Stats
Posted on 25 January 2012
One of my readers asks for some evidence that the sexual revolution has led to the various social pathologies which mar the modern age.
I hope I can be forgiven for treated the request rather lightheartedly, because I am sure that if that reader merely speaks to his grandmother, he will have a sufficient basis of evidence to make up his mind on the issue.
I hope we can agree, in the abstract, that marriage was instituted for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children. The sexual revolution, by promoting fornication and adultery and divorce, decreases the sanctity and the frequency of marriage, and increases the rate of divorce.
Statistically, the best indicator that a couple will end in divorce is if they begin by cohabiting without marriage.
Statistically again, the best indicator that a spouse will commit adultery is premarital sex. In other words, even if fornication were not blameworthy in and of itself, fornication would still be a warning sign telling prospective mates to look elsewhere for marriage partners.
The relationship between adultery and divorce is plain enough, since this is the prime and classical cause for divorce.
Hence, taken these finding together, we see that the sexual revolution by promoting fornication and cohabitation also promotes adultery and divorce. So far in the argument, I make no claim as to cause and effect: I am merely pointing out that the statistics show a correlation.
Divorce and fornication increases the incidence of single mothers raising children which correlates to the number of children from fatherless homes.
Here are some numbers. Children from fatherless homes, according to federal statistics, are
- 14 times more likely to commit rape,
- 32 times more likely to run away from home,
- 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders,
- five times more likely to commit suicide,
- ten times more likely to abuse chemical substances and
- 20 times more likely to end up in prison.
And without the widespread use of contraception, the sexual revolution, which is the attempt to make fornication a normal and socially accepted practice, founders on the imprudence of risking pregnancy. Contraception by design lowers the moral hazard of pregnancy, and this makes the normalization of fornication possible, which in turn correlates to the rise in the social pathologies listed above.
Statistics are funny things! For example, a 2005 Kripke Center study determined that the most secularized industrial nations ‘come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion…. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.’ It is worth noting that the Kripke Center is not a secular propaganda mill — the organization funds scholarship in areas of religion and society and draws its funding (and name) from religious backers.
(PDF available here: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.pdf)
Life is complex. We’re picking up a very complex three-dimensional object and rotating it to see it from different angles. Different statistics may give us different views but they don’t define the object. It is hubris (and human nature
to jump on statistics which agree with us and sneer knowingly at those that don’t.
You are certainly richly endowed with hubris — I think it has a salutary effect on your fiction! I personally enjoy my own supply of hubris. But in my opinion yours isn’t always as beneficial to your political or social discourse as it is to your books.
But don’t stop
Stats are a very interesting thing. Cross country stats are nearly worthless to start out with: there are extreme differences in measuring things and classifying what is measured across countries and most regressions come up with error bounds that make the estimate nearly worthless. That said I see the results of this study as being particularly bad: nothing is controlled for at all. It appears to be mostly pulling out the fact that poorer nations tend to also be less secularized and that the US is more violent than other places.
A better way of treating the US would be to split up the states into the individual states or into distinct regions as there is sufficient data to complete that and there are large variations in belief, crime rates, abortion rates, and everything else within the US. For reference the US population is over half of the combined European population with many individual states being larger in population and area than most countries. This means that by looking at cross state statistics from within the US would give one almost as much certainty as cross country statistics, with the added benefit of less variation in the way things are reported. Looking at everything together would also be interesting. I could put that together in less than a week (assuming I wasn’t busy with other things) and run various regressions on it and end up with better conclusions than the cited study, remind me in May if you are interested.
Also, they don’t mention having fertility rates below replacement levels as a sexual related problem but that seems to be a much bigger problem than anything else mentioned. Society can live with high murder rates, suicides, everything else but not replacing the population through new births resigns society to death (usually by getting replaced by a different culture (like the Muslims in Europe) that does have above replacement levels of births.
A Canadian friend, referencing “The Cowboy, the Mountie, and the Samurai” (iir the title c), said that the murder rate among Japanese Americans is similar to that of Japanese, of Anglo-Americans to that of Canada outside Quebec, of Mexican-Americans similar to that of Mexico, and so on. IOW, a cultural matter. In colonial times, Southerners came in general from regions of England that were more violent than those from which most Northerners came; and this has continued. He contended that if you subtract those committed by Southerners, white or black, and their descendants who moved North, the US would have the murder rate of Denmark. I cannot verify his comments; but as a Canadian he did not seem to have an axe to grind.
