The Future of the Family

A friend told me the following story. He and his wife had had an argument. They were happily married – in fact their marriage is one of the strongest I know – and the difference was soon resolved. But that night his nine-year-old son sought him out on his own. He asked: “Does this mean that you and mummy are getting a divorce?”

It shook me as it shook him. They were, as I say, a strong family. They were deeply religious Jews. Their son went to a religious school. Until recently this was a world in which divorce was relatively unknown. But it had now begun to strike even here. There were children in his son’s class who had experienced family break-up. It had left them, as it always does, traumatised and disturbed. The other children in the class, strongly bonded by their shared faith, had tried to help and had taken on some of their pain. They too now knew that divorce was not just a theoretical possibility, something that happens to other people far away. It had entered their world, and destabilised it.

They had discovered that in this new world parents were not people who were always there. Sometimes they split apart, emotionally splitting apart their children with them. Suddenly, even for the children from stable families, a disturbing reality had dawned. Arguments of the kind all families have took on a new significance. Was a quarrel what divorce is, or at least how it begins? Instead of learning what they might have learned – that marital happiness consists in negotiating conflicts, in being able to have an argument and yet resolve it, love intact – they now felt fear. The marital bond was no longer like the familiar mug that you use cheerfully, knowing that when you accidentally drop it, it will not crack. It had become a cup of the finest china that you are reluctant to drink from for fear of breaking it. Divorce, my friend concluded, now affected everyone, not just those who were divorced.

Beginning with my 1990 Reith Lectures, I have written and spoken much about the family. It has seemed to me to be the arena of the central moral crisis of our time. The family is not one social institution among others, nor is it simply one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations, and for enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we acquire the skills and language of relationship. It is where we learn to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. Of all the influences upon us, the family is by far the most powerful. Its effects stay with us for a lifetime. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next and ensures the continuity of a civilisation. Nothing else – not teachers or schools, not politicians or the media – so shapes us and what we have a chance of becoming as our experience of early childhood. For any society, the family is the crucible of its future.

In ours, it is beginning to crack. In Britain, and throughout the liberal democracies of the West, family norms have disintegrated with astonishing speed. Today, three of every ten children are born outside of marriage. One in five is brought up in a one-parent family. Almost four in ten marriages end in divorce. There are inner-city areas in Britain and the United States where the stable nuclear family is almost unknown. A few years ago a vicar in Newcastle told me that throughout his working life he had gone into schools, teaching children about religious faith, and about “God our father.” Now, at the end of his career, he discovered that he could no longer do so. The children did not know what he was talking about. The word they did not understand was not “God,” but “father.”

Nothing so contradicts our new secular mythology – that life is made of unfettered individual choices through which we negotiate our private paths to happiness – than this. In his The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith forged an image which has dominated our age. It was the image of the free market which, as if by an “invisible hand,” turned the myriad self-interested decisions of the economy into the collective good. Each sought his or her own gain but somehow, through the positive energies released, everyone benefited. Since the 1960s we have acted as if that metaphor were valid for personal relationships as well. We forgot what Adam Smith so convincingly remembered, that alongside The Wealth of Nations lies The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. Smith believed that the market was sustained by institutions whose inner logic was the reverse of the market, above all else the family. It was here that we learned sympathy and fellow feeling, sociability and altruistic love. The family is the oil in the engine, the fluid which saves the system from frictions which would destroy it otherwise.

For a time it could be believed that the “invisible hand” operated in relationships too. The values invoked by those who criticised the family and its conventions were positive enough. They spoke of personal freedom, experimentation, liberation. They touched a chord. Who would not be attracted by the prospect of pleasure without responsibility, relationships sustained by personal attraction with no attached bill of lasting commitment? One of the early advertisements for credit cards exactly caught the new moral mood. The card – it said – “takes the waiting out of wanting.” The long-standing basis of morality, the capacity to delay instinctual gratification, seemed no longer necessary. This was a new world of instant consumption, governed by a law of inexorable growth. Economies grow. Incomes grow. Happiness grows. They grow by getting, using and expending, and then making more. The more you discard, the more you produce and therefore the more there is.

