moral collapse of the family

reading william j. bennett's the broken hearth: reversing the moral collapse of the american family... this morning while waiting for my hair highlights to "cook" and while eating a waffle at our local waffle house...

i quote: "as usual, our founding fathers got things just about right. capitalism, they saw, was a crucial component in sustaining a liberal, democratic society. but there were also certain human qualities that needed to be disciplined, tamed, and checked: avarice, excessive individualism, the tendency to reduce everything to the economic bottom line, the danger of being entrapped by the enchantments of this world.
'will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury?' john adams asked thomas jefferson. 'will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?'

the family, it was believed by our founders, would serve as something of a counterbalance to the free market by anchoring people in a different set of values... but today, the values of the market have encroached on the separate sphere of family life. as christopher lasch pointed out, when money becomes the universal measure of value, then motherhood, which after all is unpaid labor, will come to bear the stigma of social inferiority. more broadly, the values of capitalism, with the premium it places on acquisition, competitiveness, "creative destruction," "rational choice," innovation, and self-interest, are often incompatible with and may even be antithetical to the qualities important to marriage and family life -- sympathy and deep devotion, patience and restraint, the deferral of gratification, loyalty, and the willingness to lay aside self-interest." (bennett, wj, p. 16)

now, bennett is not saying that he is anti-capitalism; he is saying that the nuclear family is essential as that counterbalance to the evils of human nature leading to a corruption of the capitalistic system...

the family, says bennett, must be preserved and defended in america... and in the rest of the world as well...

a good read... highly recommended...