RZehr wrote:He is decrying that, true. But to suggest the solution can be found by circumventing the immediate family is patently absurd.
He doesn’t like the trend we are on, but he proposes to accelerate it by suggesting alternatives, instead of correcting it by returning to the natural system that God designed and what naturally produces what the writer misses.
I don't read him as suggesting that we circumvent the immediate family. Rather, that the American/Western ideal is, sociologically speaking, a rather new construct; itself the result of demographic and economic changes in wider society about 100 years ago. We can debate his analysis of history or his sloppy use of "nuclear family" that fails to distinguish between pair-bonding (a phenomenon as old as time) and the American/Western version of it in the 20th Century; and
one of the articles critiquing his that I linked to does just that. Nevertheless, it seems eminently evident that the fragile construct of the American nuclear family thrived mid-century under unique social conditions and that as those social conditions fell apart, so too did the unique style of family. The problem of course is that the atomizing and individualizing social forces of the 20th Century not only gutted the American version of the nuclear family, it also made returning to older, more ancient forms of family incredibly difficult.
If you're interested in such things - writer and demographer, Jonathon V. Last wrote a book a few years ago about population decline:
What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster. I just listened to a
fascinating interview of him by Bill Kristol. An interesting corollary to Brooks's thesis is Last's assertion that the Baby Boom of mid-century was completely unforeseeable but that when we look back on the social and economic conditions that gave rise to it, it makes perfect sense. Those were the same social and economic conditions that gave rise to the American ideal of the aspirational nuclear family of Father-Mother & 2.4 children. Just as the nuclear family began to disintegrate then, as those unique socio-economic conditions of the 1940's-1960's began to break down, so too did the fertility rate; declining from a high of 3.77 to the current all-time low of 1.73. What's curious to me is that as the social conditions of the 40's-60's were swept away, neither the family nor the fertility rate snapped back to something like pre-1940. Nor did their decline plateau and reach a sort of stasis. They've both continued to decline and precipitously so. None of this is to say that social forces are destiny at the individual level or that they excuse a rejection of human nature and God's ideal for man. Rather we must recognize them for what they are, the dangers or advantages they pose to our communities of faith and how they affect how we are able to visualize what is normal or even possible.
