Terrifying:

Greece is facing an acute political and social crisis this weekend as the bankrupt state prepares to decide whether it can stay in the single currency.

As riot police clashed with protesters on the streets of Athens, and five ministers resigned in protest at the scale of the spending cuts demanded in return for a new €130bn (£108bn) bailout, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek finance minister and socialist leader, said the country had until Sunday to choose whether to swallow the eurozone medicine of more cuts – or default on its debt next month and be forced out of the euro.

In an emotional speech he said: “The choice we face is one of sacrifice or even greater sacrifice – on a scale that cannot be compared. Our country, our homeland, our society has to think and make a definitive, strategic decision. If we see the salvation and future of the country in the euro area, in Europe, we have to do whatever we have to do to get the programme approved.”

Also:

On Saturday night, Lucas Papademos, the Greek prime minister, told the nation in a televised address that a rejection of the deal would lead to “uncontrollable economic chaos and social explosion”.

“This agreement will decide the country’s future,” he said. “We are just a breath away from ground zero.”

Meanwhile:

In Germany, Angela Merkel was reported to have warned her centre-right MPs of “uncontrollable consequences” for the eurozone should Greece become the first euro nation to declare sovereign default on its soaring debt.

UPDATE: Parts of Athens in flames today:

Fireballs lit up the night sky in Greece’s capital as buildings were set ablaze late Sunday amid widespread rioting and looting before a historic parliamentary vote expected to approve harsh austerity measures demanded to keep the country from going bankrupt and within the eurozone.

At least 10 buildings, including a closed cinema, a bank, a mobile phone dealership, a glassware store and a cafeteria, were on fire. There were no immediate reports of people trapped inside. Dozens of shops were also looted in the worst damage the country has seen since unrest in December 2008 following the fatal police shooting of a teenager.

I am hearing that there are realistic fears that an economic collapse will bring about a military coup to preserve civil order.

Did you know that much of the olive oil on store shelves is really inferior stuff, and that some of it is not even pure olive oil at all? Who knew? Here’s some advice for the gourmand:

Given that so many “extra-virgin” oils are actually inferior oils cut with other products, where should the average shopper buy his oil?

Ideally, at a mill, where you can see the fresh olives turned into oil, and get to know the miller—in an industry where the label means so little, personal trust in the people who have made and sold it is important. Barring this, try to visit a store where you can taste before you buy; an increasing number of olive-oil specialty stores exists throughout America, even in small towns and unexpected corners of the country. In a conventional retail store, certain characteristics of labelling and bottling suggest (though they don’t guarantee) high quality: a harvest date (as opposed to a meaningless “best by” date), a specific place of production and producer, mention of the cultivar of olives used, dark glass bottles (light degrades olive oil), a D.O.P. seal on European oils, and a California Olive Oil Council seal on oil made in the U.S.

So now you know. I used to think olive oil was no big whoop, until I tried a real one. The difference between ordinary supermarket olive oil and a well-made one is like the difference between Bud Light and Dogfish Head.

“You know how it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.”

“Yes.”

“It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”

— from The Sun Also Rises

UPDATE:Here’s the reference:

Smith summarizes what, for the American teens he interviewed for his study, is the whole of religion: “Just don’t be an asshole.”

Patrick Appel continues our discussion. Excerpt:

I do believe that same-sex marriage is a right, but rights are not absolute. Both straight and gay couples should have the right to marriage. Opponents of marriage equality claim that same-sex marriage will destroy straight marriages, which, if true, would deprive straights of their marriage rights. Since there are many more straight marriages than gay marriages, it would make sense protect the marriage rights of straight couples in this case. But, because there is no evidence that marriage equality actually harms straight marriage, there is no reason to deny the basic rights of same-sex couples.

Wait, what? I don’t know any same-sex marriage opponent who believes that the existence of SSM is going to cause hetero marriages to dissolve like sand castles struck by the incoming tide. I don’t believe for a second that that’s the case. The argument is rather that SSM institutionalizes a radical redefinition of marriage, such that marriage itself becomes a much weaker institution, with very serious social consequences for everyone. This is not something that is going to happen overnight, or within 10 years. By the time the conclusive data come in, there will be no going back, just as there is no going back on liberalized divorce laws, even though there’s ample evidence that the divorce culture has been bad for society.

