Rachael Jeantel: Voter.

As I've argued in my previous posts, one of the great problems with modern democracy is that political power is placed into the hands of men and women who lack the capacity to make judgements. Furthermore, even amongst those who can make judgements, there appears to be a natural cognitive-emotive defense which prevents facts, which are inconvenient to one's political orientation from becoming recognised.

The problem with this state of affairs should be obvious to anyone who has the ability to syanpse at least two pairs of neurons.  Wrong decisions are going to be made....repeatedly.....even with the best of intentions.

The reason why I bring this up again is because I was familiarising myself with the Trayvon Martin case and became aware of  Rachael Jeantel.

I think its important to put a face to the subject matter, since the topic on hand is not an abstraction but a real life problem.  Rachael is a senior high school student who is illiterate. I mean how are you in senior high school and not able to read or write?  But more importantly, Rachael Jeantel is 19, and therefore, as I understand it, has the God given right to Vote in the state of Florida. She gets the right to actively participate in the electoral process. She gets a say in the running of government.

How much consideration do you think she gives to national defense? Or how to finance health care? Social Security?  How about to environmental care or nuclear power?

Dwell on those thoughts and remember that there are millions or Rachaels out there. Contrast her with Keith Tillage, 

someone I've randomly pulled from the internet for no particularly reason apart from the fact that he came up when I Google successful black small business man. Do you think he is concerned about taxes, national defense and education? Law and order? Do you think he can read?

More importantly which one of these two is more likely, if given power, to turn tyrannical?

And yet, the democratic system of the Western World gives each one of these individuals an equal vote.

This is not a  issue about Left or Right, it's a question about stupid and competent. Mencken was right. In any group of people there exists superior and inferior men.  The notion of superiority chafes the democratic, but not conservative mind. Who can seriously argue, that on matters political Keith Tillage's opinion is worth more than Rachael Jeantel's ? From a conservative perspective, is it right to give a say in the political affairs of the nation to those who have no comprehension of them?  The answer for any rational man is in the negative and therefore how should a rational man view unlimited democracy?

People need to remember that, numerically, the elites form only a small percentage of society. The reason why they are able to exert the influence that they do is by co-opting the unthinking orks of the underclass.  The ideologues know how to play the system to their advantage.  The leftward lurch of western society strongly correlates with the expansion of the right to vote. The French revolution would never have happened if the proles had stayed at home.

The Ancient Greeks felt that democracies eventually evolved into tyrannies. Looking at it from a systems perspective, it's easy to see why. Poor democratic governance keeps piling error upon error until it as a society fails. In the ensuing chaos, it's only the strong and ruthless that survive and such men are not likely to tolerate anyone's idiotic bullshit. Viewed from the vantage point chattering classes who squandered their inheritance he, the leader  is a tyrant, but to the mob, they applaud him as a saviour.  Whether or not he is good or evil is all up to pot luck.

The founding fathers of the U.S were as fearful of tyrants as of the mob. As Erik von Kuenhelt Leddihn shows in his book Liberty or Equality, they established a republic and not a democracy.  It was Jackson who started diluting the quality pool by enlarging the franchise and establishing the spoils system. It may be too late, but conservatives, especially in the U.S need to make a pushback against the universal franchise. If there is any hope, it's not with the people.

Rod Dreher Gets It.

Yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court Ruling should send shivers down the spine of anyone who is traditionally religious. Rod Dreher quite eloquently describes the situation;

Scalia: Open Season on Marriage Traditionalists.

I'm not a American constitutional scholar, but it was my understanding that Supreme court jurisdiction extended only to the judging whether or not a law was in conflict with the constitution.

This DOMA law appears to have been struck off because the court determined that the intention behind the law was malicious. The court made a moral judgement and not a constitutional one and was therefore peddling its opinion of what it considered right and wrong.  The court did not say that congress does not have the power to make laws concerning state marriages, rather, it stated that congress does not have the power to make laws on state marriages that it determines are hateful. God is not the measure of right and wrong anymore. The Supreme Court of the United States is. It's an usurpation of congressional power.

Dreher accurately foresees the implications.


Update.

Apologies to all about the typos and spelling today. Dyslexia in full force.


Update II.