The turning point came when we discovered that, even for the economy, Adam Smith’s metaphor had limits. Economic growth is not open-ended, nor does it operate in a self-contained system. It too rapidly consumes finite natural resources. It puts at risk the delicate ecological balance. It is subject to uncertainties, inflations and recessions. Unexpected changes in trade and technology can leave whole groups of people devastated and unemployed. If that is true for the economy, it is even more so for relationships. A generation after the planting of the new morality we are left with a harvest of new pain. Men have suffered. Jack Dominian’s researches have shown the brute physical effects of divorce, more marked for the husband than the wife. They show in the doubling of heart attacks and strokes and other symptoms of depression such as alcohol and cigarette consumption. Women have suffered more. Overwhelmingly they remain the carers, and in single-parent families they are left to carry a double burden, of economic and emotional support, that is hard enough for two. Too often they live in poverty, struggling to make do on an inadequate income and trying constantly to control children who, in the absence of a father, have grown unsocialised and wild.

Unquestionably, though, the greatest victims have been children themselves. Professor A. H. Halsey, summarising the research on children from broken or one-parent families, came to the following conclusion: “On the evidence available, such children tend to die earlier, to have more illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered.” Halsey, himself a sociologist and “ethical socialist” of immense distinction, once said to me, “Our age is often referred to as the Century of the Child. I do not believe it is. I think it has been the Century of Child Neglect.”

If there is a fracture at the heart of our collective conscience, it is this. There have been protests in full measure against economic inequalities. But there have been far too few against the greatest inequality of all, that which condemns a significant and ever-growing proportion of our children to lasting disadvantage in almost all spheres of life. In The Times in 1993, in a piece subsequently taken up by politicians, I wrote: “Nothing more threatens to return Britain to Disraeli’s ‘two nations’ than a division of the population into those who have known a stable caring childhood and those who have not.” The controversial American thinker, Charles Murray, later wrote a long analysis in the Sunday Times. He spoke of a deepening rift in the social fabric of modern societies. The more educated and affluent classes were beginning to realise the mistake of the 1960s and were returning to conventional marriages. The less well-off, particularly those trapped in inner-city ghettoes, were not. The pattern of single-parenthood was replicating itself and extending its hold into a new generation. He spoke of a schism between the “new Victorians” and the “new rabble.” It was, like so much of his writing, a brutal and unlovely analysis. But it rang true. For years his has been a lonely voice warning of the centres of self-sustaining disadvantage at the heart of our cities, which have grown worse not better through the interventions of the State. He, like a growing number of others, has seen family breakdown at its core.

There have been protests, too, against the erosion of the natural environment, and they have been loud and long. But there has been no equivalent protest at the erosion of our human environment, the world of relationships into which we bring our children. How, I have often asked, can we devote our energies to saving planet earth for the sake of future generations while neglecting our own children who are our future generations? The ethical issue of the environment is a genuine one. But it is also a relatively abstract one. It is about long and unexpected sequences of cause and effect. The connection between using an aerosol spray and global warming is distant in both space and time. Yet it has caught the moral imagination in a way that the disintegration of marriage has not. Nonetheless, if anything is a moral issue, this is. We did not bring the planet into being, but we bring children into being. As John Stuart Mill rightly said, “The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life.” And if the ought of responsibility is there, so too is the can. Our individual acts have little effect on the environment. Only in the aggregate do they make a difference. But our individual acts as parents have a decisive influence on our children. In fact, they make almost all the difference there is.

Our conscience has been extraordinarily selective. Nothing so characterises the contemporary moral landscape as Dickens’ portrait of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, a lady of “rapacious benevolence” who spends her life in good works for the natives of Africa while utterly neglecting her own children. She could almost be us. Our moral sentiments have been inverted. Adam Smith used to say that the closer a disaster was to us, the more our sympathies were enlisted. Today the opposite seems to apply. Our moral antennae are attuned to distant famines and wars, remote rainforests and threatened species. To the things closest to us, our children and their appeals to us for attention and stability, we seem curiously ambivalent and defensive.

