in character
Man is a social animal – utterly dependent on forming and maintaining relationships with other people. A person who has always been truly alone is one who will be emotionally dead. Of all of the relationships into which people enter, the family is the most important. We are raised by parents, confronted with siblings, and introduced to peers through our familial roots. Indeed, human character arises out of the very commitments people make to others in their family or outside of it. Marriage, of course, is the supreme form of that commitment. When we make marriage less important, character suffers. In addition to the fact that married people are happier, wealthier, and sexually more satisfied than are unmarried persons or those cohabiting, it turns out that married people and their children are less likely to commit crimes.
The problem our society, and indeed any society, faces today is to reconcile character and freedom. The Western world is the proud beneficiary of the Enlightenment, that cultural and intellectual movement that espoused freedom, endorsed scientific inquiry, and facilitated trade. But for a good life, mere freedom is not sufficient. It must work with and support commitment, for out of commitment arises the human character that will guide the footsteps of people navigating the tantalizing opportunities that freedom offers. Freedom and character are not incompatible, but keeping them in balance is a profound challenge for any culture.
One aspect of character that appears connected with marriage – and is even included in the marriage vows of many religious traditions – is loyalty. But what sort of loyalty is meant here? The word comes from the French loyauté, which in turn derives from the Latin legalis. In feudal times, it meant fidelity to one’s oath to a master. The nineteenth-century American philosopher Josiah Royce said that loyalty was the supreme moral good, but surely that cannot be right. As critics have pointed out, a Nazi is not regarded as a moral person because he is loyal to Nazism. Even being loyal to the state in which one lives can be destructive if the state is headed by an evil ruler or is constitutionally illegitimate.
Let me distinguish, therefore, between two meanings of the term. Loyalty can mean doing one’s duty (obeying the law, honoring promises, paying taxes, serving faithfully in the military) or it can mean a commitment to valued friends and family. In this second sense almost everyone is loyal to someone because they partake of the necessary sociability of mankind. No one can exist without being sociable to some degree; a human who lives life without any contact with other people will not be able to speak or perhaps even to think in some meaningful way. In this essay I use “loyalty” to mean the natural sociability of people. A loyal person is someone who is attached to other people for the long term based on a deep sense of what is due to them. It is hard to imagine a person who utterly lacks any sense of loyalty; that trait, after all, is the basis for friendship and the duties that friendship and moral obligations imply. Even people without married parents, or possibly without knowing any parent at all, will invest somebody – a friend, a teammate, a gang member – with loyalty.
One can imagine a person who is part of society but, because he or she trusts no one in that society, lives a life of anxiety and calculation. And we can find people who appear to enjoy the company of others but who nevertheless lack any sense of obligation to them. We call them sociopaths because they will cheerfully cheat or attack others without compunction.
The fundamental social institution that encourages loyalty is the family. An infant is raised by one or two parents and acquires an attachment, usually a strong one, to these people. If raised with brothers and sisters, a child will become attached to them. These siblings are ordinarily loyal to one another even when they are not fond of one another or live in widely separated locations. A family also instills some concern about the future, teaching people that they must pay taxes, service mortgages, and arrange for the education of their children in ways that suggest a commitment to manage whatever events may bring.
The evidence of the centrality of the family is all about us. We care more about our children than about the children of others; we run greater risks to save a threatened child or parent than we do to help someone else’s child or parent; when we go home we expect to be taken in; when football players appear between plays on television, they routinely say, “Hi Mom.”
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Some countries, and some people in almost every country, recognize the benefits of social commitments but seek to obtain them from nonfamily sources. In Sweden, public officials have made it clear that the laws of that country should give no advantage to marriage over unmarried cohabitation. In France, a law is now in force that allows any couple to appear before a court clerk where they sign a paper that recognizes their union, one that can be ended at will with no divorce proceeding. Here in America, Emory Law School professor Martha Fineman has urged that “marriage should be abolished as a legal category” and replaced by an arrangement in which “society” will pay for children to be raised by “caretakers.” Her views were matched by a conservative federal judge, Richard Posner, who, after arguing that conventional marriages “foster puritanical attitudes,” went on to propose the Swedish system in which marriage offers so few advantages over cohabitation that the latter is preferable to the former.
