-off makes all the difference in the world:
Once upon a time, in the halcyon days that Murray contrasts to the present … there were many fewer markers of social class and future affluence. The best and brightest were not so institutionally, geographically, and culturally segregated from the rest. (That is, within the community of white Americans. For black Americans, all of this is old hat.) The risk of “mismarrying”, for a male, was not so great, as he would be the primary breadwinner anyway, and her family, while perhaps poorer than his own, was unlikely to be in desperate straits. Men could choose whom they liked, in a personal, sexual, and romantic sense without great cost. Women from poor-ish backgrounds had a decent chance at landing a solid breadwinner, if not the next President…. Very much like an insurance pool, a large and mixed pool of potential spouses renders marriage on average a pretty good deal for everyone … In a middle-class society, it was reasonable for a woman to guess that a nice guy she could fall in love with would be able to be a good husband and father too.
Flash-forward to the present. We now live in a socially and economically stratified society. By the time we marry, we can ascertain with reasonable confidence what kind of job, income, neighborhood, and friends a potential mate is likely to come with. The stakes are much higher than they used to be. Our lifestyle norms are based on two-earner households, so men as well as women need to think hard about the earning prospects of potential mates. Increasing economic dispersion — inequality — means that it is quite possible that a potential mate’s family faces circumstances vastly more difficult than ones own, if one is near the top of the distribution. It is unfashionable to say this in individualistic America, but it is as true now as it was for Romeo and Juliette that a marriage binds not only two people, but two families. If you have a good marriage, you will love your spouse. If you love your spouse and then her uninsured mother is diagnosed with cancer, those medical bills will to some perhaps large degree become your liability. More prosaically, if the in-laws can’t keep the heat on, do you wash your hands of it and let them shiver through the winter? In a very unequal society, the costs and risks of “marrying down” are large.
As with an insurance pool, too much knowledge can poison the marriage pool … Because the stakes are now very high and the information very solid, good marriage prospects (in a crass socioeconomic sense) hold out for other good marriage prospects. The pool that’s left over, once all the people capable of signaling their membership in the socioeconomic elite have been “creamed” away, may often be, objectively, a bad one. Marriage has a fat lower tail. When you marry, you risk physical abuse, you risk appropriation of your wealth and income, you risk mistreatment of the children you hope someday to have, you risk the Sartre-ish hell of being bound eternally to someone whose company is intolerable. More commonly, you risk forming a household that is unable to get along reasonably in an economic sense, causing conflicts and crises and miseries even among well-intentioned and decent people. It is quite rational to demand a lot of evidence that a potential mate sits well above the fat left tail, but the ex ante uncertainty is always high. When the right-hand side of the desirability distribution is truncated away, marriage may simply be a bad risk.
As a partial explanation for what’s been happening with marriage among the poor and working class, I agree with much of this. (I think Murray would agree with much of it as well, and given that one of the few real prescriptions offered at the end of “Coming Apart” is a call for elites to become less self-segregated — to involve themselves more fully with the lives of their less-educated neighbors, to cease pulling up, up and away — Waldman may be accusing Murray of a blindness that he doesn’t actually display.) And I would also partially endorse Waldman’s rejoinder to the suggestion that poor and working class women can solve all their problems by just using longer-lasting birth control and waiting as long as possible to have kids:
… single motherhood is not a frequent occurrence among women who expect to marry happily and soon. The relevant question is whether we should discourage from having children women who reasonably expect they may not find a good spouse at all, at least not while they are in their youth. That is to say, should we tell women who have been segregated into the bad marriage market, who on average have lowish incomes and unruly neighbors and live near bad schools, that motherhood is just not for them, probably ever?
… I think it would be monstrous. I believe that, as a society, we should commit ourselves to creating circumstances in which the fundamentally human experience of parenthood is available to all, not barred from those we’ve left behind on our way to good schools and walkable neighborhoods. Women unlikely to marry who wish to have children by all means should. The shame is ours, not theirs. It belongs to those of us who call ourselves “elite”, who are so proud of our “achievements” that we walk away without a care from the majority of our fellow citizens and fellow humans, from people who in other circumstances, even in the not so distant past, would have been our friends and coworkers, lovers and spouses. It’s on us to join together what we have put asunder.
