![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsJames Poulos, an editor at Ricochet Magazine, says that there are two Americas, and he refers to them as "The Mature and the Immature." Poulos, ricocheting off the New York Times article "What Is It About 20-Somethings?," "suggests" (his word) that the dividing line between these two Americas can be seen in thi discussion about gay marriage: on the one hand, his preferred kind of people get married and become mature adults early in life; on the other, "the desire to expand marriage to fit any voluntarily formalized love-oriented arrangement is sure to erect a vast new legal and administrative apparatus dedicated to managing the social, economic, and psychological fallout from the dissolution of those arrangements."
In other words, because marriage will be seen primarily as a voluntary agreement among parties, the willingness of those parties to sustain it will be deeply wounded and we will be left with "a costly, cumbersome, ubiquitous, and intimate legal and administrative system obliged to manage the achievements, setbacks, and failures of a vast class of Americans defined above all by their immaturity."
As if we weren't there already.
Poulos, of course, counts himself among the "mature" Americans, who somehow are privileged to understand... something or other. He doesn't actually convey a sense of what "maturity" means, other than to suggest that "generations will become ... meaningless" and "the window of reproductive sexual activity will expand to embrace five decades." (He links to a James Lileks' piece in which Lileks laments, with mild irony, that most teenagers have no appreciation or understanding of the different eras of music: everything is just fodder for the next mash-up, which will entertain for less that two weeks before something else comes along.)
Being in that inconvenient age slot between the Boomers and Generation X (my "generation" has the irredeemable name of "Wedger"), I have little appreciation for the distinction of "generations;" I have appreciation for human beings of different ages, but the whole idea of "generations" always seemed a little overbroad to me.
Jonathan Rauch has his own take on the same discussion, several months back, entitled "Red Families, Blue Families, Gay Families, and the Search for a New Normal." Rauch's argument is more concise, and goes like this:
The American tradition of maturity, the "Red Family" tradition, is predicated on two facts: (a) sex leads to children, and the core pupose of marriage is to regulate sexual and social activity to provide for stable, nuturing families; and (b) a low-skilled man, if he applied himself, can get a job, make a living and support a family. Families, Rauch says, formed early (and not always voluntarily), but that was acceptable because the man could still get a job and support his kids. Small-town values are designed around these facts and their consequences.
The premise is that "Families Form Adults."
(This also leads me back to the November 2008 issue of New Yorker and the story "Red Sex, Blue Sex," which asks, in the wake of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, why evangelical kids get pregnant out of wedlock so much; the basic answer is that their world has the above expectation and a story of redemption and forgiveness that lets them ease the psychological distress of their failure to abide by their community's expectations.)
Rauch says that there are two world-changers: birth control, and the global information economy. Blue Families, in contrast, appreciate that it takes much more than a mere high-school education to survive in our high-tech economy. (There is some indication, for illustration, that the economic crisis has revealed a lack of jobs for the low-skilled workforce in the United States.) Basic jobs require more than a high-school disploma, and you can't get those skills if you can't go to a trade school or college. You can't do that if you have a family, but birth control allows twentysomethings to manage their sexual procilivities without the consequences of children. In the Blue Universe, early family formation is a disaster that short-circuits the path to economic viability.
Rauch suggests that this is the reason why the "voluntary formal arrangement" model of marriage is so anathema to the right, even moreso than gay adoption(!): in the Blue universe, same-sex marriage is in line with the twin values of autonomy and responsibility: "In Blue World, gay couples fit the paradigm perfectly. They are responsible adults trying to live more stable, more responsible lives, and trying to improve the prospects of any children they may have. Who could ask for anything more?"
In the Red universe, the delinkage of marriage and sex has been disastrous (again, see: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston). But it is inevitable, unless you outright ban contraception and somehow provide a means by which young people who form families can somehow maintain the high-investment pattern both Red and Blue state parents are proud of, and somehow allow Red state parents to acquire the high-value skills needed to provide our workforce.
Polous does not approve of the idea that one must achieve a level of maturity and economic autonomy before forming a family unit. Obviously, I think Polous is wrong, and inevitably so: what he wants is incompatible with the onrushing future. (If you want a sick take on it, consider the Alternative Right website's take in "The Red State Family Crisis:" "This is a nice distillation of the bizarre idea that all Americans have the potential to be college graduates with lots of skills suitable for a post-industrial economy. IQ never enters the equation. But this utopian future is just not going to happen. A far better program would be to provide better economic opportunities for White people, especially White males, whose prospects have been blunted by the present regime." All of the usual nonsense is there: the suggestion that too much of America is too stupid to keep up with the Blue program, and that white people, especially, have been blocked from accessing the low-skill economic activities due them by "the current regime.")
