In the West, marriage is no longer considered essential for raising children, nor is having them at all, while God and national identity are mostly irrelevant.
Marriage, which was the default way to form a family in the West regardless of income or education, has become another part of US life reserved for the privileged. One of greatest Western institutions is now increasingly reserved for middle and upper classes.
The British weekly magazine The Economist now explains that marriage is no longer considered essential for raising children. A once universal institution has become the brand of those “who made it”. 48 per cent of children in the UK today are born out of wedlock, compared to 8 per cent in 1970. One third of new borns in Italy come from de facto unmarried couples. In 1960, three quarters of American adults were married. Half of them are today.
Marriage once was “a rite of passage” to adult life, while today it is a method of transmitting the cultural, social and economic advantages of the medium-high classes to their children. That is also because today, statistically, people marry more and more within the same class (graduates among graduates, etc …). Meritocracy is now becoming hereditary. Marriage in the West today is favored by wealthy people and by minorities who have strong marital cultures. Namely, Muslim minorities.
From being universal and fertile, marriage in the West has become elitist and sterile.
There is, however, a cost for this type of marriage. If you insist on accumulating wealth before starting a family, your chances of having children will become thinner. In most rich countries, the more highly qualified women are, the more likely they are to remain childless.
In Italy we lost 100.000 births in just ten years (one fifth of the total). It is the “childless” ideology, the dominant one in the West according to which reproduction is a pure option, not a destiny. It is the advent of the “childfree life”, as a cover of the weekly Time magazine proclaimed. It shows a young couple on the beach, without children, intent on enjoying life. From being universal and fertile, marriage in the West has become elitist and sterile.
The West today is deeply affected by three ideological plagues: post-national, with the erosion of the identity of Western countries; post-God, with the radical secularization of Western societies; and post-family, with the rising of the childfree and gender ideologies, the construction of a Western society of gender neutral human beings.
And probabily this is why the West hates Israel, the opposite of the decadent West, a God, national and family oriented society.
@ AJM:
That’s where appeasement begins. “If only we do things differently, they won’t hate us.” That’s the flip side of the article’s “They hate us because we are virtuous.”
But, it doesn’t matter what we do. Those who wish to hate us will find reasons. It’s always been so. Spain, Russia, and Germany are prominent historical examples. And those who try too hard to please our tormentors wind up as quislings, who will, themselves, be rewarded for a time and then discarded. So, we might as well do as we please. More important to find allies.
Sebastian, this article is not pointless. It is a good-faith attempt to explain why the West has a problem with Israel.
Allow me to make an analogy. Those who are concerned about jihad have nothing to fear from analytical attempts to explain why jihadis hate the West. Similarly, those who love Western civilization have nothing to fear from analytical attempts to explain why terrorists do what they do.
I rather appreciate that IsraPundit includes big-picture articles about the state of Western civilization.
That you disagree with an articles’s point does not make the article worthless.
Pointless article. Since when has the West needed a reason to hate Israel, except for a couple of brief moments?
And Israel’s recent dramatic baby boom is mostly in the secular and moderately religious sectors. Ultra-Orthodox and Muslim births have fallen.
https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/2013/02/28/israel-demographic-miracle/