Anyway, I do wonder what kind of harm to straight marriage would have to be demonstrated to justify denying a right to marry to same-sex couples in the eyes of those who now support it. Call me skeptical, but I don’t believe that once you’ve committed to the idea that it’s a right, that anything is going to dissuade you. And we all know that if, 40 years from now, the institution of marriage is in even worse shape than it is today, nobody who supports SSM today will claim then that society made a wrong turn at legalizing gay marriage, and nobody at all will suggest taking away a right that same-sex couples have exercised for a generation.

Patrick points out Benjamin Dueholm’s commentary on this exchange. It’s worth reading. I want to quote this bit:

And as we have by now all experienced, the framing of the question goes a long way to deciding what the evidence is. “Does same-sex marriage produce statistically significant negative outcomes in children?” is a question for which you can devise an evidentiary test (not that I necessarily recommend it, because all kinds of marriages will fall under legal scrutiny if that’s how we’re deciding who can and can’t have their relationship acknowledged by the state). “Is marriage inherently an opposite-sex institution oriented toward the creation of new life?” is not really liable to a data-driven answer. For that matter, neither is the question “Is same-sex marriage a fundamental right?” These latter two questions can be answered logically, but not empirically.

Now contrary to Dreher, I think minds can change on these sorts of questions. And “evidence” can certainly come into play in terms of complicating the neat distinctions we get from whatever metaphysics we happen to be toting around with us. But we owe it to ourselves to understand that the evidence-based argument and the fundamental-right argument for same-sex marriage are, if not in fact contradictory, at least entirely unrelated. The whole point of a right, for good or for ill, is that it isn’t granted or withheld based on good or bad consequences.

A clarification: I do believe people change their minds on this question. The polls bear this out, and testimonies of individuals who have changed their minds bear this out. I think minds change mostly because those who change their minds aren’t as committed to their first principles as they thought they were, or held their beliefs because they either hadn’t thought them through, or based them on a thin prejudice, e.g., that gays are icky people — nonsense that can easily be dispelled from personal experience. In short, I think the main reason most Americans who have changed their minds on same-sex marriage have done so is because they have come to realize that given what they believe marriage is, there’s no reason to deny it to same-sex couples. In other words, SSM advocates have not so much made them change their minds as they have pressed them to make the logical connection between SSM and what they already believe to be true. This is why the SSM battle was lost in the Sixties and the Seventies, though nobody could see it then.

By the way, the SSM marriage proponent Jonathan Rauch gave a speech two years ago in which he tried to make sense from a “Red America” point of view of opposing SSM. Worth a look.

Jordan Ballor makes an interesting point about the interdependence of local economies on global systems by using Your Working Boy’s problems with Internet service as an example. Excerpt:

Indeed, it was not very long into Dreher’s sojourn into small-town America that the limitations of the small, local, old, and particular became painfully obvious. As if on cue, less than a month into his new community, Dreher complained of the “frustratingly slow” Internet access in his house. You can perhaps imagine the gravity of the situation: “We had to cancel Netflix, because we can’t stream. My iPad apps can’t update, and have been permanently hung up for weeks (I’ve rebooted the iPad several times, to no avail). Skyping is very spotty. You can’t watch any online video, even YouTube, without transmission being interrupted.” Dreher is savvy enough to realize how these complaints sound, and defends himself on the grounds that “given the line of work I’m in—media—I have to have reliable broadband access to do my job efficiently.” It seems when it comes to our professions, sometimes efficiency does trump simplicity after all. So much for Slow Journalism.

Dreher’s frustration in this situation illustrates in microcosm how deeply the contemporary communitarian conservative impulse relies on the technological innovations made possible by global trade. Perhaps it’s just the vestiges of Dreher’s cosmopolitan acculturation, but we can hardly imagine him being satisfied professionally and vocationally if his potential readership were restricted to readers of the local paper. As it stands, the development of and dissemination of access to the Internet have broadened rather than constricted the freedom of people like Dreher to live where they choose, in large cities, suburbs, or small towns. At a website like the American Conservative, where Dreher’s writings now find a home, his readership is potentially global. Smaller is better, except when it comes to audience.

