Thirty years ago, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff identified the goal of the cultural revolution of the 20th century as the ” permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands.” Under the tutelage of Freud and his successors, Rieff wrote, modern man was learning a “strange new lesson”: “how not to pay the high personal costs of social organization.”
Now, 30 years on, comes Maggie Gallagher to describe and deplore the transformation wrought by that revolution in the primary unit of social organization. The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (Regnery, 300 pages, $ 24.95) is her obituary for the old, deeply internalized belief in marriage as a union until death. That antique creed has been supplanted by the conception of divorce as a human right and of self- actualization as every person’s central duty. Modern man has learned not only that he need not pay the high personal cost to keep a disappointing marriage intact; he actually has redefined such self-sacrifice as hypocritical, harmful to the kids (“If I’m unhappy, they’ll be unhappy”), immoral.
The perfect expression of this new ethic, Gallagher says, is no-fault divorce: All it takes to end a marriage is for one partner to want out. By ceasing to require fault on the part of either spouse, the law sides with the sunderers of families. No longer a legally enforceable contract, marriage has been demoted from bedrock social institution to “lifestyle” option, which may and should last only so long as it fulfills Maggie Gallagher its purpose, the emotional gratification of two adults.
In her indictment of the culture of unmarriage, Gallagher rehearses the familiar social and economic damage wrought by divorce and non-marital childbearing, but she also inventories the spiritual ravages. She laments the present state of affairs not just because it fosters downward mobility, especially for women and children, or because it has proved to be such a spawning ground for youthful addiction, depression, crime, and suicide. Her greatest contribution is her discussion of what it means for a culture to jettison the ideal of faithful love.
In our culture, something like half of all marriages fail, and most children live with a single parent before they are 18. (In 1987, the last time the Census Bureau made that calculation, it projected that 61 percent of children born that year would experience a single-parent household at some point.) Thus, our children are learning from experience that love is unreliable; that spouses are disposable. And learn this they must. In our therapeutic ideology, Gallagher notes, the self is the trump card in any moral dilemma — the self, that is, of the adult seeking personal growth, not of the vulnerable child.
Whatever we aim for, Gallagher writes, the arrow falls short. Our culture chooses to idealize not marriage, but divorce. Marriage, she says, is an arrangement that unifies the erotic, economic, and emotional interests of mother, father, and children. In divorce, those interests are cleft; adults are torn, for example, between the financial and emotional needs of the children of the first marriage and the children of the second. To comfort ourselves for the harm divorce does to children and abandoned spouses, we imagine smoothly functioning joint custody and happily-ever-after second marriages creating “blended” families. In this romanticized vision of divorce, two people unwiling to make the necessary effort as spouses become models of cooperation once they live apart.
Must it be so? Gallagher chastises politicians for refusing to address this national ill. Brave enough to exploit the fringe issue of gay marriage, most of them shrink from any discussion of stiffening divorce laws, sharply increasing tax breaks for married couples with children, or permitting discrimination in favor of married couples in housing, credit, welfare, and zoning. Even so obviously constructive a proposal as requiring sex-education or family-life curricula in public schools to level with students about the ” economic, social, health, and emotional advantages of a good-enough marriage” has few takers. No wonder: Both politicians and the voters on whom they depend are as apt as everyone else to be divorced.
Moreover, even if we could bring ourselves to confront the issue through government, public policy alone could hardly turn back so powerful a tide. Nor does Gallagher call simply for locking unhappy couples in permanent misery. The essential task, she urges, is to recover the full meaning of marriage as a brave and worthwhile undertaking in itself: namely, the attempt “to come as close as human beings are capable of doing “justice” to one human being: to know and to love him. To attempt to love just one other person the way God loves everyone. That,” she says, “is the seal, the aim, the substance of the marriage contract.”
This book itself is a valiant sally in a necessary campaign to restabilize the family. It is littered with brilliant formulations, both of what’ we have to fear from present trends and of what we stand to gain by changing course. Yet it leaves one pessimistic. Gallagher writes that no sacrifice is too great to stave off the bleakness of a world where people use one another, then discard one another, in the name of an elusive happiness. The trouble is, the sacrifice is unevenly distributed across the population. From those with the judgment or luck to choose their partner well, it amounts only to the normal forbearance demanded by the ups and downs of life. From those ill- matched, it is of another order entirely.
Who will persuade modern man to resume this burden? He has tasted the forbidden fruit. He has seen apparent good flow from particular divorces, and not only those justified by cruelty or gross dereliction. Why should he choose a self-sacrifice he has decided is perverse? It will take more than a reorientation of public policy, more than exhortation-more even than truth eloquently told — to rectify the revolution of modern times.
By Claudia Winkler
