Events have conspired to delay this long promised post. However, like marriage, some things are worth waiting for. Here at last is "The End Of Courtship", part two. As usual, I've front-paged a few especially relevant excerpts, then taken excessive liberties with emphasis and boldface.

Also worth waiting for is the Bradley Prize, which Dr. Kass won in 2003, along with Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, and Mary Ann Glendon. Here's a picture (pdf) of the happy winners. And why should they not appear happy?
Each of them was 250,000 dollars richer. Congratulations!

Let's just look at some of the rich social observation that helped Dr. Kass earn his cool quarter million...

The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control — the pill — which for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences.

Not to nitpick, but this is factually incorrect. The pill is the latest in a long line of fertility control techniques, some of which can be traced back over at least two millennia. What's really new is that the pill is safer, cheaper, more convenient, and of course, legal.

Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality — as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety.

Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness...

Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning.

News flash? That's what they're there for . If they didn't work, no one would take them.

Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage...most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS...

The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral...No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy.

But perhaps still worse than such amorality — and amorality on this subject is itself morally culpable — is the failure of sex education to attempt to inform and elevate the erotic imagination of the young...

True sex education is an education of the heart; it concerns itself with beautiful and worthy beloveds, with elevating transports of the soul. The energy of sexual desire, if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings...

The sonnets and plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley, and the novels of Jane Austen can incline a heart to woo, and even show one whom and how...

The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people try to argue...that children of divorce will marry better than their parents...But the deck is stacked...Not only are many of them frightened of marriage...they are often maimed for love and intimacy.

...their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents, to provide that durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world.

Countless students at the University of Chicago have told me and my wife that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives.

Full disclosure. I myself am the product of a "broken home". And you know what? You get over it.

Given time and experience, you can even begin to see the good in it. My parent's divorce was long overdue, mostly because they took their marriage vows so seriously. They should have done it years before. I don't know a single divorced couple who took the end of their marriage lightly. Not one. They all agonized over it, they all did their best to make it work. It is impossible for me not to feel honest anger at Kass's glib dismissal of their efforts.

If "countless" students think that their parent's divorce has been "the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives" it's probably because they they haven't yet had much of a life, or encountered grown-up problems of their own.

We now return to our scheduled programming...

They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively...Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another...they are not generally eager for or partial to children...

And many of the fatherless men are themselves unmanned for fatherhood...these children of divorce have a hard time finding, winning, and committing themselves to the right one.

It is surely the fear of making a mistake in marriage, and the desire to avoid a later divorce, that leads some people to undertake cohabitation...It is far easier, so the argument goes, to get to know one another by cohabiting than by the artificial systems of courting or dating...

But such arrangements, even when they eventuate in matrimony, are, precisely because they are a trial, not a trial of marriage. Marriage is not something one tries on for size, and then decides whether to keep; it is rather something one decides with a promise, and then bends every effort to keep...

Nice. A real marriage, with virgins and all, is ineffably superior to those cheap hook-up marriages. That's why I've been saving myself...

cohabitation is an arrangement of convenience, with each partner taken on approval and returnable at will. Many are, in fact, just playing house...

When long-cohabiting couples do later marry...post- marital life is generally regarded and experienced as a continuation of the same...

The formal rite of passage that is the wedding ceremony is, however welcome and joyous, also something of a mockery...

Does he even know what he sounds like? Sail ever on, o my captain...

Given that they have more or less drifted into marriage, it should come as no great surprise that couples who have lived together before marriage have a higher, not lower, rate of divorce...Too much familiarity? Disenchantment? Or is it rather the lack of wooing...

That the cause of courtship has been severely damaged by feminist ideology and attitudes goes almost without saying.

Even leaving aside the radical attacks on traditional sex roles, on the worth of motherhood or the vanishing art of homemaking, and sometimes even on the whole male race, the reconception of all relations between the sexes as relations based on power is simply deadly for love.

I thought it was about equality. Shows what I know.

Anyone who has ever loved or been loved knows the difference between love and the will to power...

On the one side, there is a rise in female assertiveness and efforts at empowerment, with a consequent need to deny all womanly dependence and the kind of vulnerability that calls for the protection of strong and loving men...

On the other side, we see the enfeeblement of men, who, contrary to the dominant ideology, are not likely to become better lovers, husbands, or fathers if they too become feminists or fellow-travelers...

These ever so sensitive males will defend not a woman's honor but her right to learn the manly art of self-defense...

The problem is not woman's desire for meaningful work. It is rather the ordering of one's loves. Many women have managed to combine work and family; the difficulty is finally not work but careers, or, rather, careerism.

Careerism...is surely no friend to love or marriage; and the careerist character of higher education is greater than ever. Women are under special pressures to prove they can be as dedicated to their work as men...they are compelled to regard private life, and especially marriage, homemaking, and family, as lesser goods...And marriage, should it come for careerist women, is often compromised from the start...

the economic independence of women...is itself not an asset for marital stability, as both the woman and the man can more readily contemplate leaving a marriage.

Indeed, a woman's earning power can become her own worst enemy when the children are born. Many professional women who would like to stay home with their new babies nonetheless work full-time.

Tragically, some cling to their economic independence because they worry that their husbands will leave them for another woman before the children are grown...

In previous generations, people chose to marry, but they were not compelled also to choose what marriage meant...

Sometimes, they were merely compelled to marry...

