B O O K S
Humpty Dumpty's Problem* By Patricia Lança The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, Melanie Phillips The Social Market Foundation, London, 1999. A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999. Books describing the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and mounting impatience. Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got here in the first place. Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown. Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition of the family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers; policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions. Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded, leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’. Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical. She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family. She is damning in her denunciation of a society where ‘Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion. It is her decision alone.’ Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’ She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to have been replaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation. If the account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study. Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage. Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be. She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’. Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposals and concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution. She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films. Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists. There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments and their contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed. However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners. A certain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively. For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them. It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad morals seem to go hand in hand with the growth of over- familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given. The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presence of professional ‘carers’ rather than the family. Can it be any wonder that the central fact of adult life— marriage—should have been radically affected also? When you may choose whether and when to have children, when you and your spouse may reasonably expect to live to over eighty, when modern medicine offers the prospect of acceptable health until near the end, the traditional behests seem strangely inappropriate. ‘Go forth and multiply’ seems positively anti- ecological. ‘In sickness and in health’ and ‘for richer or for poorer’ are both expressions which seem to have more to do with health insurance and the welfare state than with marriage vows. ‘Till death do us part’ evokes the prospect of half a century with a person that suited you in your twenties, instead of the less than twenty years that was the average duration of marriage when few people lived beyond the age of forty. When sociologists in the area of employment and training tell us we should expect to change our professions several times over a lifetime and should engage in continuous education and re-training, it is likely that similar considerations might be applied to matrimony, especially where there are few children or none at all. Then there is the 1662 Prayer Book’s avowal in the funeral service that ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery’, a proclamation that does not exactly conform to everyday consumerist doctrine. All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population. However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world need not for the moment trouble us. What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the increase in material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour. Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness of happenings and occasions. As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death. Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread. The trouble, however, is that there is no going back. Nostalgia may be a pleasant self- indulgence but it is scarcely useful. Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that would uphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue of changes that have brought us to the present pass. So what is to be done? The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course. Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous; a helot class of the uneducable and unemployable will grow; civilization itself will be endangered. Now that the Cold War is over and communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit. We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder. A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy. We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition. Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage. But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity. What about making divorce extremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew, rather than ‘till death do us part’? This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage. And people might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel. Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives. But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking? If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together with the imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it. * Published in The Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000
|
‘Till death do us part’ evokes the
prospect of half a century with a
person that suited you in your twenties,
instead of the less than twenty years
that was the average duration of
marriage when few people lived
beyond the age of forty.
prospect of half a century with a
person that suited you in your twenties,
instead of the less than twenty years
that was the average duration of
marriage when few people lived
beyond the age of forty.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Portolani for Our Times
|
Humpty Dumpty's Problem
BOOKS
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall:
All the King's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
| LINKS TO OTHER ARTICLES |