Several things. First, yes, I would give up iPad, Netflix, Skype, YouTube, and all that in exchange for living here. None of that stuff is essential to me. I was just trying to indicate how dependent on Internet access I (and we all) have become, and how disrupting the lack of it is to the routines of daily life. The most important thing — indeed, for our purposes, the only important thing — is that without reliable high-speed Internet access, I cannot do my job. If I cannot do my job, I cannot afford to live here. The only way I can work and live in this small town is to do so online. I have never understood this complaint from critics of crunchy conservatism — this idea that if, say, you drive a car instead of biking or walking, you must at some level be a hypocrite.

I don’t have a copy of “Crunchy Cons” near to hand, and I haven’t read it since I wrote it seven years ago, but I do seem to recall laughing at myself, in the narrative, for the irony of pounding out a philippic against modernity on a laptop. Outside of an Amish village, there is no such thing as purity on the question of localism, and I have never advocated for any sort of purity test. It is a false choice to say we must either be Amish or Globalists. There is a vast middle ground. I favor doing the best one can to re-localize life by patronizing local businesses, living in a localist manner, and so forth. That will necessarily look different for different people, depending on their circumstances. I think it’s a good thing that extending broadband to rural areas will make it possible for a number of folks to move (or move back!) to those areas, or to never have to leave in the first place. Where I live, West Feliciana Parish, there aren’t now enough jobs to enable everyone’s children to stay here if they wanted to. Broadband access, and the move towards working at home, has the potential to expand the economy here. The place still needs a more diverse economy, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

All of which is to say that I generally agree with Ballor that given the world that we actually live in, the localism and the kind of conservatism I favor will in many cases only be feasible through the Internet. When I was growing up, one reason people moved from small towns to the big cities was the lack of something to do. The lack of movies and bookstores were a big deal to me as a kid. We still don’t have theaters or bookstores in St. Francisville, but Netflix and Amazon.com mean that sort of thing need not be an impediment to choosing small-town life over city life. Now, if you never leave your house, and instead just sit inside watching TV and not getting to know your neighbors or your town, you haven’t really accomplished much. Still, it’s good that books and movies are easily available electronically. And of course I am grateful that the Internet makes it possible for me to sell my product to a wide audience. But if the day comes when I cannot do that, I’m either going to have to find another line of work, or move to where the job is, whether I want to or not. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you are dependent on economic forces no locality can control.

This morning I toured a beautiful old building in my neighborhood that was once the town’s high school. It was built by a wealthy Jewish philanthropist in 1905. He used to be a merchant here. This town had a sizeable Jewish merchant class. Then came the boll weevil, the 1927 flood, and the Great Depression. Almost all of the Jews moved away. What choice did they have? They were economically ruined, and had to go somewhere else to start over. Perhaps some, even all, of them would have preferred to have stayed here. But they couldn’t, given the economic realities of the time.

The main thrust of “Crunchy Cons” was by no means that we ought to all turn into Luddites, but only that as conservatives, we ought to be a lot more thoughtful about how the things we take as absolute goods — especially the free market — are in fact things we ought to be more critical of, because in some cases they undermine the values we profess. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to any of these problems. But they are problems, or, if you prefer, challenges. And making the perfect the enemy of the good doesn’t really help us deal with this stuff effectively. If Ballor is saying that neotraditionalist conservatives like me depend on the market more than we like to think, then I would say he makes a good point, one that I ought to consider more frequently. Maybe I just wince because I got so tired of the “A-ha! You work on a computer instead of writing your stuff out longhand like Wendell Berry does! Poseur! I don’t have to take anything you say seriously” business that I’m a little defensive about this stuff.