Statistics are indeed funny things, because Leftist quote them as if they were persuaded by them, on the grounds that anything involving numbers must be scientific and therefore part of the progressive wave of the future.
No statistic ever persuaded a Leftwinger of anything. The only point of introducing numbers into a philosophical discussion is to derail it. Any statistics introduce on the other side can be dismissed merely by pretending that some arcane rule of procedure was violated. So shifting the ground to piffle about numbers is a win-win for the Leftist, who can always hunt around to find some study done by some East German university in the 1950′s to support whatever error is popular these days.
No one actually needs statistics to see that a divorce-culture, a porn-culture, a culture filled with bastards and fatherless families is a bad thing. Any morally-retarded wight dim enough to think such a culture is a good thing is not going to be persuaded by statistics to change his mind.
So, as I said above, I treat requests for statistics to confirm what common sense already shows somewhat lightheartedly.
Ah, but a PCnik uttering a comment without adding an ad hominem is almost unheard of, and so you accuse me of “hubris” — a term that refers to insubordination to the gods.
In this case, I am insubordinate to the sewer of self-contradictory bumper-sticker slogans and nonsense-phrases the parroting of which passes for discourse among the Politically Correct. Are you claiming that this inchoate mass of unreason that you follow is a god? If so, it is a god like the Azathoth of HP Lovecraft: blind, dim, insane and chaotic.
Or are you merely using the word to mean that you disapprove of pride? You are recommending humility as the proper and virtuous course? Demonstrate this to us in your words and conduct, if so.
“No one actually needs statistics to see that a divorce-culture, a porn-culture, a culture filled with bastards and fatherless families is a bad thing.”
Out of curiosity, have you ever encountered anyone trying to make the argument that while the effects of these things are bad, they are acceptable prices for a greater good? E.g. rampant frivolous divorce is bad, but worth it to make it easier for women to get themselves or their children away from abusive husbands, or get support out of deadbeat ones; porn and porn addiction are bad, but worth it to avoid giving the State dangerous levels of power over free and private speech; that fatherless families are bad, but preferable to families trapped with an exploitative or abusive father; etc.
I would not myself necessarily agree with any of these theses, but what I find interesting is how seldom sexual libertinism is actually defended on this level — as if even to admit the existence of tradeoffs and unexpected consequences is to admit that conservatism has a point in resisting radical change. It reminds me of Screwtape’s line: “The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. …By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?”
It would be more persuasive if even a significant fraction of divorces were for reasons of abuse; and against it we must measure those men who become unstable because they have been deprived of their children. “Deadbeat dads” are far more often divorced dads than they are dads who remain with the family or who were not kicked out by a partner anxious to “find herself.”
The divorce rate in 1900 was 4 per 1000 married women. By 1960, this had doubled to 9. The trend was very nearly linear, except for a spike just after WW2. During this time, divorce required that one partner be guilty of an offense, like adultery or abusiveness. (You could always divorce an abusive partner.) Between 1967 and 1975, divorce rules were loosened so that only mutual consent was required, and never mind the kids (who, bewildered, often silently blamed themselves). Divorce rates then soared to about 20 per kilowife and has remained essentially stable there since 1975.
Granted; but then one is usually hit with the accusation, “So how many violently abusive marriages and spouse murders are acceptable to prohibit ‘frivolous’ divorce? Isn’t even one too many? Yes, you could get divorced for abuse if you could prove it to a court’s satisfaction and still had enough resolve left to try at all; but all too many abuse victims can’t achieve either, let alone both. And who the hell are you to decide whether another free adult’s choices are ‘frivolous’ or not, anyway? Who put you in charge?”
Which is unanswerable and unfair, but not wholly without a point, either. The impossibility of perfect solutions means that no matter who you’re trying to help and why, somebody else usually gets screwed; I think this is one reason progressivism is so concerned with the hierarchy of who is “most deserving” at any one time, because it’s the only way they can morally justify deciding who gets the short end of the stick this time. It’s also why the “If it saves even one life, isn’t it worth it?” demand gets trotted out so often, because it conflates the just moral principle “For some things, we shall not count the cost” with the totalitarian power principle “And therefore, you have no right to question how I allocate the costs, whatever they turn out to be”.
It’s a paradox I appreciate for its irony: Progressivists would do far better convincing conservatives if they could learn to do proper cost-benefit analyses, but the very act of learning to do proper cost-benefit analysis tends to turn one into a conservative.
How many children beaten — and how many beaten to death — by their stepfathers or their mother’s live-in boyfriends are acceptable to prevent violently abusive marriages and spouse murders?
