We’re Ignoring a Root Cause of Our Problems
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Everyone today is concerned about the sharp increase in social pathologies in America: addiction, mental illness, suicide, violent crime, and so forth. They want to blame the economy, social media, the pharmaceutical industry, the gun lobby. Recently, some people have suggested a connection between mass shootings and marijuana use. But what I want to know is this: How many mass shooters were raised by parents in an intact, biological marriage? Why has this information not even been collected?
The fact is, no one seems to want to talk about what is probably the single greatest contributor to our social pathologies: the breakdown of marriage and the family. Much of the evidence is there (see for example this summary of the data assembled by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, but also important books by Ryan Anderson, Robert George, and Sherif Gergis, Charles Murray, Katie Faust and Stacy Manning, Allan Carlson, and others), but the underlying truth cuts strongly against our dominant culture of expressive individualism.
The truth is that we are not by nature autonomous individuals but dependent rational animals; and intact, biological marriage (the comprehensive union of one man and one woman) is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for human development and flourishing. Facing this truth will require us to confront widespread practices, especially promiscuity, cohabitation, and no-fault divorce, but also same-sex marriage and surrogacy.
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