Over a Rod's,  a commentator illustrated just why this decision is so bad:

Apparently, Cardinal George said if gay marriage becomes a reality that in five years, Catholic schools, colleges, charities, hospitals, and organizations will cease to exist. Since it would be contrary to Catholic Christian teaching to hire same-sex couples, those people will not be hired. Since not hiring would now be seen as discrimination, those schools and charities will be sued. So, the only choice is either wait for them to be closed or close them down ourselves. I learned of this from a couple of family members who heard it in a priest’s homily on Sunday.

It won't just affect Catholic institutions, but other traditionalist ones that disapprove of homosexuality, polygamy etc.  What the Supreme Court did today was put itself in opposition to mainstream Christianity.  The salami tactics are about the begin. First it starts with the little laws, then they become more stringent and finally it's full on warfare.

Component Failure.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

H.L. Mencken.

As I've agrued before in some of my previous posts, H. L. Mencken is a political commentator that is easily enjoyed but rarely taken seriously. Part of Mencken's problems is that he writes so well that his writing becomes more of interest than the message he is trying to get across. Mencken was contemptuous of democracy famously describing it as a system of jackals leading jackassess.  At the heart of Mencken's contention was the notion that the average man simply does not have the intellectual capacity to participate fully in democracy. Mencken was also perceptive to note that the reason why this is so stems mainly from the fact that men tend to make emotional decisions rather than rational ones.

This isn't an idle charge. One of the prerequisites for successful action is the both an an accurate degree of situational awareness and the ability to generate an appropriate response. In order for democratic systems to work democratic theory, likewise requires that the voting public be fully informed and able to act appropriately in order for democracy to function appropriately and adapt to the challenges that threaten its survival. Voters, who act out of ignorance, will support policy responses which don't correspond to the necessities of reality. The net result, then, is that democratic systems gradually become divorced from situational realities and collapse eventually ensures. If Mencken is right,  the democracy is doomed.

Modern America--and the rest of the West--are based on the idea that broadly representational democracy is the best system of government. The one that most ensures an individual's rights and opinions and protects its citizens from abuse.  Indeed, much American foreign intervention is directed towards spreading this ideal; an ideal which I once believed in but do not now.

The position that I have taken isn't based upon some prior belief of a "natural order" or some sense of elitism, rather, it's based upon a notion akin to John Boyd's OODA loop: It's a control theory problem.
If democratic man is unable to weigh evidence rationally and deliberate dispassionately his situational awareness will become lessened and his actions thus become increasingly ineffective.

Unfortunately, the bulk of cognitive neuroscience points in this direction. In this rather depressing survey paper, Motivated Reasoning in Political Information Processing: The Death Knell ofDeliberative Democracy? by Mason Richie, convincing evidence is laid out that the average voter is unable to engage in dispassionate deliberation. Motivated Cognition, a.k.a the rationalisation hamster, ensures that information which is emotionally unpleasant is kept at bay.  Both sides of politics do this, but there appears to be some evidence that the Lefties have a stronger hamster.

Note, that this critique of democracy is not based upon a superior alternative, rather, the fundamental unit of the democratic system, the individual, has been shown to be unable to perform as expected scientifically.  Most people prefer their own version of reality to the truth, and in fact have highly developed defensive mechanisms to prevent their fantasy world from being disrupted.

The reason why all governments in the West are progressively becoming dysfunctional is because of the mental capacities of the average voter. Corrective action which is necessary to stabilise society is politically unpalatable and thus the system errors accumulate till it all comes tumbling down.

Some Conservative Political Art.

One the areas that Conservatives need to do a lot of work on is the incorporation of their political ideals through the medium of art. It's a sad fact that the liberal end of the political spectrum has effectively harnessed this medium to further its political gains.

Whats inspired this post is Ian Ironwood's Pintrest pinboard where he has posted up some manosphere artwork. Now I applaud Ian for the artwork, which is more manosphere orientated than strictly conservative, but in the spirit of constructive criticism I'd like to make a few comments.

Great political artwork lets the image do the talking with a minimum of verbiage. I thought this poster below the most powerful of his images.

Simple and to the point. The stripper sexual reference provides a great psychological contrast the sexually absent daddy daughter imagery. (? Original art by Bernie Fuchs)

I thought that these images were also quite good.

 

 

I think some of his other MGTOW posters on the other hand are much weaker. Not because because of my anti MGTOW position but the posters don't really get their massage across with enough punch. Still, Ian gets high marks for the effort.

A lot of conservative political art is clumsy and lacks punch but I thought I'd post up a few examples of what I think is exceptional good stuff.