Especially given that a woman who is head of her household is more likely to be abused than a woman who is married. Including being killed — though, to be sure, it’s not a spouse murder — so does that mean we shouldn’t care?
You’re right, of course; which is another problem with all statistically-based arguments, in that since you’re usually dealing with indirect effects at best, it’s fatally easy to move your goalposts as you wish to, arguing that correlation indicates causation when you want it to and that it doesn’t when you don’t. It’s also fatally easy to make the “we know what would have happened” assumption, which, of course, as no less than Aslan himself pointed out, we never can.
To be ruthlessly fair to the progressivist argument at this point, though, they would probably say, “By making marriage easy to get out of, we prevent many of the murders that would have occurred because the abuse victims couldn’t leave. We can’t prevent the murders that occur when a victim chooses to stay, or feels coerced to stay by something other than the law of the land — but we couldn’t have prevented those anyway. Should the fact that some people who leave a marriage will fall victim to crimes outside it mean we should make it harder for people to escape crimes within it?”
(I have personally always thought that the answer to this is the same one the Church uses: Make marriage much harder to get into, as well as to get out of. I’d be very interested to see what happened to the divorce rate if every marriage, Christian or not, required a year-long engagement period and completion of counselling courses first.)
As if the kids could leave!
Precisely my point: the only way children *can* escape an abusive family situation (safely and successfully, that is) is if one of their guardian figures has the power to escape, and takes them with him or her when exercising that power. Therefore (so the argument goes) better to make divorce easy so those who can be saved may be, rather than make divorce hard and trap both those children whose parents won’t save them even if they could, and those whose parents would but can’t.
(Alternately, the state can be given the power to remove children from family custody entirely, which is one of those powers where the consequences of being able to abuse it are just as heartbreaking as the consequences of being unable to use it.)
Note that I don’t propose to justify this argument logically, only to explain its emotional power, which is why it is so often used by progressivists.
Exactly the opposite of your point. The parent who leaves is more likely to drag the children into an abusive situation than to remove them from one. Therefore your easy divorce is the trap, not the escape.
But they are as free (legally, anyway) to get out of the second abusive situation as they were to get out of the first one. If the risk of winding up in a second abusive situation is the price of being able to escape the first one at all, most progressivists I know would rather accept the risk and guarantee the ability to escape.
It is only in large-scale matters (like AGW and government health care) that individual autonomy is seen as too great a risk to allow.
Of course, if your point is about divorcing spouses who remove their children from a merely unhappy marriage into a situation with a genuinely abusive live-in significant other, then that is far more obvious an example of abuse of the freedom. But the progressivists will still cast it as an acceptable price, like allowing guilty men to go free rather than risk punishing the innocent.
The basic paradox is that the social crusader’s cry always takes the form of, “Even one suffering innocent is too many!” without ever bothering to admit, “But there is no solution where no innocents suffer at all.” The utilitarian says, “Then let us pick the solution where the fewest suffer”; the progressivist says, “Then let us pick the solution where those who currently suffer least are made to suffer most”; and the Christian says, or should say, “Let us pick the solution where the suffering is not at the hands of unjust law.”
@Mary: I had read some years ago that a child’s risk factor for abuse increased by about 1300% in a household with a live-in boyfriend. (The good news was that a 1300% increase of a very small risk is still a pretty small risk.)
They are as freely legally, of course, since they have no right at all in either situation — they go where their mothers drag them, in this case, to a much more dangerous situation.
Nor does growing up end their perils. The children of divorce are still more likely to die than the children of intact marriges when both sets are forty years old.
The vicious indifference of “progressives” to children is exactly the problem.
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous wrote me privately: “In the comment thread of your post titled “Stats,” a reader links to a study linking atheism with positive social outcomes and religiosity with negative social outcomes within developed industrial democracies. Supposedly, this is supposed to prove that religion is bad for society … However, its methodology and conclusions have been contested by George Gallup (of Gallup Poll fame.) Paul used cherry-picked data that merely confirmed his secular biases… the Journal of Religion & Society (the original publisher of the Paul study) itself critiqued the methodology.”
I am not willing to get involved in a debate about statistical methodology — it is like getting into a rock throwing contest with popcorn puffs. Even if you score a direct hit, no one is moved.
My reluctance is twofold, where, as here, the comment is merely ad hominem tu quoque (“Oh YEAH? Well, if you say whoring around is bad, I can say that religion is bad! Hoo Hah!”)
