Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought

10. Positivism Supplemented: Anatomy, Evolution, and the Family

201 Chapter 10 Positivism Supplemented ANATOMY, EVOLUTION, AND THE FAMILY Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. —Horace What an opportunity family decline has been for sociologists! Few social trends are as well documented as those surrounding the decline of the modern family. Compared with a century ago, non-marital births are up, divorce rates are up, fertility rates are down, cohabitation has risen as marriage rates have declined, adults marry later in life and have children later, abortion rates are up, families are smaller and more fluid, people spend less of their lives in a stable family, the number of single-parent families is up, the percentage of children who have their family life disrupted by divorce or desertion is up, and polls across the industrialized world suggest that people find less personal satisfaction from family life than they once did and that people are less defined by their places within the family than they were earlier in modernity. These findings concern social scientists because of the negative social effects that accompany family decline. David Popenoe, one of today’s eminent family sociologists, sees this pattern. The first chapter of his Life without Father (1996) catalogues the “remarkable decline of fatherhood and marriage” and the second describes the “human carnage of fatherlessness.” 202 FaMIlY PolITICS Popenoe and other marriage movement scholars show that children are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems,1 to need professional help from psychologists, to have health problems, to have poor academic performance, to drop out of school, to divorce when they marry, to have less satisfying interpersonal relationships, to commit crimes, to spend time in jail, to be abused, and to live in poverty when they are not raised by two married, biological parents. Many are upset about the connections established between family decline and “human carnage.” The great accomplishment of the marriage movement social science is to establish such connections beyond reasonable doubt.2 Why have marriage and the family declined so? Social scientists answer with sociological theory derived from Durkheim’s assumptions. Family form is the product of culture. Culture changes, so the institutions that defined culture yesterday (hereditary monarchy, strong centralized church, and a guild-based economy, for instance) are not today’s cultural institutions . Today’s culture is more taken with ideas of individual freedom and female equality than yesterday’s. The subtitle of James Q. Wilson’s The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families tells the story of family decline. From the perspective of positivist social science, human nature provides little direction in how culture shapes family life; nature poses problems for the family and provides the almost useless materials through which culture shapes the purposes of marriage. The fact of cultural diversity suggests that there is nearly infinite variety of family forms, and there is little in human nature to limit the power of culture to shape these institutions. Cultures give us scripts, and we are versatile actors playing our parts on the stage. If there is something wrong with family life, there is something wrong with the script from which today’s individuals read; any restoration of family life requires a rewrite of that script.3 Taking a long view and with the aid of anthropological research, the general findings of social science positivism are as follows. (1) Marriage is a social institution whose primary purpose is the procreation and education of children. (2) Marriage is the most successful institution in which to raise children. (3) Marriage has mostly divided the labor up between men, who are inclined to be public faces and providers for the family, and women, who are more inclined to be homemakers and caregivers. Must marriage always be these things, however? Might not another institution—the state, for instance, in some form—take care of children? are two parents really essential to the education of children?4 Why is there a relationship between natural fathering and the actual job of educating and supporting children? Is the sexual division of labor necessary to procreate PoSITIvISM SUPPleMenTeD 203 and to educate and care for children? Might a more informal cohabitation arrangement suffice to raise children? Might stepfamilies or adopted families be as successful, in the aggregate, as a family with two biological parents? Must sexual exclusivity be a part of married life and family life? There may be no necessity behind the two biological parent institution and other institutions may...