Having in so many cases already given their bodies to one another — not to speak of the previous others — how does one understand the link between marriage and conjugal fidelity?

And what, finally, of that first purpose of marriage, procreation, for whose sake societies everywhere have instituted and safeguarded this institution?...

Marriage, especially when seen as the institution designed to provide for the next generation, is most definitely the business of adults, by which I mean, people who are serious about life, people who aspire to go outward and forward to embrace and to assume responsibility for the future.

To be sure, most college graduates do go out, find jobs, and become self- supporting...But, though out of the nest, they don't have a course to fly. They do not experience their lives as a trajectory, with an inner meaning partly given by the life cycle itself.

The carefreeness and independence of youth they do not see as a stage on the way to maturity, in which they then take responsibility for the world and especially, as parents, for the new lives that will replace them. The necessities of aging and mortality are out of sight;

The view of life as play has often characterized the young. But, remarkably, today this is not something regrettable, to be outgrown as soon as possible; for their narcissistic absorption in themselves and in immediate pleasures and present experiences, the young are not condemned but are even envied by many of their elders.

Parents and children wear the same cool clothes, speak the same lingo, listen to the same music. Youth, not adulthood, is the cultural ideal, at least as celebrated in the popular culture.

Yes, everyone feels themselves to be always growing, as a result of this failed relationship or that change of job. But very few aspire to be fully grown-up...

So this is our situation. But just because it is novel and of recent origin does not mean that it is reversible or even that it was avoidable.

Indeed, virtually all of the social changes we have so recently experienced are the bittersweet fruits of the success of our modern democratic, liberal, enlightened society — celebrating equality, freedom, and universal secularized education, and featuring prosperity, mobility, and astonishing progress in science and technology.

Even brief reflection shows how the dominant features of the American way of life are finally inhospitable to the stability of marriage and family life and to the mores that lead people self- consciously to marry.

Tocqueville already observed the unsettling implications of American individualism, each person seeking only in himself for the reasons for things.

Gratuitous Tocqueville quote...

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.

Back to Kass...

The celebration of equality gradually undermines the authority of religion, tradition, and custom, and, within families, of husbands over wives and fathers over sons.

A nation dedicated to safeguarding individual rights to liberty and the privately defined pursuit of happiness is, willy- nilly, preparing the way for the "liberation" of women; in the absence of powerful non-liberal cultural forces, such as traditional biblical religion, that defend sex-linked social roles, androgyny in education and employment is the most likely outcome.

Further, our liberal approach to important moral issues in terms of the rights of individuals — e.g., contraception as part of a right to privacy, or abortion as belonging to a woman's right over her own body, or procreation as governed by a right to reproduce — flies in the face of the necessarily social character of sexuality and marriage.

The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient rights- bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who understand themselves as, say, unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply....

Not all the obstacles to courtship and marriage are cultural. At bottom, there is also the deeply ingrained, natural waywardness and unruliness of the human male.
Sociobiologists were not the first to discover that males have a penchant for promiscuity and polygyny — this was well known to biblical religion.

And yet, counterexamples are available...

Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women; lacking woman's powerful and immediate link to life's generative answer to mortality, men flee from the fear of death into heroic deed, great quests, or sheer distraction after distraction.

One can make a good case that biblical religion is, not least, an attempt to domesticate male sexuality and male erotic longings, and to put them in the service of transmitting a righteous and holy way of life through countless generations.

For as long as American society kept strong its uneasy union between modern liberal political principles and Judeo-Christian moral and social beliefs, marriage and the family could be sustained and could even prosper.

But the gender-neutral individualism of our political teaching has, it seems, at last won the day, and the result has been male "liberation" — from domestication, from civility, from responsible self-command.

Contemporary liberals and conservatives alike are trying to figure out how to get men "to commit" to marriage, or to keep their marital vows, or to stay home with the children, but their own androgynous view of humankind prevents them from seeing how hard it has always been to make a monogamous husband and devoted father out of the human male.

Ogden Nash had it right: "Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous; higamus hogamus, women monogamous."

To make naturally polygamous men accept the conventional institution of monogamous marriage has been the work of centuries of Western civilization, with social sanctions, backed by religious teachings and authority, as major instruments of the transformation, and with female modesty as the crucial civilizing device.

As these mores and sanctions disappear, courtship gives way to seduction and possession, and men become again the sexually, familially, and civically irresponsible creatures they are naturally always in danger of being.

At the top of the social ladder, executives walk out on their families and take up with trophy wives. At the bottom of the scale, low-status males, utterly uncivilized by marriage, return to the fighting gangs, taking young women as prizes for their prowess. Rebarbarization is just around the corner.

Courtship, anyone?

Wow. A quarter of a million dollars.

If you read this essay in its original form, you may notice that Dr. Kass has included footnotes. Yes, footnotes. To maintain my facade of scholarly erudition, I shall include one for you, me being such a completist and all...

Truth to tell, the reigning ideology often rules only people's tongues, not their hearts. Many a young woman secretly hopes to meet and catch a gentleman, though the forms that might help her do so are either politically incorrect or simply unknown to her. In my wife's course on Henry James' The Bostonians, the class's most strident feminist, who had all term denounced patriarchy and male hegemonism, honestly confessed in the last class that she wished she could meet a Basil Ransom who would carry her off. But the way to her heart is blocked by her prickly opinions and by those of the dominant ethos.

Wow. Just...wow.