The comment is also irrelevant. Even granting that religion is bad would have no bearing on the issue. All this would mean was that a secular yet chaste society was preferable to a secular sexually-promiscuous society — assuming that was what the debate was about, which it is not. The debate here was whether or not there are valid secular reasons for prohibiting contraception.
There is nothing worth saying to a man who barges into a discussion about a social issue, when his only point and only purpose is to make a smug public display of his hate-on for Christ.
The problem with comparing large populations is the unwarranted assumption that the only relevant difference between (or among) the populations is the quality in which one is interested.
An example is a study that purportedly showed that women in group A, who worked in front of CRT screens all day, had a higher cancer rate than women in group B, who did not. However, A and B differed in far more ways than whether or not they worked with CRTs: group A had a greater proportion of smokers, for example; ate fattier foods; exercised less; and so on. That is why professional organizations try to “control” for extraneous variables, with no assurance that they have succeeded in doing so.
Just my own popcorn ball.
this reminds me of the people who compare New York city’s crime rate to London’s to argue for gun control even though New York City has always been the more violent of the two — and had gun control first. And London’s rate has been rising as they implemented more and more gun control.
Figure the sexual revolution as running from 1965 to 1975. (The Sixties were no more respective of chronology than of anything else.) Now go to the statistical abstracts and begin plotting timelines for your favorite statistic. See if it begins a sharp drop (or a sharp rise) during that time frame.
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html
a) Start with the “Historical” abstracts through 1970.
b) Individual years will cover multiple past years, so you can dip into probably 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 and get a reasonably complete series.
c) Have fun.
There is also the fact that the economic status of the secular countries is actually the prime reason for their lowered crime, better medicine, more effective police and social services etc.
But this economic status is inherited from over a century of following the “old” morality. The new morality harms primarily the section of the population who follow it. There can be no doubt that single-parent homes, births out of wedlock, and increased divorce are societal ills. The fact that the West still has a large number of conventional families is what drives the economic and social engine that lets us tolerate, at least for a while, the burden that the new morality puts on it.
I was born in 1949, which means I lived through the sexual revolution, and can remember what it was like beforehand.
We were told that living together would reduced the divorce rate. But it didn’t. Admittedly, other factors intruded, such as no-fault divorce but, as Mr Wright pointed out, marriages which started as extra-marital cohabitation have the highest divorce rate.
We were told that freely available contraception might encourage pre-marital sex, but at least it would reduce pre-marital conceptions. But it didn’t.
We were told that abortion would mop up the difference, and result in fewer pre-marital births. But it didn’t.
I was also told that if you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging.
“I make no claim as to cause and effect: I am merely pointing out that the statistics show a correlation.”
I myself am willing to assert that I think the correlation almost conclusively implies causation, for my part.
I will, however, ask about one of your points: You observe that adultery is “the prime and classical cause for divorce”. The classical situation this implies, and as it was often depicted in pop culture, is of a relatively content (no less so than most, anyway) couple destroyed by one partner’s weakness in the face of a sudden opportunity, and the subsequent irreparability of the other partner’s ability to trust, such that if the infidelity had been prevented from occurring by mere good fortune (and a similar opportunity never again occurring), the couple would still be together.
Current thinking as I understand it, however, generally tends to attribute the decision to engage in infidelity to a deeper dissatisfaction with the relationship — to prior problems that do not go away even if a particular temptation is resisted, or thwarted by chance. In this view, adultery is not the cause per se of the divorce, but merely the final symptom of the mutual relationship breakdown that is the cause; often the adultery itself need not actually even occur — people quite often get divorced over the realization that both of them no longer want to be faithful to the other, rather than over the discovery that one of them actually has been unfaithful. (I don’t know if it’s more often or not, but I shouldn’t be surprised.)
I therefore wonder if the divorce rate should not be attributed to the Sexual Revolution per se but to the toxic crossbreeding of that revolution with the lingering cloud of Romanticism still extant in pop culture: sex is simultaneously devalued as “no big thing” and yet constantly depicted as the one thing without which “love” can’t be true or fulfilled — sex can do perfectly fine without love but love can’t do without sex. Which only leads to the constant misperception that if the passion has faded (as all biological responses eventually do, via habituation and age if nothing else) what one feels is no longer “love”. All the Sexual Revolution did was give people the ability to walk out on such “loveless” relationships and try again without practical consequence; the belief that such walking out was justified came from another current of thought altogether, and a rather older one.
