Gallagher on Culture: part VII

At the corner:

...the marriage fights didn't begin in 2003.

Between roughly 1960 and 1980, marriage came under a rather fierce and multi-faced ideological attack.

Five great strands of contemporary liberalism — the sexual revolution, the gender-role revolution, the expansion of welfare for the poor, the movement for racial equality, and the environmental movement — came together to support de-norming of marriage, knocking it off its pedestal and de-legitimating, in various ways, its privileged cultural postion. 

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And roughly between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate and the out-of-wedlock birth rates tripled. (I do not say this was cause and effect, I simply note that both things happened at roughly the same time in mutually reinforcing ways). 

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Pause: What did I learn during this era from personal experience, my first 20 years? 

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I learned this truth: Connecting sex, babies, love, money, and mothers and fathers is hard.

Hard at the individual level, and hard at the societal level. A society where marriage is the normal, usual, and generally reliable way to raise children is a great cultural achievement, not a law of nature.

Why, then, is marriage a universal human social institution? Because, over time, cultures that do not find a way to some minimal version of this achievement die out and are replaced by cultures that do.