Poor suffering bastards

Policy Review, Spring 1994 by Murray, David W

America is becoming a nation of bastards. Thirty percent of the children born in 1991 were out of wedlock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Families are no longer simply breaking apart--with one in two marriages ending in divorce. More and more parents today aren't marrying at all. The growth of illegitimacy is most severe in the inner city, but the phenomenon is not exclusive to any race or sector of society. More white children than blacks are born and raised out of wedlock, and it is among whites that illegitimacy is rising most rapidly.

The dangers of this growth in illegitimacy are now widely recognized. Single-parent families are five times as likely to be poor as two-parent unions. Broken and unformed families are the most important root cause of violent crime, drug abuse, and academic failure. The psychological toll is enormous: Boys and girls, especially teenagers, are emotionally devastated by the absence of fathers who combine love and discipline.

For an anthropologist, the widespread failure to marry is a sign of impending disaster. Cultures differ in many ways, but all societies that survive are built on marriage. Marriage is a society's cultural infrastructure, its bridges of social connectedness. The history of human society shows that when people stop marrying, their continuity as a culture is in jeopardy.

Marriage is the very basis of society because it creates kinsmen out of strangers; it turns hostile outsiders into "in-laws." The Zulus have a saying, 'They are our enemies, and so we many them." By uniting with outsiders, marriage helps families multiply their economic capital-and, perhaps even more important, their social capital. You and your wife's uncle may not like each other very much, but marriage imposes a set of reciprocal obligations on you; you are at least partly responsible for looking out for each other's well-being.

The early anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor observed in 1888 what has become an anthropological maxim: "Savage tribes must have had plainly on their minds the practical alternative between marrying-out and being killed-out." Tylor was seeking to explain the universality of the incest taboo. His phrase "marrying out" expressed the realization that families, in order to survive, need alliances and networks with others. Exogamous marriage, or taking a spouse from outside your immediate group, is the best way of building such networks.

Anthropology records an interesting variety of marital form and family structure, but no society builds the arch of social experience without the keystone of marriage. Let the stakes be clear: When American society experiments with ever-higher numbers of illegitimacies and single adults, we risk being crushed by our own roof. Children "out of wedlock" are ill-fitting stones.

"HE HAS NO RELATIVES"

"Bastard" has always been a pejorative term. The word is a Spanish idiom: bastardo or "pack-saddle child"; the French term is fils de bast, the child of the saddle bag, implying rootlessness. An alternative etymology derived from the Saxon "base" or lowly, and "start" or origin. Being a bastard was to be a "natural" child, lying outside of society.

The name is an insult, "bastard" being associated with mongrel or inferior breeds of animals. The inferiority derived from improper mixture, or blending. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a phrase from 1641, "To beget and bring forth mules, a bastard brood." Spurious, adulterated, debased, corrupt, unauthorized, and counterfeit are other connotations of the word.

Our colloquial language expresses this concern. Consider how the word "bastard" has come to mean someone heartless, cruel, or prone to cheat. We are not alone in this judgment. A Navajo saying captures well the universal stigma that attaches to illegitimate offspring. Do Ahalyada, they call them, "those who care for nothing." The worst social characterization the Navajo can offer of a thoughtless, deviant man is the charge that "he acts as if he has no relatives." This phrase tells us that being embedded in relationships, in a network of legitimated and recognized kinsmen, is a powerful reinforcement for moral action.

A man with no relatives, the Navajo feel, is a man with no concern for the shame or honor that his behavior might bring upon those he loves. He acts, therefore, without control or humanity. European countries of the Middle Ages felt the same, regarding illegitimate children as virtual outlaws. They called them filii nulii, those "without relatives."

We see a similar phenomenon in modern America. People concerned about the reactions of relatives behave differently than do people who are "atomized" as anonymous strangers. The husband at a distant convention, or the tourist abroad, may do things under the cover of anonymity that would bring embarrassment were they done in front of one's mother, wife, children, or in-laws. A culture of bastards is a world of hardened carelessness.

DOMESTICATE THE MALE

That women domesticate men who many them has been widely noted; indeed "groom" derives from guma, Indo-European for servant. In addition, children domesticate both men and women. In American cities the presence of children has become a "miner's canary" for social health; where we find children playing, there we find safety for ourselves. Consider how we feel in a potentially threatening neighborhood where two young males approach. There is a relief that comes from seeing them hand-in-hand with a young child. We recognize instinctively that males caring for children are not seeking violence.