“I therefore wonder if the divorce rate should not be attributed to the Sexual Revolution per se but to the toxic crossbreeding of that revolution with the lingering cloud of Romanticism still extant in pop culture: sex is simultaneously devalued as “no big thing” and yet constantly depicted as the one thing without which “love” can’t be true or fulfilled — sex can do perfectly fine without love but love can’t do without sex”
Not to carp, but may I suggest that “the Sexual Revolution” is nothing more or less than the attitude that you describe (the simultaneous glorification and desecration of sex) given manifestation in society? So it seems to me that you say “but” but you mean “and”.
“May I suggest that “the Sexual Revolution” is nothing more or less than the attitude that you describe (the simultaneous glorification and desecration of sex) given manifestation in society?”
I’m not sure that’s quite sufficient to what I mean, as the attitude in question has always been with us and has always manifested in some way in society.
On its own most brute terms, after all, the Sexual Revolution saw no reason why two good friends of opposite sex might not marry, bear children, and then — should they find their mutual physical desire had passed — cease intimacies with each other to obtain satisfaction with other partners, yet still remain together as spouses, friends and parents so long as their personal sex lives did not disrupt the family. Of itself the Revolution held that sex and love could be so cleanly disconnected that neither need interfere with the other at all.
In a somewhat analogical sense (though starting from completely different principles, of course), traditional Judeo-Christian teaching also states that faithful love and permanent partnership can be separated from sexual intimacy, in that the former can and must be maintained even if the latter becomes impossible or undesireable. The tragic overtones of the mediaeval Courtly Love tradition came from precisely the fact that the longings felt by the Courtly Lovers could never be truly fulfilled, and everyone knew that.
It was the Romantic tradition, and its exaltation of sentiment over reason, which insisted that love was only truly love so long as it was physically passionate. Prior to the Sexual Revolution, anybody who actually tried to live by that precept almost always caused more damage than it was worth, so it never had much traction in practice — but it built up a lot of dissatisfaction and resentment in popular culture, making the Revolution’s liberations that much more tempting. Hence my overall thesis: the crossbreeding of the Romantic belief in the necessity of sex to love with the Revolution’s belief in the irrelevance of love to sex produced the worst of both worlds — the Revolution broke the physical, practical, external restrictions on intimacy, while Romanticism taught us to reject the spiritual, honorable, internal restrictions, and it was the combination of both that has sent our marriage breakdown rate soaring.
I grant that this may seem like splitting hairs, but while the Sexual Revolution justly gets a lot of blame for society’s current ills, it has always seemed important to me to highlight the issues that pre-date the Revolution and are part of why its effects are still so hard to undo. I’m a big believer in identifying and treating causes rather than symptoms.
It is not splitting hairs at all. I agree the roots go back to the Romantic movement and the exultation of sentiment over reason. You have convinced me.
And I now have this strange urge to apologize.
What? For banishing a little speck of dark ignorance from the darkness of the world? I owe you boon or something.
I am obliged to ask you for a source. Please don’t take offence.
No offense taken. Here is one of several places: http://deltabravo.net/custody/stats.php
Ah. Thanks.
“Statistically again, the best indicator that a spouse will commit adultery is premarital sex.”
I find this a dubious claim. Nearly everyone in our society engages in premarital sex. So how can it be a useful predictor of who will end up commiting adultery when nearly everyone in both categories (adulterers and non-adulterers) had premarital sex?
Or perhaps what you meant to say that the best indicator that a spouse will NOT commit adultery is whether they didn’t have premarital sex. That might well be true. But the two claims are not equivalent.
““Statistically again, the best indicator that a spouse will commit adultery is premarital sex.” I find this a dubious claim.”
If I went to the trouble of tracking down the specific statistics behind the claim, why should you find it any more persuasive?
I’m not disputing a conclusion drawn from this claim. I’m disputing the claim itself. If you don’t want to provide your source for a claim when it’s questioned then that’s your choice.
My suspicion is that you might have misinterpreted your source. If, for example, it said that being a virgin at marriage is the best predictor of marital FIDELITY, I wouldn’t be at all surprised by such a finding.
But, as I said before, from the fact that X (virgin at marriage) is the best predictor of marital fidelity it does not follow that not-X (not a virgin at marriage) is the best predictor of marital infidelity.
Providing your source should allow us to clear up whether this is the case.
I don’t want to take the time when the man who questions me would not be convinced were I to provide it, no.
Suppose I did: suppose study XYZ from Snortflork University conducted a scientifically respectable study in 1989 showing exactly the results I here claim. Would you actually be convinced? Or would you merely scoff that Snortflork University is an illegitimate source? Or that the sample was not large enough? Or that the year 1989 was too long ago to be scientific?
