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.
