HOW THE WEST REALLY LOST GOD di Mary Eberstadt cap 8-9 e conclusioni
- 8 The Future of Faith and Family: The Case for Pessimism
- . Fewer people are getting married.
- . Fewer people are having children.
- . Fewer people who are having children are sustaining intact two-parent homes for them to grow up in.
- 9 The Future of Christianity and the Family: The Case for Optimism
- “Calamities,” Sorokin observed, “generate two opposite movements in different sections of the population. One is a trend toward unreligiousness and demoralization; the other is a trend toward extreme religious, spiritual, and moral exaltation.”1 Reviewing large chunks of religious and other history, including some from beyond the West and Christianity alone, Sorokin believed that he spied a general rule: that “the principal steps in the progress of mankind toward a spiritual religion and a noble code of ethics have been taken primarily under the impact of great catastrophes
- “The incontinent spending of many European governments, which awarded whole populations unearned benefits at the expense of generations to come, has…produced a crisis not merely economic but social, political, and even civilizational.”
- “Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.”7
- Does the health of Christianity in the West matter? How and to whom?
- The fate of Christianity matters even to nonbelievers, because Christianity on balance is a force for good in modern society
- Believers give more to charity.
- Believers live longer and are healthier.
- Believers are more likely to be happy.
- Believers are less likely to commit crime.
- Believers contribute to “social capital.”
- Is it similarly in society’s interests to encourage the natural family?
- The family is the enemy of society, progress, or the state—or all of the above. Da platone a marx... altri detrattori... Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, and more
- “The women…who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in the concentration camps,” as Betty Friedan rather infamously put it in The Feminine Mystique
- But what does contemporary empirical evidence for its (often overlooked) part tell us about the role of family in society?
- The family is the partner of society, progress, or the state—or all of the above.
- James Q. Wilson
- Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school.
- Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work.
- Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth
- Children in one-parent families are much worse off than those in two-parent families even when both families have the same earnings
- children of an unmarried woman were much more likely than those in a two-parent family to become a delinquent, even after controlling for income
- To quote Charles Murray once more, “I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political partie
- First, the family—if it is competent—reduces the need for state intervention,
- Second, the family—again if it is competent—acts as the original safety net, lowering the risks to its members of adverse outcomes and raising the likelihood that its members will contribute to society in turn.
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