You see, I do not offer any statistics for their persuasive value. I don’t trust them and I have never known a single person EVER to have been persuaded by statistics about ANYTHING on ANY TOPIC outside of the physical sciences. A reader with a fetish for numbers asked my to restate what I said in words using numbers, which I did. I took me all of five seconds on Google to find two zillion sites listing these numbers I listed above.
The burden of proof is on you for claiming that premarital sex bear no relation to post-marital divorce, because this claim defies common sense and common experience; and because the statistics I quote are well known, at least in the circles of those of us concerned with such things, and have been part of the common dialog of the culture for some time now.
So I will make you a deal: If you take the time to find me statistics arguing against what I have said, I will take the time to find statistics arguing in favor. That is, if you swear a powerful oath to change your philosophy and your worldview if the statistics bear me out. Deal?
No statistic ever persuaded a Leftwinger of anything. The only point of introducing numbers into a philosophical discussion is to derail it.
This is not just a philosophical argument. You have made scientific claims throughout it as support for your position. We should all agree that the social ills you listed as correlated with fatherless homes are serious problems that we should want to minimize. And doing so is largely a scientific issue. Are fatherless homes really correlated with the levels of crime and social dysfunction you describe? For that we need to know your sources, examine the methods, look at other statistics as well to see how they compare.
When we settle that it would be useful to see how it compares when corrected for poverty and how much it persists when looking at societies with a better social safety net (Canada would be a good choice to start with).
We also need to look at other issues like whether the negatives of making contraception illegal would be worse than the problem one is trying to cure (possible increases in venereal disease—including AIDS, just to name the most obvious example).
Not to mention whether we would end up with the sort of fiasco surrounding Prohibition….and we all know how well that worked out.
And those are just a few preliminary tasks to work on.
“For that we need to know your sources, examine the methods, look at other statistics as well to see how they compare.”
Unless it is a matter of common sense. Talk to your grandmother.
I have a suspicion that poverty plays a big role in these statistics. I doubt the children of single mothers earning $100,000 a year have these problems in this degree. What the statistics you point out (and I’m not particularly disputing most of them—I don’t find them at all implausible)is the conclusion you’re drawing: that contraception is the primary or ultimate culprit and that criminalizing contraception is the most useful solution.
For example, when you remove those who married very young and those living at the poverty level the divorce rate in the US is very low. Working on these two problems would probably do far more to lessen single mother homes than would making contraception illegal. Also, clearly, we need to reduce teen pregnancy. Good sex education and the availability of contraception can do that without having the government eliminating the right to reproduction choice.
And this should be especially important if one also has a goal of minimizing abortion—something that will almost surely increase markedly if contraception is criminalized.
…if contraception is criminalized
Quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt.
– Q. Horatius Flaccus, Odes, 3.24.36-7
Sic hunc nimis liberum populum libertas ipsa servitute adficit.
– M. Tullius Cicero, De re publica 1.68
Locutus sum.
– M. Francesco Flynn, De re stats
Regarding the use of the word “bastard”:
For example, if your brother fathers a bastard out of wedlock on one of the many whores he patronizes…
Do you really want to bring this word back into common usage? To have children stigmatized as “bastards” as they were in the past? To reinstate the practice of shaming and ostracizing women and their children that we’ve, gratefully, mostly gotten rid of in this country?
My dear sir, do you actually have the effrontery to come to my website as my guest, and then to criticize my vocabulary on the grounds that I do not use politically correct nonsense-words, but instead speak honestly?
I was using the word in its ordinary meaning, which refers to the children of unwed parents.
The reason why “bastards” picked up the negative implications it currently holds is that being raised without fathers tends to encourage the various social pathologies we are here discussing.
And no, I do not disapprove of using peer pressure on the side of encouraging virtue by stigmatizing vice. If I had my preference, of course, the opprobrium would of course go to the fathers of the children of unwed parents.
Do not offer such PC criticisms of myself or my guests here again. I will not countenance them here.
My dear sir, do you actually have the effrontery to come to my website as my guest, and then to criticize my vocabulary on the grounds that I do not use politically correct nonsense-words, but instead speak honestly?
I was using the word in its ordinary meaning, which refers to the children of unwed parents.
The word “bastard” has fallen into disuse for one simple and beautiful reason: our culture has nearly completely stopped thinking of the chilren of unmarried women as anything but children. That’s why it so jars on the ear when someone like yourself spouts off by referring to children with a word that stigmatizes and shames.
