The decay you decry

Photo by mks at dubstepforum.

Concerned David Brooks is concerned about marriage inequality! Not what you're thinking: it's that apparently all the best marriage is being hogged by a happy few while the majority have to make do with what remains, and the gap between the camps is growing:

marriage is polarizing: The best marriages today are better than the best marriages of generations ago; the worst marriages now are worse; over all, the average marriage is weaker than the average marriage in days of yore.

This is a not totally inaccurate summary of some research results reported in 2014 by the social psychologist Eli Finkel in a New York Times Valentine's Day piece, "The All-or-Nothing Marriage", and as a matter of fact it's probably the most interesting thing in the column, or would be if Brooks had been capable of understanding what he was reading when he read, or looked at, that article—I'll be getting back to it shortly, as Krugman would say at this point—but Brooks himself quickly loses interest in it and moves on to his own views on what modern thought, as represented by the self-help literature in airport bookshops, has to say on the subject of marriage, which is that we have three attitudes, of course, seeing it through three distinct "lenses", psychological, romantic, and moral...

Through the psychological lens, our choice of a marriage partner is a kind of eonomistic or meritocratic one, in which we subject the potential partner to a battery of quality testing and end up picking somebody with the optimal list of personality traits, according to the program presented in Dr. Ty Tashiro's The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love (2014), which advises you to pick somebody clubbable:

you want to marry someone who scores high in “agreeableness,” someone who has a high concern for social harmony, who is good at empathy, who is nice. You want to avoid people who score high in neuroticism — who are emotionally unstable or prone to anger.

Someone like, it occurs to me, David F. Brooks, as he perceives himself, though perhaps not as you and I perceive him.

Then again the romantic lens, according to Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee's The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts (1996), will ask you to be passionately in love with your future spouse, "to fuse you together" as a good preparation for "when times get hard". Unfortunately this sturdily conceived and attractive option is typically only available, Wallerstein and Blakeslee have determined, to 15% of the population.

Lastly, there is the moral lens:

In this lens a marriage doesn’t exist just to exist or even just for procreation. It exists to serve some higher purpose, whether it is seeking God’s kingdom for the religious or in service to some joint cause or humanity-enhancing project for the secular.

This is best illustrated by The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God, by Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller (2013):

Modern culture would have you believe that everyone has a soul-mate; that romance is the most important part of a successful marriage; that marriage does not mean 'til death do us part, but merely for as long as my needs are being met; and that when serious differences arise, divorce is the best solution. According to the bible, all of these modern-day assumptions miss what marriage is all about. In The Meaning of Marriage, Timothy Keller, along with Kathy, his wife of thirty-six years, draws a profound portrait of marriage from the pages of Scripture that neither idealizes nor rejects the institution but points us back to the relationship between God and man. The result is a vision for marriage that is refreshingly frank and unsentimental, yet hopeful and beautiful.

That doesn't sound like a lot of practical advice for those attracted to humanity-enhancing projects, but I think the author credits alone, reinforcing the point that God made Timmy (author) and Kathy (contributor), not Kathy and Timmy, and "back to the relationship between God and man" clarifying who really counts in the threesome, gives you a sufficient idea of where it's going,

Brooks doesn't touch at all on what Finkel was describing in that Times piece, which really did involve inequality: the clash between actual inequality, the economic kind, and the cultural changes in Americans' expectations of marriage over the past couple of centuries, which has very little to do with the tripolarization of psychology, romance, and virtuousness.

American demands on marriage have developed, in Finkel's view, from a more or less economic model in which its main function was wrapped up in survival, marriage as an instrument of the division of labor, up to around 1850, through the ideal of the companionate marriage, when people looked to the institution as an emotional necessity, the central source of friendship and sexual happiness but not of the meaning of life, up to the mid-1960s, to the current "all-or-nothing" model of marriage as a vehicle of self-actualization and personal fulfillment. As the expectations people brought to a marriage became more and more intense, the theory goes, their ability to satisfy them grew weaker and weaker; the ideal marriage became harder and harder to achieve as the ideal changed, and, since what you need to satisfy those expectations is above all leisure to work on the thing, a luxury, more available in principle to the wealthy:

According to the sociologist Steven P. Martin, among Americans who married between 1975 and 1979, the 10-year divorce rate was 28 percent among people without a high school education and 18 percent among people with at least a college degree: a 10 percentage point difference. But among Americans who married between 1990 and 1994, the parallel divorce rates were 46 percent and 16 percent: an astonishing 30 percentage point difference.

The problem is not that poor people fail to appreciate the importance of marriage, nor is it that poor and wealthy Americans differ in which factors they believe are important in a good marriage. The problem is that the same trends that have exacerbated inequality since 1980 — unemployment, juggling multiple jobs and so on — have also made it increasingly difficult for less wealthy Americans to invest the time and other resources needed to sustain a strong marital bond.

So what Finkel proposes as remedies to the problem are on two different levels: government could directly help marriage among the less wealthy by reducing inequality across the board and through specific measures like making child care more available to working couples; and individuals can work on their own lives especially by lowering expectations and making less totalitarian demands on their partners. Or as he put it in a talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science reported in The Guardian around the same time, the "suffocation model" of marriage needs to be relaxed a little:

couples could improve the quality of their marriages by allowing them to breathe, for example by lowering their demands on the relationship in hard times, such as when the couple had young children or faced work or money problems. "Some people will realise they are asking a lot of their marriage given the 30 minutes a week they spend talking to their wife," he said. "The irony is that asking less of the marriage when resources are scarce will actually make the marriage stronger."

Of course it is clear that Brooks hasn't strictly speaking read any of his article, and would have been baffled by it if he had, since as we all know he is rich but his marriage was breaking up at the time nevertheless, and if poor people have trouble with self-actualizing marriages, well, what's up with that? And I don't believe he'd have embraced its proposals of government assistance, let alone reducing income and wealth inequality, or of emotional coddling the partners by one another (while he always makes that effort to look clubbable and easy, I don't believe I've ever seen him suggest that people ought to relax and not burden one another with their demands).

What's very remarkable is what he seems to have done with Finkel's three-stage historical sequence: because he hasn't ignored it, as you might think at first sight. Rather, he's turned it upside down to construct an anti-historical sequence of his own.

Because where Finkel understands, as a kind of liberal, that technological progress over the modern period has enabled ordinary people to aim at continually richer lives, Brooks sees in the first place only the lives of the privileged—he can never quite imagine the masses as having any subjectivity—and a narrative of spiritual decline:

The three lenses are operating at different levels: personality, emotions, the level of the virtues and the vices. The first two lenses are very common in our culture — in bookstores, songs and in movies. But the moral lens, with its view of marriage as a binding moral project, is less common. Maybe that’s one of the reasons the quality of the average marriage is in decline.

He thinks of his gooey binding moral project of marriage, you see, and having sex all day for the most excruciatingly proper purposes, to enhance humanity, as something that really existed in some glorious past, among the knights and ladies and bishops and abbesses, and falling in love too, among the eminent Victorians, and instead of Finkel's progressive sequence

economic > companionate > self-actualizing

he sees its inverse, retrogressively

economistic < romantic < moral

from a vulgar, materialistic present to the higher, nobler existence of old, in which he could have been appreciated for the refinement of his perceptions and the lovely openness of his heart: "I was of high lineage/cast up in a dreadful age..." (only he's not an adolescent with a less narcissistic future ahead of him like the kid affectionately mocked in the song...) Watch out! The decay you decry may be your own!



Driftglass compares our hero to the Impressive Clergyman from the Princess Bride. Spoiler: The I.C. from the P.B. has a tighter and more muscular style.