Yesterday I responded to Patrick Appel’s claim that Maggie Gallagher is a “fundamentalist” in her view of same-sex marriage, because there is no evidence that would persuade her that it was morally acceptable. I think this is an unfortunate way to characterize Gallagher’s view. I argued that we are all “fundamentalists” about the things we most care about, in the sense that there is nothing, or almost nothing, that would cause us to change our minds. I suggested that neither Patrick nor his boss, Andrew Sullivan, would change their minds about same-sex marriage, no matter what. He responds, in part:

If there were real evidence that marriage equality made gay couples unhappy, if the children of gay parents were severely damaged due to their upbringings, and if same-sex marriage truly were a grave threat to straight marriage, I’d reconsider my views.

I don’t think this is true. I don’t know Patrick, so I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly certain he believes same-sex marriage to be a “right.” A right is something that is not up for negotiation. It exists prior to the state, and cannot be taken away. If social science were able to show, for example, that racial integration made black Americans unhappy, severely damaged their children, and was a grave threat to the social order, that would not matter. Black folks would still have the inalienable right to equal treatment under the law. Nobody would consider eliminating the right of straight people to marry simply because they make such a hash of marriage these days. If Patrick really has concluded that same-sex marriage is a right, then I would expect him to stand by that view even if evidence demonstrated that same-sex marriage was socially deleterious. Rights don’t exist only when they make people happy and prosperous. To say something is a “right” is to make an absolute moral claim on it — a claim that is not negated by instrumental reasoning.

Similarly, for the religiously orthodox people like Maggie Gallagher, same-sex marriage runs deeply against what they believe to be absolutely true. There is no way to convince them that it is morally right, no matter how many social-science statistics, or anecdotes of happy gay families you produce. Data can convince people who may come to realize that their views against same-sex marriage were based on an irrational prejudice, but that is not the case with a thoughtful and convinced orthodox Christian, Jew, or Muslim, who may take his or her stand on a clear and firm idea, derived from religion and/or tradition, of what a human being is, what truth is, what sex is, and what freedom is. They conclude that same-sex marriage cannot be reconciled with those principles. You may disagree with their first principles, but you cannot call their conclusion from those principles irrational.

My point here is, in part, that people who believe in same-sex marriage also operate from a set of strong first principles about what a human being is, what truth is, what sex is, and what freedom is. It all seems natural to them, and obvious, because that is the world they operate within. A Catholic friend who is a chaste gay man was visiting me recently, and lamented that it’s impossible to make a case against same-sex marriage because so few people share the same first principles that, say, religious Catholics do. The problem is that cultural liberals who support SSM tend to believe that their viewpoints are neutral. They aren’t. Nobody has a neutral viewpoint. Our real problem here is what Robbie George terms “a clash of orthodoxies.” Excerpt:

The secularist orthodoxy also rejects the Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage as a bodily, emotional, and spiritual union of one man and one woman, ordered to the generating, nurturing, and educating of children, marked by exclusivity and permanence, and consummated and actualized by acts that are reproductive in type, even if not, in every case, in fact. Marriage, for secularists, is a legal convention whose goal is to support a merely emotional union-which may or may not, depending upon the subjective preferences of the partners, be marked by commitments of exclusivity and permanence, which may or may not be open to children depending on whether partners want children, and in which sexual acts of any type mutually agreeable to the partners are perfectly acceptable.

As any type of mutually agreeable consensual sexual act is considered as good as any other, secularist orthodoxy rejects the idea, common not only to Judaism and Christianity but to the world’s other great cultures and religious traditions, that marriage is an inherently heterosexual institution. According to secularist orthodoxy, same-sex “marriages” are no less truly marriages than those between partners of opposite sexes who happen to be infertile.

Justice Kennedy infamously wrote in his majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s Casey decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.” Within that philosophically loosey-goosey framework, the orthodoxies clash. Prof. George believes that there can be a rational comparison of the orthodoxies, and that the religiously orthodox position can be shown by reason to be superior (read deep into his article for a taste of this). For my purposes, there’s no need to go into this here. The point I wish to convey is simply that the same-sex marriage case is based just as much on fundamental convictions about the meaning of life and the human person. There is no neutral ground, as Justice Kennedy imagines there to be. We are all fundamentalists about those things for which we care the most. When Maggie Gallagher appears to some to have closed her mind — this, because she attempts to respond rationally, not emotionally, to the thought of a happy gay family — she is actually thinking, insofar as thinking involves judging things based on logic and first principles. Of course either her premises or her logic may be wrong. But so too may yours.