Pure gold, this one is going to be a political classic. It's just so good. Virtually no verbiage and its lets the image do the talking. In a similar vein,  this British Conservative party poster really annoyed the Lefty's.

Saatchi and Saatchi did this one. It's modern its simple and conveys left wing menace effectively without moralising.

The next one is also great since it flips the script when it comes to the Left's championing of minorities.

Now, I've always been a fan of humor and the art of making your opponent look like an idiot. I think one of the things that conservative artists have a habit of is overtly moralising when trying to get the message across, this is off putting to the all but the most crude and therefore counterproductive.

Now, the point is that conservatives need to embrace art as medium to get the message across since most people don't respond to reasoned logic but rather emotional argument.  Part of the Left's success lays in the fact that it is percieved party of the "cool people", the group that most of the proletariat seek to aspire to.  This places the conservatives in a difficult position if they want to capture the arty high ground. If they try to imitate the Lefty's they play within the Left's frame, making it difficult to get their message across. Conservatives should not try and cultivate a hipster image.  It's a difficult problem but perhaps some of the Eastern European dissident art may serve as a useful springboard from which a conservative art may emerge.

This one is also good.

Finally, I've always thought this beer commercial by Steinlarger has lot going for it.

Papal Developments.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types--the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob.

 G.K.Chesterton.

Note: This is a religious post so those of an atheist disposition might want to leave now.

It appears that Pope Francis may have been surreptitiously hanging about on this blog. In this speech to some assembled priests, Francis outlines two approaches which stifle the development of the faith. Now, these comments that Francis makes are not ex cathedra, and therefore not binding on anyone, but they represent a certain strain of thought that I've noticed amongst some members of the more intelligent upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy.

Prior to his election as Pope, Ratzinger/Benedict was colloquially known as God's Rottweiler, a sobriquet earned as result of being the inflexible orthodox enforcer of the Catholic faith.  Now it's on the record that Ratzinger, privately, deplored the modern liturgy, the liberalisation of morals and the general decline of the faith which followed Vatican 2, yet, he never either privately criticised it, and in fact many times reaffirmed it's goodness  privately ,publicly and on theological grounds. I imagine that his failure to "turn back the changes" must have infuriated the traditionalists who initially thought his election was going to put things back on track.

It's also interesting to see the current pope, Francis, in some ways echo his sentiments. Firstly, in the audience where his confirmation of the the "gay lobby" was noted, Francis, also made some disparaging remarks with regard to the traditionalist practices of some members of the Church. Francis, it seems, is operationg with a similar mindset to Ratzinger in that he  recognises that the further development of doctrine involves steering a middle course between errors of traditionalism and "adolescent progressivism";

This freedom of the Spirit requires embarking on “a path of continuous discernment to do the will of God” and this can frighten us, the Holy Father observed.

He warned that the fear that comes with this way “brings two temptations with it.”

The first, is to “go backwards” to say that, “it’s possible up to this point, but impossible beyond this point” which ends up becoming “let’s stay here.”

It’s a fear that “it is better to play it safe.”........

........ The second temptation that comes with relying on the Holy Spirit’s guidance is to engage in “adolescent progressivism,” which ends up sending things off-track.

The temptation, Pope Francis said, lies in seeing a culture and “not detaching ourselves from it.”

“We take the values of this culture a little bit from here, a little bit from there ... They want to make this law? Alright, let’s go ahead and make this law. Let’s broaden the boundaries here a little.”

“In the end, let me tell you, this is not true progress,” he stated.

I think its safe to say that here he is criticising both traditionalists and progressive factions within the Church. Now, this may surprise many orthodox Catholics who tend to blame all the ills of the Church on the progressives, little realising that the traditionalist element is the Trojan horse in Church affairs. It's quite true that the liberal factions of Catholicsm have effectively abandandoned the Church but it is my feeling that should the Church liberalise some of its teachings, not in response to societal pressure but doctrinal development, it will be the Trads who will abandon it in droves.

G.K. Chesterton once said that Catholicism will end up keeping the "best bits" of Protestantism, and I suspect any new doctrinal developments will be "Protestant" in nature I think that the Church will move towards a more "Church assisted" rather then "Church mediated" relationship between man and God. I also think that there will be more room for "rigorous* conscience", and I feel that there may be further developments in sexual ethics and economics. On the other hand, things like the prohibitions against adultery, fornication, abortion  and homosexuality will be reaffirmed again.  I think we're in for interesting times.

