"Stolen Car" - Bruce Springsteen
I met a little girl and I settled down
In a little house out on the edge of town
We got married, and swore we'd never part
Then little by little we drifted from each other's heart
At first I thought it was just restlessness
That would fade as time went by and our love grew deep
In the end it was something more I guess
That tore us apart and made us weep
And I'm driving a stolen car
Down on Eldridge Avenue
Each night I wait to get caught
But I never do
She asked if I remembered the letters I wrote
When our love was young and bold
She said last night she read those letters
And they made her feel one hundred years old
And I'm driving a stolen car
On a pitch black night
And I'm telling myself I'm gonna be alright
But I ride by night and I travel in fear
That in this darkness I will disappear
(Really one of his saddest, darkest songs -- this is not joy riding, it's the express lane to existential angst -- where single occupancy vehicles are always welcome.)
To follow up on the silliness of Kay Hymowitz, BryanCaplan, David Brooks, Ross Douthat and all of the other neo-traditionalists who want to magically return to an era of early marriage and child rearing, it seems to me that they are seeking to repeal the last fifty years of social development in this country. In so doing, they are not only fighting human nature, but the advanced economy that most of them purport to advocate. Good jobs in this technologically and information driven economy frequently call for graduate level education, the kind that takes most people until their mid to late twenties to complete. This is not a life that is terribly compatible with early marriage and child-rearing -- unless, of course, one half of the couple can be counted on to opt out of the advanced education scheme.
But there's more to it than that. Essentially the culture would have to unlearn the ethic of sexual freedom that has been embraced and elevated by an overwhelmingly large chunk of the populace over the last several decades. People would have to return to an ethic of early, monogamous commitment with happiness premised on the notion that learning to conform to conservative societal expectations and obligations will, in the long run, somehow foster greater happiness than a life of experience and experimentation. And you actually see this attitude advanced on conservative web sites -- the notion that if people just suck it up and do the right thing, that at some point down the road they will find themselves in a happy place -- happy in some sort of Aristotelian sense of having achieved a kind of social excellence I suppose, not sexually happy.
It's really not an ideal with a great deal of appeal to most people. And it is one that requires stifling the impulse toward sexual and other forms of self-actualization -- as a result, both abortion and gay equality must be quashed, because we cannot have "consequence-free" sex nor can we have people following their sexual bliss in ways that defy the norm of heterosexual marriage and child-bearing and rearing for all. Gay marriage cannot be accepted because it means a lifting on the general conservative condemnation of a life lived in which sexual pleasure and freedom -- for the masses that is -- is given too much prominence in the value system. Sexuality is the great disrupter in this paradigm, the thing that makes people restless, and break their vows, and otherwise fail to do that which is expected of them. In the right's view, this means that sexuality outside of marriage cannot be countenanced, as it will lead to knowingness and a sense of entitlement to pleasure -- again, especially for women.
The reality is that a return to this kind of lifestyle on a mass basis is simply impractical. It is not going to happen because people by and large do not want it to happen. What is fascinating, is that many of the adherents to this socially conservative world view purport to be sympathetic to "libertarian" ideas. Showing once again that libertarianism has little to do with freedom in the existential sense and everything to do with the right to exploit others in employment and avoid paying taxes -- no more, no less.
It's a strange, cramped, incredibly dated, and fearful view of the world. It is a world where, as I quote Brooks below saying, people lack the ability to establish their own rules of good conduct. This strikes me as -- well -- un-American, among other things. As MR. Bill noted in comments, our very foundational documents as a people stand squarely for the notion of human reason and judgment as the basis for forming the United States. Ultimately, it is a world view that pretty much ignores the way that people live and sweeps under the rug the likely outcomes, i.e. more divorce, lower rates of education and equality, and more, much more, unhappiness.