If I fully shared Waldman’s analysis, I would share his conclusion: Better a society where people have children out of wedlock at ever-higher rates, I would say, than a society where non-elites are just discouraged from ever having kids at all.
But I don’t fully share it, and I don’t think the choice is actually that stark. In part, that’s because I think he overstates how dire the economic picture has become for the lower middle class and poor. The post-1970s American economy has been mediocre for non-elites and especially for working class men, yes, but income levels have still risen, and overall levels of deprivation have decreased. When you factor in taxes and transfers, poor Americans are much less poor today than they were in the more socially-egalitarian past that Murray and Waldman (and I) think had advantages over our more unequal present. So while it’s true that assortative mating may have “creamed” some of the best marriage prospects from the overall marriage pool, it’s also true that some of the material downside risks of marriage are lower today than they were in 1940 or 1960 or 1980 — and these two trends should, to some extent, work to mitigate one another, if not fully cancel out.
To take Waldman’s specific examples, for instance, even if you “marry down” today you’re probably less likely to have in-laws who can’t pay for heat than were married couples at mid-century, because compared to the Eisenhower era (when lots of people, including my maternal grandparents in their first home, lacked indoor plumbing) many fewer Americans today suffer from that kind of basic deprivation. Likewise, whatever inequality has done to marriage among the working class, it’s strange to have a liberal argue that potential mates today have more to fear from an uninsured in-law’s cancer diagnosis – and thus more reason to avoid wedlock entirely — than they did during an era when neither Medicaid or Medicare existed.
What people contemplating marrying down clearly should fear more than in the Eisenhower-era past are interpersonal problems — a spouse who comes from a broken home, who doesn’t have positive models of marriage and parenting in her past, who carries a cloud of suspicion into wedlock because his own parents’ marriage fell apart. Economic redistribution can help mitigate those problems (which is why I favor it, to a point), by creating a firmer material foundation for families. But the problems themseves just aren’t exclusively material: They have a cultural element, and reflect a cultural change, that can’t simply be ignored.
This is where I look at Waldman’s critique of how elite self-interest has contributed to marriage’s decline and see a case study in what liberals are inclined to leave out of this story, and what implications they are unwilling to draw from their own premises. Because if the heart of your social analysis, the core of your conclusion, is the idea that the homogamous new elite’s social behavior is essentially (if perhaps unknowingly) self-interested — that the pursuit of meritocratic success has led the mass upper class to “walk away without a care … from people who in other circumstances, even in the not so distant past, would have been our friends and coworkers, lovers and spouses” — then perhaps you need to apply the same cold-eyed perspective to that elite’s cultural assumptions and attitudes as well, and to the blend of laws and norms those attitudes incline its members to support.
By which I mean … is it just a coincidence that this self-interested elite holds the nearly-uniformly liberal views on social issues that it does? Is it just random that the one idea binding the post-1970s upper class together — uniting Wall Street’s Randians and Harvard’s academic socialists, a left-leaning media and a right-leaning corporate sector, the libertarians of Silicon Valley and the liberal rich of the Upper West Side — is a hostility to any kind of social conservatism, any kind of morals legislation, any kind of paternalism on issues of sex and marriage and family? Is the upper class’s social liberalism the lone case, the rare exception, where our self-segregated, self-interested elites really do have the greater good at heart?
Maybe so — but for the sake of argument, let’s consider the possibility that they don’t. Not infrequently in culture-war arguments, conservative complaints about liberalism’s hostility to “traditional values” (or whatever phrase you prefer) are met by the counterpoint that liberal regions of the country seem to embrace bourgeois norms more fully than conservatives communities. (The contrast between family stability in Massachusetts and Alabama, for instance, is often invoked by cultural liberals as an argument-clincher.) I think this counterpoint oversimplifies a more complicated landscape and elides some crucial issues, but it does get at something real: In upper class circles, liberal social values do not necessarily lead to libertinism among the people who hold them, and indeed quite often coexist with an impressive amount of personal conservatism, personal restraint.
