The Howard Center
[Caleb Stegall  02/28 08:48 AM]

When looking for ways to understand and reign in economic structures which are profoundly hostile to the permanent things, we ought not ignore the treasure trove of resources provided by Allan Carlson and The Howard Center. The archives of their Family in America and their News Research newsletters are invaluable. Here’s a snippet picked out nearly at random:

“Modernity” tore through this settled way of life. The family household ceased to be the center of productive labor. Centralized factories, warehouses, and offices displaced home workshops, gardens, and storehouses. Cash exchanges pushed aside the altruistic exchanges of the family. Mothers, fathers, and children alike were pulled out of their homes into the wage laborer ranks. Family bonds, once the source of economic strength, now stood more as obstructions to the efficient allocation of labor. The individual, unencumbered and alone, was the new ideal worker.

The status of marriage changed. In the pre-industrial order, husbands and wives had specialized in their labor according to their respective strengths and skills, so that their small family enterprises might succeed. This natural complementarity reinforced their need for each other, uniting the sexual and the economic functions and giving real strength to marriage. Industrial managers, in contrast, preferred the androgynous individual, sexless, interchangeable. In this new order, men and women needed each other less than before. As an institution, marriage weakened.

The status of children also changed. In an agrarian and artisan economy, children — even small ones — were economic assets, parts of small family enterprises. Accordingly, fertility on the family farm and in the artisan’s shop tended to be high. However, in the new order, children were either pulled away into an early — and sometimes dangerous — economic independence or the children became liabilities, left at home by working parents to fend for themselves. Fertility plummeted, as actual or potential parents avoided taking on these new little burdens. Indeed, two leading analysts of modern fertility decline, Kingsley Davis writing in 1937 and John C. Caldwell writing in 2003, have both concluded that “the family is not indefinitely adaptable to modern society, and this explains the declining birth rate.”[6] Indeed, no developed nation today can claim even replacement level fertility. In many lands, ranging from Russia to Italy to Singapore, fertility levels are perilously low, children are disappearing, threatening even national survival.