Do not offer such PC criticisms of myself or my guests here again. I will not countenance them here.
Have no fear. I will never exchange words with you again.
The simple and beautiful reason is that fornication and adultery were successfully normalized in our culture, so it no longer disapproves of men who father children out of wedlock. There was no great progress in altruism nor courtesy involved, as your own reaction here proves. All that happened was that you are loyal to an Orwellian speech code that disapproves of ordinary speech, so much so that honest speaking sounds like intolerable insult to you.
Farewell. No hard feelings. You will be welcome back if you change your mind.
What does calling the child names have to do with disapproval of the father?
I give. What does calling a child names have to do with the disapproval of the father?
The word bastard took on its sharply negative implication, indeed, became a by-word for ruthless and craven and unmanly selfishness, precisely because boys raised without fathers tend, due to the lack of a proper male role model, to indulge the natural passions for selfishness, cravenness, and ruthlessness which follows from the lack of masculine virtue. However, the word also can be used without its negative meaning, but merely in its descriptive, as if one were to call someone “a gentleman” because he was of the arms-bearing class rather than because of his nicety of manners.
Our society lost its disapproval of bastardy not out of the motive of kindness to children, but out of contempt for marriage.
There are those who pretend to be concerned with obliterating “stigma” — but the pretense is hollow. The result has not been the obliteration of “stigma” (I have been stigmatized myself, and boycotted, for half a dozen infractions of PC speech codes and thought codes, including this one). The result has been the lapse of ability to judge between vice and virtue, good and evil. The result has been a marked decrease in courtesy, civility, and tolerance.
The vices it is unfair uniformly to ascribe to bastards have instead become commonplaces among modern men: selfishness, called self esteem; unmanliness, called feminism; cravenness, called political correctness, and ruthlessness, called competitiveness.
I do not see the advantage of ceasing to call illegitimate children bastards while at the same time raising all children, legitimate or not, to be bastards.
Allow me to ask a personal question: Are you a more virtuous man because you adhere to speech codes? Is courtesy and respect for others a prime concern of yours, a longing never to use sarcasm nor give offense? If so, you have not yet overwhelmed me with your strictly fairminded courtliness, I fear.
You were the one who said you didn’t disapprove of using peer pressure on the side of stigmatizing vice. Was there relevance to that remark or not? Does calling the child a bastard serve to stigmatize the father? Wouldn’t it be more effective to refer to the father with an epithet?
Sure. Just like the word nigger took on it sharply negative implication because black people tended to be selfish, craven, etc.
Well, make up your mind then. Are you using it as a pejorative or not?
The advantage is the same as the advantage of ceasing to call black people niggers.
I’m certainly less of a bastard because I don’t go around calling people one.
Only when it’s due.
So do you care about courtesy or not? If not, you have no reason to object to my using a word like ‘bastard’, which is that accepted and common term for illegitimate children; if so, you are a hypocrite as your own sarcasm, sneers, vaunts and various insults and discourtesies testify against you. If you claim the right to be polite to good people and rude to bad people, then this is not courtesy. There is no merit in speaking civilly to one’s own.
As for the rest, you do not occupy the moral high ground in this case. Encouraging the dissolution of marriage, but then objecting to the normal word people use to express their disgust with the corruption that follows from the dissolution of marriage is as dishonest and illogical as everything else Political Correctness entails.
Politically Correct corrections of normal English will in the future be subject to summary deletion without comment or explanation.
Already answered, and irrelevant. Whether I have the moral high ground or not has no bearing on a discussion of your choice of words.
When have I done this?
First, it’s not. It hasn’t been for about fifty years. It’s now almost universally seen as a standard insult. Second, if you are using it to express disgust with the corruption that follows from the dissolution of marriage, why is the term aimed at the child rather than at the parents?
Also, just out of curiosity, are you under the impression that the meanings of words can’t change through shifts in usage? That word meanings are set in stone somewhere?
The question of courtesy is not irrelevant, because if your objection is not that the use of the word is rude, then you have no objection.
As for the use:
1. a person born of unmarried parents; an illegitimate child.
2. Slang . a vicious, despicable, or thoroughly disliked person
3. something irregular, inferior, spurious, or unusual.
This is from a current dictionary. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bastard. Why don’t you write the writers and tell them that they are 50 years out of date?
Just out of curiosity, why do you think that the customs of your little circle are the customs of the greater world? Perhaps your lot stopped using the word bastard to refer to illegitimate children, but the cost is that you cannot read or speak outside your little circle without creating misunderstandings and illwill — as we saw during this discussion. The flaw here is yours.
