Apparently, Charles Murray is just a big, mean spirited misandrist:
Note the discrepancy between what I just said and our common perceptions of what's going on with marriage. The very common impression is that it's the upper class that's had problems with marriage...
...For the upper middle class, marriage is alive and well. It has collapsed in the working class.
Why is it a big deal that fewer than half of working class whites ages 30-49 are married? Well, there are several reasons.
One is that marriage civilizes men. Married men... their incomes go up. Their productivity goes up. In a more general sense, adult males who are single are kind of a kind of disheveled population....disheveled in a variety of ways culturally and socially and they clean up their acts when they get married with fairly good regularity.
Another reason is that single people are not good producers of social capital. They seldom coach Little League teams and chair civic fund drives, or take the lead in getting a 4 way stop sign at an intersection where children play.
A third, more fundamental reason is the one that de Tocqueville saw. It's worth quoting directly:"I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans [domestic virtue referring to married life in America] as the principal source of all their other qualities.
He then goes on to enumerate those qualities and concludes:"In short, domestic virtue does more for the preservation of peace and good order than all the laws enacted for that purpose, and is a better guarantee for the permanency of the American government than any written instrument - the Constitution not excepted.
Debate questions:
1. How does what Murray just said differ from Kay Hymowitz's latest effort, which has produced the most amusing (if deafening) howls of outrage - along with cries of "Misandry!!!1!!!!111!!!!" - from quite a few righty bloggers?
2. Is Murray's message "misandry"?
3. If so, is John Hawkins a misandrist, too?
Is it controversial to note that people in their twenties are a lot less grown up and responsible than they used to be? Yes, it’s nice that so many Americans can waste their twenties clubbing and playing Madden — and I mean that. The fact that so many young Americans even have the option to do that shows we have an extremely prosperous society.
Of course, there’s also a price to be paid for that prosperity: Percentage wise, we have a lot of “adults” in this country who think like children because they’ve never been forced to grow up and deal with the real world the way Americans did in past generations.
Pointing this out apparently infuriates liberals, who in their ignorance, tend to confuse hedonism with happiness.
From what I've seen, liberals have plenty of company on the right side of the blogosphere. Just sayin'.
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