To see what is wrong with the view that commitment based on cohabitation is preferable to commitment based on marriage, one need only apply the implications of cohabitation to business partnerships. Suppose two people wish to sell bread. They can have an oral agreement to do that, or they can enter into an enforceable contract. If they rely on an oral agreement, then whenever one gets bored, greedy, or distrustful, he or she can walk away from the partnership with whatever that person can carry. But if they insist on a written and enforceable contract, ending the partnership will require the agreement of the other person and the sanction of the law. As a result of the power of contracts, most businesses use them.
So also with living together. Men and women who cohabit have only a weak incentive to pool their resources and to put up with the inevitable emotional bumps that come from sharing an apartment and a bed. In this country each member of a cohabiting couple tends to keep a separate bank account. This means that they keep personal wealth apart from shared wealth. When the two members of a cohabiting couple have unequal incomes, they are likely to split apart, whereas when two members of a married family have unequal incomes they are likely to stay together. In a marriage, we merge not only our feelings but our wealth. We know that we not only share our love, we share our dependency. Cohabitation merely means living together; marriage means making an investment in one another.
Why does marriage beget loyalty when cohabitation does not? The difference is that marriage follows a public, legally recognized ceremony in which each person swears before friends and witnesses to love, honor, and cherish the other until death parts them. Cohabitation merely means shacking up. Of course, many marriages end in an easily arranged divorce, but even in this new era of no-fault divorces, they still must be done before a magistrate and be accompanied by a careful allocation of property and children.
Perhaps because of the acknowledged impermanence of their condition, cohabiting couples, compared to married ones, are more vulnerable to depression, have lower levels of happiness, experience more cases of physical abuse, are more likely to be murdered, are more likely to be sexually unfaithful, and more likely to be poor. Children living with cohabiting parents are, compared to those living with married ones, much more likely to witness their parents’ relationships end, to have emotional and behavioral problems, to experience educational problems, and to be poor.
Some of the disadvantages of cohabitation result from the fact that in this country men and women who live together without being married are likely to be poor and erratic even before they formed their relationship. So the effects that are ascribed to cohabitation may result in part from prior disadvantages. In this country 60 percent of high school dropouts have cohabited compared to 37 percent of college graduates. In other countries, especially in Scandinavia, cohabitation is common among affluent people who have, in growing numbers, rejected conventional marriage. Because of these differences, the children of unwed American mothers are much poorer than those of unwed mothers in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. There is no easy way to sort out the different effects of cohabitation itself from the traits of those who choose to cohabit. It is possible that even if people who now cohabit were to marry, their lives, and those of their children, would be as bad as they are when they simply live together.
The defects of cohabitation and the benefits of marriage are lost on many young Americans. Six out of ten high school seniors think it is usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married because by cohabiting they will find out whether they really get along. In 1985 about half of all Americans said that there is no reason why single women shouldn’t have children. But in the same poll, people were asked whether it was acceptable for their daughter to have a child outside of wedlock. Only one out of eight respondents agreed. Apparently half of us think it is all right for other people’s daughters to have illegitimate children but hardly any of us want it for our daughters. As sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead put it, cohabitation is not to marriage what spring training is to baseball.
This tension between our libertarian views about other people and our conventional views about ourselves has made it hard for this country to think seriously about marriage. Almost everybody believes that marriage is a good idea, but over one-fourth of all children (and over half of black ones) are now being raised in single-parent families. There is one large exception to this confusion in the public’s mind: Among Americans who attend church weekly, only one-fourth said that it is morally acceptable to have a child out of wedlock, whereas among people who seldom or never attend church nearly three-fourths held that view. Religious communities are unabashed about wanting to breed the kind of cohesion and loyalty that results from a strong family unit.
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The problem of single-parent families is, of course, much worse than that of cohabiting ones. This fact is by now so well-known that most sociologists believe it. Though single-parent families are poorer than two-parent ones, the best research shows that, even after controlling for income, growing up in a single-parent (typically, female-headed) family makes matters worse for a child, and that this is true in every ethnic group. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur have done the most careful research on this matter and have concluded that poverty by itself accounts for about half of the problems of children in single-parent families, with the absence of the father explaining the rest. These problems are not trivial. After holding income constant, boys in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to go to jail and girls in father-absent families were twice as likely as those in married families to have an out-of-wedlock birth.