*Rigorous conscience means a conscience that is properly formed, not merely opinionated. Note, to both trads and liberals. A properly formed conscience is open to the truth, no matter how inconvenient it is.

Democratic Man Has No Balls.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin.

In my mind there is no doubt that Islamic terrorists are currently making attempts to cause harm to the U.S. and other countries in the West. I have no doubt, either, that should they obtain access to nuclear or biological weapons they would use them in an indiscriminate fashion for the maximum psychological effect.  The threat against the West is real and it is only a matter of time till the Radical Islamicists pull off another spectacular stunt. Many will die.

It is also true that the majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed by individuals with high powered semi-automatic weapons. The current attempts to ban them will, in my mind, significantly reduce the risk of mass shootings such as were seen in Colombine and Sandy Hook. The removal of these weapons in Australia has now meant that there have been none since the Port Arthur massacre.

Now the reason I bring these points up is with regard to the interplay, in democracy, between personal safety and individual liberty. I have no doubt that the recent PRISM revelations (and Echelon, Trailblazer, etc.) are all programs which have been implemented to protect American (and allied citizens). I have no doubt that they probably have saved peoples lives but the question I ask myself is, "at what expense?" The price, I think, is now too high.

Take the proposed semi-automatic firearm restrictions. This is very complex topic (Why is it that Americans are more trigger happy than other nationalities when it comes to mass shootings? But that's for a different time.) but any elemental reading of the U.S. constitution would lead to the conclusion that U.S. citizens have the right to bare arms. I'm no constitutional scholar, but it appears to me that the founding fathers intended for the citizens of the U.S. to fight back against their government if it became too uppity.  The U.S. constitution is front loaded with an ever present potential for war of the U.S. citizenry against the U.S. government.

The U.S. constitution was founded in a time where modern antibiotics, anaesthetics and surgical techniques were non-existent. War was horrible, yet, the fathers of the U.S. felt that the mass slaughter that wound entail should Americans choose to defend their liberty against the government was worthwhile price to pay. The founding fathers valued their liberty more than their security.

I can't imagine Ben Franklin, surveying the tragedy of Sandy Hook, suddenly proposing a semi-automatic ban. He too would have been moved by the horror, but accepted it as a consequence of having an armed citizenry.  The fact that some citizens misused their right to bear arms was no reason to take away the rights from those who didn't-- especially in the name of public safety. It would of been a trade-off he would have been unprepared to take.

Which brings me to the PRISM program. I have no doubts that it has bought benefits to the U.S. state and the West, but at the expense of having every electromagnetic enabled communication monitored. Nothing is private any more. The U.S. government's argument, that there is clear oversight of the program is of no comfort, especially to anyone who has any first hand knowledge of public servants or government officials. I mean, after all, wasn't the IRS mean to be impartial?* Most congressmen, not exactly examples of moral rectitude, have the vaguest idea of what is going on. How do they police the system? More importantly, what happens when these morally ambiguous beings take control of it.

PRISM, Echelon, the Gun control debate and nanny state rules are all enabled by a democracy which values safety over liberty. History has repeatedly shown that those who own the guns make the rules and those without the guns have to take it. Having everyone disarmed and having the government spy on everyone else is a great thing until the government becomes tyrannical, then it's too late.

The terrible tragedy here is that of Edward Snowden. He has given up friends, family, liberty and a hot girlfriend (who seems to be exploiting her situation with a lot of raunchy pics) in order to "inform the people." The problem is that the people are the problem and  seem quite happy with the situation as it is. His efforts were in vain; the people prefer safety to liberty. Democratic man has no balls.

*Just to show that this isn't a Left vs Right thing. Political opponents in the U.S have traditionally used the IRS to their persecute their opponents. Richard Nixon sent in the IRS to hound Curtis Le May after his failed attempt with Wallace in the 1968 elections.

Herman is Hottie whilst Dagfin is a Dud.

Appropriate to my recent posts on the relationship of fascism to masculinity is the relationship of the women in the countries occupied by the Nazi's and the invading soldiers. The other day I purchased a copy of Keith Lowe's excellent (if thoroughly depressing) book, Savage Continent, a book about the violence and killing that occurred in Europe following the end of the Second World War.  Lowe has an interesting passage in the book where he presents some data on the degree of collaboration between some of the local women and the Nazi's.