I do believe words change in meaning. I also believe that you and yours are liars, who deliberately pretend words have changed meaning when they have not for propaganda purposes, so that you can wax indignant when others do not kowtow to your Orwellian Newspeak.
Finally, I did warn you that I will reserve the right to delete without ado or explanation PC blither along these lines you love. I am letting this comment stand for reasons of my own. Don’t impose on the standards of courtesy that you despise.
I’m tempted. If it were me writing it, 2 would be 1, 3 would be 2, and 1 would be a note at the bottom with “archaic” next to it.
I’m not basing my assessment on my little circle. I’m basing it on everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life excluding you. Plus everything I’ve ever read or watched. Unless it’s a period piece, no one is using bastard in the traditional sense anymore. Are you sure it’s not just your little circle that does use it that way?
As usual, you ascribe motives to me based on…what? Your intuition? I have no objection. I never claimed to. I’m not the PC police. I don’t care even a tiny little bit if you go around calling people bastards. Feel free. I only entered into this discussion because I’m interested in the way people use words, and I was curious about why you use this one. Hence the one question I’ve kept asking you throughout, which you’ve, for whatever reason, continually refused to answer: If your intention is to shame the parents, why do you shame the child?
Out of courtesy to you, I will take you at your word and assume your motives are as honest as you say. In that case, I can answer the question and satisfy your interest in the way people use words.
In the original post, which you can read above, I used the word “bastard” in the first and primary meaning of the word, which is not an insult, but a mere description. I use it rather than the word “illegitimate” because I do not like modern words, vague words,gas, and euphemisms.
I did not refuse to answer the question. To the contrary, I answered it several times. It is not a question, it is an accusation that I am shaming a child. You have no specific individual in mind. This means you are referring to a theoretical child, an abstraction. Reference to the dictionary shows that the abstraction is false.
If your interpretation that my use of the word were archaic, this would be reflected in the dictionary. Can you find one that supports your interpretation? If not, then my comment your interpretation is parochial still stands.
Now, you have said that you are curious about why I used the word as I did, and you have given me your word that you are not interested in correcting me, upbraiding me, or arguing that mine is an immoral or insensitive usage. To be blunt, I do not believe you, but I accept the implied covenant: Now you must live up to your words.
The word “bastard” has fallen into disuse for one simple and beautiful reason: our culture has nearly completely stopped thinking of the chilren of unmarried women as anything but children.
Do you keep your fingers stuck in your ears? We are continually thinking of bastards as a distinct group, given their propensity to commit crimes, their disproportion deaths, and other problems concentrated in that group..
But you stick to your ugly reason: you would rather bully people for using words you don’t like than do the heavy lifting of restoring a society that would protect and help children.
The pill was the greatest revolution of the 20th century. It enabled women to be free of their ‘biology’ to explore their sexuality. It enabled men to be free to explore their sexuality with the women who were ‘exploring their sexuality’. And what did all these sexual ‘Magellans’ find? – “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” – as Shakespeare could have told them.
In my casual browsing on another topic, I came across this quote yesterday:
from one Jill Twisty at her blog I Blame the Patriarchy.
Note that the philosophy is the opposite of stoicism. Stoicism holds that one’s choices are entirely internal, based on duty and honor and reason, and that any external pains caused by opposition or oppression or punishment are indifferent, unworthy of notice.
Here Miss Twisty (I hope she is a Miss, out of pity for any bridegroom) asserts such choices are problematical, a matter embraced in the scare-quotes of sarcasm, on the ground that offending social norms should be a risk free and cost free activity. She is unambiguous in placing feminism as the enemy of feminine nature. Biology is the enemy.
As with the most ascetic of Gnostics, the flesh and blood is a hateful lure and trap from which the asexual spirit should be free.
And what, then, is the Ms. Twisty’s alternative to femininity – Chaz Bono? Here is Chaz on Howard Stern with her noble version of “The Impossible Dream”
“What I will probably do is I will probably go to Belgrade, actually,” said Bono. “There’s a doctor in Belgrade that just does this procedure the best of anywhere I’ve seen it. They take your clitoris and basically, kind of, use certain ligaments and stuff–make it a little bit bigger, release it, wire it so you can take a graft from your cheek…and they lengthen your urethra through it so you can urinate, and they put in testicular implants. You know, it’ll be small, but you’re going to be able to urinate through it…You’ll be able to pee standing up….For me, the ultimate would be able to penetrate and have feeling.”