But if we’re inclined, with Waldman, to see our elite as fundamentally self-interested, then we should ask ourselves whether the combination of personal restraint and cultural-political permissiveness might not itself be part of how this elite maintains its privileges. Waldman, for instance, makes the (completely valid) point that just telling a single mother to go get married to whomever she happens to be dating isn’t likely to lead to happy outcomes for anyone involved. But is that really just because of wage stagnation and the truncation of the potential-mates bell curve? Or could it also be that the decision to marry only delivers benefits when it’s part of a larger life script, a way of pursuing love and happiness that shapes people’s life choices – men as well as women — from the moment they come of age sexually, and that exerts its influence not through the power of a singular event (ring, cake, toasts) but through that event’s place in a larger mix of cues, signals, expectations, and beliefs?
If it’s the latter — and if you’re not an economic or genetic determinist, I really think it has to be — then it’s worth recognizing that much of what the (elite-driven) social revolutions of the 1970s did, in law and culture, was to strip away the most explicit cues and rules linking sex, marriage, and childrearing, and nudging people toward the two-parent bourgeois path. No longer would the law make any significant effort to enforce marriage vows. No longer would an unplanned pregnancy impose clear obligations on the father. No longer would the culture industry uphold the “marriage-then-childbearing” script as normative, or endorse any moral script around sexuality save the rule of consenting adults.
And following our hermeneutic of anti-elite suspicion, let’s ask: If the path to human flourishing still mostly runs through monogamy and marriage, who benefits the most from the kind of changes that make that path less normative, less law-supported, less obvious? Well, mostly people who are embedded in communities that continue to send the kind of signals that the law and the wider culture no longer send.
That can mean a religious community: In those red states with high divorce rates that liberals like to cite, frequent churchgoers are an exception to the pattern, and of course Mormon Utah is the high marriage-rate (and, not surprisingly, high social mobility) exception to every post-1970s trend.
Or, more importantly for our purposes, it can mean a community low in explicit moralism but high in social capital and social pressure, where the incentives not to date or sleep with the wrong person at the wrong time are sharpened by the immense rewards for not making personal mistakes, where divorce and single parenthood are regarded as major threats to the all-important intergenerational transfer of success, where young people are inculcated with the kind of self-control required to dabble in libertinism but not take major risks, and where the influence of a libertine culture is counteracted by the dense network of adult authority figures whose examples matter more than what you watch and read and consume. A place where the norms and rules and script don’t have to be made explicit to carry immense weight. A place where everyone understands the basic secret of success.
A place like, well, the modern meritocracy.
Now I’m not saying that everything is wine and roses in the post-sexual revolution upper class. But the challenges of navigating that landscape, the mating stresses and reproductive difficulties that come with the meritocratic life script, are not threats to the social position of its members in anything like the same way that the essential scriptlessness of sexual life is to the life chances of people further down the socioeconomic ladder.
And it’s hard for the meritocracy’s inhabitants, I think, to recognize that their own script really can be a kind of a gnostic secret – that people outside their circle are getting a very different message about sex and children and marriage than the one that’s implicitly imparted to the new upper class’s organization kids. Consider this passage from Waldman, making the case that American culture writ large is still pro-marriage and effectively socially conservative:
The stylized fact that the great preponderance of grown-ups with kids who seem economically and socially successful are married is known to everybody, rich and poor, black and white. Yes, the traditional family is not uncontested. There are, in our culture, valorizations of single-parenthood as statements of feminist independence, valorizations of male liberty and male libertinism, aspirational models of non-traditional families by until-recently-excluded gay people, etc. But despite the outsized role played by Kurt on Glee, these alternative visions are numerically marginal, and probably especially marginal among the poor.
What is widely “known” in our culture, I would submit, is that fancy weddings are swell and being married with kids is a nice, worthwhile goal. But what often passes unacknowledged — or gets actively undermined — is the idea that this goal is best achieved by treating sex and dating and mating with real caution, real care, real moral responsibility.
It’s certainly unacknowledged in the main pop-cultural iconography of our age – the obsessive coverage of celebrities and pop idols and reality stars, whose marrying and babymaking and splitting-up is treated with a mix of prurience and sentimentality that admits of only the haziest sort of moral judgment. It’s a little more visible in the pop-cultural genres that deal directly with dating and mating, from pop music to sitcoms to soap operas, where you do sometimes see more conservative treatments of sex and marriage — whether embodied in Apatovian comic raunch or rom-com sentimentalism. But these genres tend to portray personal responsibility as something that can be taken up almost randomly in your late 20s or early 30s, when circumstances finally call for it, and treat any debauchery that precedes it as relatively cost-free. And even this limited, occasional conservatism coexists with enough straightforward valorizations of libertinism, both male and female, to make me very strongly doubt Waldman’s dismissal of these attitudes as strictly “marginal” – especially given the dark-matter influence of pornography on how young people are taught to think about their sexuality.