Many women across Europe embarked on such relationships with Germans during the war. They justified their actions by saying that "relationships" based on love' were 'not a crime', that 'matters of the heart' have nothing to do with 'politics', or that "love is blind'.  But in the eyes of their communities, this was no excuse. Sex, if it was with a German, was political. It came to represent the subjugation of the continent as a whole: a female France, Denmark or Holland being ravished by a male Germany. just as importantly, as I have already mentioned in Chapter 4, it also came to represent the emasculation of European men. These men, who had already shown themselves impotent against the military might of Germany, now found themselves communally cuckolded by their own womenfolk.

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering. In Norway as many as 10  per cent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war. If the statistics on the number of children born to German soldiers are anything to go by, this was by no means unusual: the numbers of women who slept with German men across western Europe can easily be numbered in the hundreds of thousands sands.

Resistance movements in occupied countries came up with all kinds of excuses for the behaviour of their women and girls. They characterised women who slept with Germans as ignorant, poor, even mentally defective. They claimed that women were raped, or that they only slept with Germans out of economic necessity. While this was undoubtedly the case for some, recent surveys show that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes and all walks of life.

On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent  or because they needed money or food - but simply because they found the strong, 'knightly' image of the German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk. In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots.

Nowhere was this need more keenly felt than in France. In a nation where the huge, almost entirely male German presence was matched by a corresponding absence of French men - 2 million of whom were prisoners or workers in Germany - it is unsurprising that the occupation itself was often seen in sexual terms. France had become a 'slut', giving herself up to Germany with the Vichy government acting as her pimp. As jean-Paul Sartre noted after the war, even the collaborationist press tended to represent the relationship between France and Germany as a union 'in which France was always playing the part of the 'woman'.

There are several interesting facets to this passage. Firstly, fraternisation will occur wherever young people meet, however this was not normal fraterniation.  The women were fraternising with men who had just subjugated their country and shipped off their men to prisoner of war camps. Secondly, it's interesting to see how the traditional explanations were, even then, being used to justify the behaviour of women. No one, it seems, could bear the thought that the reason why so many women slept with the men was because the Germans were hot whilst their menfolk were not.

Just to put this into perspective, the wiki site on war children estimates the number of babies born to German fathers  (i.e occupiers) in France at between 75,000-200,000. Between 10,000-50,000 in Holland.  Whereas a full ten years of occupation in Germany by the allied forces produced 66000 war babies. I know the figures are very rough but it would appear that the Germans had the overwhelming advantage in more than just armor when they invaded France.

One of the factors which may be correlated to the preference of Danish women for Germans may reside in the fact that the Germans had far more martial spirit. The Danish Army lost 16 killed trying to defend Denmark. Guess their women didn't really find them that sexy after that performance.

The PIll and Divorce.

Roissy recently put up an interesting post on the link between contraception and divorce. Unlike Roissy--and a lot of others--I'm not that convinced that the Pill is a solvent of modernity. While the link between pill use and sexual immorality would appear to be intuitively obvious, in my experience, I have found that what is intuitively obvious is sometimes not how things are in reality. Inuitively, we all know that easy availability should result in a decrease in out of wedlock births.

Sometimes intuition is wrong.

I don't try to complicate things for the sake of complication or try to find complex explanations where simple ones will do, however, the whole "pregnancy as a deterrent to promiscuity" argument has never really appealed to me. From the earliest days of my medical training, it always surprised me just how many women who were sexually active weren't on the Pill. Whilst it's true that the Pill markedly reduces the risk of pregnancy, it takes nothing away from the fact of promiscuity.

One of the problems with men writing about women's issues is that they think like men and not like women. Women are far more social creatures than men are, and when they act, their moral calculus always involves a consideration of how their act will be viewed by others. Shame and social ostracism have their powerful effect on women because of this, and in her mind,  the social consequences are just as important as any benefits accrued through any specific act. In societies where promiscuity is viewed negatively, you can make a woman infertile but you can't make her slut.

It needs to be understood that pre 60's society regarded out of wedlock pregnancy as a big deal.  But is also needs to be recognised that promiscuity was also a big deal in itself, regardless of the natal consequences. No one wanted to go sloppy seconds. Being the town bike, yet without children, was no mark of distinction. Cultural opprobrium rather than fear of pregnancy kept most women in check.

