Marry or perish: the death knell of Western society

"Nor will children want to look after a step-parent who, even if not actively resented, will not command the same bonds of love and duty as someone’s natural father or mother.

This breaking of the bonds between the generations is absolutely calamitous. For beyond the tragic abandonment of people to lonely lives, there can be no community without a strong sense of duty and commitment to other people and the need to look after them.

What this society has increasingly thrown overboard is nothing less than the idea of kinship, where people are knitted together by the sense they belong to each other.

Instead, our post-religious, post-modern, post-moral society prizes above all else independence, which is seen as essential to fulfilling one’s potential without any constraints or interference by anyone else.

This fact more than anything else helps explain the rise and rise of cohabitation, and the reason why so many now prefer it to marriage.

The key point about marriage is that it is not a partnership or a relationship but a union in which two people bind themselves to each other for ever in solemn obligation.

By contrast, those who choose to cohabit regard their relationship as a partnership of independent individuals — in which they reserve for themselves the right to opt out, with no binding obligation on either side.

Whatever they think the word ‘commitment’ may mean, the fact is they are not prepared to make that leap of faith and love that binds them in a permanent tie of obligation to another person. Who can be surprised, therefore, that cohabitations break up far more frequently than do marriages? For cohabitants have written themselves a get-out clause from the start.

Nor is it surprising that a principal reason why cohabitations collapse is the arrival of a baby. For a child demands unconditional obligation to another human being. And that’s what cohabitants don’t want."

The whole of Melanie Phillips' stirring article, "Broken Families, Lonely Britain" in the Daily Mail is here. I would head it differently (as per the title of this post). For a generation or more most Western societies have steadfastly refused to affirm the importance of marriage over other forms of relationships, even by the simplest step of (say) offering tax incentives to married couples. The debate on gay 'marriage' is another step in the journey of devaluing marriage between a man and a woman because it is a further application of the refusal to affirm the distinctive contribution marriage between a man and a woman make to the present and future of a society. (I acknowledge that gay 'marriage' is a nuanced step in that journey because the arguments for it involve affirmation of the intrinsic value of unconditional commitment in a relationship). 

In the end societies reap what they sow. The unravelling of the economies of the West at present is the harvest of sowing plentiful debt. The surge in immigration into those economies is the harvest of sowing minimal attention to marriage and family life. In the end Western societies will be replaced with peoples who value marriage, family and thrift. Solomon predicted all this when he wrote Proverbs!