A de-moralized society: the British/American experience

Public Interest, Fall, 1994 by Gertrude Himmelfarb

The past is a foreign country," it has been said. But it is not an unrecognizable country. Indeed, we sometimes experience a "shock of recognition" as we confront some aspect of the past in the present. One does not need to have had a Victorian grandmother, as did Margaret Thatcher, to be reminded of "Victorian values." One does not even have to be English; "Victorian America," as it has been called, was not all that different, at least in terms of values, from Victorian England. Vestigial remains of that Victorianism are everywhere around us. And memories of them persist, even when the realities are gone, rather like an amputated limb that still seems to throb when the weather is bad.

How can we not think of our present condition when we read Thomas Carlyle on the "Condition of England" one hundred and fifty years ago? While his contemporaries were debating "the standard of living question"--the "pessimists" arguing that the standard of living of the working classes had declined in that early period of industrialism, and the "optimists" that it had improved--Carlyle reformulated the issue to read, "the condition of England question." That question, he insisted, could not be resolved by citing "figures of arithmetic" about wages and prices. What was important was the "condition" and "disposition" of the people: their beliefs and feelings, their sense of right and wrong, the attitudes and habits that would dispose them either to a "wholesome composure, frugality, and prosperity," or to an "acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin."

In fact, the Victorians did have "figures of arithmetic" dealing with the condition and disposition of the people as well as their economic state. These "moral statistics" or "social statistics," as they called them, dealt with crime, illiteracy, illegitimacy, drunkenness, pauperism, vagrancy. If they did not have, as we do, statistics on drugs, divorce, or teenage suicide, it is because these problems were then so negligible as not to constitute "social problems."

It is in this historical context that we may address our own "condition of the people question." And it is by comparison with the Victorians that we may find even more cause for alarm. For the current moral statistics are not only more troubling than those a century ago; they constitute a trend that bodes even worse for the future than for the present. Where the Victorians had the satisfaction of witnessing a significant improvement in their moral and social condition, we are confronting a considerable deterioration in ours.

The "moral statistics": illegitimacy

In nineteenth-century England, the illegitimacy ratio--the proportion of out-of-wedlock births to total births--rose from a little over 5 percent at the beginning of the century to a peak of 7 percent in 1845. It then fell steadily until it was less than 4 percent at the turn of the century. In East London, the poorest section of the city, the figures are even more dramatic, for illegitimacy was consistently well below the average: 4.5 percent in mid-century and 3 percent by the end of the century. Apart from a temporary increase during both world wars, the ratio continued to hover around 5 percent until 1960. It then began to rise: to over 8 percent in 1970, 12 percent in 1980, and then, precipitously, to more than 32 percent by the end of 1992--a two-and-one-half times increase in the last decade alone and a sixfold rise in three decades. In 1981, a married woman was half as likely to have a child as she was in 1901, while an unmarried woman was three times as likely.

In the United States, the figures are no less dramatic. Starting at 3 percent in 1920 (the first year for which there are national statistics), the illegitimacy ratio rose gradually to slightly over 5 percent by 1960, after which it grew rapidly: to almost 11 percent in 1970, over 18 percent in 1980, and 30 percent by 1991--a tenfold increase from 1920 and a sixfold increase from 1960. For whites alone, the ratio went up only slightly between 1920 and 1960 (from 1.5 percent to a little over 2 percent) and then advanced at an even steeper rate than that of blacks: to almost 6 percent in 1970, 11 percent in 1980, and nearly 22 percent in 1991--fourteen times the 1920 figure and eleven times that of 1960. If the black illegitimacy ratio did not accelerate as much, it was because it started at a higher level: from 12 percent in 1920 to 22 percent in 1960, over 37 percent in 1970, 55 percent in 1980, and 68 percent by 1991.

Teenage illegitimacy has earned the United States the dubious distinction of ranking first among all industrialized nations, the rate having tripled between 1960 and 1991. In 1990, one in ten teenage girls got pregnant, half of them giving birth and the other half having abortions. England is second only to the United States in teenage illegitimacy, but the rate of increase in the past three decades has been even more rapid. In both countries, teenagers are far more "sexually active" (as the current expression has it) than ever before, and at an earlier age. In 1970, 5 percent of fifteen year old girls in the United States had had sexual intercourse; in 1988, 25 percent had.