Our attitudes are inverted in another way as well. The things we are least able to affect – global phenomena like the economy and unemployment – we are most vociferous in wanting to change. In the thing we are most able to affect – our way of life – we are most insistent in rejecting calls to change. Whenever the call is heard summoning us back to the traditional family, a host of columnists and commentators is readily to hand, arguing that it is gone, never to be recovered. The genie is out of the bottle, the toothpaste has left the tube. Those who argue for the return of the stable nuclear family, they say, are like Canute trying to turn back the waves. It is crucial to understand that this is self-evidently false. If there is one thing we can change by our own decisions it is the way we act as spouses and parents. The argument of the commentators is a moral one masquerading as a fact. It is a claim to the right to leave all living arrangements uncriticised, however harmful their consequences for others. What is, is what ought to be. There is no right and wrong, only alternatives. What needs to be said about this never fully articulated line of thought is that if it is true, there is no morality of personal relationships. And if there is no morality of personal relationships it is hard to see how there can be morality of any kind. It is untrue. But it is significant that it is said, and said so often as to have become a cliche.

Melanie Phillips, a journalist who has stood out against the trend and has shown great courage in doing so, related a telling personal incident in an article she wrote in The Tablet. She had been to a seminar at which Professors Halsey and Norman Dennis surveyed some of the research data on the harm caused by family breakdown. She was impressed by the strength of the case, and wondered why the material was not better known. She telephoned another social scientist to ask him about his hostility to the claims advanced by the two men. The following then ensued:

He released a stream of emotional invective, calling into question the mental faculties of those distinguished academics and asking excitedly, “What do these people want? Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?” After being pressed repeatedly to identify the research which repudiated the Halsey-Dennis thesis, he said, in summary, this: of course it was correct as far as the research was concerned, but where did that get anyone? Nowhere! Was it possible to turn back the clock? Of course not! And why were they so concerned above all else for the rights of the child? What about the rights of the parents, which were just as important?

This surely is the heart of the matter. In the field of personal relationships two systems of thought, two ways of life, have collided, one which speaks of interdependence, the other of independence. The battle against the family has been conducted in terms of rights, the rights of men to have relationships unencumbered by lasting duties, the rights of women to be free of men, the rights of each of us to plot our private paths to happiness undistracted by the claims of others, willing to pay our taxes in order to be able to delegate our responsibilities to the State and otherwise to be left alone.

But something happens in this scenario to make it unsustainable. Assisted by birth control, abortion, new work patterns and the liberalisation of all laws and constraints touching on relationships, we have divorced sex from love, love from commitment, marriage from having children, and having children from responsibility for their care. That extraordinary institution, marriage, which brought together sexuality, emotional kinship and the creation of new life and wove them into a moral partnership suffused by love, has been exploded as effectively as if someone had planted a bomb in the centre of our moral life. What remains are fragments, chance encounters, temporary attachments, terminable and contractual arrangements, unpredictable sequences in which our lives are thrown together without expectation, hope or emotional investment. Above it all hangs the smoke of war, conflicts of gender and liberation, turning our most intimate relationships into the potential battlefields of date rape, sexual harassment and divorce.

John Stuart Mill defended liberalism on the grounds that there were things – above all personal relationships – that were inherently private. Since his claims have been put into practice all that was once private has become massively public: in films, pop concerts, law cases, newspaper reporting, explicit speech and graphic portrayal. On university campuses the most casual relationships have become subject to codes of political correctness as casuistic, intrusive and relentless as any Victorian manual of propriety; worse, since the censoriousness of public opinion has been supplanted by litigation and the courts. The I-and-Thou of male-female relationship has been turned into a confrontation of Us and Them.

Mill himself spoke of the need to conduct “experiments of living.” His concept of liberty was related to his understanding of science. But science, as Sir Karl Popper has taught us, is a matter of conjectures and refutations. An experiment has been tried, and has failed. The family turns out to be not one stage in the evolution of mankind but the permanent condition of its happiness. It is, as Winston Churchill said about democracy, the worst system we have, apart from all the others. Ways of life are susceptible to refutation. The clearest sign that one has failed is that it cannot reproduce itself; it cannot sustain its own continuity. No society can survive the breakdown of half its families, the vehicles of its own journey across the generations. No society ought to survive, which provides its children with so little stability, security, attention or love. The family is the refutation of individualism.

