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This year, we celebrate
the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love; and “40”
is still traumatic for those having a hard time with
aging. If you were 20 in 1967, you turn (ahem) 60 this
year and likely wear “business casual.” But
back then, as part of that youthful herd of independent
thinkers, you wore tattered jeans and tie-dyed tee-shirts.
If you were going to San Francisco, you had to wear
some flowers in your hair. And you were hyped: Free
Love was going to make you healthy and well-adjusted,
just as drugs were going to make you wise.
The vast majority of middle-class kids
did not go to San Francisco that summer, nor to Woodstock
in ‘69. And in terms of limiting the spread of
venereal diseases and drug-induced psychoses, it was
just as well they stayed home. The appeal of hallucinogenic
drugs soon faded, as the “bad trips” ended
up in the emergency wards and morgues. But the destructive
consequences of Free Love have taken longer to roost.
As the ‘Sixties faded, a cohort
of middle-class stay-at-homes soon became revolutionary
wannabes, too prudent to join a commune, but committed
as adults to making the world safe for the fun they’d
missed in their youths. Once they graduated with their
education, law, journalism and social work degrees,
they began their Long March through the political and
social institutions--justice departments, advertising
agencies and Girl Guides. The Sexual Revolution went
mainstream in the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties,
ironically through the efforts of those who believed
they hated political oppression. They followed the lead
of fretful Beatle martyr John Lennon (whose “Imagine”
was broadcast globally by aging UNistas on the 20th
anniversary of his death), seeking to erase sexual guilt
from the world.
Here’s the point: The Sexual Revolution
did not bring down any government. It did not weaken
the centralized political control of society. It did
not push back the intrusion of coercive law into private
lives. What it attacked and finally eviscerated were
Western Civilization’s age-old secondary institutions,
like the church, the free market, voluntary charities,
independent schools, and of course the natural family.
In making the world safe for promiscuity, upwardly-mobile
young adults began to weed-whip the perennial free associations
that had always checked the crabgrass spread of government.
Rising legislators and jurists proved eager to suppress
the “oppressive” moral influences of the natural
family, the free market, the church--in short, any free
associations that might question the moral authority
of the omnipotent state.
The double-whammy came when the Sexual
Revolution generated a major new political constituency:
refugees from broken homes. Across North America, single-parent
homes generate nine out of ten of runaway children,
eight out of ten behavioural disorders and imprisonments,
three-quarters of high school dropouts, and almost two-thirds
of youth suicides. Even in nanny-state Canada, fatherless
girls are more than twice as likely to end up single
mothers and fatherless boys over twice as likely to
end up as criminals. Anti-family innovations like no-fault
divorce, punitive family taxation and day-care incentives
have created a cohort of lonely clients for the patron
state, even while it undermined the voluntary groups
that might have helped them. The state seemed to be
obliged to step in loco parentis, self-justified in
substituting its ever-expanding bureaucracy for irreplaceable
parental love. And as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted,
150 years ago, this social atomization fueled the limitless
expansion of the public administration.
While the cost in broken lives is incalculable,
we are now beginning to count up the economic cost.
The British Tories have now calculated that family breakup
costs British taxpayers over $200 billion yearly--over
$3,000 yearly from every man, woman and child, and five
or six times that from members of their shrinking cohort
of productive workers. In Canada, over 45 per cent of
the country’s annual wealth is funnelled through
federal, provincial and municipal governments, largely
providing services once found in families. Yet the cost
of broken homes continues to multiply, in terms of kids
in custody, lack of labour productivity, increased medical
demands (like childhood obesity and STDs), and especially
labour shortages (given the over 100,000 abortions yearly).
The impact of free sex and uncommitted relations on
our bank accounts is plain to anyone not deliberately
blind.
Nothing can turn back the omnipotent state, but a recovery
of voluntary society, a renewal of the free market,
spontaneous charities, independent schools, churches,
and first and foremost the natural family. And contrary
to the claims of some doctrinaire libertarians, a legal
restoration of marriage and family is not an illegitimate
expansion in the powers of the state. A legally enshrined
family is no more a public intrusion into private lives,
than the enforcement of contract law is an illegitimate
intrusion of the state into the market place.
Legal enforcement of commercial contracts
is a necessary precondition of a free market, but more,
it represents the state’s promise that its barons
and sheriffs themselves will not pillage the trade.
Through contract law, the state recognizes the practical
autonomy of the marketplace, because reliable exchange
and free accumulation of economic capital is good for
everyone. So the enforcement of trade contracts is a
core responsibility of the state, along with the defense
of its borders and wielding criminal justice.
Likewise, the legal enforcement of marriage
contracts is a necessary precondition of stable families,
but more, it represents the state’s promise that
its agents will not normally steal a family’s children.
Through the marriage contract, the state recognizes
the natural autonomy of the multi-generational family,
because domestic solidarity and the accumulation of
“social capital” is good for everyone. So
the state’s recognition of marriage is like its
licensing of charities--not an intrusion, but a declaration
of independence.
Social capital, broad networks of trust,
is absolutely essential for a commercial society. And
despite the claims of Sexual Revolutionaries, the ordinary,
everyday natural family is the indispensable nursery
of voluntary association and productivity. This is proven
by the crippling social pathologies, caused by the political
suppression of the family. Despite the propaganda of
dysfunctional TV parents, only within the safety and
encouragement of the family can children mature with
the confidence and habits of co-operation needed for
productive citizenship. The family is the social nursery
the state can encourage, but cannot replace. And social
capital is squandered when parents are too scared of
sexual predators to let their kids to play outside.
The only practical alternative to the
nanny state is a society of vibrant, multi-generational
families, groundcover preventing the spread of bureaucratic
weeds, from which flower all varieties of free associations.
At the bottom line, the legally enshrined, fertile family
is good for everyone, even rugged individualists, even
those who do not want families of their own.
The Sexual Revolution, like the Drug
Revolution, has been a disaster, and the dissolution
of family life has been the primary culprit in the limitless
expansion of the wasteful bureaucratic state. And only
the most addicted could believe that the Sexual Revolution
is irreversible. It didn’t “just happen.”
It was the deliberate policy of a privileged segment
of society, swallowing whole the liberation theories
of propagandists like Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Kinsey
and the absurd Hugh Heffner. The Sexual Revolutionaries
did not get Free Love, because we’ve all been paying
with our taxes. So it’s time to recognize that
a free society needs strong families.
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