And please don’t deceive yourself: If you believe that same-sex marriage is a right, as distinct from merely a good idea, then you have by definition closed your mind to evidence that would cause you to withdraw support from it.

This is news:

Seeking to allay the concerns of Catholic leaders, the White House is planning to adjust its health care rule requiring religious employers to provide women access to contraception, a senior administration official said.

President Obama is scheduled to announce the change during an appearance before reporters in the White House at 12:15 p.m. He is trying to head off a growing political problem, after angering Catholic church officials with his decision Jan. 20 to grant only a narrow exemption to the health-care rule.

Republicans are vowing to reverse President Barack Obama’s new policy on birth control, blasting the rule that religious schools and hospitals must provide contraceptive coverage for their employees as an attack on religious freedom.

No information was available about the details of the new accommodation, which was first reported by ABC News. But a senior administration official cautioned that the White House will stick to the principle of guaranteeing free contraception coverage for women.

I’ll see what this adjustment means specifically before commenting, but I feel confident predicting that the Obama administration is about to get Komenned — that is, get the Susan B. Komen foundation treatment. If it backs off its decision, its allies will be furious at the backtracking under pressure, and those made happy by the decision will still never again trust this administration, or at least will always regard it warily on issues of religious liberty. This will still be a big issue this fall for goading GOP turnout, as it well should be. If this is how the Obama administration regards religious liberty, they really cannot be trusted to do the right thing in future questions, especially those having to do with conflicts between religious freedom and gay rights, which everybody can see coming down the pike. Indeed, I think one reason this flamed up into such a huge issue among conservatives is that we knew, or at least intuited, that this is a dress rehearsal for much bigger legal fights to come.

This is a no-win situation for the White House, and one of its own making. Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, today at CPAC, said, “Thanks to President Obama, we are all Catholics now.”

My friend Ryan Streeter, who once worked on public policy in the White House and who now hangs his shingle in his home state of Indiana at the Sagamore Institute, responds to the point in the “Homeschoolers as public school athletes” post — the point that people treating public school services in an “a la carte” way (i.e., taking only what they want) would be destructive to the ethos and smooth operating of the school. Ryan writes (and I quote him with his permission):

>A la carte, I think, is the way to go. Why? Because it helps keep the family as the central unit in education, a (healthy, I think) throwback to the good ol’ days. The education establishment, aided by the media, will be quick to find some backwater family who uses homeschooling as an excuse to reinforce unappealing ideologies and get nothing done all day…..like, for instance, many crappy public schools.

Here in Indiana, our education reforms are now the farthest reaching in the country, not just because of how we structured choice/vouchers, but because we dissolved district lines. The latter allows a suburban family to send their child to a charter school downtown Indianapolis, for instance. And districts are free to allow homeschoolers to play sports, or participate in other menu options. Our daughter, who’s homeschooled, joins up with a French class in our local school, for instance. The harm in that is……?

It’s hard to find the answer. If the argument is that it makes budgeting and planning by public school officials difficult, well, as a parent who also has budgeting and planning responsibilities, it’s hard to sympathize, especially since we’re helping pay their bills.

See the point? Arguments the establishment often makes about homeschooling can easily be turned back on them. As a parent of homeschooled children who’s also a PhD policy wonk who likes following these kinds of debates, I can’t help but to see that reality over and over again in the public noise on this issue.

Your thoughts? The thought did occur to me that people who criticize homeschooling on the grounds that homeschooled kids wouldn’t be properly socialized should logically want to do anything possible to bring these kids into the community.

I will say it again, because people tend not to listen whenever this education issue comes up: I am not taking a position on whether or not public schools ought to open their athletic programs and suchlike to homeschoolers. I intuitively sympathize with the view that if you opt out, you’ve opted out, and have no right to expect anything.  I certainly do not. But I would also be grateful if the local school offered such options, not only because we might use them, but because it would mean going beyond what they have to do.