But perhaps I'm wrong and lets see what science says about the matter.

While I'm a bit dubious with regard to the methodology, Divorce and the Birth Control Pill by Miriam Marcem shows only a very small increase in divorce with availability of the Pill.


As you can see, in States where there was an availability of the Pill there is only a small increase in the divorce rate compared to the states where the Pill was less available. (It interesting to note that the difference still exists before the introduction of Enovid. i.e. The Pill)

Zuppan, in a different paper also tried to estimate the effect of the Pill on marital stability. He concluded that women who were married prior to the availability of the Pill had a higher risk of divorce than those who were married after the Pill became available, though the effect was small.

In fact, women who got married after the pill was made available had slightly longer marriages on average. i.e. It exerted a small protective effect against divorce.

This is also in keeping with the latest research on female mate selection whilst on the Pill. Much has been said about the females in estrus preferring cads to dads but when you have a look at the actual data you can see that the preference for cads, whilst significant, is still quite small.

The point is that the Pill's effect on marital stability is small and may in fact be positive. 

The take home summary is that the Pill's effect on marriage is very small. So what then drove the change and the sudden epidemic of divorce?

No fault divorce laws?

Once again, another obvious explanation but one which, on further scrutiny, fails the test.

In a very interesting paper, Does Culture Affect Divorce Decisions, by Furtado et al, the authors set about trying to see how influential culture was on divorce. Their methodology was as follows:

To separate the effect of culture from institutions on an individual’s probability of divorce, we examine divorce patterns of immigrants from Europe who arrived in the US at or under the age of 5. Immigrants in our sample have lived under the laws, institutions, and markets of the United States. However, since their preferences are likely to reflect the attitudes of their parents and ethnic communities, differences in their divorce rates by country of origin may be interpreted as evidence of the importance of culture. For example, if divorce laws were the only explanation for why Italy has a
lower divorce rate than Russia, then when we remove differences in laws by examining Russians
and Italians living in the same city in the US, all Russian-Italian divorce differentials should be
eliminated.


Quite a simple and commonsense approach, though it has some problems. First generation immigrants, whilst strongly being influenced by parental culture, will still become acculturated (to  varying degrees) by the prevailing environment. Still the data is interesting.

It's appears that divorce rates are almost divisible along an North West/South East axis. It's quite possible that the variation in divorce rates may be due to local institutional factors. But when people from these countries move to the U.S. (and the effect of institutional variability is diminished) we get the following data.

What's interesting about this study is that the protective effect was more pronounced in regions where there was a large community of similar people i.e ghettos. The other interesting finding from this study was that the cultural protective affect seem to apply to women more than men, in other words, women adopted their behaviour to group norms more than men. *


These findings were also demonstrated in a very good Australian study, which showed that being of a Mediterranean background was very protective with regard to divorce. The  Meditteranian effect dwarfs all other typical sociological considerations with the exception of maternal employment.

*Just a brief word about maternal employment.  Female employment is highly correlated with divorce but the Australian authors (quite rightly) seem more circumspect with regard to its relationship when compared to American ones. Anecdotally, I grew up in a large Mediterranean immigrant community. In my little bit of the world, the Italian mothers hardly ever worked outside the home, the Croatian mothers nearly all worked in factories and the Greek mothers were 50/50. Divorce in all communities was rare.  I also didn't know what people used for contraception but most families had only two kids.

Now if the Pill, no-fault laws and maternal employment were all causative factors with regard to divorce why do people from Mediterranean cultures seems so powerfully resistant to these corrosive effects when exposed to them?

Briefly, Mediterranean cultures are far less individualistic and see the individual as not only having rights but as also having obligations, especially when it comes to family.  Divorce, even when easily available, is not an option they will choose.

On the other hand, people from  North Western European cultures will take the option when it is available.

I personally don't think that the 60's were a period of cultural revolution, rather it was period of institutional revolution.  The culture had changed well before then and it was a time when the institutions of the land finally caught up with the popular will of the people.  The reason why the whole traditional edifice came tumbling down so rapidly once the floodgates were open is because its foundations were rotten.  The people had already given up on traditional morality and its guise was only maintained by the coercion of the state.  The fact that the Pill made its appearance at the same time is a classic case of correlation rather than causation. It was culture, not the Pill, which drove the divorce epidemic.

*In another interesting paper, aptly titled Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years shows just how pernicious peer group norms are at promoting particular behaviours.