In a follow-up post, Waldman notes that American pop culture still puts weddings on a pedestal — and so it does! But celebrating wildly expensive, consumption-oriented festivals of late-twentysomething success has very little to do with cultivating and celebrating the kind of behavior that makes the path to marriage easier to follow, and that helps make a marriage last. (The Queen Latifah-blessed mass wedding at the Grammys Sunday night was, in a way, the ne plus ultra of this tendency: An “I do” apotheosis that stripped out all the crucial particularities of personality, family and community from the institution it was allegedly celebrating.) And no matter how much our movies love their wedded endings, the premarital sexual and romantic scripts that our culture holds up as aspirational — as mass-market depictions of the way cool people live now — tend to associate coolness with a level of casual promiscuity, an entirely relaxed attitude to sex and dating and babymaking, that ends in wedded bliss for the characters in question but for lots of Americans would be a royal road to disaster.
Fortunately enough (for them), most inhabitants of the overclass seem to know intuitively that these freewheeling scripts don’t bear that much relationship to the way that successful, upwardly-mobile people actually live and mate and marry. (The movies make college life seem like nonstop beer-soaked dissipation, for instance, but actually “individuals attending four year colleges and universities report some of the lowest levels of casual sex regardless of how casual sex is measured …”) So again, if you were inclined to view all of this suspiciously, you might look at the culture industry — networks and production companies, magazines and music labels — and note that the messages it sends about sex are a kind of win-win for the class of people running it. They get to profit off various forms of exploitation directly, because sex sells and shock value attracts eyeballs. And then they also reap benefits indirectly – because the teaching they’re offering to the masses, the vision of the good life, is one that tends to ratify existing class hierarchies, by encouraging precisely the behaviors and choices that in the real world make it hard to rise and thrive. In this sense, one might suspect our cultural elites of being a little bit like the Silicon Valley parents who send their kids to computer-free schools: They don’t mind pushing the moral envelope in the shows they greenlight and the songs they produce, because they’re confident that their own kids have the sophistication required to regard Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus as amusements rather than role models, the social capital required to keep the culture’s messages at arm’s length.
Now do I actually think there’s some kind of elite-liberal cultural conspiracy to keep the masses in their social place? No, of course not – there’s nothing so conscious and cynical at work. But then again, neither do I think there’s a meritocratic conspiracy to withdraw into walkable-urban enclaves and leave the rest of society to fragment and decay. Yet that withdrawal and its consequences are still important facts for understanding the decline of marriage, just as Waldman says. An approach to life doesn’t have to be calculated to be effectively self-interested, and in the context of a stratified country that self-interest is well worth pointing out.
And the same is true of an approach to politics and culture. Again, I’m not alleging cynicism: Social liberals are entirely sincere in their belief that even self-censorship is unnecessary censorship (or, perhaps, that the internet has rendered cultural standards obsolete); in their conviction that laws banning abortion or restricting divorce are too punitive, illiberal and inherently sexist to be just; in their abiding sense that economic paternalism is morally acceptable but social-moral-sexual paternalism is not. But it is still the case that when we legalized abortion and instituted unilateral divorce, we helped usher in a sexual-marital-parental culture that seems to work roughly as well for people with lots of social capital as it did sixty years ago, while working pretty badly for the poor and lower middle class. It is still a reality of contemporary life that when anyone can get a divorce for any reason, the lower classes seem to get far more of the divorces, and that when anyone can get an abortion for any reason, the poor end up having more abortions and more children out of wedlock both. And it is still a fact that if you tallied up winners and losers from the sexual revolution, the obvious winners would tend to cluster at one end of 1975’s income distribution, the obvious losers at the other.
This post’s title is a provocation, of course: What I’m describing isn’t literally a class war. But it really does have winners. And they’re the ones most likely to insist, with great passion and conviction, that we can’t possibly learn anything from the social rules and laws and norms that held sway in America’s more equal and more mobile past.