What all of this means for the rest of society is evident on the evening news programs. Boys without married fathers populate our street gangs, and these gangs are responsible for an inordinately high level of violence. We rely on the police to control gangs, but the important, and often absent, control is that exercised by fathers. A boy growing up without a father has no personal conception of what it means to acquire skills, find a job, support a family, and be loyal to one’s wife and children. Research on the link between unemployment rates and crime has shown that the connection is very weak. The connection between crime and father absence is much higher. Boys in single-parent families are also more likely to be idle rather than in school or unemployed and to drop out of high school. These differences are as great for white families as for black and Hispanic ones and as large for advantaged children as for disadvantaged ones.
In Europe as well as in America the proportion of children who live with a single, usually female parent has risen dramatically. In 1960 less than one out of every ten of the families in Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, or the United Kingdom was headed by a single parent, and many of these were families where the father had died. By 1988 that percentage had roughly doubled.
There are several explanations for these changes. One is that women have entered the workforce and become economically more independent than they once were so that more of them can survive (and in a few cases do rather well) with a child and without a husband. These are the Murphy Brown mothers, but they are relatively rare. Only about 4 percent of white unmarried mothers are college graduates; the rest have, at best, finished high school. A second is that when women outnumber men, as they do here and in some other countries, they face tougher statistical odds against getting married. A third reason for single-parent families is that, at least in this country, welfare payments have enabled poor women to choose children and government checks over children and a husband. Indeed, evidence now suggests that the availability of welfare payments is associated with out-of-wedlock births.
The fourth reason, in my view the most important one, is that cohabiting without being married and having a child out of wedlock have lost their stigma. We have a lot of single-parent families because the shame once attached to having a child out of wedlock has largely disappeared. In my book, The Marriage Problem, I devote many pages to explaining why this stigma has vanished. A full account requires one to understand how the way we conceive of our relationships to one another has changed in Western society.
At one time, a couple living together without being married was regarded as shameful. This stigma was reinforced by labeling any child emerging from this improper union as a bastard. The word “bastardy” referred to children born to unmarried parents. It did not refer to children conceived by their parents before marriage but born after they were married. Pregnant brides were common in England from its earliest history on; they produced about one-third of all births. They were not viewed as a social problem. But children born to unmarried parents faced very high costs. Such children could not inherit property, and so if they were abandoned by either parent they had no one to whom they could turn. To survive at all they usually had to be taken in by a kindly aunt or adult friend.
Scholars have studied bastardy in England using data that goes back to the sixteenth century. Until roughly the beginning of the eighteenth century, the illegitimacy ratio (that is, the proportion of all births that were out of wedlock) was 4 percent or less. In the nineteenth century it crept up to around 5 percent. By the 1970s it was well over 8 percent. Today it is nearly 30 percent. That increase came about because the state abandoned the penalties it once enforced on bastards, developed programs to take care of single-parent families, and had its policies shaped by new sentiments about marriage.
In this country those sentiments are easily captured by comparing opinions of the United States Supreme Court. In the late nineteenth century it spoke of marriage as a “sacred obligation” and a “holy estate” that was the source of civilization itself. By 1972 it had abandoned any such reference and said instead that marriage is “an association of two individuals, each with a separate emotional and intellectual makeup.” Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a sacred obligation, and now it is a private contract.
Friedrich Nietzsche would not have been surprised. He predicted that the family would be “ground into a random collection of individuals” bound together by the “common pursuit of selfish ends,” in other words, family loyalty would slowly disappear. John Stuart Mill would have been pleased by these developments; he had long argued that marriage should be a private, bargained-for arrangement.
For many women the change has been a disaster. They may prefer cohabitation and shun marriage as a trivial inconvenience, but then they discover that cohabitation will not last and their children will be disadvantaged. They may marry, but they will quickly discover that husbands often want new trophy wives and, in order to get them, will find it easy to end marriages. And when the marriage ends, the women will discover that, though the courts try to be fair, they will often be left with too little money with which to support themselves and their children.
