The structure of Society

Clayton Cramer has been reading.

Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), pp. xv + 263

This is an astonishingly depressing book. You really do need to read it--but there are a few caveats that I will get to at the end of the review.

Dalrymple observes how little of the blame the underclass spreads to their own actions -- everything bad in their lives happens to them, the result of bad luck, societal conspiracy, or their victims.  They never do anything wrong, or fail to do anything right.
But I also noticed this:

Dalyrymple, who is pretty clearly not a Christian, points out that the collapse of traditional sexual morality did not free the underclass from all the horrible limitations of narrow-minded rigidity. Instead, it destroyed a system of family ties and duties that provided the most stable situation for the poor to rise up and out. The underclass has all the sexual jealousy that was present in the past (and then some), but without any of the rules or social conventions that punished men for philandering and discouraged them (not always very effectively) from abusing their wives and children. The absence of those rules has only aggravated the sexual jealousy problem that seems to be natural to the species.

I've been thinking that marriage, as an institution, is a lot more than a goodie bag the churches and the government give to people.  It's a nucleus around which society crystallizes.  Playing with the structure won't endanger any particular marriage.  If the rules are relaxed to allow same-sex marriage, we won't see couples running to divorce court en masse. Instead, we'll see what Dalrymple observes in the inner cities -- people just not bothering.
Marriage has a number of goodies attached, but these goodies are bribes, designed to induce compliance with a wide array of rules, both written and unwritten.  Destroy the incentive structure around marriage, and the institution goes away.  When the institution goes away, the short-range forces that pull a mob together into society disappear, and society crumbles from the bottom up.