I have a friend whose particular passion is monitoring education trends. She firmly believes that we’re starting out at the leading edge of a revolution in online education that will break apart the standard industrial model of the local school as a factory to produce educated children. She may be right, and if so, that would certainly benefit people like me, who make enough money to free one parent up to homeschool full time. The great majority of people are not and won’t be in that position, given the economic realities we face. Their children will be going to the public school. It is a real civic challenge to keep people who educate their children at home, or who send them to private schools, engaged enough with their communities to keep them supportive of the public schools.

Personally, I don’t mind paying taxes that support the public schools, because I see them as a public good, even though my family chooses not to use them. But ours is such a libertarian society that it’s becoming harder to think that way. In the 1990s, when I lived in south Florida, I recall that there were a lot of old folks who had retired to there, who couldn’t understand why their taxes should go up to support public schools that their grandkids, who lived back on Long Island, or wherever, would never use. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the extent to which a sense of common purpose and common values has broken down in certain places and among certain communities, as a result of the same atomistic libertarian individualism that has caused well-off people to think only in terms of self-interest. I’m thinking here of a secular liberal friend in Dallas who, after three years of teaching in a public school there, decided that he was going to do anything he could to keep his toddler out of the public system in Dallas because he didn’t want to throw her into a culture he believed, from daily experience, promoted corrupt, socially destructive values (e.g., middle-school kids having sex in classrooms, and that not being unusual). People aren’t wrong for wanting to escape from that sort of thing. In some parts of the country, this is a real problem.

But I digress. What do you think about Ryan’s point?

Education gap between rich, poor, turning into a chasm:

It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

More:

Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”

The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.

“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.

I think Murray is right about a lot of this, though I think David Frum provides a fairly devastating critique of Murray’s thesis by pointing out the role income has likely played in bringing about this chasm. See Frum here, here, here, here, and here. An excerpt from Frum:

[O]nce you spell out [Murray’s] implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you’ll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That’s not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren’t married, and you don’t go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

How you can tell a story about the moral decay of the working class with the “work” part left out is hard to fathom.

I’ll be writing more about the Frum critique later. I’m trying to wait until I finish the Murray book. Frum’s basic argument is that Murray completely ignores the forces that have driven income inequality, and the fact that over the past 40 years or so, the rich really have gotten a lot richer, and the working class has gotten poorer. And he mocks Murray’s prescription for what he (Murray) identifies as a social problem threatening the very essence of America: for the rich to scold the poor more, and move closer to them to get to know them and set a good example. But like I said, more on that later. Back to the Times article:

There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.

The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare.”

Here is where the breakdown of traditional sexual mores, ideals about marriage and parenting, and communal sensibilities play such a big role. Anecdotally, I think about the stories told to me by teacher friends — my late sister, as well as friends in Dallas — about the chaos and instability in the lives of the children in their schools, and the enormous burden this placed on the children when it came to learning. I think also anecdotally about my father’s childhood, spent during the Great Depression, in serious rural poverty. His father was gone for much of that time, on the road making money to support his family. My dad and his brother were effectively raised by a single mother, my grandmother, who also had the responsibility for caring for her mother in law. They suffered, but the one great thing they had in that house was a sense of order. It came from my grandmother’s Methodism, and, I think, from the understanding that their father was a mostly unseen but very real force in their lives. Though he was gone for much of their childhood, he had in no way abandoned his family, and that knowledge had real binding force in their conduct. (I read a study once that showed children whose parent had died, versus those left with a single parent because of divorce or abandonment, were much better adjusted emotionally; the thesis was that they didn’t have to deal with deep feelings of rejection by their absent parent).

I suppose the point I am making is an entirely obvious and unoriginal one: that there are material, moral, and cultural reasons for this growing chasm. I suspect Besharov is right that nobody knows what to do about it. It often seems to me that the economic (e.g., globalism) and cultural forces (e.g., individualism and hedonism) causing this to happen are irresistible. It’s as if a tsunami were passing over our society, and the only realistic thing you can hope to do is to grab as many people as you can and hope to ride the crest of the wave.