Fortunately, it can be recovered. One of the most striking findings revealed by research is how firmly the family remains at the apex of our aspirations. What we do turns out not to be the measure of what we want. Overwhelmingly we still value the concept of a stable, lasting relationship. Most single parents do not choose to be single parents. Many divorcees marry again. This may be, as Samuel Johnson called it, the “triumph of hope over experience” but it is significant that we continue to hope. Making a documentary on the family recently for the BBC, I visited Sherborne House, the centre for young offenders described by Roger Graeffin in his book, Living Dangerously. I was struck as he was by the fact that these young men, most of whom came from broken homes, were fiercely attached to the ideal of family and wanted desperately to be good parents. It is not that we no longer value the family. It is that we have forgotten the disciplines that make it work.

The family can be recovered because it is, first and foremost, a moral institution. It is made or unmade by our choices. It is built on bonds of commitment, fidelity and self-restraint. In it a couple pledge themselves to one another, and through love bring new life into the world. Prosaic though its daily reality may be, it is vast in its moral power, weaving together the physical, moral and spiritual aspects of our being into a sense of the unity and continuity of life. It is more than a moral institution. It is the birthplace of the moral sense. It is where, as children, we discover who we are and develop a sense of personal worth. It is where, as parents, we encounter the most inalienable of responsibilities, for those who without us would not exist.

It is within the family that the three great ethical concerns arise: welfare, **or the care of dependents; education, or the handing on of accumulated wisdom to the next generation; and ecology, or concern with the fate of the world after our own lifetime. As James Q. Wilson has pointed out, the family is our best guarantor of moral courage: studies of those who risked their lives in Nazi Germany to rescue Jews showed them to be people who had been particularly close to their parents and had learned from them the importance of dependability, self-reliance and caring for others. Nothing could be less just than Edmund Leach’s famous verdict, in his 1967 Reith Lectures: “The family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all discontents.” To the contrary, it is the most reliable training ground of sympathy we know.

The family is ultimately a religious institution. It is born of, and gives birth to, faith. It is hard to imagine a world of sexual chaos and random family structures responding to the idea of a morally ordered universe created in love. The biblical word emunah, usually translated as faith, means among other things “faithfulness” as in a marriage, and “nurturing” as in bringing up a child. God, for the Hebrew Bible, is one who brings us into being as Creator, who betroths us as covenantal partner, and having done so does not walk away. Religious and marital fidelity are almost inextricable in the biblical vision of the world. Only through the experience of secure childhood can we grow to see the universe as a place which answers to our trust.

The congruence between family feeling and religious experience is close. Seeing something of ourselves live on in our children is the nearest we come in this life to immortality. Seeing our children develop in unexpected ways is the nearest we will come to the pure mystery of creativity. Stephen Hawking was wrong in his A Brief History of Time. It is not through theoretical physics that we will approach an understanding of the “mind of God.” It is through the feelings we have when we watch our children playing and they are unaware that we are watching them.

Wittgenstein once said that the task of philosophy was to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The way back to the family is not closed. We have simply become trapped in a set of habits of short-term self-gratification that cause us and others great unhappiness in the long run. I have faith in the future of marriage precisely because mankind is a learning animal. We have survived by recognising and rectifying our mistakes. Moral habits may suffer a temporary eclipse, but we would not have come this far without an inner gyroscope that kept us from tilting into the abyss. Natural ecology has taught us to place limits on our patterns of consumption. Human ecology will teach us, no less surely, to set limits on our patterns of relationship and live within them.

Marriage and the family will matter more in the future, not less. For our children are now born into a world of unprecedentedly rapid change, economic, political and technological. They do not have what most people at most times have had: a set of stable expectations about what they will do and experience and become. Chaos theory is the most characteristic discovery of our age. More than any previous generation, our children need what Alvin Toffler calls “personal stability zones” that will sustain them in the midst of flux. Of these none is more powerful than the family. Far from being over, its greatest time is yet to come.