Today the war between Western freedom and the radicalized critique of that freedom we find among many Muslims is a war about how well we manage the challenge between freedom and character. Our freedom has made the West wealthy; the lack of freedom in most Muslim nations has left that part of the world poor. Radical Muslims rejoin that Western freedom was purchased at too high a price because European and North American nations are awash in a sea of crime, drug abuse, pornography, illegitimate children, wanton women, and licentious television programs. Only by living in close devotion to the teachings of Allah as revealed in the Qu’ran do these critics think that a culture can be holy.
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There are some small signs that American culture is regaining a grip on itself in this regard. The crime rate has dropped dramatically for reasons that have nothing to do with economic success. The sharp increase in the percentage of children living with single parents that began around 1960 has leveled off and was about the same in 2003 as it had been in 1990. The rate at which children are born to teenage mothers has declined since 1991, the year at which it hit its peak. In 2000, teenage pregnancy rates for girls ages fifteen to nineteen were about one-fourth lower than they had been in 1991. Some of this reduction may well result from increased use of contraceptive devices rather than from sexual abstinence. In 2002, the use of condoms had increased by over one-third since 1988.
Though there has been a decline in teenage birthrates and an increase in the use of contraceptives, the leveling off in the proportion of children living in single-parent families is at best a modest gain. It may be the result of either a revived culture or the exhaustion of further victims. The cultural explanation would be this: women are more willing to avoid becoming unwed mothers. The exhaustion argument is this: perhaps there are no more people at risk, and so the rates of children living in single-parent homes have reached a natural apogee. We cannot choose between these two explanations with any precision, but there are some signs that a cultural change has occurred.
Bill Cosby made headlines when in June 2004 he called on parents to take charge of their children and for black men to stop beating their women. A survey done in 2001 jointly by CBS News and Black Entertainment Television found 92 percent of black respondents agreeing that absent fathers are a major problem. Many rap and hip-hop musicians, to a degree not appreciated by most of us, sing lyrics that call attention to fatherless families and child abandonment, albeit in words that offend practically everyone. It must be one of the supreme ironies of the modern age that the most vulgar, foul-mouthed musicians sing words that call attention to our gravest social problem. It surely is paradoxical that the worst features of our commitment to freedom endorse an appeal to the greatest threats to our character.
At this point in an essay, one expects to find set forth the correct solution to our problem. That will not happen here. There is no magic bullet that can revive marriage and enhance its character-forming properties. Even our boldest measures have so far had little visible impact. Welfare reform reduced the proportion of women on welfare and increased the fraction who are working, but it has done next to nothing about increasing the likelihood that welfare recipients marry before having more children.
It is easy to see why. If you run a welfare agency, you can urge your frontline employees to be tough about women seeking welfare payments. If you do that, your success is immediately evident, you save the state money, and you act in accordance with public opinion that has always regarded the old welfare system as a disaster. But now imagine that you want to tell these employees to increase marriage rates. Your effect will not be measurable or even visible for many years, you will not save the state any money, and you will not have public opinion strongly behind you.
In fact, there is a tendency in American politics to shy away from any discussion of these matters because they lack the obvious pain of an airplane crash or the dramatic appeal of an isolated case. Since the Supreme Court struck down laws against homosexual conduct many people have been preoccupied with either encouraging or resisting homosexual marriage. Whatever your views about homosexual marriage, were it adopted nationally it would affect only about 2 or 3 percent of the population. Cohabitation, divorce, and single-parent families are problems that affect roughly half of the population. Still, we find it more interesting to discuss homosexual marriage than to discuss marriage itself.
But talking about marriage is essential to the future of our society. Marriage shapes our commitments and builds our character. No one is quite certain what will restore marriage to its once privileged position, but many private groups and some state governments are trying to find out. Our task ought to be to encourage and to evaluate these efforts.
If we are successful in revitalizing marriage, we shall have dramatically improved loyalty and the benefits that flow from this commitment. Marriage, it is true, is a lasting restriction on human freedom; indeed, some young people resist marriage because by accepting it they lose some of their freedom. But every human freedom has its limits: we cannot falsely shout “fire” in a crowded theater nor knowingly print libelous stories about another person. In every aspect of our lives we accept limits to freedom, but in the case of the limits set by marriage we gain a great deal in return: longer, healthier lives; better sex; and decent children. Loyalty to spouse and children and relatives enhances our capacity to enjoy the freedom we have.
