Posted on 03/11/2015 5:04:22 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
The first response to these stats and to these profiles should be intense sympathy. We now have multiple generations of people caught in recurring feedback loops of economic stress and family breakdown, often leading to something approaching an anarchy of the intimate life.
But it’s increasingly clear that sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms. The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.
Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.”
The Bible. Just sayin’.
Sure they were. Sexual license is a bad value, and it was made the chief characteristic of society by the people in positions of political and cultural leadership. Those people were, in most cases, able to mitigate the bad outcomes of their bad values, while the lower classes were not.
Theodore Dalrymple explained all this nearly 20 years ago. (Does anyone but me think it's weird that the mid-1990s were 20 years ago?)
Yup. IIRC, there were minimum standards and everyone understood them.
Then drugs, poverty, indiscriminate unprotected sex, crime and other moral deviancy somehow infiltrated its way into daily life and instead of being condemned, the people who had the standards were forced to accept it.
The unintended consequences of government looking for an answer and implementing a bad solution to a problem that they created.
Brooks has supported numerous facets of political life that engendered the breakdown of moral structures. Now he wants us to forget about all that and read this as if it’s a revelation?
The replies are priceless. It’s amazing how many brain dead people there are in this country.
Day late and a dollar short, Dave.
But it’s increasingly clear that sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.
If you take away the $$, the problem will take care of itself. Sanity, norms (and even shame) will return....out of sheer necessity. Will there be suffering along the way? Of course. For some it will get very ugly, but that is kind of the point. Without these negative examples, behaviors aren’t going to change.
The problem now is that a majority grew up on this System and don’t want those behaviors to change—so it won’t. The actual taxpayers are not IN the minority.
These social pathologies are the natural, and I would say calculated, results of liberal policies.
Here's the thing; the people that suffer the most from these dysfunctions are the people that reelect democrats time after time, and so really, it all works out.
Just make sure you live as far away from them as possible.
Maybe he's growing up? We conservatives generally learned this stuff long before we reached his age, so maybe he's just slow.
Day late and a dollar short, Dave.
Exactly right. The more people mature, the more their ideas come to resemble what we've been saying all along.
Liberalism is on the face of it, a childish and ignorant manner of looking at the world. (So is Libertarianism)
When we had standards, it wasn't the condom that made the sex OK.
“(Does anyone but me think it's weird that the mid-1990s were 20 years ago?)”
That's nothing. I'll be watching a movie on TV and think, “Oh, this just came out a few years ago.” Then I'll look at the date and realize “a few years ago” was 1983.
A car from 1995 is still a "late model" in my mind.
sitetest
Sexual immorality is the disease nobody wants to discuss. Then they wonder why their efforts to address the symptoms aren’t very successful.
Absolutely. Mid-90s cars aren't all rectangular, like my mother's 1983 Toyota Camry was. Cars only look "outdated" when they're rectangular.
Our sons drive a 1997 Mercury Tracer. It's hard to get parts for it when it breaks down.
What is so sad is we have a reverse of made the Victorian Era so successful. You had a society go through at that time the most massive change in human society since the movement from hunter-gather to agricultural societies. Despite these changes all indicators of social cohesion and stability improved. One of the hallmarks of the Victorian Era was demands from the middling and lower classes for the the elite to improve their behavior. Compare Victoria and Albert to the behavior of the children of George III. Now we have a situation of the societal elites behaving in one way with stable families and the like but the mores and policies they espouse is the direct opposite. Those are the values that have devastated the lower classes. It is as if the top 10% are conspiring to make sure they and their descendants will stay on top and no need to worry about potential competition from the bottom 10% stuck due to broken homes and destructive behaviors.
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