In any event, I expect the debate to get uglier even as the circle of Red gets smaller.
In other words, because marriage will be seen primarily as a voluntary agreement among parties, the willingness of those parties to sustain it will be deeply wounded and we will be left with "a costly, cumbersome, ubiquitous, and intimate legal and administrative system obliged to manage the achievements, setbacks, and failures of a vast class of Americans defined above all by their immaturity."
As if we weren't there already.
Poulos, of course, counts himself among the "mature" Americans, who somehow are privileged to understand... something or other. He doesn't actually convey a sense of what "maturity" means, other than to suggest that "generations will become ... meaningless" and "the window of reproductive sexual activity will expand to embrace five decades." (He links to a James Lileks' piece in which Lileks laments, with mild irony, that most teenagers have no appreciation or understanding of the different eras of music: everything is just fodder for the next mash-up, which will entertain for less that two weeks before something else comes along.)
Being in that inconvenient age slot between the Boomers and Generation X (my "generation" has the irredeemable name of "Wedger"), I have little appreciation for the distinction of "generations;" I have appreciation for human beings of different ages, but the whole idea of "generations" always seemed a little overbroad to me.
Jonathan Rauch has his own take on the same discussion, several months back, entitled "Red Families, Blue Families, Gay Families, and the Search for a New Normal." Rauch's argument is more concise, and goes like this:
The American tradition of maturity, the "Red Family" tradition, is predicated on two facts: (a) sex leads to children, and the core pupose of marriage is to regulate sexual and social activity to provide for stable, nuturing families; and (b) a low-skilled man, if he applied himself, can get a job, make a living and support a family. Families, Rauch says, formed early (and not always voluntarily), but that was acceptable because the man could still get a job and support his kids. Small-town values are designed around these facts and their consequences.
The premise is that "Families Form Adults."
(This also leads me back to the November 2008 issue of New Yorker and the story "Red Sex, Blue Sex," which asks, in the wake of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, why evangelical kids get pregnant out of wedlock so much; the basic answer is that their world has the above expectation and a story of redemption and forgiveness that lets them ease the psychological distress of their failure to abide by their community's expectations.)
Rauch says that there are two world-changers: birth control, and the global information economy. Blue Families, in contrast, appreciate that it takes much more than a mere high-school education to survive in our high-tech economy. (There is some indication, for illustration, that the economic crisis has revealed a lack of jobs for the low-skilled workforce in the United States.) Basic jobs require more than a high-school disploma, and you can't get those skills if you can't go to a trade school or college. You can't do that if you have a family, but birth control allows twentysomethings to manage their sexual procilivities without the consequences of children. In the Blue Universe, early family formation is a disaster that short-circuits the path to economic viability.
Rauch suggests that this is the reason why the "voluntary formal arrangement" model of marriage is so anathema to the right, even moreso than gay adoption(!): in the Blue universe, same-sex marriage is in line with the twin values of autonomy and responsibility: "In Blue World, gay couples fit the paradigm perfectly. They are responsible adults trying to live more stable, more responsible lives, and trying to improve the prospects of any children they may have. Who could ask for anything more?"
In the Red universe, the delinkage of marriage and sex has been disastrous (again, see: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston). But it is inevitable, unless you outright ban contraception and somehow provide a means by which young people who form families can somehow maintain the high-investment pattern both Red and Blue state parents are proud of, and somehow allow Red state parents to acquire the high-value skills needed to provide our workforce.
Polous does not approve of the idea that one must achieve a level of maturity and economic autonomy before forming a family unit. Obviously, I think Polous is wrong, and inevitably so: what he wants is incompatible with the onrushing future. (If you want a sick take on it, consider the Alternative Right website's take in "The Red State Family Crisis:" "This is a nice distillation of the bizarre idea that all Americans have the potential to be college graduates with lots of skills suitable for a post-industrial economy. IQ never enters the equation. But this utopian future is just not going to happen. A far better program would be to provide better economic opportunities for White people, especially White males, whose prospects have been blunted by the present regime." All of the usual nonsense is there: the suggestion that too much of America is too stupid to keep up with the Blue program, and that white people, especially, have been blocked from accessing the low-skill economic activities due them by "the current regime.")
In any event, I expect the debate to get uglier even as the circle of Red gets smaller.
